The Museum of Innocence (31 page)

“I just checked, but the pay phone here is broken,” said Sibel in an angry voice.

“So, what did you do today? Let’s see what you bought,” I said. “Open those packages of yours. Let’s have a little fun.”

But Sibel was not in the mood for opening packages.

“I am quite sure that you could not be as in love with her now as you were,” she said, with a startling airiness. “Your problem is not that you’re in love with another woman—it’s that you are not in love with me.”

“If that were so, then why am I always at your side?” I said, taking her hand. “Why is it that I don’t want to go through a day without you? Why am I always here, holding your hand?”

It wasn’t the first time we’d had this discussion. But this time I saw a strange light in Sibel’s eyes, and I feared that she would say: “Because you know that left alone you wouldn’t be able to bear the pain of losing Füsun, and that it might even kill you!” But luckily Sibel still didn’t realize that the situation was quite that bad.

“It’s not love that keeps you close to me; it just allows you to continue believing you have survived a disaster.”

“Why would I need that?”

“You’ve come to enjoy being the sort of man who is always in pain and turns his nose up at everything. But the time has come for you to pull yourself together, darling.”

I made my usual solemn assurances—that these difficult days would pass, that in addition to two sons, I was hoping we’d have three daughters who would look just like her. We were going to have a big, wonderful, happy family; we would have years and years of laughter, and lose none of the pleasures of life. To see her radiant face, to listen to her thoughtful words, to hear her working in the kitchen—these things gave me no end of joy, I told her, and made me glad to be alive. “Please don’t cry,” I said.

“At this point, it doesn’t seem to me as if any of these things could ever come true,” said Sibel as the tears began to flow faster. She let go of my hand, picked up her handkerchief, and wiped her eyes and her nose; then she took out her compact and dabbed a great deal of powder under her eyes.

“Why have you lost faith in me?” I asked.

“Maybe because I’ve lost faith in myself,” she said. “I’ve even lost my looks—that’s what I think now sometimes.”

I was squeezing her hand and telling her how beautiful she was when a voice said, “Hello, young lovers!” It was Tayfun. “Everyone’s talking about you—did you know that? Oh dear, what’s wrong?”

“What are people saying about us?”

Tayfun had come to visit us at the yali many times in September. When he saw Sibel had been crying, all the jolliness left his face. He wanted to leave the table, too, but seeing Sibel’s expression, he was paralyzed.

“The daughter of a close friend died in a traffic accident,” said Sibel.

“So what was it everyone was saying about us?” I asked mockingly.

“My condolences,” said Tayfun, looking left and right in search of an escape, and finally shouting in an overloud voice at someone who had just walked in. Before peeling himself away, he said, “People have been saying that you are so in love it’s got you worried that marriage might kill it, as happens with so many Europeans, and that, because of this, you’re thinking of not getting married. If you ask me, you should just get married. Everyone is just jealous of you. There are even people saying
this yali
of yours is unlucky.”

As soon as he was gone we ordered more
raki
. All summer long Sibel had ably masked my “illness” from others with invented excuses, but there was no way forward. Our decision to live together before marriage had become fodder for gossip. It had been noted, too, that Sibel had begun needling me and making jokes at my expense and that I’d begun to swim great distances on my back, and, of course, there was the ridicule of my low spirits for some to savor.

“Are we going to call Nurcihan and company and ask them to join us, or should we order our food?”

Sibel seemed anxious. “You go find a telephone somewhere and call them. Do you have a token?”

Among those taking an interest in this story fifty or a hundred years on, there might be a temptation to turn up their noses at Istanbul circa 1975, when there was still a shortage of running water (obliging even the richest neighborhoods to be supplied water by private trucks), and where the phones rarely worked. In an effort to elicit reflective sympathy rather than reflexive disdain, I have displayed a telephone token with serrated edges that could be bought in those days at any tobacconist’s. During the years when my story begins, there were very few phone booths in the streets of Istanbul, and even if they had not been vandalized, they were usually out of order. I do not recall being even once able to make a call from a PTT phone booth during that entire period. (Such success was only managed, it seemed, in Turkish films, whose stars copied what they saw done in Western films.) However, one clever entrepreneur had managed to sell metered phones to grocery stores, coffeehouses, and other outlets; it was by using these that our needs were met. I offer these details as explanation of why I was obliged to go from shop to shop in the streets of Nişantaşı. Finally, in a lottery ticket outlet, I found a phone not in use. But Nurcihan’s phone was busy, and the man wouldn’t let me make a second attempt to call, and some time had passed before I was able to ring Mehmet from a phone in a florist’s. I found him at the house with Nurcihan, and he said they would join us at Fuaye in half an hour.

By going from store to store, I had arrived at the heart of Nişantaşı. It occurred to me that being this close to the Merhamet Apartments, I might as well see if I could do myself some good by dropping in for a brief while. I had the key with me.

As soon as I entered the apartment, I washed my face and hands, and carefully removed my jacket, like a doctor preparing for an operation. Sitting shirtless on the edge of the bed where I had made love to Füsun forty-four times, and surrounded by all those memory-laden things (three of which I display herewith), I spent a happy hour caressing them lovingly.

By the time I got back to Fuaye, Zaim was there as well as Nurcihan and Mehmet. As I gazed upon the genial chatter of Istanbul society, and all the bottles, ashtrays, plates, and glasses on the table, I remember thinking how happy I was, and how much I loved my life.

“Friends, please excuse me for the delay. You’ll never guess what happened to me,” I said, as I tried to think up a good lie.

“Never mind,” said Zaim sweetly. “Sit down. Forget the whole thing. Come and be happy with us.”

“I’m already happy, actually.”

When I came eye to eye with the fiancée I was about to lose, I saw at once that, drunk as she was, she knew exactly what I’d been up to and had finally decided I was never going to recover. Though furious, Sibel was in no condition to do anything about it. And even when she sobered up, she would not make a scene—because she still loved me, and because the prospect of losing me still terrified her, as did the socially disastrous consequences of breaking off the engagement. This might explain why I felt even then a strong bond with her, although perhaps there were other reasons that I still did not understand. Perhaps, I reasoned, this enduring attachment would restore her faith in me, and she would return to believing in my eventual recovery. For that night, however, I felt that her optimism had run out.

For a while I danced with Nurcihan.

“You’ve broken Sibel’s heart. She’s very angry at you,” she said as we danced. “You shouldn’t leave her sitting alone in restaurants. She’s so in love with you. She’s also very sensitive.”

“Without thorns, the rose of love has no fragrance. When are you two getting married?”

“Mehmet wants us to marry right away,” said Nurcihan. “But I just want to get engaged first as you two did—and have a chance to enjoy love a bit before we settle into marriage.”

“You shouldn’t use us as your model, not to that extent, anyway….”

“Why—are there things I don’t know?” said Nurcihan, trying to hide her curiosity behind a fake smile.

But I paid her no mind. The raki was easing my obsession from a strong, steady ache into an intermittent specter. I remember that at a certain point in the evening, Sibel and I were dancing, and, like a teenage lover, I made her promise never to leave me, and she, impressed by the ardor of my pleas, tried sincerely to allay my fears. Many friends and acquaintances stopped by our table, inviting us to join them elsewhere when we had tired of Fuaye. Some wanted to play it safe and drive out to the Bosphorus for tea, others were saying we should go to the tripe restaurant in Kasımpaşa, there were even those proposing we all go to a nightclub to listen to Turkish classical music. There was a moment when Nurcihan and Mehmet wrapped their arms around each other with exaggerated abandon and amused everyone as an instantly recognizable impression of the romantic dance that Sibel and I were given to dancing. At daybreak, and in spite of pleas from a friend leaving Fuaye with us, I insisted on driving. Seeing how I was drifting back and forth across the road, Sibel began to scream, so we took a car ferry to the other side. At dawn, as the ferry approached Üsküdar, we both fell asleep in the car. A sailor woke us by pounding on the window, because we were blocking food trucks and buses. We made our way along the shore, under ghostly plane trees shedding their red leaves, reaching the yali without incident, and, as we always did following our all-night adventures, we wrapped our arms tightly around each other and drifted off to sleep.

43

Cold and Lonely November Days

IN THE days that followed, Sibel didn’t even ask where in Nişantaşı I’d spent the hour and a half that I’d gone missing, but there was little room for doubt. After that night we had both become resigned to the fact that I was never going to get over my obsession. It was clear that strict regimens and prohibitions had been useless, though we still enjoyed living together in this once grand, now crumbling
yali
. However hopeless our situation, there was something about this decrepit house that bound us together and made our pain bearable by endowing it with a strange beauty.
The yali
added gravity and historical depth to this doomed love of ours; our sorrow and defeat were so great that the vestigial presence of a vanished Ottoman culture could furnish what we had lost as old lovers, as a newly engaged couple. The world evoked protected us somehow from the pain we felt at being unable to make love.

If, of an evening, we set up our table beside the sea—and, resting our arms and our elbows against the iron balcony rail, drank Yeni Rakı together and found our spirits lifting—I would sense from the way Sibel looked at me that in the absence of sex the only thing that could bind us together was marriage. Weren’t there plenty of happy married couples—not just in our parents’ generation but in our own—who led chaste lives together, as if everything were normal? After our third or fourth glass, we would play guessing games about young and old couples we knew—sometimes from a distance, sometimes more intimately—asking each other, “Do you think they still do?” and giving the question half-serious consideration. Our mockery, which now seems so very painful to me, owed a great deal, no doubt, to a dubious supposition that we would soon be returning to a satisfying love life. In our strange complicity and in these conversations that walled us off from the outside world, there was the veiled aim of convincing ourselves that we could marry in this condition, and peacefully await the return of that sex life of which we had once been so proud. At least Sibel would come to believe this, even on her most pessimistic days; swayed by my teasing, my jokes, and my compassion, she would grow hopeful, and content, even sitting on my lap, as if to trigger a reaction. In my more hopeful moments I, too, would feel the thing I thought Sibel was feeling, and it would occur to me to say that we must marry at once, but I held back, fearing that she might decline my proposal quickly and definitively, and then abandon me. For it seemed to me that Sibel was waiting for an opportunity to end our relationship with a retaliatory blow that would also restore her self-respect. Unable to accept that she had lost the lifetime of marital bliss that had stretched out before us only four months ago—that enviable, unsullied existence, rich with children, friends, and diverse amusements—she could not bring herself to strike first. In this way, we both derived emotional utility from the strange love that still bound us and for the time being, whenever in the middle of the night despair awoke us from the slumber that only drink can induce, we would continue the custom of wrapping our arms around each other, ignoring the pain as best we could.

From mid-November onward, whenever we awoke on a windless night—raw from misery, or thirst, because we’d had so much to drink—we began to hear a fisherman splashing around in his rowboat, just beyond our closed shutters, moving through the still waters of the Bosphorus, casting his net. Sometimes the boat would drift beneath our bedroom. Accompanying this quiet, soft-spoken fisherman was a slim little boy whose voice was sweet and who did everything his father asked. As the lamp hanging from their boat filtered through our shutters, casting a lovely glow on the ceiling, we could hear the sounds of their oars cutting into the silent water, and the water cascading through their net as they lifted it from the sea, and at times only the boy’s coughing as the two went wordlessly about their work. We would wake up to their arrival and clinging to each other we listened to them rowing five or six meters from our bed, little knowing that we were in here listening; we heard them throw stones into the sea, to scare the fish into the net, and on rare occasions they spoke: “Hold it tight, my son,” the fisherman would say, or, “Pick up the basket,” or, “Now backwater.” Much later, in the midst of the deepest silence, the son would say in his sweet voice, “There’s another one over there!” and Sibel and I lying enfolded would wonder what the child was pointing at. Was it a fish, or a dangerous spike, or some sea creature we could only imagine from our bed? I do not remember ever talking about the fisherman and his son during the waking hours that followed. But at night we wafted between sleep and wakefulness, sometimes hearing the fishing boat drift away after its night’s work and sometimes missing it we would nevertheless enjoy without fail a precious interval of immense peace, as if there was nothing to fear as long as we’d been visited by the fisherman and his son.