The Museum of Innocence (63 page)

“So do I,” said Zaim. “It doesn’t matter what
we
drink…. Papatya will help us increase sales in the provinces. But what sort of woman is she? … Can we trust her?”

“I don’t know. She is an ambitious girl who comes from nothing. Her mother is a former nightclub singer…. There’s no sign of a father. What are you worried about?”

“We’re investing so much in this. If she went off and did a belly dance in a porn film afterward, or if—I don’t know—she got caught with a married man … the provinces wouldn’t be able to take it. I hear she’s involved with your Füsun’s husband.”

I didn’t like the way he said “your Füsun,” and neither did I care for his knowing expression, which I read to imply unspoken awareness of my intimacy with the people in question. Somewhat spitefully I said, “So do they really like Meltem better in the provinces?” Zaim, who had pretension to modern and European sophistication, bristled at the fact that, despite his Western ad campaign with Inge, his product’s cachet with the rich and the urban had proved ephemeral.

“Yes, we’re more popular in the provinces,” admitted Zaim. “Because people in the provinces haven’t corrupted their palates yet, because they’re pure Turks, that’s why! But don’t get hostile and tetchy with me…. I understand perfectly your feelings for Füsun. In this age of ours, your love is perfectly respectable—whatever anyone might say.”

“Who’s saying what?”

“No one’s saying a thing,” said Zaim cautiously.

This meant “Society has written you off.” The thought caused us both disquiet. I loved Zaim both because he could be counted on to tell me the truth and because he didn’t want to hurt me.

And Zaim saw affection in my eyes. With a friendly and encouraging smile, he raised his eyebrows and asked, “So what’s going on?”

“Things are going well,” I said. “I’m going to marry Füsun. I’m going to reenter society and bring her with me…. Assuming, of course, I can see past those disgusting gossips.”

“Just forget them, my friend,” said Zaim. “And very soon the whole thing will be forgotten. You look so well, and it’s clear you’re in good spirits. When I heard the Feridun story, I knew at once that Füsun would come to her senses.”

“Where did you hear the Feridun story?”

“Just forget that, too,” said Zaim.

“Sooo, what about you? Is there marriage on the horizon?” I asked, reluctantly changing the subject. “Is there someone new in your life?”

“Hilmi the Bastard’s just walked in with his wife, Neslihan,” Zaim said, looking at the door.

“Oooooh … hey, look who’s here!” Hilmi said, approaching our table. Neslihan was very fashionably turned out, and that suited Hilmi the Bastard well, for he had no confidence in the tailors and seamstresses of Beyoğlu, and wore only Italian clothes, which he selected with much consideration. It was pleasing to see a pair so well dressed, so affluent, but I knew I would not be able to join in their general disdain of all things and persons not up to their standards. As I shook hands, there was a moment when I thought I saw fear in Neslihan’s eyes, and so I remained reserved in their presence, a stance that suddenly seemed all-important. I couldn’t believe that a moment ago, speaking to Zaim, I had used that peculiar word “society,” an expression lifted from the magazines and celebrity pages my mother perused—and having declared a hope to return to it once I had redeemed myself, I now felt ashamed, and longed to return to Çukurcuma and the world I’d shared with Füsun.

Fuaye was as crowded as ever, and as I surveyed the vases of cyclamen, the plain walls, and the modish lamps like so many pleasant memories, the place looked time-worn, as if it had aged ungracefully. Would I be able to sit here with Füsun one day with an untroubled heart, sustained purely by the happiness of being alive and together? I let myself believe so.

“Is something on your mind? You have that faraway look. You’ve floated off into your daydreams,” said Zaim.

“I was thinking about your dilemma concerning Papatya.”

“Remember this summer she’ll be the face of Meltem—this woman has to appear at all our parties and so on. So what do you think?”

“What are you asking?”

“Will she be presentable? Will she know how to act?”

“Why wouldn’t she? She’s an actress, a star, in fact.”

“Well, that’s what I mean…. You know how those Turkish film types carry on, the poor ones who play rich people. We can’t have that sort of thing, can we?”

Zaim owed his turn of phrase to his well-mannered mother, but what he meant was “we won’t.” Papatya was not the first person to stir up such concerns, which beset him whenever it was a matter of anyone he viewed as lower class. Put off though I was by his bigotry, I nevertheless saw nothing to be gained by showing my friend anger or disappointment as we sat there at Fuaye.

I asked Sadi, the headwaiter at the restaurant for many years, which fish he was recommending.

“You hardly ever come here anymore, Kemal Bey,” he said. “Your lady mother doesn’t come here, either.”

I explained that after my father died, my mother had lost interest in going out.

“Why don’t you bring the lady here yourself. Please, Kemal Bey—we could cheer her up. When the Karahans’ father died, they brought their widowed mother out to eat three times a week, and we put her at the table next to the window, where the lady would eat her steak and enjoy watching the passersby in the street.”

“Did you know that the lady in question came out of the last sultan’s harem?” said Zaim. “She’s Circassian, green-eyed, and still beautiful even in her seventies. What sort of fish have you got for us?”

Sometimes Sadi would affect an undecided air and recite the names one by one: “Whiting, bream, red mullet, swordfish, sole,” he would say, raising his eyebrows in approval or frowning to indicate the freshness or quality of each. Other times he’d cut it short: “I’m going to give you fried sea bass today, Zaim Bey.”

“What will you serve with it?”

“Mashed potatoes, arugula, whatever you like.”

“And to start?”

“We have this year’s salted bonito.”

“Bring red onions with it,” said Zaim without raising his eyes from the menu, and then turning it over to the beverage list. “God bless, you have Pepsi, Ankara soda, and even Elvan, but still no Meltem!” he blurted.

“Zaim Bey, your people bring one delivery, and then we never see them again. Cases of empties have been sitting in the back for weeks.”

“You’re right, our Istanbul distributors are useless,” said Zaim. He turned to me. “You know this business. How is Satsat managing? What can we do about our distribution problem?”

“Forget about Satsat,” I said. “Osman set up a new firm with Turgay, and he’s done us in. Since my father died, Osman cares only for money.”

Zaim did not care for Sadi hearing us talk about our private failures. “Bring us each a double Kulüp raki with ice on the side, would you? That would be best,” he said. When Sadi left he frowned as if waiting for an answer. “Your beloved brother, Osman, wants to do business with us, too.”

“I’d rather stay out of that,” I said. “I’m not about to take it amiss if you choose to do business with Osman. Business is business. What other news, Zaim?”

He knew at once that I meant society news, and hoping to cheer me up, he offered quite a few amusing stories. Güven the Ship Sinker had run a rusty cargo ship aground, this time between Tuzla and Bayramoğlu. Güven specialized in rotting, polluting derelicts that had been decommissioned. He would buy them abroad at scrap prices and with the help of his contacts in the government and the state bureaucracy fiddled the paperwork to make them seem valuable and seaworthy vessels; by bribing the right people he could then take out interest-free loans from the Turkish Maritime Development Fund, putting the ships up as collateral, and soon thereafter he’d sink them and receive big payouts from the state-owned Başak Insurance. And so by the time he’d sold the beached cargo ship to his scrap yard friends, he’d made himself a pot of money without ever getting up from his desk. Plied with a few drinks, Güven would brag to his friends at the club that he was “the biggest shipowner who’d never been aboard a ship.”

“The scandal erupted not because of this chicanery, but because he ran the ship aground just next to the summer home he had bought his mistress, so that he wouldn’t have to travel far to see the shipwreck. But the residents of those beach and summer homes raised an awful hue and cry over his having polluted the water. Even his mistress couldn’t stop crying, apparently.”

“What else?”

“The Avunduks and the Mengirlis invested everything with Deniz the Banker and were wiped out, and that, by the way, is why the Avunduks have pulled their daughter out of Notre Dame de Sion and are trying to marry her off.”

“That girl is hideous. Good luck to them,” I said. “On top of that—who would trust somebody called Deniz the Banker? I’ve never even heard of him.”

“Do you have any money with brokers?” asked Zaim. “Is there a reputable one you know and trust?”

Having arrived at this new profession after running kebab restaurants, truck tire depots, and even lottery shops, these bankers were offering such ludicrously high interest rates that it was clear they would not stay in business indefinitely. But so ubiquitous and seductive was their advertising that they’d taken in enough cash to stay afloat temporarily, because even those who derided and exposed them in the press—among them even economics professors who saw them clearly as con men—were apparently dazzled enough by the advertised rates to invest their own money, “just for a month or two.”

“I don’t have any money with brokers,” I said. “Our companies don’t either.”

“With those returns it seems idiotic to put money into an ordinary business. To think if I’d given Kastelli the money I’ve sunk into Meltem, I’d have doubled my investment by now and avoided these headaches.”

Whenever I remember that conversation we had among the crowd at Fuaye, it seems to me as empty and meaningless as it did that day. But then as now I did not blame the general idiocy—or more politely, the general unreflectiveness—of the world in which my story takes place, but rather I imputed a sad want of seriousness, which could never trouble me unduly, and more typically moved me to laugh, to embrace it with pride.

“Is Meltem really not making money?”

I’d said this without intending a dig, but Zaim took offense.

“It’s all riding on Papatya—what else can we do?” he said. “I just hope she doesn’t embarrass us. I’ve arranged for her to sing Meltem’s jingle accompanied by the Silver Leaves at Mehmet and Nurcihan’s wedding. All the press will be there at the Hilton.”

I fell silent for a moment. I had heard absolutely nothing about Mehmet and Nurcihan’s impending wedding at the Hilton, and I was crushed.

“I know you won’t be coming,” said Zaim. “But I figured you’d have heard about it by now.”

“Why wasn’t I invited?”

“Oh, there were endless discussions. As you might have guessed, Sibel doesn’t want to see you: ‘If he’s going to be there, I’m not coming’ is what she said. And after all, Sibel is Nurcihan’s best friend. She’s even the one who introduced Nurcihan to Mehmet, don’t forget.”

“I’m a good friend of Mehmet’s,” I said. “You could also say that I had as much to do with introducing them.”

“Don’t make too much of this—it will only upset you.”

“Why do Sibel’s feelings take precedence?” I said, knowing even as I spoke that I had no right.

“Look, my friend, everyone sees Sibel as a woman wronged,” said Zaim. “You got engaged to her, and after living with her in a Bosphoru
s yali
, and sharing the same bed, you abandoned her. For the longest time there was talk of nothing else, and you’d have thought they were speaking of some evil djinn the way mothers discussed the scandal with their daughters. Sibel really did not mind, but everyone felt very sorry for her all the same, and naturally they were very angry at you. You can’t be indignant that they’re on Sibel’s side now.”

“I’m not indignant,” I said indignantly.

We downed our
rakıs
and began to eat our fish, and it was the first time Zaim and I had eaten a meal at Fuaye and fallen silent. I listened to the waiter’s hurried footsteps, the steady crackle of laughter and conversation, the clatter of knives and forks. I angrily vowed never to come back, even as I thought how much I loved this place, and how I had no other world.

Zaim said that he wanted to buy a speedboat that summer but that before doing so he needed to find a suitable outboard motor, though there were none to be found in the stores in Karaköy.

“That’s enough, now. Stop looking so glum,” he said suddenly. “Nobody should get this upset over missing a wedding at the Hilton. I’m sure you’ve been to one?”

“My friends have turned their backs on me because of Sibel—I don’t like that.”

“No one’s turned their back on you.”

“Fine, but what if the decision had been up to you? What would you have done?”

“What decision?” said Zaim, in a way that seemed disingenuous. “Oh, now I see what you mean. Of course, I would have wanted you to come. You and I always have such fun at weddings.”

“This is not about fun; it’s something much deeper.”

“Sibel is very lovely; she’s a very special girl,” said Zaim. “You broke her heart. Not only that—in front of everyone, you put her in a very precarious situation. Instead of pulling a long face and glaring at me, why don’t you just accept what you did, Kemal? Take it on the chin and then it will be much easier for you to return to your real life, and before you know it, all this will be forgotten.”

“So you consider me guilty, too?” I said. I knew it wouldn’t be long before I began to regret persevering in this, but I couldn’t help myself. “If we insist virginity is still so important how can we pretend we’re modern and European? Let’s be honest with ourselves, at least.”

“Everyone is honest about this…. Your mistake was imposing your view on someone else. It might not be important to you, or to me. But it goes without saying that in this country a young woman’s virginity is of the utmost importance to her, no matter how modern and European she is.”