The Museum of Innocence (66 page)

“Füsun Hanım needs a report from the ear, nose, and throat specialist to take to the office of drivers licensing,” I’d say. “We were sent here from Beşiktaş.”

“The doctor isn’t in yet,” the orderly in charge would say. Opening the file in our hands, he would glance quickly at the documents inside and say, “Please sign in and take a number.” When we noticed how long the line of patients was, he would add: “Everyone is waiting in line. There’s no one who doesn’t wait.”

Once I spied an opportunity to grease the orderly’s palm, but Füsun objected, saying, “No, we’re going to do this like everyone else.”

As we waited in line, chatting with patients and clerks, everyone assumed I was her husband, and this pleased me. I did not see the mistake as reflecting the assumption that a woman would never go to a hospital with a man who wasn’t her husband, but as proof that our growing intimacy was now clear to all. Once we went for a stroll in the backstreets of Cerrahpaşa, while waiting for our number to be called at the University’s Çapa Hospital, and at some moment I had lost Füsun, whereupon a window in a ramshackle wooden house opened, and a headscarf-wearing auntie informed me that “your wife” had stepped into the grocery story around the corner. We attracted some notice in these backstreet neighborhoods, but no alarm. A few children might follow us; some adults mistook us for tourists who’d lost their way. Sometimes a smitten youth might shadow us, just to admire Füsun from afar, but when a few streets farther on I would catch his gaze, he would politely retreat. Heads were often to be seen poking out of doors and windows, the women asking Füsun whom we were seeking or what address, and the men asking me. Once, seeing Füsun about to eat a plum she’d bought from a street vendor, an old woman reached out, crying, “Wait a minute, my girl. Let me wash that for you first!” The woman washed our plums in her stone-paved kitchen on the ground floor, made us coffee, and asked us what we were doing in the area; when I said that my wife and I were searching for a beautiful wooden house to live in, the old woman relayed this information to all the neighbors.

All the while, our laborious driving lessons in Yıldız Park continued, and we were also preparing for the written exam. If we were sitting in a tea garden with some time to kill, Füsun would sometimes take a booklet from her bag with a title like
Driving Made Easy
or
Driving Exam Questions Complete with Answers
, and, smiling mischievously, she would quiz me.

“What is a road?”

“I give up.”

“The lanes and zones open to traffic for public use,” Füsun would say, reciting half from memory and reading the rest. “All right then, what is traffic?”

“Traffic refers to the presence and movement of pedestrians and animals—”

“There is no ‘and,’” Füsun would say. “Traffic refers to the presence and movement of pedestrians, animals, vehicular machinery, and tractors with tires on roads.”

I enjoyed these question-and-answer exchanges, which caused us to reminisce about middle school, and the curriculum, which relied so heavily on memorization, and our report cards, which included marks for “comportment,” and soon I would find myself asking her a question.

“What is love?”

“I don’t know.”

“Love is the name given to the bond Kemal feels with Füsun whenever they travel along highways or sidewalks; visit houses, gardens, or rooms; or whenever he watches her sitting in tea gardens and restaurants, and at dinner tables.”

“Hmmm … that’s a lovely answer,” Füsun would say. “But isn’t love what you feel when you can’t see me?”

“Under those circumstances, it becomes a terrible obsession, an illness.”

“What has this got to do with the driving examination?” Füsun would say. Then she would behave as if this sort of dalliance could not be allowed to go on if a couple was unmarried, and I would take care not to make any more such jokes for the rest of the day.

The written exam took place in Beşiktaş, in a small palace where Numan Efendi, one of Abdülhamit’s crazy princes, had listened to harem girls play the ud as he whiled away the hours doing impressionist paintings of the Bosphorus. After the founding of the Republic the building had been converted by the state into offices that were never properly heated, and as I waited at the entrance, I regretfully remembered, as I had countless times, that I should have waited outside the Taşkışla Building, where she had taken her university entrance exam eight years earlier. Had I broken off the engagement to Sibel and sent my mother to ask for Füsun’s hand, we could have had three children by now. But there would still be time for three children, or even more, once we’d married. I was so sure of this that when Füsun came out of the exam looking elated, and announcing, “I answered all the questions!” I was on the verge of informing her how many children we would have, but I held back, mindful of how, in the evenings, we were still sitting, quite solemnly, at the family table, watching television as we ate.

Füsun passed the written exam with a perfect score, but she failed her first road test miserably. They flunked everyone on the first attempt, just to emphasize what a serious business it was to operate an automobile, but we were unprepared for how it turned out. Füsun got into the Chevrolet with the three-man examination committee, and though she had successfully started up the car and put it into motion, she had not gone far before a deep-voiced examiner in the backseat declared, “You didn’t look in the mirrors!” and when Füsun turned around to ask, “What did you say?” they instructed her to stop the car at once and get out. Drivers, the regulations clearly stated, were never to look behind them while they were driving. The examiners bolted from the Chevrolet, as if truly frightened to be in a car with such a reckless driver, a degrading show that Füsun found demoralizing.

They scheduled her for a retake four weeks later, at the end of July. Those familiar with the modus operandi of the drivers licensing agency could only laugh to see us so downcast and humiliated, and they lectured us amicably about bribes and how we might go about procuring a license at a particular shantytown teahouse (with four pictures of Atatürk and a clock on its walls) that was frequented by everyone in Istanbul who had a hand in the drivers licensing business. If we were to enroll in one of the pricey driving schools where retired traffic policemen taught (and attendance wasn’t compulsory), we were certain to pass, because the examination committee and many policemen were partners in that business.

Paying for this course also afforded one the privilege of taking the test in an old Ford specially modified for the purpose: This vehicle had a huge hole in the floor next to the driver’s seat, so that when the driving candidate was called upon to park in a tight space, he could see the colored markings on the road; and if he would but refer to the written guide hidden behind the sun visor, he would know which colored marking indicated that he should turn the wheel as far as it could go to the left, and exactly when he should go into reverse, so as to park the car flawlessly. It was also possible, for a larger sum, to avoid enrolling in a school altogether, a custom which I, as a businessman, knew only too well was sometimes unavoidable. But as Füsun was adamantly opposed to the smallest enrichment of the policemen who had callously failed her, we continued our lessons at Yıldız Park.

The examination guide contained hundreds of minor regulations of which a driver needed to show awareness on the road. It was not enough to operate the car properly in the presence of the examining committee; one also had to demonstrate, sometimes by exaggerated gestures, mastery of these regulations—for instance, looking into the rearview mirror as required counted for nothing unless you also showed consciousness of doing so by gripping the mirror. A fatherly policeman with long experience of the licensing process explained this to Füsun in a most affable way, saying, “My girl, it’s not enough to drive a car during your exam. You also have to look
as if
you’re driving. The first you do for your own benefit, and the second for the benefit of the state.”

After our driving lessons in the park, when the sun was low in the sky, we would go to Emirgân for coffee and soda on the edge of the Bosphorus, or to a coffeehouse in Rumelihisarı for tea from a samovar, and these pleasures never failed to neutralize the aggravations of the lessons. But let no reader infer from this that we carried on like giddy lovers.

“We’re making better progress at these lessons than we did with mathematics!” I said once.

“We shall see,” Füsun replied cautiously.

Sometimes we would sit at the table and drink our teas in silence, like some long-married couple who had run out of things to say to each other; as we admired the Russian tankers passing by, or the City Line ferries on their way to Heybeliada, or (as happened once) the
Sam-sun
heading out on its tour of the Black Sea ports, we seemed lost in misery, in dreams of other lives and other worlds.

Füsun didn’t pass her second test either. This time they set her the very difficult task of maneuvering into an imaginary parking space while driving up a hill in reverse. When she made the Chevrolet tremble and judder again, they ordered her out of the car in the same humiliating way.

I had been watching from a distance with a mixed crowd of retired policemen, applicants, letter writers, teaboys, and various gawkers; when one of them saw a bespectacled examiner once again take the wheel from Füsun, he said, “They flunked that chick,” and a couple of others laughed.

As we drove back toward the house, Füsun was too upset to speak. Without asking her first, I parked the car in Ortaköy and sat down in a little
meyhane
in the market, where I ordered us some
rakı
with ice.

“Life is short but very sweet, Füsun,” I said after a few swigs of
rakı
. “The time has come to stop letting these fiends get the better of you.”

“How can they be so vile?”

“They want money. So let’s pay them.”

“Do you believe women can never be good drivers?”

“It’s not what I think, but it is what they think.”

“It’s what everyone thinks.”

“Darling, I beg you, don’t be so stubborn about this as well,” I said, hoping almost at once that Füsun had not heard me say this.

“I’m not stubborn in anything, Kemal,” she said. “But when your pride or your honor is being trampled on, you can’t just bow your head. Now I’m going to ask something of you, and I would like you to listen, please, and take it seriously. I am going to get my license without paying a bribe, Kemal, and on no account are you to interfere. Don’t you dare pay a bribe behind my back, and don’t try to pull any strings, either, because I’ll know if you do, and I will be extremely upset.”

“All right,” I said, looking down.

We drank our
rakıs
saying little more to each other. It was almost evening, and this
meyhane
in the middle of the market was empty. Impatient flies were perched uncertainly on its trays of fried mussels and little meatballs with thyme and cumin. Years later I went back for another look at that ramshackle
meyhane
whose memory is so dear to me, but the entire building had been razed and in its place were now shops selling evil eyes, trinkets, and other tourist souvenirs.

That evening, after we’d left the restaurant and were getting back into the car, I took Füsun by the arm.

“Do you know what, sweetheart? That was the first time in eight years we have eaten in a restaurant, just the two of us.”

“Yes,” she said. The light that flickered for a moment in her eyes made me inordinately happy. “I have something else to say to you. Give me the keys, I’m going to drive the car.”

“Of course.”

The junctions and hills of Beşiktaş and Dolmabahçe made her perspire a little, but even though she’d had a bit to drink, she was able to steer the Chevrolet as far as Firuzağa Mosque without incident. When I picked her up three days later from the usual spot, she wanted to drive the car again, but the city was crawling with police and I talked her out of it. Despite the hot weather, our lesson went amazingly well.

As we were driving back I looked at the whitecaps on the windy Bosphorus and said, “If only we’d brought our swimsuits!”

The next time we went out, when Füsun left the house in the usual floral print dress, she was wearing underneath it the blue bikini displayed here. After our lesson, at Tarabya Beach, she did not take off her dress until just before she jumped off the seawall into the water. For one brief moment of embarrassment, I could see my beloved’s body, and then she swam away, so fast you might have thought she was fleeing me. The bubbles and the churning water in the wake of her plunge, the beautiful light, the midnight blue of the Bosphorus, her bikini—all this gathered in my mind to form an indelible image, a feeling. I spent years searching out that sentiment, and those wondrous colors, in the old photographs and postcards of Istanbul’s troubled collectors.

I jumped into the sea right after her. A strange voice inside warned of monsters and evil creatures perhaps lurking underwater, waiting to attack her. I needed to reach her in time and protect her from the depths of the waves. I remember that I was giddy as I searched for her in the choppy sea, that I swam as fast as I could, panicked at the thought that happiness might escape my grasp, and that at one moment at the height of my panic I couldn’t breathe. Füsun had been carried away by the Bosphorus currents! At that moment I wanted to die with her; I wanted to die at once. Just then the capricious waves of the Bosphorus opened up and there was Füsun right in front of me. Both of us breathless, we faced each other with the smiles of happy lovers. But when I tried to get closer, so that I might touch her, kiss her, she pulled a long face, like some modest girl with scruples; without further dallying, she did a cool breaststroke away from me. I swam after her, doing the same stroke. As I swam I admired the movement of her beautiful legs, the sweet roundness of her buttocks. Only much later would I notice how far we were from shore.