The Museum of Innocence (70 page)

“After I’m officially divorced from Feridun I want to meet all your family, your friends, everyone,” she said, sounding like the pupil at the head of the class, laying out her future. “I’m not in any hurry. We can take our time…. After I’ve divorced Feridun, of course your mother has to come to us to seek permission. She and my mother will get along fine. But first she has to telephone my mother and apologize for not coming to my father’s funeral.”

“She was very unwell.”

“Of course. I know.”

We fell silent, and for a time picked at our profiteroles. As I watched her mouth, now filled with sweet chocolate and cream, it was not desire I felt, but love.

“There is something you must believe, and I expect you to behave accordingly. At no point during my marriage with Feridun did we have marital relations. You absolutely must believe this! In this sense I am a virgin. I shall be with only one man in my life, and that man is you. We can draw a veil over those two months that preceded the past nine years.” (Actually, dear reader, it was a month and a half, less two days.) “It will be as if we’ve just met. So it will be just as in those films—I married someone, but I remained a virgin.”

She smiled slightly as she uttered the last two sentences, but having grasped the seriousness of her demands, I only frowned soberly and said, “I understand.”

“We’ll be happier if we do it this way,” she said as one would utter any judicious pronouncement. “There’s one more thing I want. Actually, this was not my idea—it was yours. I want us all to tour Europe together in your car. My mother will come to Paris with me. We can go to the museums, look at all the pictures. Before we marry, I also want to buy things there that I can take to our house, as my trousseau.”

Hearing her speak of “our house” I broke into a smile. Even as she issued her commands she smiled slightly as she spoke, as a chivalric commander emerging victorious might declare his righteous terms at the end of a long war. Later, when she said, “We’ll have a big, beautiful wedding at the Hilton, like everyone else,” she frowned gravely. “Everything will be as it should be, down to the last detail,” she said, without affect, as if having no memories, good or bad, of my engagement party there nine years earlier, and simply wanting all to be correct.

“That’s how I want it, too,” I said.

For a time we were silent.

The İnci Patisserie had been an important landmark of my childhood excursions to Beyoğlu with my mother, and in thirty years it hadn’t changed a bit, though it was more crowded than I remembered, and that made it harder to speak.

When, for a moment, a mysterious silence fell over the whole patisserie, I whispered that I loved her very much and would obey her every wish, desiring nothing else in the world than to spend the rest of my life with her.

“Really?” she said, in the same childish manner as when doing her math homework.

She was confident and determined enough to laugh at her own words. Carefully lighting another cigarette, she enumerated her other demands: I was never to hide anything from her, I would share all my secrets, and whatever question she asked about my past, I was to answer it truthfully.

As I listened, everything I saw engraved itself upon my memory: Füsun’s stern, willful expression, the patisserie’s ancient ice cream machine, and the framed photograph of Atatürk, whose frown so closely resembled Füsun’s. We decided that the engagement should happen before we went to Paris, and that it should be a small family affair. We spoke of Feridun with respect.

Returning to the subject of sexual relations, she expressed her clear wish to wait until after marriage in the following terms: “Don’t try to force me, okay? It won’t work anyway.”

“I know,” I said. “Actually, I’d prefer this to be an arranged marriage.”

“It can almost count as one!” she said, sounding so very certain.

She went on to say that without a man in the house anymore, the neighbors might jump to conclusions if I continued coming to supper every night. (Every night?) “Of course, I don’t really care about the neighbors; they won’t be my neighbors for long,” she said later. “I just can’t have those same sweet conversations without my father there. It’s so painful.”

For a moment I thought she was going to cry, but she held herself together. The patisserie had swinging doors, but now a great influx was holding them open. A crowd of lycée students in navy jackets, their thin ties askew, were pushing their way in, laughing boisterously and jostling one another. Before long we rose to leave. Taking no end of pleasure from escorting Füsun through the Beyoğlu crowds, I walked silently by her side as far as Çukurcuma Hill.

76

The Cinemas of Beyoğlu

WE MANAGED to honor the spirit of the conditions Füsun had set out at the İnci Patisserie. I immediately arranged for an army friend of mine, a lawyer who lived in Fatih—a world away from Nişantaşı—to represent Füsun in what was, after all, a straightforward case, since the couple had made a mutual decision to divorce. Füsun had told me with a smile that Feridun had also considered asking me to recommend him a lawyer. Though I could no longer visit her in Çukurcuma, we met every other day in Beyoğlu and went to see a film.

Even as a child, I’d always treasured the coolness of the Beyoğlu cinemas as the streets grew warmer with the progress of spring. Füsun and I would meet in Galatasaray, and after considering all the posters we would select a theater, buy our tickets, and step into the cool, dim, and mostly empty seats, where, by the light reflected off the curtains, we would find a secluded place at the back, to hold hands, and watch the film at leisure, like people with all the time in the world.

At the beginning of summer, when the cinemas began to show two or three films for the price of one, I remember a day when I’d sat down, adjusting my trousers to be as comfortable as possible, setting my newspapers and magazines on the empty seat beside me, thus deferring my blind search for Füsun’s hand, and before I could act, it landed on my lap like an impatient sparrow, opening expectantly on my belly for a moment, as if to ask, Where are you? And at that moment, moving faster than my soul, my hand wrapped itself longingly around hers.

Those Beyoğlu theaters with summertime double features (the Emek, the Fitaş, and the Atlas) and even those showing three films (the Rüya, the Alkazar, and the Lale) did away with the traditional five-minute intermission midfilm; and so it would not be until the lights went up between features that we would see what sort of an audience we’d been sitting with. During these intervals, as we watched the lonely men in wrinkled clothes, holding wrinkled newspapers, sprawled or reclining or doubled over in the seats of these huge, mildewy, dimly lit halls, and the elderly dozing in corners, and those desirous souls who had such a hard time wrenching themselves from the dream world of the film back to the reality of the dusty, murky theater, Füsun and I would exchange our news in whispers, though never holding hands. It was at one such interval, in a box at the Palace Cinema, that Füsun whispered the words I’d been awaiting for eight years: She and Feridun were officially divorced.

“The lawyer has the papers,” she said. “Now I am legally a divorcée.”

In that instant the gilded ceiling of the Palace Cinema, its faded glamour and its peeling paint, and its curtains, and its stage, and its drowsy slouching patrons, engraved itself forever in my memory. Even as recently as ten years ago, couples still used theater boxes at the Atlas and the Palace as they used Yıldız Park, to hold hands and kiss in private; while Füsun wouldn’t let me kiss her while we were sitting in a box, she did not stop me from resting my hand on her legs or petting her knees.

My last meeting with Feridun reached the necessary resolution, but contrary to my hopes and expectations, it left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I’d been shocked by Füsun’s insistence at the İnci Patisserie that they’d never made love, and by her demand that I believe this, because, after all, I (like so many men in love with married women) had been secretly clinging to this idea for eight long years. This is, in fact, the crux of our story, for it explains why I had been able to stay in love with her so long.

Had I dwelled long and hard and openly on the notion of Füsun and Feridun’s enjoying full marital relations (a painful proposition I’d tested once or twice with no desire to repeat the experience), my love could not have survived. Yet, when, following years of successful self-deception, Füsun had commanded that I had no choice but to believe it, I immediately and unequivocally told myself that it couldn’t be true, and indeed even bristled at the thought that she was tricking me. But as Feridun had in fact left her after six years of marriage, the deception clung by a reed of hope, though a moment’s thought to the contrary would make me unbearably jealous and also angry at Feridun, keen to humiliate him. We had muddled through eight years without conflict precisely because I’d felt no anger toward this man. Eight years on, it was easy to understand how their happy sex life had permitted Feridun to tolerate me, especially at the beginning. Like any man who is happy with his wife but also enjoys the company of friends, Feridun had wanted to spend the evenings in the coffeehouse relaxing and talking about work. As I looked into Feridun’s eyes, I was obliged to accept another fact I had long hidden from myself: that my presence had curtailed the happiness Füsun might have shared with her husband during the early years of their marriage.

It was during my last meeting with Feridun that I first heard the murmurings of the jealousy that had been lying voiceless and dormant for eight years, in the oceanic depths of my consciousness, and I decided then and there, as I had with certain old friends of my circle, that I would never see him again. Those who knew how, for many years, Feridun had been like a brother to me, and those who had pined for Füsun before I even knew her, may find it inscrutable that I should have borne him such ill will just as things were going my way. Suffice it to say that after so many years of seeing Feridun as an enigma, I was coming to understand him, and with that, let us close the subject.

Feridun’s eyes betrayed his own jealousy, though small, of the happiness Füsun and I had before us. But during that long final lunch at the Divan Hotel, we plied ourselves with enough raki to relax us; and so after ironing out the details of transferring full rights to Lemon Films to Feridun’s name, we were able to turn to another subject that soothed and charmed us both: Feridun was soon to start shooting his art film,
Blue Rain
.

I’d drunk so much that with an unsteady gait I went straight home, without even stopping off at Satsat, and immediately fell into bed. I remember remarking to my worried mother when she came to check on me, before dropping off, “Life is beautiful!” Two days later, on an evening when the skies were ripped open by thunder and lightning, Çetin drove my mother and me to Çukurcuma. My mother pretended to have forgotten her refusal to attend Tarık Bey’s funeral, and being agitated, as she always was on such occasions, she did not stop talking the whole way. “Oh, look how nicely they’ve done those sidewalks,” she said as we came closer to Füsun’s house. “I’ve always wanted to see this neighborhood. What a lovely hill that is. What nice snug places they seem to have here.” As we entered the house, a cool wind swept up the dust from the cobblestones, presaging rain.

My mother had previously telephoned Aunt Nesibe with her sympathies, and the two women had met a few times. And yet this visit to ask for Füsun’s hand seemed at first to be a condolence call, the occasion to express our regrets at Tarık Bey’s passing. But everyone felt that the regrets expressed went far deeper. After the requisite pleasantries and formalities (“How lovely it is here. Oh how I’ve missed you. I can’t tell you how sad we were to hear …”) Aunt Nesibe and my mother embraced and began to cry, whereupon Füsun fled the room, running upstairs.

When a lightning bolt struck somewhere nearby, the two women released each other and straightened up. “Dear God!” my mother said. Then, as the rain came pouring down and the sky continued to rumble, the twenty-seven-year-old divorcée brought us coffee on a tray that she carried as daintily as any eighteen-year-old who has just entered society. “Nesibe, Füsun is your spitting image!” said my mother. “How clever and knowing she looks when she smiles. What a beauty she’s become!”

“No, she is much more intelligent than I am,” said Aunt Nesibe.

“Mümtaz, may he rest in peace, he always used to say that Osman and Kemal were more intelligent than he was, but I was never sure he believed it. Who says the younger generation must have more brains than we do?” my mother said.

“The girls are certainly smarter,” said Aunt Nesibe. “Did you know, Vecihe”—for some reason, she was unable to, or wouldn’t, address her as “Sister Vecihe” in her old reverential way—“what I regret most in life?” She went on to tell how for a long time she’d dreamed of opening a shop and making a name for herself, but could never find the courage, only to live to see “people who don’t even know how to hold a pair of scissors or sew a stitch now own the finest fashion houses.”

Together we went to the window to watch the rain and the runoff pouring down the hill.

“Tarık Bey, may he rest in peace, was very fond of Kemal,” said Aunt Nesibe as she sat down at the table. “Every evening he’d say, ‘Let’s wait a little longer. Kemal Bey might be coming.’”

I could tell that my mother did not care for these words at all.

“Kemal knows his mind,” said my mother.

“Füsun knows what she wants, too,” said Aunt Nesibe.

“They’ve already made their decision,” said my mother.

But that was as close as my mother got to asking Aunt Nesibe for her daughter’s hand.

Aunt Nesibe and Füsun and I each drank our usual glass of
raki;
my mother drank only rarely, but she asked for a glass, too, and after two sips turned cheerful—not so much because of the effect of ingesting the raki itself, but because of the fragrance, as my father used to say. She recalled the days when she and Nesibe had stayed up until dawn to complete an evening gown. They both enjoyed reminiscing about the weddings and dresses of that era.