The Museum of Innocence (33 page)

It was his usual conversational fare, reports of parties and dances, gossip about people at the club, and the growing popularity of Meltem, no one subject dwelt on for long. He knew I’d moved out of
the yali
and was not at my parents’ in Nişantaşı, but to avoid triggering my gloom he refrained from asking about Füsun or my broken heart, though from time to time I tried to lead us in that direction, for I longed to know what he knew about her past. When it was clear that he was disinclined or unable to feed my obsession, regarding the complexity as too reckless or simply a bore, I assumed the air of a self-possessed man, and made sure he knew that I was going to the office every day and working hard.

It was snowing in late January when Sibel rang the office from Paris; in some agitation she told me that she’d heard from the neighbors and the gardener that I had moved out of the
yali
. It had been a long time since we’d spoken on the phone, and certainly this was an indication of our estrangement, but in those days it wasn’t easy to make international calls. The line would crackle with strange noises, and one had to shout into the receiver. Daunted by the prospect of proclaiming my love to Sibel at the top of my lungs (and without meaning a word of it) for the entire office to hear, I kept finding reasons not to talk to her.

“You’ve moved out of
the yali
, but I hear you’re not at your parents’!” she said.

“Yes, that’s right.”

I did not remind her that we had decided together that returning to my parents in Nişantaşı would exacerbate my illness. Neither could I ask who had told her I was not spending my nights at home. My secretary Zeynep Hanım had jumped from her seat to close the door between us, so that I could speak to my fiancée in private, but I still had to shout for Sibel to hear me.

“What are you doing? Where are you staying?” she asked.

No one but Zaim knew I was staying in a hotel in Fatih, I now remembered. But I didn’t want to shout this either, for the whole office to hear.

“Have you gone back to her?” asked Sibel. “You have to be straight with me, Kemal.”

“No!” I said, but I wasn’t able to shout it loud enough.

“I can’t hear you, Kemal.”

“No,” I said, louder this time. But still my response was muffled in the whoosh of the international line, whose sound was that of a seashell held to the ear.

“Kemal, Kemal, I can’t hear you, please….” Sibel shouted.

“I’m here!” I was shouting as loud as I could.

“Let me have it straight.”

“There’s nothing to tell you!” I said, shouting even louder.

“I understand!” said Sibel.

A strange sea sound came down the line, then a crackle, before the line went dead and the voice of the operator cut in. “The line to Paris has been disconnected, sir. Would you like me to try to connect you again?”

“No thank you, my girl,” I said. It was my father’s habit to address all female clerks, no matter their age, as “my girl.” It shocked me to notice how soon I was taking on my father’s habits. It shocked me to hear Sibel sounding so sure of herself…. But I was tired of telling lies. Sibel did not ring me from Paris again.

45

A
Holiday on Uludağ

I HEARD of Sibel’s return in February, at the start of the fifteen-day school holiday when families went to Uludağ to ski. Zaim, too, had called me at the office, suggesting we meet for lunch. As we sat together at Fuaye, eating lentil soup, Zaim fixed me with an affectionate gaze.

“You’ve run away from life. Every day I see you turning into a sadder and more troubled man, so I’m worried about you.”

“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’m fine….”

“You do not look fine,” he said. “Try to be happy.”

“You think the point of life is to be happy,” I said. “That’s why you believe I’m not happy and have run away from life…. I’m on the threshold of another life that will bring me peace.”

“Fine … Then tell us about this life, too. We’re genuinely curious.”

“Who are ‘we’?”

“Don’t do that, Kemal,” he said. “How is any of this my fault? Am I not your best friend?”

“You are.”

“We … Mehmet, Nurcihan, myself, and Sibel … We’re going to Uludağ in three days’ time. Why don’t you come, too. Nurcihan was planning to keep an eye on her niece, and so we decided to make it a group excursion. It will be fun.”

“So Sibel is back.”

“It has been ten days now. She came back the Monday before last. She wants you to come to Uludağ.” Zaim smiled, his face shining with goodness. “But she doesn’t want you to know it…. I’m telling you all this without her knowledge, so whatever you do, don’t make any mistakes in Uludağ.”

“I won’t—I’m not coming.”

“Come, it will do you good. This business will be over soon, and you’ll forget all about it.”

“Who knows? Do Nurcihan and Mehmet know?”

“Sibel knows, of course,” said Zaim. “She and I talked about this. She understands very well how someone as caring as you could get pulled into something like this, and she wants to help you out of it.”

“Is that so?”

“You’ve taken a wrong turn, Kemal. We all fall for the wrong people sometimes. We all fall in love. But in the end we all pull ourselves out of it before we ruin our lives.”

“Then what about all those love stories, all those films?”

“I love romantic films,” said Zaim. “But I’ve never seen one that justifies a case like yours. Six months ago, you had that huge engagement party. You and Sibel stood in front of everyone and exchanged rings. What a lovely evening that was. You moved in together, before you even were married. You even had parties at your house. We all thought, How elegant, how civilized. And because everyone knew you were getting married, everyone accepted it, not a soul took offense. I even heard people saying it was so chic, they wanted to do the same. But now you’ve moved out of
the yali
, and you’re on your own. Are you leaving Sibel? Why are you running away from her? You’re not explaining yourself. You’re acting like a child.”

“Sibel knows….”

“No, she doesn’t,” said Zaim. “She has no idea how to explain the situation. How is she going to face people? What can she say? ‘My fiancé fell in love with a shopgirl, so we’ve separated’? She’s very upset, she’s heartbroken. You have to speak to her. In Uludağ you could patch things up, put all this behind you. I guarantee you, Sibel is ready to go on as if this never happened. Nurcihan and Sibel will be staying in a room together at the Grand Hotel. Mehmet and I have taken the corner room on the second floor. There’s a third bed in that room. You know, you can see the misty mountaintop from there. You can stay with us. We can stay up all night ragging one another just like we did when we were young. Mehmet is so smitten with Nurcihan he’s burning up. Think of the fun we could have with him.”

“Actually the person you’d be having fun with would be me,” I said. “And anyway, Mehmet and Nurcihan are already a couple.”

“Believe me, I would never joke at your expense,” Zaim said, somewhat hurt. “Nor would I let anyone else.”

From his words it was clear that already Istanbul society—or at least the people in our own circle—had begun to make jokes about my obsession. But I had already guessed this.

I was full of admiration for Zaim’s delicacy in setting up this trip to Uludağ, just to help me. When I was young, my family would go to Uludağ every winter, along with most of my father’s business associates, his friends from the club, and so many other wealthy Nişantaşı families. I had so loved those vacations—when everyone knew or would come to know everyone, and you could make new friends, and play at matchmaking, as even the shiest girls danced the night away—that even years later, if I happened on an old mitten of my father’s at the back of a drawer, or the goggles that my brother had used and then passed on to me, my spine would tingle. During my time in America, whenever I looked at the postcards my mother sent me from the Grand Hotel, I felt a wave of happy longing.

I thanked Zaim but said, “I’m not coming. It would be too painful. But you’re right. I need to talk to Sibel.”

“She’s not at the yali. She’s staying with Nurcihan,” said Zaim. Turning his head to survey the other diners, who were in high spirits—and like him, getting richer by the day—he was able for a moment to forget my troubles and smile.

46

Is It Normal to Leave Your Fiancée in the Lurch?

I COULDN’T bring myself to call Sibel until the end of February, when she was back from Uludağ. I was afraid that the dreaded talk might end in unpleasantness, anger, tears, and reproach, and hoping she might take the initiative and send back the ring with a fully justified excuse. But one day I could bear the tension no longer, so I picked up the phone and rang her at Nurcihan’s house; we agreed to meet for supper.

I’d thought it would be good to go to Fuaye because neither of us was likely to succumb to sentimentality, anger, or excess surrounded by people we knew. And so it was in the beginning. At the tables around us were Hilmi the Bastard with his new wife, Neslihan, and Tayfun, and Güven the Ship Sinker with his family, and (at a very crowded table) Yeşim and her husband. Hilmi and his wife even came over to our table and said how very pleased they were to see us.

Over mezes and Yakut red wine, she talked about her trip to Paris, describing Nurcihan’s French friends, and telling me how beautiful that city was at Christmas.

“How are your parents?” I asked.

“They’re fine,” she said. “They have heard nothing about our situation as yet.”

“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “We don’t have to say anything to anyone.”

“I don’t,” said Sibel, and then she fell silent, with a look as if to ask, So what’s going to happen now?

Changing the subject, I told her that my father seemed to be withdrawing from the world a little more every day. Sibel told me about her mother’s new habit of hiding away her old clothes and other belongings. I told her how my mother was even more radical about banishing all her discarded things to another apartment. But this was a dangerous subject, so we fell silent again. Sibel’s expression told me she inferred no malice in my having brought it up just to keep the conversation going, but she also understood that my avoiding the real subject meant I had nothing new to say to her.

So she got to the point herself, saying, “I see you’ve come to accept your condition.”

“What do you mean?”

“For months now we’ve been waiting for your illness to pass. But after all this waiting, there are no signs of recovery—and instead you seem to greet your illness with open arms. It’s very painful to see, Kemal. In Paris I prayed for your recovery.”

“I’m not ill,” I said. I looked at the jolly crowd of diners around us. “These people might see it that way. But you shouldn’t.”

“When we were at the yali,” Sibel said, “didn’t we both agree it was an illness?”

“We did.”

“So what has changed now? Is it normal to leave your fiancée in the lurch like this?”

“What?”

“For a shopgirl …”

“Why are you mixing things up like that? This has nothing to do with shops, or wealth, or poverty.”

“It has everything to do with it,” said Sibel, with the determination that attends having given something a great deal of thought and reached a painful conclusion. “It’s because she was a poor, ambitious girl that you were able to start something with her so easily. If she hadn’t been a shopgirl, maybe you could have married her without causing yourself embarrassment. So that’s what made you ill, in the end. You couldn’t marry her. You couldn’t find the courage.”

Believing that Sibel was saying these things to me to make me angry, I got angry. But this is not to say that the fury owed nothing to my partial awareness that she was right.

“It isn’t normal, darling, for someone like you to do all these bizarre things for the sake of a shopgirl, to go to live in a hotel in Fatih…. If you want to get better, you have to concede that I have a point.”

“First of all, I’m not in love with that girl the way you think I am,” I said. “But just for the sake of argument, don’t people ever fall in love with people who are poorer than they are? Don’t rich and poor ever fall in love?”

“The art of love is in finding a balance of equals,” Sibel said. “As there is with you and me. Have you ever seen a rich girl fall in love with Ahmet Efendi the janitor, or Hasan Usta, the construction worker, just for his good looks? Outside Turkish films, I mean.”

Sadi, the headwaiter, was walking toward us, his face beaming at the sight of us, but when he saw how intently we were talking, he broke off the approach. I indicated with my head that he had been right to do so and turned back to Sibel.

“I believe in Turkish films,” I said.

“Kemal, in all these years I have never seen you go to a Turkish film, not even once. You don’t even go with your friends to the summer cinemas, just for a laugh.”

“Life at the Fatih Hotel is just like a Turkish film, believe me,” I said. “At night, before I go to sleep, I walk around those desolate and impoverished streets. It does me good.”

“In the beginning I thought this whole business with the shopgirl was Zaim’s fault,” she said pointedly. “I thought you were aping
La Dolce Vita
. I thought you wanted to have some fun with dancers, and bar girls, and German models before you got married. I discussed this with Zaim. But now I’ve decided you’re suffering from some sort of complex”—this word had just come into fashion—“some sort of complex about being rich in a poor country. Of course, this is a lot deeper than some little fling with a shopgirl.”

“You may be right,” I said.

“In Europe the rich are refined enough to act as if they’re not wealthy. That is how civilized people behave. If you ask me, being cultured and civilized is not about everyone being free and equal; it’s about everyone being refined enough to act as if they were. Then no one has to feel guilty.”

“Hmmmmm. I see your time at the Sorbonne was not a waste,” I said. “Shall we order our fish now?”

Sadi now came to our table, and after we’d asked him how he was (“Extremely well, praise be to God!”) and how business was going (“We’re a family, Kemal Bey. It’s the same people every night!”), we talked about the general state of affairs (“Ah, with all this terrorism between leftists and rightists, it’s almost impossible for a decent citizen to go out into the street!”) and the comings and goings of the regulars (“Everyone’s back from Uludağ now!”). I’d known Sadi since childhood. Before Fuaye opened, he’d worked at Abdullah Efendi’s in Beyoğlu, where my father had eaten all the time. He’d come to Istanbul thirty years earlier, at the age of nineteen, never having seen the sea before, and quickly learned the intricacies of picking and preparing fish from the old Greek tavern owners and the city’s most famous Greek waiters. He brought us a tray of red mullet, large, oily bluefish, and sea bass that he’d bought with his own hands at the fish market that morning. We smelled the fish, looked at the brightness of the eyes, and the redness of the gills, and confirmed that it was fresh. Then we complained about how polluted the Sea of Marmara was getting. Sadi told us that Fuaye had a private company deliver a tanker full of water every day because of the cuts in the water supply. They had not yet ordered a generator to cope with the power cuts, but the guests seemed to like the atmosphere on those evenings when they had to depend on candles and gas lamps. After topping off our wineglasses, Sadi went on his way.