The Museum of Innocence (34 page)

“There was that fisherman with his son,” I said. “We used to listen to them in the yali. Not long after you left for Paris, they disappeared, too. After that the yali got even colder and lonelier, until I couldn’t bear it anymore.”

Sibel heard the note of apology in my voice as I spoke of this development, hoping to redirect the conversation. (My father’s pearl earrings crossed my mind.) “This father and his son were probably going after the schools of bonito or bluefish.” There had been plenty of both this year, I told her; even in the backstreets of Fatih, I’d seen them sold from horse-drawn carts, followed everywhere by cats. As we ate our fish, Sadi told us that the price of turbot had gone up dramatically, because they’d arrested those Turkish fishermen who’d gone into Russian and Bulgarian waters to fish turbot. As we were discussing this story, I saw that Sibel was looking more distressed than ever. She knew I was talking about all these things so as not to speak of our predicament, about which I had nothing new to say and no hope to offer. I did want to find an easy way to talk about it, but I couldn’t think of any. Now, seeing her sad face, I knew I couldn’t lie to her, and that made me frantic.

“Look, Hilmi and his wife are getting up to leave,” I said. “Shall we invite them to join us?” Before Sibel could say anything, I waved at them, but they didn’t see me.

“Don’t ask them to join us,” said Sibel.

“Why? Hilmi’s a very nice boy. And I thought you liked his wife, what’s her name?”

“What’s going to happen to us?”

“I don’t know.”

“When I was in Paris, I talked to Leclerq.” This was Sibel’s economics professor, whom she admired greatly. “He thinks I should do a dissertation.”

“So you’re going to Paris?”

“I’m not happy here.”

“Shall I come, too?” I asked. “Though I have a lot of work here.”

Sibel did not answer. It was clear that she’d already made up her mind about this meeting, and also about our future, but I sensed that she had one more thing to say.

“Go to Paris, then,” I said, tiring of the halting discussion. “I can see to things here and come later.”

“There’s one more thing I have to say. I apologize for bringing it up, but there’s the question of virginity, Kemal. Perhaps you feel some obligation to this shopgirl. But I think virginity is not important enough to justify what you’ve done.”

“What do you mean?”

“If we’re really meant to be modern in our outlook, if we’re really European, as I said, it has no importance. If, on the other hand, we’re still tied to tradition, and virginity matters to you, as something you want everyone to respect, then everyone’s should be considered in the same way!”

At first I frowned, because I wasn’t sure what Sibel was trying to say. Then I remembered that I had been her first lover. “It’s not the same burden for you as for her,” I wanted to say. “You’re rich and modern!” But instead I looked down in shame.

“And there’s something else that I’m never going to be able to forgive, Kemal. If you weren’t going to be able to break it off with her, then why did we get engaged? Why didn’t you break off the engagement?” Her voice trembled with bitterness. “If it was going to come to this, why did we move to
the yali?
Why did we give parties? Why, in a country like this, did we live openly as a couple without being married?”

“The innocent, sincere companionship I shared with you in the
yali—
I’ve never known such a thing with anyone else.”

I could see how angry my answers were making her. She was so angry and miserable that she was about to cry.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so very sorry.”

There was a terrible silence. To keep Sibel from crying, to keep this from going any further, I waved frantically at Tayfun and his wife, who were still waiting for a table. They were glad to see us. When I insisted, they sat down at our table.

“Do you know, I’ve already begun to miss
the yali
!” said Tayfun.

They had come to visit us a lot during the summer. Tayfun had strolled up and down the wharf and through the house as if they belonged to him, he’d opened up the refrigerator to get drinks for himself and others, sometimes he’d feel inspired to spend hours in the kitchen cooking, while consumed by the need to hold forth on the particularities of the Soviet and Romanian tankers steaming by.

“Do you remember that evening when I passed out in the garden?” he said, reminiscing fondly. Seeing Sibel sitting there listening to Tayfun, saying jovial things in reply, without betraying a hint of her inner feelings, I could not help but feel something akin to admiration.

“So then, when are you two getting married?” asked Tayfun’s wife, Figen.

Was it possible that she had not heard the gossip about us?

“In May,” said Sibel. “At the Hilton again. You’ll all have to promise to wear white, as in
The Great Gatsby
. Have you seen it yet?” Suddenly she looked at her watch. “Oh no, I have to meet my mother at the corner of Nişantaşı in five minutes.” In fact her parents were in Ankara.

She jumped up and kissed first Tayfun and Figen, and then me, on both cheeks. After sitting for a while with Tayfun and Figen, I, too, left Fuaye and went to the Merhamet Apartments to find my customary consolation. A week later, Sibel returned her engagement ring to me, via Zaim. Although news of her came to me from all directions, I would not see her again for thirty-one years.

47

My Father’s Death

THE NEWS of my broken engagement spread fast; Osman came to the office one day to berate me; he was ready to intervene and mollify Sibel’s heart. Meanwhile, a wide variety of rumors reached my ears: I’d gone soft in the head; I’d become a creature of the night; I’d joined a secret Sufi sect in Fatih; there were even those who said I’d become a communist and, like so many militants, gone to live in a shantytown—but none of this upset me much. On the contrary, I hoped that when Füsun heard I had broken my engagement, she would be impressed and send word from wherever she was hiding. By now I had given up all hope of recovery; instead of seeking to relieve it, I made the most of my pain. I took to wandering aimlessly through those forbidden streets of orange light, and four or five times a week I would repair to the Merhamet Apartments for the peace of my memories and the therapeutic comfort of the things I kept there. With Sibel out of my life, I could have gone back as a bachelor to my old bedroom in my parents’ house in Nişantaşı, but my mother, herself unable to accept the broken engagement, had concealed the bad news from my father, whom she described as “listless and weak,” and as she was unwilling to discuss this dangerous subject openly, there would be long silences at the table when I went to have lunch with them, which I did frequently, though I never stayed the night. In fact, my stomachaches worsened whenever I was in the Nişantaşı house.

But when my father died at the beginning of March, I went home to stay. It was Osman who came to the Fatih Hotel in the Chevrolet to bring me the bad news. I would never have wanted him to come up to my room and see the strange objects I’d bought during my walks through the poor neighborhoods, from junk dealers, grocers, and stationers, all of them hoarded in my shamefully ramshackle room. Refraining from his customary scolding, this time he just looked at me sadly, embracing me with tender sincerity, and no reproach; half an hour later I had packed up my things, paid the bill, and left the Fatih Hotel. Teary-eyed Çetin Efendi looked so distraught, and I remembered that my father had entrusted both him and the car to my care. It was a gloomy, leaden winter’s day, and as Çetin Efendi drove us over the Atatürk Bridge, I looked at the Golden Horn, its icy aquamarine swirling with oil slicks, its coldness chiming with my loneliness.

My father had died of heart failure, a few minutes after seven, as the morning prayers were being sung; my mother had awoken thinking her husband was still asleep beside her; when she realized what had happened, she became hysterical, so they had given her a Paradison tablet to calm her down. Now seated in the sitting room in her usual chair, across from my father’s, she would from time to time begin to cry, and gesture toward the empty seat. She brightened when she saw me. We threw our arms around each other; neither of us spoke.

I went in to see my father. He was lying in his pajamas on the walnut bed he had shared with my mother for almost forty years; though still in a sleeping position, he was rigid, and the expression on his pallid face suggested not a slumberous peace but deep distress. He had awoken to see death before him; his eyes were wide with panic, frozen on his face a look of fear and awe, the sort you would expect on someone helpless in the path of fast-approaching traffic. His wrinkled hands gripping the blankets, their scent of cologne, their crooked curves, their hairs and moles; these hands had caressed my hair, my back, my arms thousands of times when I was a child, making me so happy; these were hands I knew. But now their whiteness scared me; and I could not bring myself to kiss them. I wanted to pull off the blanket and see his whole body in those blue-and-white-striped silk pajamas he always wore, but the blanket was stuck somewhere.

While I was pulling at it, his left foot poked out. I felt compelled to look at his toe. My father’s big toe was absolutely identical to my own, and as one will gather from this detail of an old photograph that I’ve had enlarged, his toes had a unique shape. Ever since my father’s old friend Cüneyt had first noticed this strange resemblance twelve years earlier when we were sitting in our swimsuits on the Suadiye shore, he would greet us with the same old joke whenever he saw us together: “How are the father-and-son toes doing?”

I locked the bedroom door and sat down, preparing to take the opportunity to cry over Füsun for a very long time while thinking about my father, but the tears wouldn’t come. Instead I gazed with new eyes at the bedroom where my father had spent so many years with my mother, this intimate chamber of my childhood still entirely redolent of cologne, carpet dust, floor polish, old wood, curtains, my mother’s perfume, and the oil from our hands that clung to the barometer that my father would take me on his lap to show me. It was as if the center of my life had dissolved, as if the earth had swallowed up my past. Opening up his cupboard, I took out the outmoded ties and belts, and one of the pairs of shoes that were still occasionally shined, though he hadn’t worn them in years. When I heard footsteps in the corridor, I felt the same tinge of guilt I’d felt when rummaging through this wardrobe as a boy, and I quickly shut its creaking door. On my father’s bedside table were medicines, crossword puzzles, folded newspapers, a much loved photograph from his army days, taken when he’d been drinking raki with the officers, his reading glasses, and also his false teeth, in a glass. The false teeth I took from the glass, wrapping them in my handkerchief, and put them in my pocket; then I went to be with my mother in the front room, taking my father’s chair.

“Mother dear, don’t worry—I took Father’s false teeth,” I said.

She nodded, as if to say, Fine, you know best. By noon the house had filled with relatives, friends, acquaintances, and neighbors. They all kissed my mother’s hand and embraced her. The front door was open and the lift in constant use. Before long there were so many people that I could not help but remember the holiday feasts we’d had here. I felt that I loved this crowd of people, these sounds of family life, and the warmth; surrounded by all these relatives, all these cousins with the same potato noses and wide foreheads, I felt happy. For a while I sat with Berrin on the divan, gossiping amiably about the cousins. It pleased me that Berrin followed them all so closely, that she knew the family news better than I did. Like everyone else, I whispered the occasional little joke, I talked about the latest football match, which I’d watched in the lobby of the Fatih Hotel (Fenerbahçe 2–Boluspor 0), and I sat down at the table set by Bekri, who, despite his pain, was frying up more cheese pastries; and I went often to the bedroom in the back to look in on my father’s pajama-clad body. Yes, he was perfectly still. From time to time I opened up his drawers, to touch the things that carried so many of my early memories. My father’s death had turned these familiar props of childhood into objects of immeasurable value, each one the vessel of a lost past. I opened the bedside table drawer, and as I breathed in the fumes of cedar and my father’s sugary cough syrup, I gazed for a long time at the old phone bills, the telegrams, my father’s aspirins and medicines, as if I were looking at a complicated picture. I remember, too, that before leaving with Çetin to make the funeral arrangements, I stood on the balcony at length, gazing down at Teşvikiye Avenue. With the death of my father, it wasn’t just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole. Because coming home now meant a return to the center of that world, there was a happiness I could not hide from myself, and my guilt was even deeper than that of a man whose father has just died. In the refrigerator I found the little bottle of Yeni Rakı that my father had half finished the last night of his life; after all the guests had left and I was sitting with my mother and older brother, I drank what was left.

“Did you see what your father did to me?” said my mother. “Even when he was dying, he didn’t let me know.”

That afternoon, my father’s corpse had been taken to the morgue at Sinan Pasha Mosque in Beşiktaş. My mother, wishing to fall asleep immersed in my father’s scent, had not wanted the sheets or pillowcases to be changed. It was late when my brother and I gave our mother a sleeping pill and put her to bed. My mother smelled the pillowcases and the sheets for a time, and cried a little, and fell asleep. When Osman, too, had left, I went to my own bed, thinking that in the end—as I had so often longed would happen, and dreamed of happening, when I was a child—I had been left alone in this house with my mother.

But it was not this that filled me with excitement; it was (as I in my heart could not deny) the possibility that Füsun might come to the funeral. For this express reason I had included all the names of that distant branch of the family in the death announcements in the papers. I kept thinking that Füsun and her parents would read one of these announcements, somewhere in Istanbul, and come to the funeral. Which newspaper might they read? Of course, they might also hear the news from other relatives mentioned in the death notices. My mother read through all the newspaper death notices over breakfast. From time to time she would grumble: “Sıdıka and Saffet are related both to me and to your dear departed father, so their names should have come just after Perran and her husband. Şükrü Pasha’s daughters, Nigân, Türkan, and Şükran, have also been put in the wrong order. There was no need to include Uncle Zekeriya’s first wife, Melike the Arab. After all, she couldn’t have been married to your uncle for more than three months. That poor little baby of your great-aunt Nesime, who died when she was two months, her name wasn’t Gül, it was Ayşegül. Who did you go to for your information when you were writing these up?”