The Museum of Innocence (7 page)

“Çetin Efendi, we still have time, can you take us on a little drive?”

So many years later Füsun was able to remind me of most of the things we talked about during our long drive around the city. In my own memory only one image remained of that cold, gray holiday morning: Istanbul resembled a slaughterhouse. It was not just in the poor areas, or the empty lots in dark and narrow backstreets, or among the ruins and burned-out lots—even on the big avenues and in the richest neighborhoods, people had been slaughtering lambs, tens of thousands of them since the early hours of the morning. In some places the sidewalk and the cobblestones were covered in blood. As our car rolled down hills and across bridges and wound its way through the backstreets, we saw lambs that had just been slaughtered, lambs being chopped into pieces, lambs being skinned. We took the Galata Bridge across the Golden Horn. Despite the holiday and the flags and the crowds in their finery, the city looked tired and sad. Beyond the Aqueduct of Valens we turned toward Fatih. There we saw hennaed lambs for sale in an empty lot.

“Are these going to be slaughtered, too?” asked Füsun.

“Maybe not all of them, little lady,” said Çetin Efendi. “It’s almost noon, and these still haven’t been sold…. Maybe, if they’re not bought by the end of the holiday, these poor animals will be saved. But eventually, the drovers will sell them to butchers, little lady.”

“We’ll get there before the butchers and buy them, and save them,” said Füsun. She wore an elegant red coat and as she smiled, she gave me a courageous wink. “We can rescue the sheep from this man who wants to slaughter his children, can’t we?”

“We certainly can,” I said.

“You’re very clever, little lady,” said Çetin Efendi. “Actually the prophet Abraham didn’t want to kill his son at all. But the command was from God. If we don’t submit to God’s every command, then the world will turn upside down, the Judgment Day will be upon us…. The foundation of the world is love. The foundation of love is the love we feel for God.”

“But how could a child whose father wants to kill him understand this?” I asked.

For a moment I met Çetin Efendi’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Kemal Bey, I know you are just saying these things to tease me and have a good laugh, just like your father,” he said. “Your father loves us very much and we respect him greatly, so we never get upset at his jokes. Your jokes don’t upset me either. I’ll answer your question with an example. Have you seen the film called
The Prophet Abraham?”

“No.”

“No, of course not—you’d never go to a film like that. But you should see this film and take this little lady with you. You won’t be bored…. Ekrem Güçlü plays Abraham. We took the whole family—my wife, my mother-in-law, and all our children—and we all cried to our hearts’ content. When Abraham took out his knife and looked at his son, we all cried then, too…. And when Ismail said, ‘Dear Father, do whatever God commands!’ just like he does in the Glorious Kuran … we cried again. Then, when the sacrificial lamb appeared in the place of the son who was to have been slaughtered, we wept with joy, together with everyone else in the cinema. If we give what we treasure most to a Being we love with all our hearts, if we can do that without expecting anything in return, then the world becomes a beautiful place, and that, little lady, is why we were crying.”

I remember going from Fatih to Edirnekapı, and from there we turned right to follow the city walls all the way to the Golden Horn. As we passed the poor neighborhoods, as we advanced along the crumbling city walls, the three of us fell silent, and we remained so for a very long time. As we gazed upon the orchards between the old castle walls, and the empty lots strewn with rubbish, discarded barrels, and debris, and the run-down factories and workshops, we saw the occasional slaughtered lamb, and skins that had been tossed to one side, with their innards and horns, but in the poor neighborhoods, with their unpainted wooden houses, there was less sacrifice, and more festivity. I remember how delighted Füsun and I were to look out over the lots where carousels and swings had been set up for the celebrations, and at the children buying gum with their holiday money, and the Turkish flags set like little horns on the tops of buses, and all the scenes that I would later find in photographs and postcards, and collect so ardently.

As we drove up Şişhane Hill a crowd was milling in the middle of the road and the traffic had come to a standstill. At first I thought it was another holiday gathering, but when the crowd parted before us we found ourselves right beside two vehicles that had crashed only moments ago, and the dying victims. The truck’s brakes had failed, and the driver had swerved into the oncoming lane, then mercilessly plowed into a private car.

“God is great!” said Çetin Efendi. “Please, little lady, make sure you do not look.”

We caught a glimpse of someone still trapped inside the car, whose front was completely crushed, her head bobbing as she fought for her life. I shall never forget the crunch of shattered glass under our tires as we drove on or the quiet that followed. We hurried on up the hill, and as we sped through the deserted streets from Taksim to Nişantaşı, it was as if in flight from death itself.

“Where have you been all this time?” my father asked. “We were getting worried. Did you get the liqueur?”

“It’s in the kitchen!” I said. The sitting room smelled of perfume, cologne, and carpet. As I joined the crowd of relations, I forgot all about little Füsun.

12

Kissing on the Lips

THE FOLLOWING afternoon, Füsun and I reminisced again about our drive around the city on that holiday morning six years earlier, before giving ourselves over to kisses and lovemaking. As the linden-scented breeze rustled through the tulle curtains to lap against her honey-colored skin, I was driven to distraction by the way she clung to me with all her strength, as to a life raft, eyes tightly shut, and I could neither see nor reflect on the deeper meaning of what I was experiencing. Still I concluded that if I was to avoid sinking into the dangerous depths where guilt and suspicion serve only to induce the helplessness of love, I should seek out the company of other men.

On Saturday morning, after I’d been with Füsun three more times, my brother rang to invite me to the match that Fenerbahçe was to play that afternoon against Giresunspor; if Fenerbahçe won—as the odds-makers expected—it would take the championship. So off we went to the İnönü Stadium, formerly known as the Dolmabahçe Stadium. Apart from its name, it pleased me to note, it was just the same as it had been twenty years ago. The only real difference was that, adopting European convention, they had tried to grow grass on the playing field. But as the seed had taken root only in the corners, the playing field resembled the head of a balding man with just a scattering of hair on the temples and the back. The more affluent spectators in the numbered stands did the same as they had done in the mid-1950s: Whenever the exhausted players approached the sidelines, especially the less glorious defensemen, they would shower them with abuse, rather as the Roman masters cursed gladiators from the tribunes (“Run, you gutless faggots!”); while from the open stands, the poor, the unemployed, and students echoed the angry curses in unison, hoping to make their voices heard, too. As the sports pages would confirm the next day, it was something of a rout, and when Fenerbahçe scored a goal, I jumped to my feet with the rest of the crowd. In this festive atmosphere, with men on the field and in the stands conjoined in ritual embrace and congratulation, in this sudden community I felt my guilt recede, my fear transform into pride. But during the quiet moments of the match, when all thirty thousand of us could hear a player kick the ball, I turned to look at Dolmabahçe Palace, and the Bosphorus glimmering behind the open stands, and as I watched a Soviet ship moving behind the palace, I thought of Füsun. I was profoundly moved that she, hardly knowing me, had yet chosen me, had so deliberately elected to give herself to me. Her long neck, the dip in her abdomen that was like no other, the blending of sincerity and suspicion in her eyes at the same instant, their melancholic honesty when they looked right into mine as we lay in bed, and our kisses, all played on my mind.

“You seem preoccupied. It’s the engagement, I guess,” said my brother.

“Yes.”

“Are you very much in love?”

“Of course.”

With a smile both compassionate and worldly-wise, my brother turned back to watch the ball in midfield. In his hand was a Turkish Marmara cigar—he had taken up this habit two years earlier, “just to be original,” he said. The light wind blowing in from Leander’s Tower ruffling the teams’ great banners as well as the little red corner flags carried the stinging smoke right into my eyes, making them water just as the smoke from my father’s cigarettes had done when I was a child.

“Marriage will do you good,” said my brother, his eyes still on the ball. “You can have children right away. Don’t wait too long and they can be friends with ours. Sibel is a woman with a lot of sense; she has her feet on the ground. While you sometimes get carried away with your ideas, she’ll provide a good balance. I hope you don’t wear out Sibel’s patience the way you did with all those other girls? Hey, what’s wrong with this ref? That was a foul!”

When Fenerbahçe scored its second goal, we all leapt up—“Goooal!”—and threw our arms around one another and kissed. When the match was over, we were joined by Kadri the Sieve, an army buddy of my father’s, and a number of football-loving lawyers and businessmen. We walked up the hill with the shouting, chanting crowd and went into the Divan Hotel, where we talked football and politics over glasses of
raki
. And my thoughts turned again to Füsun.

“Your mind is elsewhere, Kemal,” said Kadri Bey. “I guess you don’t like football as much as your brother.”

“I do, but lately …”

“Kemal likes football very much, Kadri Bey,” said my brother in a mocking tone. “It’s just that people don’t pass him many good balls.”

“As a matter of fact I can give you the whole 1959 Fenerbahçe lineup from memory,” I said. “Özcan, Nedim, Basri, Akgün, Naci, Avni, Mikro Mustafa, Can, Yuksel, Lefter, Ergun.”

“Seracettin was in there, too,” said Kadri the Sieve. “You forgot him.”

“No, he never played on that team.”

The discussion continued and as always in such situations, led to a wager, Kadri the Sieve betting that Seracettin had played on the 1959 team, and I betting that he hadn’t. The loser would buy dinner for the entire group of
raki
drinkers at the Divan.

As we walked back to Nişantaşı, I parted from the other men. Somewhere in the Merhamet Apartments was a box in which I had kept all the photographs of football players I had collected from the packs of chewing gum that they used to sell once upon a time. It was just the sort of item my mother would banish to the apartment. I knew that if I could find that box, with all those pictures of football players and film stars that my brother and I had collected, Kadri the Sieve would be buying dinner for everyone.

But as soon as I entered the apartment I understood that my real reason for coming again was to dwell on the hours spent there with Füsun. For a moment I looked at the unmade bed, the unemptied ashtrays at the head of the bed, and the unwashed teacups. My mother’s accumulated old furniture, the boxes, the stopped clocks, the pots and pans, the linoleum covering the floor, the smell of dust and rust had already merged with the shadows in the room to create a little paradise of the spirit in which my mind could wander. It was getting very dark outside, but still I could hear the cries and curses of the boys playing football in the garden.

On that visit to the Merhamet Apartments, on May 10, 1975, I did indeed find the tin in which I had kept all the pictures of movie stars from Zambo, but it was empty. The pictures the museum visitor will view are ones I bought many years later from Hıfzı Bey, during days whiled away conversing with shivering and miserable collectors in various crowded rooms. What’s more, on reviewing my collection years later, I realized that during our visits to the bars frequented by film people—Ekrem Güçlü (who’d played the prophet Abraham) among them—we had met quite a few of these actors. My story will revisit all these episodes, as will the exhibit. Even then I sensed this room mysterious with old objects and the joy of our kisses would be at the core of my imagination for the rest of my life.

Just as for most people in the world at the time, my first sight of two people kissing on the lips was at the cinema and I was thunderstruck. This was definitely something I’d want to do with a beautiful girl for the rest of my life. At the age of thirty, except for one or two chance encounters in America, I had still seen no couples kissing offscreen. It was not just when I was a child, though even then, the cinema seemed to be the place to go to watch other people kissing. The story was an excuse for the kissing. When Füsun kissed me, it seemed as if she was imitating the people she had seen kissing in films.

I would now like to say a few things about our kisses, though I have some anxieties about steering clear of trivialities and coarseness. I want to tell my story in a way that does justice to its serious points regarding sex and desire: Füsun’s mouth tasted of powdered sugar, owing, I think, to the Zambo Chiclets she so liked. Kissing Füsun was no longer a provocation devised to test and to express our attraction for each other; it was something we did for the pleasure of it, and as we made love we were both amazed to discover love’s true essence. It was not just our wet mouths and our tongues that were entwined but our respective memories. So whenever we kissed, I would kiss her first as she stood before me, then as she existed in my recollection. Afterward, I would open my eyes momentarily to kiss the image of her a moment ago and then one of more distant memory, until thoughts of other girls resembling her would commingle with both those memories, and I would kiss them, too, feeling all the more virile for having so many girls at once; from here it was a simple thing to kiss her next as if I were someone else, as the pleasure I took from her childish mouth, wide lips, and playful tongue stirred my confusion and fed ideas heretofore not considered (“This is a child,” went one idea—“Yes, but a very womanly one,” went another), and the pleasure grew to encompass all the various personae I adopted as I kissed her, and all the remembered Füsuns that were evoked when she kissed me. It was in these first long kisses, in our lovemaking’s slow accumulation of particularity and ritual, that I had the first intimations of another way of knowing, another kind of happiness that opened a gate ever so slightly, suggesting a paradise few will ever know in this life. Our kisses delivered us beyond the pleasures of flesh and sexual bliss for what we sensed beyond the moment of the springtime afternoon was as great and wide as Time itself.