The Museum of Innocence Read online

  “What?”

  “I can see Sibel is trying to keep me away from Nurcihan,” said Zaim. “She wants to get something going between her and Mehmet. But I think Nurcihan likes me. And I like her, a lot. So I’d like you to help me with this a little. I know Mehmet is our friend, but let us compete on a level field.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I couldn’t get very far this evening, not with Sibel and Mehmet working against me, and now if I have to defend this girl of yours from the clerk, that will cut into the time I can spend with Nurcihan. So you have to make it up to me. Promise me now that you will bring Nurcihan with you to the picnic at the Meltem factory.”

  “I promise.”

  “Why does Sibel want to keep me away from Nurcihan anyway?”

  “Well, you do make an impression, with your German models, and your dancers…. Sibel doesn’t like those things. She wants to marry her friend off to someone she trusts.”

  “Please tell Sibel that I’m not a bad person.”

  “I tell her all the time,” I said as I stood up. There was a silence. “I appreciate the sacrifices you’re making for me,” I said. “But when you are minding Füsun, be careful, don’t let yourself fall for her. Because she’s very sweet.”

  Zaim’s expression, so full of understanding, liberated me from feeling shame for my jealousy. It brought me peace, if only short-lived.

  Back at my parents’ table I told my father, who had drunk himself into a stupor, that I wanted to introduce a very clever and industrious young clerk named Kenan, who was sitting at the Satsat table. So as not to inflame the other ambitious Satsat employees, I jotted down a note in my father’s name and gave it to Mehmet Ali, a waiter who’d known us since the time the hotel had first opened, instructing him to pass it to Kenan at the next pause in the music. At that moment, my mother reached out and tried to grab my father’s raki, saying, “You’ve had enough,” and in the tussle, spilled some on his tie. They were serving ice cream in glasses when the Silver Leaves took a break. In those days, we would all enjoy a cigarette before each new course. The bread crumbs, the tumblers smeared with lipstick, the stained napkins, overflowing ashtrays, lighters, dirty plates, and crumpled cigarette packets all fired painful sensations in my muddled mind that the evening’s end was fast approaching. At one point, a little boy, perhaps six or seven years old, climbed onto my lap, and Sibel seized the excuse to come over to sit beside me and play with him. The sight of this moved my mother to remark, “What a lovely way you have with him.” People were still dancing. A few moments later my young, handsome, dapper clerk had joined the table and as the former foreign minister rose to his feet, a courtly Kenan told him and my father what an honor it was to meet them both. After the former foreign minister had lumbered off, I explained how Kenan Bey had given considerable thought to Satsat’s potential expansion into the provinces, and that he was particularly knowledgeable about Izmir. I praised him at length so that everyone at the table could hear. My father then began to ask him the same questions he asked all the new clerks. “What foreign languages do you speak, my child? Do you read books, do you have any hobbies, are you married?” “He’s not married,” my mother said. “Just a moment ago he was dancing very nicely with Nesibe’s daughter, Füsun.” “She’s blossomed into quite a beauty,” said my father. “Don’t let this father and son wear you down with business talk, Kenan Bey,” said my mother. “You must want to get back to your friends.” “Not at all, madam! The honor of meeting Mümtaz Bey—meeting all of you—is much more important.” “Such a courteous, refined young man,” my mother whispered, though loud enough for Kenan to hear. “Shall I invite him over one evening?”

  When my mother liked or generally approved of someone, she would make sure he heard it when she discreetly told us so, because she enjoyed seeing in his embarrassment proof of her own power. My mother was smiling with this satisfaction when the Silver Leaves resumed with a very slow, sentimental number. I saw Zaim escort Füsun to the dance floor. “Let’s talk about Satsat’s chances in the provinces now, while my father is here, too,” I said. “My son, are you telling me that you are going to talk business now, at your own engagement party?” “Madam,” said Kenan to my mother, “you may not be aware of this, but three or four times a week, when everyone else has gone home, your son stays very late and carries on working.” “Sometimes Kenan and I work late together,” I added. “Yes. Kemal Bey and I enjoy our work,” said Kenan. “Sometimes when it’s very late we make up expressions that rhyme with the names of the people who owe us money.” “That’s fine,” said my father. “But what do you do with the bounced checks?” “I would like for us to meet the distributors to discuss this, Father,” I said.

  As the orchestra played one slow dance after another, our talk ranged from possible innovations at Satsat, to the places of entertainment that my father had frequented in Beyoğlu when he was Kenan’s age, to the methods adopted by İzak Bey (my father’s first accountant), to whose table we now turned, raising our glasses in what must have seemed to the accountant a puzzling tribute, after which we went on to contemplate what my father hailed as the beauties of youth and of this evening, and, he added in jest, of “love.” Despite my father’s pressing the matter, Kenan would not be made to admit whether or not he was in love. This did not stop my mother from grilling him about his family, and upon learning that his father was employed by the city council and had for years worked as a streetcar driver, she said with a sigh, “Oh how beautiful they were, those old streetcars!”

  More than half the guests had left by now. My father was having a hard time keeping his eyes open.

  As my mother and father kissed us each on our cheeks, preparing to take their leave, my mother said, “Don’t you stay out too late either, my son,” looking into Sibel’s eyes, not mine.

  Kenan wanted to return to his friends at the Satsat table, but I wouldn’t let him go. “Let’s find my brother and discuss this shop we might open in Izmir,” I said. “It’s not often that the three of us are together in one place.”

  I took it upon myself to introduce Kenan to my brother, and my brother (who had known him for some time) raised an eyebrow in disdain, declaring that I must be seriously drunk. Then he looked at Berrin and Sibel, nodding in the direction of the glass in my hand. Yes, I had downed two glasses of raki at around that time, one after the other, because every time I caught a glance of Zaim dancing with Füsun, the raki was my only relief from a ridiculous jealousy. As my brother talked to Kenan about the logistics of collecting on overdue accounts, everyone at our table, including Kenan, watched Zaim dancing with Füsun. Even Nurcihan, who had her back to them, sensed that Zaim had taken an interest in someone else and she was becoming uneasy. At one point I said to myself, “I am happy.” As drunk as I was, I still felt as if everything was going to go my way. On Kenan’s face I recognized an all too familiar species of disquiet, and so I took this long, slender glass (see exhibit) and poured a consoling raki for my ambitious greenhorn friend, who, on account of his bosses having taken a sudden interest in him, had lost the girl he’d been holding in his arms only a few minutes before. At that moment, Mehmet finally asked Nurcihan to dance, and Sibel turned to give me a conspiratorial wink, adding sweetly, “You’ve had enough, darling. Don’t have any more.”

  Charmed by her solicitude, I took Sibel to the dance floor, and the moment we got there I knew I had made a mistake. The Silver Leaves were playing “A Memory from That Summer,” which called to mind the previous summer, when Sibel and I had been so happy, and as the music evoked these memories with arresting force—just as I hope the exhibits in my museum are doing—Sibel embraced me as if for the first time. How I wanted in return to embrace with the same ardor my fiancée, the one with whom I was to share the rest of my life. But I could think only of Füsun. Because I was trying to catch a glimpse of her in the crowd, because I did not want her to see me in a warm embrace with Sibel, I held myself back. I let the other coupl
es distract me. They smiled at me affectionately, as people will at seeing a groom a little worse for wear at the end of his engagement party.

  At one point we came shoulder to shoulder with the best-loved columnist of that era dancing with an attractive dark-haired woman: “Celâl Bey, love has nothing in common with a newspaper column, does it?” I said. When Mehmet and Nurcihan came alongside us, I treated them as if they’d been lovers for ages. I slurred an attempt at a quip in French to Zümrüt Hanım, who spoke French whenever she visited my mother, even when there was no one around, supposedly to keep the servants from understanding her. By now Sibel had given up on having a dance she would remember forever, and was whispering into my ear, telling me how sweet I was when I was drunk, apologizing for having forced me into matchmaking, which she’d done, she insisted, only to make our friends happy, and alerting me that the fickle Zaim had moved on from Nurcihan and set his sights on that girl who was my distant relation. Frowning, I told her that Zaim was a very good person, and a trusted friend. I added that Zaim had wanted to know why she was treating him so badly.

  “So you were talking about me with Zaim? What did he say?” said Sibel. During the break between songs, we came alongside Celâl Salik the columnist again. “I’ve worked out something love has in common with a good newspaper column, Kemal Bey,” he said. “What is it?” I asked. “Love, like a newspaper column, has to make us happy now. We judge the beauty and power of each by how deep an impression it makes on the soul.” “Master, please write that up in your column one day,” I said, but he was listening not to me but to his raven-haired dance partner. At that moment I noticed Füsun and Zaim beside us. Füsun had placed her head very close to his neck and was whispering to him, and Zaim was smiling gaily. It seemed to me that they could see us perfectly well, but were pretending not to notice as they spun around the dance floor.

  Without losing a beat I maneuvered Sibel in their direction and then, like a pirate ship pursuing a merchant galleon, I caused us to ram Füsun and Zaim from the side.

  “Oh, excuse us,” I said with a silly laugh. “How are you?” The confused joy on Füsun’s face brought me back to my senses and at once I spied in my drunkenness a good excuse for bold action. I turned to Zaim, proferring Sibel’s hand. “May I offer you the honor of this dance?” Zaim took his hand off Füsun’s waist. “You two are going to have to get to know each other better,” I said, “and you might as well start now.” Completing my gesture of self-sacrifice, I put my hands on their backs and pushed them together. As Sibel and Zaim began to dance, with obvious reluctance, Füsun and I looked for a moment into each other’s eyes. Then I put my hand on her waist and with a few gentle turns, moved her as far away as I could, like any elated suitor preparing to abscond with his sweetheart.

  How to describe the peace that came over me the moment I took her in my arms? The noise of the crowd that had so addled me, the ungodly racket that I had taken to be the aggregate of the silverware, the orchestra, and the roar of the city—now I knew what I’d heard was only my disquiet at being far from her. Like a baby who will stop crying only in the arms of one particular person, I felt a deep, soft, velvety bliss of silence spreading through me. From her expression I could see that Füsun felt the same; taking the enveloping silence as our mutual recognition of shared enchantment, I wished that the dance would never end. But soon I realized that her half of the silence meant something altogether different from mine. Füsun’s silence harked back to the question I had brushed off earlier as a joke (“What will become of us?”), and now I had to give an answer. I decided that this was what she had come for. The interest that men had shown her this evening, the admiration that I’d seen even in the eyes of the children—all this had given her confidence, had lightened her suffering. Now she might even be able to view me in perspective, as a “passing fancy.” As I began, in my drunkenness, to realize that the night was coming to an end, I was seized by the terrifying thought of losing Füsun.

  “When two people love each other as we do, no one can come between them, no one,” I said, amazed at the words I was uttering without preparation. “Lovers like us, because they know that nothing can destroy their love, even on the worst days, even when they are heedlessly hurting each other in the cruelest, most deceitful ways, still carry in their hearts a consolation that never abandons them. Trust me that after tonight I’ll stop all this, I’ll sort this out. Are you listening to me?”

  “I’m listening.”

  When I was sure that no one dancing nearby was looking at us, I said, “We met at an unfortunate time. In the early days neither of us could have known how rare this love was between us. But now I am going to put everything right. Our most immediate concern is your exam tomorrow. This evening you shouldn’t waste any more time worrying about us.”

  “Then tell me, what is going to happen now?”

  “Tomorrow, as always” (for a moment, my voice trembled) “at two o’clock, after you’ve finished your exam, let’s meet at the Merhamet Apartments. Then I’ll be able to tell you what I plan to do next, without having to rush. If I fail to win your trust, then you never have to see me again.”

  “No, tell me now, and I’ll come.”

  How sweet it was to imagine in my drunken stupor that she would come to me at two o’clock the next day, that we would make love as always, that we would remain together until the end of my days, and as I touched her wondrous shoulders and her honey-colored arms, I resolved that I would do everything I could, whatever it took.

  “No one will ever come between us ever again,” I said.

  “All right then, I’ll come tomorrow after the exam, and you, God willing, won’t have gone back on your word, and you’ll tell me how you’re going to do this.”

  While we both remained standing, perfectly straight, with my hand lovingly clamped on her hip, and in time to the music, I tried to tug her closer to me. She resisted, refusing to lean into me, and that excited me all the more. But when it became apparent that my attempt to wrap my arms around her in front of everyone was being viewed not as a sign of love but proof of my drunkenness, I pulled myself together and relented.

  “We have to sit down,” she said. “I feel as if everyone is looking at me.” She was leaving my arms. “Go right home and get some sleep,” I whispered. “During the exam, just think about how much I love you.”

  When I got back to our table there was no one there except for Berrin and Osman, both frowning and bickering with each other. “Are you all right?” said Berrin.

  “Perfectly fine,” I said, gazing upon the disordered table and the empty chairs.

  “Sibel didn’t want to dance anymore, and Kenan Bey took her with him to the Satsat table, where they were playing some sort of game.”

  “It’s good that you danced with Füsun,” said Osman. “In the end, it was wrong for our mother to give her the cold shoulder. It’s important for Füsun and everyone else to know that the family takes an interest in her, that the nonsense with the beauty contest is forgotten, and she can depend on us. I worry for the girl. She thinks she is too beautiful,” he said in English. “That dress is too revealing. In six months she’s gone from being a child to a woman; she’s really bloomed. If she doesn’t marry the right sort of man very soon, first she’ll get a reputation and that can lead only to misery. What was she telling you?”

  “Apparently she is taking her university entrance exam tomorrow.”

  “And she’s still here dancing? It’s after midnight.” He watched her walk toward her table. “I really did like your Kenan, by the way. I say she should marry him.”

  “Shall I tell them both?” I shouted, having moved away from him already. I had been doing this since childhood. Whenever my brother began to speak, I would do the opposite of what he asked, and retreat to the most remote corner, ignoring the fact that he was still talking.

  In later years I would often reflect on my bliss and joy at that point in the evening, on my way from our table to the tables
in the back where the Satsat employees, Füsun, and her parents were sitting. I had just put everything right, and in thirteen hours and forty-five minutes I would meet Füsun at the Merhamet Apartments. A brilliant future beckoned, and the promise of happiness sparkled like the Bosphorus at our feet. Even as I laughed with the lovely girls now weary of dancing, their dresses in charming (and revealing) disarray, and I joked with the last of the guests, and old friends, and affectionate aunties I’d known for thirty years, a voice inside me warned that if I continued on this path, I’d end up marrying not Sibel but Füsun.

  Sibel had joined the untidy Satsat table, where they were holding a mock séance, really just a drunken game based on no particular knowledge of spiritualism. When they were unable to summon any spirits, the group began to disperse. Sibel moved over to the next table, which was empty except for Kenan and Füsun, with whom she immediately struck up a conversation before I could join them. Seeing me approaching, Kenan asked Füsun to dance. Füsun, having seen me, turned him down, saying that her shoes were pinching her toes, and with youthful pride Kenan responded as if the point of it were not Füsun but the dance, and went off as the Silver Leaves played one of the evening’s fast numbers to do the latest step with someone else. So now, at the edge of the Satsat table, by now almost empty, a chair awaited me between Füsun and Sibel. So I went and sat down between Füsun and Sibel. How I wish someone had taken a photograph of us that I might have now displayed!

  I sat down to discover with contentment that Füsun and Sibel were discussing spiritualism like two Nişantaşı ladies who had been acquainted for years but still maintained a social distance, their language markedly formal, almost ceremonial. Füsun, whom I’d assumed had little religious education, declared that souls certainly existed, “as our religion decrees,” but that for us in this world to attempt communication with them was a sin. Here she glanced at her father at the next table. This idea had come from him.