The Museum of Innocence (50 page)

With the same conviction, I display here a number of New Year’s lottery tickets from the period. Like my mother, Aunt Nesibe would buy a ticket for the grand drawing on December 31, to serve as one of the tombala presents. To whomever won the ticket, the others at the Keskin table, as at our home, would say almost in unison: “Oh, look at that, you’re lucky tonight…. You’re sure to win the ticket for the grand drawing, too.”

By some strange coincidence, Füsun won the lottery ticket every year between 1977 and 1984. But when the winning ticket was announced on the radio and television a short while later, by an equally strange coincidence, she never won a prize, not even a refund.

At our house as at the Keskin table, the old saw about poker, love, and life was oft repeated, especially when Tarık Bey was playing cards with guests.

“Unlucky at cards, lucky at love.”

Everybody said it compulsively, and so in 1981, on New Year’s Eve, after we had watched the live broadcast of the grand drawing, supervised by the First Notary Public of Ankara, after it was clear that Füsun had won nothing, I drunkenly, thoughtlessly, uttered it too.

“Seeing as you’ve lost the lottery, Miss Füsun,” I said, imitating the English gentleman hero we watched on television, “you are bound to be a winner at love!”

“I have no doubt about
that
, Kemal Bey!” said Füsun, without missing a beat, just like the clever, elegant heroines of the same films.

Conservative newspapers like
Milli Gazete, Tercüman
, and
Hergün
were forever fulminating against New Year’s Eve, which, thanks to tombala, the National Lottery, all this card playing, and the ubiquitous promotions for restaurants and nightclubs, was slowly turning into an orgy of drinking and gambling. When some rich Muslim families in Şişli and Nişantaşı began buying pine trees to decorate and display in windows the way Christians did in films, I remember that even my mother felt uneasy, but because these were people she knew, she refrained from calling them “degenerates” or “infidels” as the religious press would, dismissing them rather as “harebrained.”

In the run-up to New Year’s there would be thousands of vendors selling tickets for the National Lottery in the streets of Istanbul, and some would go dressed as Santa Claus into the wealthy neighborhoods. One evening in December 1980, when I was choosing what tombala presents to take to Füsun’s house, I saw a small mixed group of lycée students deriding one such Santa Claus, pulling his beard of cotton wool and laughing. When I drew closer I saw that this man was the janitor of the apartment house across the street; as the teenagers tugged at his cotton wool mustache, Haydar Efendi stood there silently, holding his tickets, his eyes downcast. A few years later the conservatives’ anger at the drinking and gambling during the celebration overflowed when Islamists set off a bomb in the Marmara Hotel on Taksim Square, in the patisserie that had been decorated for New Year’s with an enormous pine tree. At the Keskin dinner table, I recall, the bombing was, of course, an urgent topic, but it was nothing compared to what happened to the belly dancer who was expected to appear on a New Year’s Eve telecast. When Sertap, the most famous belly dancer of the day, appeared on television in 1981 despite the angry diatribes in the conservative press, we were dumbfounded, along with almost everyone else in the country. The TRT management had draped the beautiful and curvaceous Sertap in so many layers that not only were her “world-famous” belly and breasts covered, but even her legs.

“They might as well have veiled her, the disgraceful buffoons!” said Tarık Bey. Actually he hardly ever got angry at the television, and no matter how much he’d had to drink, he never shouted at the screen the way the rest of us did when sufficiently annoyed.

For some years, I’d been buying a
Saath Maarif Takvimi
, the calendar indicating the prayer times, from Alaaddin’s shop to take to Aunt Nesibe’s as a tombala present. On New Year’s Eve, 1981, it was Füsun who won it, and at my insistence she tacked it on the wall between the television and the kitchen, but no one would pay attention to the pages on days when I wasn’t there, despite there being a poem of the day, a daily note about the historical events whose anniversary it was, and a picture of a clock face, so that those who could not read and write might know the prayer times, as well as recommended recipes, historical anecdotes, and a bit of wisdom.

“Aunt Nesibe, you’ve forgotten to pull the page off the calendar again,” I would say at the end of the evening, when the soldiers would be saluting the flag as they goose-stepped across the screen, and we would have polished off a lot of
raki
.

“Another day is over,” Tarık Bey would say. “Thank God we are not hungry or without shelter, that our stomachs are full, that we are sitting in a warm house—what more could a person want in life?”

For some reason it lifted my heart to hear Tarık Bey say these homely words as the evening wound down, and so—even though I’d noticed on my arrival that they’d forgotten to pull the page off the calendar—I would omit to mention it until the moment I was about to leave, when I was ready to hear this thanksgiving.

“The most important thing is that we’re here all together, with our loved ones,” Aunt Nesibe would add. As she said this, she would lean over to kiss Füsun, and if Füsun was not at her side, she would call out, “Come here, my little storm cloud, so that I can give you a kiss.”

Sometimes Füsun would assume a little girl’s expression and sit on her mother’s lap, allowing Aunt Nesibe to spend a long time caressing her, kissing her arms, her neck, her cheeks. No matter how mother and daughter were getting along, they kept up this ritual through the eight years. As they laughed and kissed and hugged, Füsun knew full well that I was watching her, but she never looked back at me directly.

There were times, too, when, after Aunt Nesibe pronounced her wisdom about “loved ones,” Füsun would not go to her mother’s lap, but instead would take a neighbor’s child, a fast-growing boy called Ali, onto her lap, and after caressing him and showering him with kisses, she would say, “Time for you to go home now, or else your parents will get angry at us for keeping you.” Finally, there were the occasions when Füsun was in a bad mood, because she and her mother had argued that morning, and at Aunt Nesibe’s plea, “Come over here, my girl,” she would say, “Oh, Mother, please!” leaving Aunt Nesibe to say, “Then at least pull the page off the calendar, so we don’t get our days confused.”

This would leave Füsun all smiles suddenly, and after getting up to pull the page off the
Saath Maarif Takvimi
, she would read out the day’s poem and the recipe in a loud semitheatrical voice and laugh. Aunt Nesibe would comment, “Oh, what a good idea, let’s make quince and raisin compote, it’s been ages,” or, “Yes, they’re suggesting artichokes, but you can’t pick artichokes when they’re still small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.” Sometimes she would ask a question that unsettled me: “If I made a spinach pastry, would you eat it?”

If Tarık Bey didn’t hear her or was too gloomy to answer, then Füsun would turn to scrutinize me in silence, with a sadistic curiosity based on the expectation that I would not dare presume the prerogative of a full member of the family by telling Aunt Nesibe what to cook.

I knew how to rescue myself from this difficult bind, saying, “Füsun loves savory pastries, Aunt Nesibe, so you should definitely make it!”

Sometimes Tarık Bey would ask his daughter about the important historical dates on the page she’d torn off the
Saath Maarif Takvimi
, and she’d read aloud: “On September 3, 1658, the Ottoman army began its siege of Doppio Castle.” Or “On August 26, 1071, after the Battle of Malazgirt, Anatolia opened its doors to the Turks.”

“Hmmmm, let’s have a look at that,” Tarık Bey would say. “They’ve misspelled ‘Doppio.’ Here, take it back, and read us the saying of the day.”

“Home is where the heart is, and where we fill our stomachs,” Füsun said, reading in a mocking voice until our eyes met and she turned serious.

Suddenly we all fell silent, as if each was pondering the deeper meaning of those words. After Füsun had finished reading and had put the leaf from the calendar to one side, I picked it up, pretending I wanted to read it for myself, and when no one was looking, I put it into my pocket.

Of course, the pilfering wasn’t always so easy, but I have no wish to make myself more risible by going into the full details of my difficulties in acquiring so many objects of such varying size and preciousness from the Keskin household. Let an example from the end of New Year’s Eve 1982 suffice: Before I left the house with the little handkerchief I’d won at tombala, little Ali, the neighbor’s boy, who grew more in awe of Füsun with every day, came up to me and in a manner quite unlike his usual naughty self he said, “Kemal Bey, you know that handkerchief you won …”

“Yes?”

“That’s Füsun’s hankie from when she was a child. May I see it again?”

“Oh, I have no idea where I put it, Ali, my boy.”

“But I know,” the brat replied. “You put it in this pocket, so it must be there.”

He almost managed to invade my pocket with his hand, but I took a step backward. The rain was pelting down outside, and everyone had gathered at the window, so no one else heard what the child said.

“Ali, my boy, it’s getting very late, and you’re still here,” I said. “Your parents will blame us.”

“I’m going, Kemal Bey. But are you going to give me Füsun’s hankie?”

“No,” I whispered with a frown. “I need it.”

59

Getting Past the Censors

I’D KNOWN for years, from the stories in the news, that all films, domestic and foreign, had to clear the state censors before theatrical release, but before setting up Lemon Films I had no notion of their power in the film business. The papers mentioned the censors only when they banned films much esteemed in the West, as with
Lawrence of Arabia
, categorically banned for insulting Turkishness, and
Last Tango in Paris
, trimmed of its sex scenes to make the film more artistic, and more boring than the original.

There was one partner of the Pelür Bar who’d been working at the board of censors for many years; Hayal Hayati Bey was a frequent visitor to our table, and one evening he told us that, actually, he believed in democracy and freedom of expression more fervently than any European, but that he could not allow those who would deceive our innocent and well-meaning nation to exploit the cinematic arts toward that foul end. Like so many other Pelür habitués, Hayal Hayati also worked as a director and a producer, and said he’d accepted the board position so as “to drive the others crazy!”—a claim he punctuated as he did every joke, by giving Füsun a wink. Hayal Hayati got his nickname (meaning “Dream”) from the Pelür crowd because he used that term so often when making his rounds of the tables, talking about the films he was going to make. Every time he came to ours he would look soulfully into Füsun’s eyes, and he would tell her about one of his dream films, asking her each time for an “immediate and sincere” appraisal devoid of “commercial considerations.”

“That’s a beautiful idea for a film,” Füsun would say each time.

“When we make it you’re going to have to agree to star in it,” Hayal Hayati would reply, in the manner of a man who always acted instinctively and from the heart. We were discovering that it would take some time for us to get our first film off the ground.

According to Hayal Hayati, the Turkish film industry was free to do more or less what it liked, provided that films did not include lewdness or sex scenes, or unacceptable interpretations of Islam, Atatürk, the Turkish army, the president, religious figures, Kurds, Armenians, Jews, or Greeks. Of course, he’d smile when he said it, because for half a century the members of the board of censors did not just obey the dictates of the state, banning any subject that made those in power uneasy, but had gotten into the habit of acting on their own agendas, banning whatever happened to annoy or offend them, and like Hayal Hayati, deriving considerable pleasure when using their power arbitrarily.

Hayati Bey told stories about the films he had banned during his time on the board with the relish of a hunter bragging of the bears he’d caught in his traps. We laughed at his stories as much as anyone. For example, he’d banned one film about the adventures of a hapless security guard on the grounds that it “degraded Turkish security guards;” and a film about a wife and mother falling in love with another man because it “insulted the institution of motherhood;” and a film about the happy adventures of a little truant was prohibited for “alienating children from school.” Unfortunately the first film Hayati Bey made after his term on the board ended was itself also banned, “and, sadly, it was a capricious decision motivated by personal matters.” Hayati Bey would get very angry whenever it was mentioned. The film, which had been very costly to make, was banned in its entirety on account of a dinner scene in which a man became enraged at the family dinner table because there was no vinegar in the salad, and the censors felt called to “protect the family, the foundation of society.”

As he sat with us explaining how this scene and two other family quarrels, likewise offensive to the censors, had been taken in all innocence from his own life, it became clear that what had really upset Hayal Hayati was being betrayed by his old friends at the board of censors when they banned his film. If we were to believe what we were told, one night he’d gone out on a bender with them and ended up brawling in an alleyway with his oldest friend on the board, ostensibly over a girl. When the police picked them up off the muddy street and carted them to Beyoğlu Police Station, neither lodged a complaint, and so were encouraged by the police to kiss and make up. But subsequently, to win approval for theatrical release and save himself from bankruptcy, Hayal Hayati, having still influence enough to win a second consideration, was obliged to remove every quarrel remotely demeaning to the institution of the family, with the exception of the one in which the brute of a son beat up his younger sister at the behest of his devout mother; with this editing, the film passed the board of censors.