The Museum of Innocence (60 page)

What with the filming and the curfew, Feridun was seldom home, and he gave Füsun none of the money I’d put into Lemon Films. It was around this time (about a month earlier I’d taken away an old deck of cards belonging to Tarık Bey, scarcely concealing my action) that I stopped replacing the things I took and instead began to leave money.

I knew that Füsun read her fortune with those cards to pass the time. When Tarık Bey played bezique with Aunt Nesibe, he used a different deck, as did Aunt Nesibe when, once in a blue moon, she played cards with a guest (poker with peas, or even seven jacks). A number of cards in the deck I “stole” were dog-eared, and their backs were stained; some of the cards were even bent and broken. Füsun was amused to admit that because she could recognize some of these cards by their marks and stains, she could make her fortune come up according to her wishes. I’d sniffed the deck, breathing in the mixture of perfume, mildew, and dust particular to old cards, picking up the scent of Füsun’s hand. The deck and its scent made my head spin, and as Aunt Nesibe had noticed my interest, I slipped it into my pocket in plain view.

“My mother tries to read her fortune, but it never works out,” I said. “This deck seems to offer more favorable results. Once she gets to know the stains and creases, perhaps my mother will have better luck. She’s been very low lately.”

“Please send my best regards to Sister Vecihe,” said Aunt Nesibe.

After I’d promised to buy a new deck from Alaaddin’s shop in Nişantaşı, she spent a good while insisting that I “should not go to all that trouble.” When I insisted, she did allow that a certain new set had caught her eye in Beyoğlu.

Füsun was in the back room. Feeling very ashamed, I took a roll of cash from my pocket and hid it on the sideboard.

“Aunt Nesibe, would you please buy two of those sets, one for yourself and one for my mother? She will be happy to receive a deck of cards if they come from this house.”

“Of course,” said Aunt Nesibe.

Ten days later, and again feeling strangely ashamed, I left another wad of bills in the place from which I’d taken a new bottle of Pe-Re-Ja cologne.

During the first few months I was sure that Füsun had no idea that I was replacing objects with money. In fact, I’d been taking cologne bottles from the Keskin household for years and storing them at the Merhamet Apartments. But these were either empty or almost empty bottles, and so bound to be discarded soon anyway. No one but the children who played with them in the street had any interest in empty bottles.

Whenever I was offered cologne after supper, I would eagerly, even hopefully, rub it into my hands, my forehead, and my cheeks, as if anointing myself with some unction. When Füsun or her parents were offered cologne, I would watch enchanted as they each performed their own rituals. Never taking his eyes off the television, Tarık Bey would slowly and noisily unscrew the heavy bottle’s cap, and we all knew that soon, at the next commercial break, he would hand the bottle to Füsun saying, “See if anyone would like some.” First Füsun would pour cologne into her father’s hands, and Tarık Bey would rub it into his wrists with therapeutic purposefulness, inhaling the fragrance deeply, like someone recovering from shortness of breath, a relief renewed for the rest of the evening by sniffing now and again the tips of his long fingers. Aunt Nesibe would take only a few drops, and with dainty gestures reminiscent of my mother’s, she would make as if she were lathering an imaginary bar of soap between her palms. If he was at home, it would be Feridun who took the most cologne when his wife offered it, cupping his hands like a man dying of thirst, slapping it on his face as if intending to gulp it down. This range of gestures led me to feel that cologne had a meaning beyond its pleasant smell and cooling effect (especially since the same rituals were performed on cold winter evenings).

Like the cologne the driver’s assistant offered each and every traveler at the beginning of a bus journey, our cologne reminded us that as we gathered around the television we belonged to one another, that we shared the same fate (a sentiment also suggested by the evening news), that even though we were meeting together in the same house to watch television every evening, life was an adventure, and there was a beauty in doing things together.

I sat impatiently when my turn came, waiting for Füsun to pour cologne into my hands, and for our eyes to meet. We would look deeply into each other’s eyes, like two who had fallen in love at first sight. As I smelled the cologne in my hands, I would never look at them, but continue to look deep into her eyes. Sometimes the intensity, determination, and love visible in mine would make her smile, a hint of a smile that would not soon leave the corners of her lips. In that smile I saw a tenderness as well as a derision inspired by my ardor, my evening visits, and life itself, but it didn’t break my heart. Rather I would feel more love for her than ever, and so I’d want to take the cologne, this bottle of Altın Damla, Golden Drops, home with me, and a few visits later, when the bottle was almost empty, I would walk over to my coat, hanging near the door, and without stealth slip the bottle into my pocket.

During the filming of
Broken Lives
, as I walked from the Peri Cinema to Çukurcuma at around seven in the evening, just before nightfall, I sometimes felt as if I were reliving a little piece of a former life. In the first life that I was now repeating exactly, there had been no great sorrow, nor any great happiness, and a heavy melancholy was blackening my soul. Perhaps this was because I’d seen the end of the story and knew that no great victory or extraordinary bliss awaited me. Six years after falling in love with Füsun, I was no longer someone who thought of life as a pleasurable adventure, indeterminately full of possibility: I was on the verge of becoming a sad and dejected man. I was slowly being overtaken by the fear of having no future.

“Füsun, shall we look at the stork?” I asked during those spring evenings.

“No, I haven’t touched it since last time,” said Füsun listlessly.

Once Aunt Nesibe interrupted us to say, “Oh, how can you say such a thing? Why, when last I saw it that stork took off from our chimney and flew so high into the air—Kemal Bey, from where it is now you could see all of Istanbul.”

“I’d love to take a look.”

“I’m just not in the mood tonight,” Füsun would say sometimes, in all honesty.

Then I would sense Tarık Bey’s beating heart, and in his longing to protect his daughter, his sadness. It grieved me to think that when she uttered these words, Füsun was talking about not just that night, but about the dead end that was her whole life, and it was then that I decided to stop going to watch the filming of
Broken Lives
. Füsun’s answer had also served as a reminder of the war she had been waging against me for many years; in Aunt Nesibe’s looks, I could see that she was concerned for me as well as Füsun. The woes and worries of life had blackened our hearts, no less than the dark rain clouds gathering over Tophane had blackened the sky; feeling this, we would sink into a silence we had only three ways to remedy:

We’d watch television. We’d pour more raki into our glasses. We’d light another cigarette.

68

4,213 Cigarette Stubs

DURING MY eight years of going to the Keskins’ for supper, I was able to squirrel away 4,213 of Füsun’s cigarette butts. Each one of these had touched her rosy lips and entered her mouth, some even touching her tongue and becoming moist, as I would discover when I put my finger on the filter soon after she had stubbed the cigarette out; the stubs, reddened by her lovely lipstick, bore the unique impress of her lips at some moment whose memory was laden with anguish or bliss, making these stubs artifacts of singular intimacy. For nine years Füsun smoked Samsuns, for which brand I gave up Marlboros soon after beginning to dine at the Keskins’. I used to buy Marlboro Lights from tombala men and the black market vendors in the backstreets, and I can recall a conversation with Füsun one night about how both Marlboro Lights and Samsuns were full-flavor cigarettes of a similar taste. Füsun claimed that Samsuns made one cough more, but I said that as we had no way of knowing how many poisons and other chemicals the Americans put into their tobacco, it was possible that Marlboros were even more harmful. Tarık Bey had not yet sat down at the table when, looking deeply into each other’s eyes, we each produced a pack to offer the other a cigarette. For eight years I followed Füsun, chain-smoking Samsuns, but as I have no wish to set a poor example for future generations, let me not dwell lovingly on those seductive details that feature so prominently in old novels and films.

Once they’d been lit, our fake Marlboros, which were produced in the Socialist Republic of Bulgaria and smuggled into Turkey on ships and fishing boats, would burn—just like the real Marlboros produced in America—all the way to the end. But Samsuns would always flame out before that. The tobacco was coarse and moist, not ground well enough, and the cigarettes often contained what looked to be chips of wood, as well as undried lumps of the plant and thick-veined leaves. For this reason, Füsun was in the habit of softening the cigarette before she smoked it by rolling it between her fingers, and over time I had acquired this habit, too, rolling my cigarette between my fingers, just as she did, before lighting up, and I loved it when our eyes met as we were both doing this.

During my first years with the Keskins, Füsun would smoke in a way as if to suggest she was half trying to hide it from her father. Covering her cigarette with the curved palm of her hand, and not using the Kütahya ashtray that her father and I used, but tipping her ashes onto the small saucer of a coffee cup, “without anyone seeing.” Her father and Aunt Nesibe and I were heedless of where our smoke went, but when she had to exhale, Füsun would suddenly turn her head to the right, as if about to whisper a secret into the ear of the classmate sitting beside her, directing the fast cloud of dark blue smoke to a point far from the table. I loved to see her face clouding with guilt, panic, and affected shame: It reminded me of our math lessons, and I believed then that I would love her all my life.

The anxious adherence to the forms of deference that we associate with traditional families—sitting straight and never crossing one’s legs or smoking or drinking in front of one’s father—had over time slowly disappeared. Tarık Bey certainly saw his daughter smoking, but he didn’t respond as one might expect a traditional father would, seeming content with the other gestures by which Füsun showed her respect. It was a great joy to study the myriad social refinements of which anthropologists seem to have so little understanding, and most especially these rituals that allowed families to act “as if” they were respecting tradition, even as they broke with it. This “as if” culture did not seem to me duplicitous: Whenever I watched Füsun making these sweet and lovely gestures, I would remind myself that I was only able to see the Keskins at all because every time I visited we all acted “as if” I wasn’t sitting there as the suitor, as I truly was. I was able to see Füsun by reason of acting as if I were merely a distant relation come to visit, however frequently.

When I was not at the house, Füsun would smoke her cigarettes almost down to the filter, as I could tell from those butts she’d left around the house before I arrived. I always knew which ones were hers, not by the brand but rather by the way she’d stubbed them out, which bespoke her mood.

When I came for the evening, she would smoke her cigarettes as Sibel and her friends smoked their long, thin, stylish American “ultralights”—never smoking the whole cigarette but putting it out midway.

Sometimes she would stub it out with evident anger, sometimes with impatience. I had seen her stub out a cigarette in anger many times, and this caused me disquiet. Some days she would put out her cigarette against the surface of the ashtray with a series of short, insistent taps. And sometimes, when no one was looking, she would press it down hard, and very slowly, as if crushing the head of a snake, so that I would think that the collected resentment of her whole life was being expressed with this cigarette stub. At times, when watching television, or listening to the conversation at supper, when her mind was clearly elsewhere, she would snuff the cigarette without even turning her head to look. Quite often, if she needed to free her hand to pick up a spoon or a large pitcher, I would see her doing the job with one quick movement. When she was feeling joyous or glad, she would sometimes press what was left of the cigarette against the ashtray, extinguishing it with the sudden force of her forefinger, as if trying to kill an animal without causing it pain. If she was working in the kitchen, she would do as Aunt Nesibe did, removing the cigarette from her mouth and holding it for a moment under the tap before throwing it into the bin.

This variety of methods ensured that every cigarette to leave her hand had its special shape, and its own soul. Back in the Merhamet Apartments I would retrieve the butts from my pocket for careful examination, likening each to some other form. For example, I would see some as little black-faced people with their heads and necks smashed, their trunks made crooked by the wrongs others had done them; or I would read them as strange and frightening question marks. Sometimes I likened the cigarette ends to crayfish or the smokestacks of City Line ferries; sometimes I saw them as exclamation marks, one warning me to take heed of lurking danger of which another was an omen; or as just so much foul-smelling rubbish. Or I would see them as expressions of Füsun’s soul, even fragments of it, and as I lightly passed my tongue over the trace of lipstick on the filter, I would lose myself in communion with her.

When those visiting my museum note that beneath where each of the 4,213 cigarette butts is carefully pinned, I have indicated the date of its retrieval, I hope they will not grow impatient, thinking I am crowding the display cases with distracting trivia: Each cigarette butt in its own unique way records Füsun’s deepest emotions at the moment she stubbed it out. See, for example, the three cigarette butts I collected on May 17, 1981, when the filming of
Broken Lives
began at the Peri Cinema: All are roughly bent, folded upon themselves, and compacted, perfectly recalling the terrible awkwardness of Füsun’s silence that day, her refusal to say what was upsetting her, and her vain attempts to pretend nothing was wrong.