The Museum of Innocence Read online

  For in the back of the crowd, standing next to her mother and father, I’d seen Füsun. A rapturous wave washed over me. As I kissed Sibel’s cheeks, as my mother came to our side and I embraced her, and then my father, and my brother, I realized what it was that had made me so joyful, though I still thought I could hide it, not just from the crowd, but from myself, too. Our table was right on the edge of the dance floor. Just before we sat down I saw Füsun sitting with her parents at the very back, right next to the table for the Satsat employees.

  “You both look so happy,” said my brother’s wife, Berrin.

  “But we’re so tired, too,” said Sibel. “If this is what it takes to pull off an engagement party, just imagine how tiring the wedding is going to be.”

  “You’ll be very happy on that day, too,” said Berrin.

  “How do you define happiness, Berrin?” I asked.

  “Goodness, what a question,” said Berrin, and she behaved as if she were considering her own happiness, but because even to joke about such a thing made her uncomfortable, she smiled bashfully. Amid the babble of conversation, the guests’ chatter, occasional cries, the clink of knives and forks, and the strains of music, we both heard my brother’s loud, shrill voice as he regaled someone with a story.

  “Family, children, and good company,” Berrin said. “Even if you’re not happy”—here, she indicated my brother with her eyes—“even when you’re having your worst day you live your life as if you are. All sorrows fade away when you’re surrounded by your family. You should have children right away. Have lots of children, just like peasants.”

  “What’s going on here?” said my brother, joining us. “Tell me what you’re gossiping about.”

  “I’m telling them to have children,” said Berrin. “How many should they have?”

  No one was looking, so I downed my half glass of raki in one gulp.

  A little later Berrin whispered into my ear: “That man at the end of the table, and that charming girl next to him—who are they?”

  “That’s Nurcihan, Sibel’s dear friend since lycée days—they also went to France together. Sibel has seated her next to my friend Mehmet, hoping to get something started.”

  “Doesn’t look very promising so far!” said Berrin.

  Sibel felt a mixture of admiration and compassion for her friend Nurcihan. When they were students in Paris, Nurcihan had had several love affairs, which she’d courageously consummated, even moving in with a few of these men (Sibel had enviously told me all these stories), and all the while keeping this life secret from her wealthy parents in Istanbul; but with time these adventures had left her feeling sad and drained, so now, under Sibel’s influence, she was plotting a return to Istanbul. “But for obvious reasons,” I added, after telling all this to Berrin, “she’ll need to fall in love with someone who appreciates her worth, someone at her level, who won’t be troubled by her French past, or her old lovers.”

  “Well, if you ask me, it’s not happening tonight,” she whispered. “What sort of business is Mehmet’s family in?”

  “They have money. His father is a well-known building contractor.”

  As Berrin saucily raised an eyebrow in snobbish suspicion, I told her that although his family was very religious and conservative, Mehmet was a trusted friend of mine from Robert College, an honest and decent man who had for years refused to let his headscarf-wearing mother arrange a marriage for him to an educated Istanbul girl, because he wanted to marry someone of his own choosing, a girl he could go out with. “But so far he’s got nowhere with the modern girls he’s found for himself.”

  “He’ll never get anywhere,” said Berrin with a knowing air.

  “Why not?”

  “Just look at him. You can tell that type from a mile off,” said Berrin. “Men like him from the heart of Anatolia … Girls would rather marry him through a matchmaker because they know if they go gallivanting about town with him too much, a man like this will secretly begin to think of them as whores.”

  “Mehmet doesn’t have that mentality.”

  “But he’s from that mold. That’s what his family is like, that’s where he comes from. A girl with brains doesn’t judge a man by the way he thinks. She looks at his family, at the way he deports himself.”

  “You do have a point,” I said. “I’ve seen brainy girls like this—no need to mention names—who shy away from Mehmet, even when he’s clear he’s serious about them, but when they’re around other men, even when they’re not sure the men would marry them, they’re much more relaxed, and much better at getting the ball rolling.”

  “Exactly,” said Berrin proudly. “I can’t tell you how many men in this country treat their wives with disrespect even years later, just for having allowed them some intimacy before marriage. Let me tell you something: Your friend Mehmet has never really been in love with any of those girls who did not allow him to approach them. If he had been, those girls would have sensed it, too, and they would have treated him differently. I’m not saying they would have slept with him, of course, but they would have let him get close enough to make marriage a possibility.”

  “But the reason that Mehmet couldn’t fall in love with them was that they wouldn’t let him get close enough, because they were conservative and frightened.”

  “That’s not the way it works,” said Berrin. “You don’t have to sleep with someone to be in love. The sex is not what matters. Love is Leyla and Mecnun.”

  I said something like “Hmmmmm.”

  “What’s going on over there?” my brother shouted from the other end of the table. “Tell us, please! Who’s sleeping with whom?”

  Berrin gave him a look that said, There are children listening! Then she whispered into my ear. “That’s the crux of it,” she said. “Why can’t this seemingly meek Mehmet of yours fall in love with any of these girls he wants to meet, or start something serious with them?”

  Out of respect for Berrin’s intelligence, I was tempted for a moment to tell her that Mehmet was an incorrigible patron of whorehouses. He had “girls” he visited regularly in four or five private establishments in Sıraselviler, Cihangir, Bebek, and Nişantaşı. Even as he struggled in vain to form deep attachments with the women he met at work—virgins in their early twenties with lycée diplomas—he’d continued to frequent the high-class brothels for wild all-nighters with girls impersonating Western movie stars, though when he drank too much it became obvious what a hard time he had keeping up the pace, or even thinking straight. Nevertheless, when we emerged from a party in the wee hours, instead of returning to his house where his father was forever fretting over his worry beads and his mother brooded in her headscarf, and everyone, including his sisters, kept the fast during Ramadan, he would bid us good-bye and head to one of the pricier brothels of Cihangir or Bebek.

  “You’re drinking rather a lot this evening,” said Berrin. “Slow down a little. There are a lot of people here and they’re all watching the family.”

  “Fine,” I said, as I lifted my glass with a smile.

  “Just look at Osman, how responsible he is,” said Berrin. “Then look at you, so mischievous at your own engagement…. How could two brothers be so different?”

  “Actually,” I said, “we’re very similar. And anyway, from now on I’m going to be even more serious and responsible than Osman.”

  “Well, don’t go overboard. People can be so boring when they’re too serious,” Berrin began, and she continued in this half-hectoring vein until, much later, I heard, “You’re not even listening to me.”

  “What? Of course I’m listening.”

  “All right, then tell me what I just said!”

  “You said, ‘Love has to be the way it is in the old legends. Like Leyla and Mecnun.’”

  “I knew you weren’t listening to me,” said Berrin with a half smile, from which I could see she was worried about me. She turned to Sibel, to see if she had noticed what condition I was in. But Sibel was talking to Mehmet and
Nurcihan.

  That I’d not been able to put Füsun out of mind all this while; that throughout my conversation with Berrin I’d felt her presence behind me, at her table in the back; that I kept wondering how she was doing and what she must be thinking—I’d been trying to hide this from myself just as I’ve been keeping it from my readers, but enough! You already know that I failed. So from now on I’ll be straight with you.

  I found an excuse to leave the table. I can’t remember what pretext I came up with. I cast my eyes over the back of the garden, but I couldn’t see Füsun. The place was very crowded, and as always, with everyone talking at once, shouting to be heard, and children shrieking as they played hide-and-seek among the tables, and the clink of knives and forks going on over their heads—a cacophony the orchestra only exacerbated—it added up to quite a roar. I walked through this infernal din toward the back, hoping to catch sight of Füsun.

  “Many congratulations, my dear Kemal,” I heard someone say. “How much longer till the belly dance?”

  This was Selim the Snob, who was sitting at Zaim’s table. I laughed, as if he’d said something hilarious.

  “You’ve made an excellent choice, Kemal Bey,” a nice matron told me. “You probably don’t remember me. I’m your mother’s …”

  But before she could make the connection, a waiter with a tray pushed me aside to make his way between us. By the time I had gathered my bearings, the well-wishing woman had been carried away in the flow of the crowd.

  “Let me see your ring!” said a child, roughly twisting my hand.

  “Stop, don’t be rude!” said the child’s fat mother, seizing the child roughly by the arm. She lunged, as if to slap him, but the brat was wise to her ways and wriggled out just in time. “Come here and sit down!” cried his mother. “I’m so sorry … and congratulations.”

  A middle-aged woman I’d never seen before was laughing herself red in the face, but when our eyes met she suddenly became serious. Her husband introduced himself—he was a relation of Sibel’s, but apparently we’d both done our military service at the same time in Amasya—and he invited me to sit down with them. I surveyed the tables at the back of the garden, hoping to catch sight of Füsun, but she seemed to have vanished into thin air. Misery spread through my body.

  “Are you looking for someone?”

  “My fiancée is waiting for me, but of course I’d love to sit down and have a drink with you….”

  They were very pleased, and at once they pushed together their chairs to make room for one more. No, I didn’t need a place setting, just a little more raki.

  “Kemal, my friend, have you ever been introduced to Admiral Erçetin?” the man asked, pointing at the gentleman across the table.

  “Yes, of course,” I said. In fact I had no memory of him.

  “Young man, I am Sibel’s father’s aunt’s sister’s husband!” the admiral told me humbly. “I congratulate you.”

  “Please excuse me, Admiral. I didn’t recognize you out of uniform. Sibel speaks highly of you.”

  In fact, Sibel had told me how a distant cousin of hers had years ago spent the summer in Heybeliada and fallen in love with a handsome naval officer; thinking that this admiral must be one of those grandees that rich families treat so well so as to have someone to pull strings whenever they have dealings with the state, or when they need to arrange the deferment of some son’s military service, I hadn’t paid particular attention to her tale. I now had a strange urge to ingratiate myself by saying, “When is the army going to step in, sir? How much longer can we be pushed to the brink by communists on the one side and reactionaries on the other?” but I was composed enough to know that if I said these things in my present addled state, I would be judged drunk and disrespectful. Suddenly something prompted me to stand up, and there, in the distance, I saw Füsun.

  “I’m afraid I’m neglecting our other guests. I think I’d better get up, gentlemen!”

  As always after drinking too much, I felt like my own ghost trying to take its first solo walk outside the body.

  Füsun had returned to her table in the back. In a dress with spaghetti straps, her bare shoulders had a healthy glow. She’d had her hair done, too. She was so very beautiful that even from that distance it filled my heart with joy and excitement to catch a glimpse of her.

  She acted as if she hadn’t seen me. Four tables closer was the fidgety Pamuk family, and so, to close the distance between me and Füsun, I went over to greet Aydın and Gündüz Pamuk, who at some point had done some business with my father. All the while I kept my antennae tuned to Füsun’s table, whose proximity to the Satsat table had created the opportunity for my young and ambitious employee Kenan, who could not take his eyes off Füsun, to strike up a conversation with her.

  Like so many formerly rich families that had squandered their fortunes, the Pamuks had turned in on themselves and found it upsetting to come face-to-face with new money. Sitting with his beautiful mother, his father, his elder brother, his uncle, and his cousins was the chain-smoking twenty-three-year-old Orhan, nothing special about him beyond his propensity to act nervous and impatient, affecting a mocking smile.

  Rising from the tedious Pamuk table, I walked straight over to Füsun. How to describe the expression on her face when she realized that she couldn’t ignore me—that I had been so bold as to approach her with love in my eyes? At once she blushed, her deep pink skin glowing with life. From the looks Aunt Nesibe was giving me, I guessed that Füsun had told her everything. First I shook her hand, which was dry, and then I shook hands with her father, who had long fingers and slender wrists like his daughter’s, and he gave no sign of knowing anything. When it was my beloved’s turn, I took her hand, and with tenderness and propriety, I kissed her on both cheeks, furtively inhaling the tender spots on her neck and below her ears that had brought me such pleasure only hours ago. The question I couldn’t get out of my head—“Why did you come?”—now took the form of “How good of you to come!” She had put on just a bit of eyeliner and some pink lipstick. With her perfume, the makeup gave her an exotic womanly air. But her eyes were red and puffy like a child’s, so I knew that after we had parted that afternoon she had gone home and spent the early evening crying; but no sooner had I worked this out than she assumed the demeanor of a confident, well-bred woman who knew her own mind.

  “Kemal Bey, I know Sibel Hanım. You’ve made a very wise choice,” she said bravely. “Congratulations.”

  “Oh, thank you.”

  “Kemal Bey,” her mother said at the same time. “I can only imagine how busy you are. God bless you for giving so much of your time to helping our daughter with her mathematics.”

  “Her exam is tomorrow, isn’t it?” I asked. “She should be heading home early to get plenty of rest.”

  “I understand you have every right to be concerned,” said her mother. “But while she was working with you she got very upset. Give her your permission to have a little fun for an evening.”

  I gave Füsun a compassionate, teacherly smile. With all the noise from the crowd and the music, it seemed that no one could hear us. I saw in the looks Füsun was giving her mother the same flashes of anger I’d seen during our trysts in the Merhamet Apartments; I took one last look at her beautiful, half-exposed breasts, her wondrous shoulders, and her childish arms. As I turned away I felt happiness overwhelm me like a giant wave crashing.

  The Silver Leaves were playing “An Evening on the Bosphorus,” their version of “It’s Now or Never.” If I didn’t believe with all my heart that absolute happiness in this world can only happen while living in the present and in the arms of another, I would have chosen this instant as “the happiest moment of my life.” For I had concluded from Füsun’s mother’s words and her own hurt and angry looks that she could not bring herself to end our relationship, and that even her mother seemed to have resigned herself to this state of affairs, though with certain expectations. If I proceeded with great care and let her know how much
I loved her, Füsun, I now understood, would be unable to break off relations with me for as long as I lived! The manly pleasures outside the realm of morality that God granted just a few favored slaves—the happiness that my father and my uncles had had only a taste of, and rarely before their fifties, not before they had suffered terrible torment—it seemed to me now that I was going to be able to enjoy the same good fortune—partaking of all the pleasures of a happy home life with a beautiful, sensible, well-educated woman, and at the same time enjoying the pleasures of an alluring and wild young girl—all this while I was still in my thirties, having scarcely suffered for it, or paid a price. Though not at all religious, I have engraved in my memory what I still regard as a postcard of bliss, sent by God: the image of merry guests, now dispersed to the outer reaches of the garden, and beyond them among the plane trees and the colored lamps, the landscape, the lights of the Bosphorus and the deep blue sky.

  “Where have you been?” said Sibel. She’d come out to look for me. “I was worried. Berrin said you had had a bit too much to drink. Are you all right, darling?”

  “Yes—I did overdo it in there, but I’m feeling better now, dear. My only problem now is that I’m too happy.”

  “I’m also very happy, but we have a problem.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not working with Nurcihan and Mehmet.”