The Museum of Innocence (71 page)

“Vecihe’s pleated dress was so celebrated that afterward other women in Nişantaşı asked to have an identical one made for them. Some of them even bought the same material in Paris, placing it right on my lap, for me to sew, but I refused,” said Aunt Nesibe.

When Füsun rose ceremoniously from the table and went over to Lemon’s cage, I got up, too.

“For God’s sake, don’t bother with that bird while we’re still eating!” my mother cried. “Don’t worry, you have plenty of time left to spend together…. Stop, stop right there, I’m not letting either of you back at the table until you’ve washed your hands.”

I went upstairs to wash, and Füsun, who could have washed her hands downstairs in the kitchen, followed me up. At the top of the stairs I took her by the arms and kissed her passionately. It was a deep and mature kiss, lasting ten or twelve seconds. Nine years ago we had kissed like children. But there was nothing childish about this kiss, with its slow, powerful soulfulness. Then Füsun went downstairs ahead of me, at a run.

We got through supper with little further merriment, and keeping a close watch on what we said; as soon as the rain had let up, we left.

“Mother dear, you forgot to ask for the girl’s hand,” I said, as we were driving home in the car.

“How often did you go over there, all these years?” my mother asked. When she saw me at a loss for words, she snapped, “Whatever is done, is done…. But Nesibe said one thing that really hurt. Maybe it’s because you hardly ever stayed in to eat supper with your mother that it broke my heart to hear it.” She stroked my arm. “But don’t worry, my son, I didn’t mind. Even so, I just couldn’t bring myself to ask for her hand, as if she were still a lycée girl. She’s been married and divorced; she’s a full-grown woman. She has a head on her shoulders, and she knows what she’s doing. You two have talked everything over and agreed on everything. So why the need for all the pomp and ceremony? If you ask me, even an engagement is unnecessary…. Stop prolonging things and creating fodder for gossips—just get married…. Don’t bother going to Europe, either; these days you can find everything you want in the shops in Nişantaşı, so what’s the point of trudging over to Paris?”

Seeing my determined silence, she closed the subject.

When we got home, before going to bed, my mother said, “You were right, though. She’s a beautiful woman, and intelligent. She’ll be a good wife for you. But be careful, she looks as if she’s suffered a great deal. I may not know the half of it, but take care not to let the anger, the grudge, whatever it is she’s harboring inside her, poison your life.”

“It won’t!”

Quite to the contrary, with every day, the bond between us grew stronger, and with it our attachment to life, to Istanbul, its streets, its people, and all else. Sometimes while holding hands in a cinema, I would feel a light shiver passing through her. Sometimes she would lean into me, or even rest her head gently on my shoulder. She would sink into her seat to get closer, and I would take her hands between mine, sometimes stroking her leg, like a feather’s touch. During the first weeks Füsun had not liked sitting in a box, but now she didn’t object. Holding her hand allowed me to measure her reflexive responses to the film, just as a doctor might with the tips of his fingers probe a patient’s innermost parts, and I drew enormous pleasure from taking the pulse of her emotional responses to the film.

During intermission, there was cautious talk about the preparations for our trip to Europe, and about beginning to appear together in public, but I never mentioned my mother’s thoughts on an engagement party. I, too, had slowly come to see that an engagement party would bring only trouble, encouraging a lot of gossip, and causing disquiet even inside the family: If we invited a great many the gossip would be of how many we’d invited; if we invited fewer the gossip would be of how few. It seemed to me that Füsun was slowly coming to the same awareness, or at least I thought this was why she, too, avoided talk of the engagement. So it was without discussion that we somehow agreed to skip the engagement and marry at once after our return from Europe. As we smoked our cigarettes during the intervals between films, and at the Beyoğlu patisseries we’d gotten into the habit of visiting afterward, our greatest pleasure was dreaming up things we’d do on our trip. Füsun had bought a book written for Turks called
Europe by Car and
always took it along to the cinema, and as we turned the pages we would plan our itinerary. We would spend our first night in Edirne, then drive straight through Yugoslavia and Austria. I bought my own guidebooks, as well, and Füsun especially liked to look at the photographs of Paris in them. “Let’s go to Vienna, too,” she would say. Sometimes staring at the pictures of Europe in a book, she would fall into a strange, mournful silence as she drifted off into a daydream.

“What’s wrong, darling? What are you thinking?” I would ask her.

“I don’t know,” Füsun would say.

Because Aunt Nesibe, Füsun, and Çetin had never been outside Turkey before, they were applying for their first passports. To save them from the torture of visiting the various state bureaucracies and the torment of waiting in all those long lines, I brought in Selami, the police chief who took care of such matters for Satsat. (Careful readers will remember that it was this same retired constable whom I had asked to track down Füsun and her family eight years before.) Anchored by love, I had not been outside Turkey for nine years, and so it was I came to discover that I no longer felt the need for travel, where before, if I’d been cooped up in this country for more than three or four months, I’d be out of sorts.

It was a hot summer day when we went to sign papers at the Security Services Passport Office at the Governor’s Headquarters in Babıali. This old building, once home to prime ministers, pashas, and grand viziers, had since been the scene of numerous raids and political murders described in lycée history books, but as with many great Ottoman buildings that had survived into the Republican era, its former gilded splendor had worn away, as thousands of weary souls entered it daily to spend hours standing in line, first to acquire documents, then to have them stamped, and then signed, an eternity that inevitably led to arguments and scuffles, the whole scene suggesting Judgment Day. In the heat and humidity, the documents in our hands quickly turned soggy.

Toward evening we were sent to the Sansaryan Building in Sirkeci for another document. As we walked down Babıali Hill, just before the old Meserret Coffeehouse, Füsun stepped into a small teahouse without asking permission of any of us and sat down at a table.

“What is it with her now?” said Aunt Nesibe.

While she and Çetin Efendi waited outside, I went in.

“What’s wrong, darling, are you tired?”

“I’ve had it. I don’t want to go to Europe anymore,” said Füsun. She lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply. “The rest of you can go, by all means—get your passports—but I’ve run out of energy.”

“Darling, hang on, we’re almost there.”

She held out for a while longer, showing a bit of temper, but in the end, inevitably, she came with us, my beauty. We endured a similar tantrum when applying for visas at the Austrian Consulate. Hoping to save them from the queues and humiliating interviews, I’d prepared documents describing Aunt Nesibe, Füsun, and also Çetin Efendi as highly paid “specialists” in Satsat’s employ. They granted us all visas, all but Füsun, who because of her young age, looked suspicious, and was called for a visa interview. I went in with her.

Six months earlier, an angry applicant who had been repeatedly denied visas over many years had shot an employee of the Swiss Consulate in the head four times; following that incident the visa sections of consulates had instituted strict security measures. Now applicants were no longer permitted to converse face-to-face with European visa officials, but rather, like death row prisoners in American films, were separated from the officials by bars and bulletproof glass, and obliged to converse by phone. Still people would crowd the entrance, prodding and pushing as they struggled to reach the visa section, or to enter the garden or courtyard. Turkish staffers (particularly in the German Consulate, where it was said that in the space of two days they became “more German than the Germans”) would scold the crowd for failing to line up decorously, shoving them around and singling out the ill-attired to say, “You’re wasting your time here,” by way of thinning the herd. And so most applicants were practically jubilant to be granted interviews, taking their place nervously before the bars and the bulletproof glass, like so many students sitting down to a difficult exam, peaceful and compliant as lambs.

Because we’d pulled strings, Füsun had no need to wait in any queue, and went into the interview smiling; but when, shortly, she emerged, she was purple in the face, and without so much as looking in my direction she went out to the street. I followed her out, catching her when she paused to light a cigarette. She wouldn’t tell me what had happened, but went into the National Sandwich and Refreshment Palace, where, having taken a seat, she announced, “I don’t want to go to Europe anymore. I give up.”

“What happened? Aren’t they giving you a visa?”

“They asked me about my whole life. They even asked why I got divorced. Even how did I support myself. They even asked me that. So I’m not going to Europe. I don’t want visas from any of them.”

“I can find another way to arrange things,” I said. “Or we could take a car ferry straight to Italy.”

“Kemal, believe me, I no longer want to take this trip to Europe. I can’t even speak the languages, and it makes me ashamed.”

“Darling, we could still see just a bit of the world…. In other places, there are people who live differently, and more happily. We can walk down their streets holding hands. There’s more to this world than Turkey.”

“Ah, to be worthy of you I need to see some of Europe, is that it? Well, I’ve also given up on the idea of marrying you.”

“We’ll be so happy in Paris, Füsun.”

“You know how stubborn I can be, Kemal. Don’t pressure me, you’ll only make me dig in.”

But I did press her, and years later, whenever I recalled how I’d insisted and felt the sting of remorse, I also remembered that it had been my fantasy for years to make love to Füsun in a hotel along the journey. With the help of Selim the Snob, who imported paper from Austria, Füsun’s visa came through one week later. It was around the same time that we were also able to obtain the documentation to take the car abroad. We were sitting in a box at the Palace Cinema when I gave Füsun her passport, whose pages were now covered with colorful visas for all the countries we’d be visiting en route to Paris; at that moment I felt a strange pride at being a good husband. Years before, when I was seeing ghosts of Füsun on every corner, I’d encountered her apparition at the Palace Cinema, too. Taking her passport, she smiled at first, before assuming a dour expression as she turned the pages, inspecting each visa in turn.

Through a travel agency I booked three large rooms at the Hôtel du Nord in Paris, one for me, one for Çetin Efendi, and one for Aunt Nesibe and Füsun. I’d stayed at other hotels in Paris during the years Sibel was at a university, but like a student who dreams of the places he’ll go when he’s rich, I had a fantasy of the happy days I would spend one day in that venerable hotel, which seemed a place out of old films and memories.

“There’s no need for this. Get married and then go,” my mother kept saying. “Come on, if you’re going to travel with the girl you love, why not make the most of it? … Why drag Nesibe and Çetin Efendi there with you? First get married; that way the two of you can fly to Paris and honeymoon by yourselves…I could talk to White Carnation and have the whole thing written up as the sort of romantic story that everyone loves, and then in two days it will be forgotten, yesterday’s news. That old world is gone, anyway. Everywhere you look it’s all parvenus from the provinces.”

For my part, I kept saying: “And how am I supposed to manage without Çetin? Who’s going to drive me around? … Mother dear, you’ve only left the Suadiye house twice all last summer. Don’t worry, we’ll be back before the end of September. When you return to Nişantaşı at the beginning of October, Çetin will be there to drive you, I promise…. And Aunt Nesibe will find you a dress for the wedding.”

77

The Grand Semiramis Hotel

ON AUGUST 27, 1984, at a quarter past twelve, Çetin parked the car in front of the house in Çukurcuma, ready to drive to Europe. It had been exactly nine years and four months since Füsun and I had met at the Şanzelize Boutique, but I did not give this coincidence much thought, nor did I dwell upon the ways in which my life and my character had changed in the intervening years. We had been delayed by my mother’s tears and ceaseless flow of advice, and also by the traffic, but none of it could dull my determination to end this chapter of my life and set out on our journey at once. After waiting endlessly for Çetin Efendi to load Aunt Nesibe’s and Füsun’s suitcases into the trunk, I grew outwardly petulant at the sight of smiling, waving neighbors and the children swarming around the car, but inside I felt a pride that I did not wish to acknowledge. As we headed down to Tophane, Füsun waved at Ali, returning from football practice. I told myself that soon Füsun and I would have a child like Ali.

As we drove over the Galata Bridge, we opened the windows, happily breathing in that familiar Istanbul smell of sea and moss, pigeon droppings, coal smoke, car exhaust, and linden blossoms. Füsun and Aunt Nesibe were sitting in the back. I was in front with Çetin—just as in my dreams—and as we drove through Aksaray past the city walls, past one poor neighborhood after another, rumbling over the cobblestone streets, in and out of potholes, I would occasionally throw my arm over the back of the seat and turn around to give Füsun a contented smile.

Outside the city limits, beyond Bakırköy, moving past little factories and depots, new neighborhoods and motels, I caught sight of Turgay Bey’s textile mill, which I’d visited nine years earlier, but now I could barely remember the jealousy that had stung me that day. Once the car had crossed the limits of Istanbul, all the suffering I’d endured for the love of Füsun was suddenly reduced to a sweet story that could be told in one breath. After all, a love story that ends happily scarcely deserves more than a few sentences! Perhaps this is why we became increasingly quiet once we’d left Istanbul behind. Even Aunt Nesibe—though full of mirth at the outset, and asking questions like, “Oh, we didn’t forget to lock the door, did we?” and admiring everything she saw through the window (even the emaciated old nags grazing in an empty lot)—had by the time we’d reached Büyükçekmece Bridge, fallen asleep.