The Museum of Innocence Read online

  In mid-January, two weeks before Sibel was due to return from Paris, I packed my bags, left the yali, and moved to a hotel between Fatih and Karagümrük. Displayed here is one of its keys, on which you can see its insignia, likewise on its headed stationery from my room, and a replica of its little sign, which I found many years later. The day before, I’d spent the afternoon exploring the neighborhoods between Fatih and the Golden Horn, looking in every street, and every shop, peering into the windows of each and every family living in the neglected stone houses and the teetering unpainted wooden houses left behind by the Greeks who had fled the city, when, having had my fill of their joy, noise, misery, and crowded poverty, I had stepped into the hotel to escape the rain. By that time night had fallen, and unwilling to wait until I had crossed the Golden Horn to have my first drink, I walked up the hill, entering a new beer hall near the main drag. Chasing vodka with beer, I sat there with the other men watching television, and before long—it wasn’t even nine o’clock—I was paralytic. When I went outside I could not even remember where I’d parked my car. I walked for a long time in the rain, thinking more about Füsun, and my life, than about my car, and I remember that as I walked these dark and muddy streets, my dreams of Füsun, painful as they were, still brought me happiness. So it was that in the middle of the night I found myself back at the Fatih Hotel; having secured a room, I was soon asleep.

  For the first time in months I slept soundly. I would continue to sleep soundly in that same hotel during the nights that followed. This took me by surprise. Sometimes, toward morning, I would be visited in my dreams by a sunny memory from my childhood or early youth. I would awake with a shudder, just as I had done when I’d heard the fisherman and his son, and my only wish was to go right back to sleep in that hotel bed, to return to the same sunny dream.

  After the first restful night I had gone back to the yali to pack up my clothes, my woolen winter socks and my other belongings, and determined to avoid the worried looks and anxious questions of my parents, I moved into the hotel rather than going home. I went to Satsat early as usual, but left the office early to run back to the streets of Istanbul. My hunt for Füsun was a boundless joy, and in the evening I would go content to beer halls to rest my weary legs. But as with so many chapters of my life, I would realize only much later that my days at the Fatih Hotel, far from being painful, as I then imagined, were in fact full of happiness. Every lunch hour I would go to the Merhamet Apartments for the distraction and consolation drawn from things; every day I would remember more of them, cherishing each newly found object; in the evenings I would drink and take long walks, my mind fogged by drink as I prowled the backstreets of Fatih, Karagümrük, and Balat, peering through parted curtains on the good fortune of families eating their evening meal, telling myself over and over that “Füsun must be in one of them,” and finding ever fresh comfort in the thought.

  Sometimes I felt that my happiness issued not from the possibility that Füsun was near, but from something less tangible. I felt as if I could see the very essence of life in these poor neighborhoods, with their empty lots, their muddy cobblestone streets, their cars, rubbish bins, and sidewalks, and the children playing with a half-inflated football under the streetlamps. My father’s expanding business, his factories, his growing fortune, and the attendant obligation to live the “elegant European” life that befit this wealth—it all now seemed to have deprived me of simple essences. As I walked these streets, it was as if I was seeking out my own center. As I meandered drunkenly up and down these narrow ways, the muddy hills and curving alleys that turned abruptly into steps, the world would suddenly seem uninhabited except by dogs, and a chill would pass through me, and I would gaze admiringly at the yellow lamplight filtering through drawn curtains, the thin funnels of blue smoke rising from chimneys, the reflected glow of televisions in windows and shop fronts. So the next night, when I was sitting with Zaim at a tavern inside the Beşiktaş Market, drinking raki and eating fish, these dark scenes would return, their protection beckoning me from the world into which Zaim’s stories might pull me.

  It was his usual conversational fare, reports of parties and dances, gossip about people at the club, and the growing popularity of Meltem, no one subject dwelt on for long. He knew I’d moved out of the yali and was not at my parents’ in Nişantaşı, but to avoid triggering my gloom he refrained from asking about Füsun or my broken heart, though from time to time I tried to lead us in that direction, for I longed to know what he knew about her past. When it was clear that he was disinclined or unable to feed my obsession, regarding the complexity as too reckless or simply a bore, I assumed the air of a self-possessed man, and made sure he knew that I was going to the office every day and working hard.

  It was snowing in late January when Sibel rang the office from Paris; in some agitation she told me that she’d heard from the neighbors and the gardener that I had moved out of the yali. It had been a long time since we’d spoken on the phone, and certainly this was an indication of our estrangement, but in those days it wasn’t easy to make international calls. The line would crackle with strange noises, and one had to shout into the receiver. Daunted by the prospect of proclaiming my love to Sibel at the top of my lungs (and without meaning a word of it) for the entire office to hear, I kept finding reasons not to talk to her.

  “You’ve moved out of the yali, but I hear you’re not at your parents’!” she said.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  I did not remind her that we had decided together that returning to my parents in Nişantaşı would exacerbate my illness. Neither could I ask who had told her I was not spending my nights at home. My secretary Zeynep Hanım had jumped from her seat to close the door between us, so that I could speak to my fiancée in private, but I still had to shout for Sibel to hear me.

  “What are you doing? Where are you staying?” she asked.

  No one but Zaim knew I was staying in a hotel in Fatih, I now remembered. But I didn’t want to shout this either, for the whole office to hear.

  “Have you gone back to her?” asked Sibel. “You have to be straight with me, Kemal.”

  “No!” I said, but I wasn’t able to shout it loud enough.

  “I can’t hear you, Kemal.”

  “No,” I said, louder this time. But still my response was muffled in the whoosh of the international line, whose sound was that of a seashell held to the ear.

  “Kemal, Kemal, I can’t hear you, please….” Sibel shouted.

  “I’m here!” I was shouting as loud as I could.

  “Let me have it straight.”

  “There’s nothing to tell you!” I said, shouting even louder.

  “I understand!” said Sibel.

  A strange sea sound came down the line, then a crackle, before the line went dead and the voice of the operator cut in. “The line to Paris has been disconnected, sir. Would you like me to try to connect you again?”

  “No thank you, my girl,” I said. It was my father’s habit to address all female clerks, no matter their age, as “my girl.” It shocked me to notice how soon I was taking on my father’s habits. It shocked me to hear Sibel sounding so sure of herself…. But I was tired of telling lies. Sibel did not ring me from Paris again.

  45

  A Holiday on Uludağ

  I HEARD of Sibel’s return in February, at the start of the fifteen-day school holiday when families went to Uludağ to ski. Zaim, too, had called me at the office, suggesting we meet for lunch. As we sat together at Fuaye, eating lentil soup, Zaim fixed me with an affectionate gaze.

  “You’ve run away from life. Every day I see you turning into a sadder and more troubled man, so I’m worried about you.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’m fine….”

  “You do not look fine,” he said. “Try to be happy.”

  “You think the point of life is to be happy,” I said. “That’s why you believe I’m not happy and have run away from life…. I’m on the thresho
ld of another life that will bring me peace.”

  “Fine … Then tell us about this life, too. We’re genuinely curious.”

  “Who are ‘we’?”

  “Don’t do that, Kemal,” he said. “How is any of this my fault? Am I not your best friend?”

  “You are.”

  “We … Mehmet, Nurcihan, myself, and Sibel … We’re going to Uludağ in three days’ time. Why don’t you come, too. Nurcihan was planning to keep an eye on her niece, and so we decided to make it a group excursion. It will be fun.”

  “So Sibel is back.”

  “It has been ten days now. She came back the Monday before last. She wants you to come to Uludağ.” Zaim smiled, his face shining with goodness. “But she doesn’t want you to know it…. I’m telling you all this without her knowledge, so whatever you do, don’t make any mistakes in Uludağ.”

  “I won’t—I’m not coming.”

  “Come, it will do you good. This business will be over soon, and you’ll forget all about it.”

  “Who knows? Do Nurcihan and Mehmet know?”

  “Sibel knows, of course,” said Zaim. “She and I talked about this. She understands very well how someone as caring as you could get pulled into something like this, and she wants to help you out of it.”

  “Is that so?”

  “You’ve taken a wrong turn, Kemal. We all fall for the wrong people sometimes. We all fall in love. But in the end we all pull ourselves out of it before we ruin our lives.”

  “Then what about all those love stories, all those films?”

  “I love romantic films,” said Zaim. “But I’ve never seen one that justifies a case like yours. Six months ago, you had that huge engagement party. You and Sibel stood in front of everyone and exchanged rings. What a lovely evening that was. You moved in together, before you even were married. You even had parties at your house. We all thought, How elegant, how civilized. And because everyone knew you were getting married, everyone accepted it, not a soul took offense. I even heard people saying it was so chic, they wanted to do the same. But now you’ve moved out of the yali, and you’re on your own. Are you leaving Sibel? Why are you running away from her? You’re not explaining yourself. You’re acting like a child.”

  “Sibel knows….”

  “No, she doesn’t,” said Zaim. “She has no idea how to explain the situation. How is she going to face people? What can she say? ‘My fiancé fell in love with a shopgirl, so we’ve separated’? She’s very upset, she’s heartbroken. You have to speak to her. In Uludağ you could patch things up, put all this behind you. I guarantee you, Sibel is ready to go on as if this never happened. Nurcihan and Sibel will be staying in a room together at the Grand Hotel. Mehmet and I have taken the corner room on the second floor. There’s a third bed in that room. You know, you can see the misty mountaintop from there. You can stay with us. We can stay up all night ragging one another just like we did when we were young. Mehmet is so smitten with Nurcihan he’s burning up. Think of the fun we could have with him.”

  “Actually the person you’d be having fun with would be me,” I said. “And anyway, Mehmet and Nurcihan are already a couple.”

  “Believe me, I would never joke at your expense,” Zaim said, somewhat hurt. “Nor would I let anyone else.”

  From his words it was clear that already Istanbul society—or at least the people in our own circle—had begun to make jokes about my obsession. But I had already guessed this.

  I was full of admiration for Zaim’s delicacy in setting up this trip to Uludağ, just to help me. When I was young, my family would go to Uludağ every winter, along with most of my father’s business associates, his friends from the club, and so many other wealthy Nişantaşı families. I had so loved those vacations—when everyone knew or would come to know everyone, and you could make new friends, and play at matchmaking, as even the shiest girls danced the night away—that even years later, if I happened on an old mitten of my father’s at the back of a drawer, or the goggles that my brother had used and then passed on to me, my spine would tingle. During my time in America, whenever I looked at the postcards my mother sent me from the Grand Hotel, I felt a wave of happy longing.

  I thanked Zaim but said, “I’m not coming. It would be too painful. But you’re right. I need to talk to Sibel.”

  “She’s not at the yali. She’s staying with Nurcihan,” said Zaim. Turning his head to survey the other diners, who were in high spirits—and like him, getting richer by the day—he was able for a moment to forget my troubles and smile.

  46

  Is It Normal to Leave Your Fiancée in the Lurch?

  I COULDN’T bring myself to call Sibel until the end of February, when she was back from Uludağ. I was afraid that the dreaded talk might end in unpleasantness, anger, tears, and reproach, and hoping she might take the initiative and send back the ring with a fully justified excuse. But one day I could bear the tension no longer, so I picked up the phone and rang her at Nurcihan’s house; we agreed to meet for supper.

  I’d thought it would be good to go to Fuaye because neither of us was likely to succumb to sentimentality, anger, or excess surrounded by people we knew. And so it was in the beginning. At the tables around us were Hilmi the Bastard with his new wife, Neslihan, and Tayfun, and Güven the Ship Sinker with his family, and (at a very crowded table) Yeşim and her husband. Hilmi and his wife even came over to our table and said how very pleased they were to see us.

  Over mezes and Yakut red wine, she talked about her trip to Paris, describing Nurcihan’s French friends, and telling me how beautiful that city was at Christmas.

  “How are your parents?” I asked.

  “They’re fine,” she said. “They have heard nothing about our situation as yet.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” I said. “We don’t have to say anything to anyone.”

  “I don’t,” said Sibel, and then she fell silent, with a look as if to ask, So what’s going to happen now?

  Changing the subject, I told her that my father seemed to be withdrawing from the world a little more every day. Sibel told me about her mother’s new habit of hiding away her old clothes and other belongings. I told her how my mother was even more radical about banishing all her discarded things to another apartment. But this was a dangerous subject, so we fell silent again. Sibel’s expression told me she inferred no malice in my having brought it up just to keep the conversation going, but she also understood that my avoiding the real subject meant I had nothing new to say to her.

  So she got to the point herself, saying, “I see you’ve come to accept your condition.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “For months now we’ve been waiting for your illness to pass. But after all this waiting, there are no signs of recovery—and instead you seem to greet your illness with open arms. It’s very painful to see, Kemal. In Paris I prayed for your recovery.”

  “I’m not ill,” I said. I looked at the jolly crowd of diners around us. “These people might see it that way. But you shouldn’t.”

  “When we were at the yali,” Sibel said, “didn’t we both agree it was an illness?”

  “We did.”

  “So what has changed now? Is it normal to leave your fiancée in the lurch like this?”

  “What?”

  “For a shopgirl …”

  “Why are you mixing things up like that? This has nothing to do with shops, or wealth, or poverty.”

  “It has everything to do with it,” said Sibel, with the determination that attends having given something a great deal of thought and reached a painful conclusion. “It’s because she was a poor, ambitious girl that you were able to start something with her so easily. If she hadn’t been a shopgirl, maybe you could have married her without causing yourself embarrassment. So that’s what made you ill, in the end. You couldn’t marry her. You couldn’t find the courage.”

  Believing that Sibel was saying these things to me to make me angry, I got angry. But thi
s is not to say that the fury owed nothing to my partial awareness that she was right.

  “It isn’t normal, darling, for someone like you to do all these bizarre things for the sake of a shopgirl, to go to live in a hotel in Fatih…. If you want to get better, you have to concede that I have a point.”

  “First of all, I’m not in love with that girl the way you think I am,” I said. “But just for the sake of argument, don’t people ever fall in love with people who are poorer than they are? Don’t rich and poor ever fall in love?”

  “The art of love is in finding a balance of equals,” Sibel said. “As there is with you and me. Have you ever seen a rich girl fall in love with Ahmet Efendi the janitor, or Hasan Usta, the construction worker, just for his good looks? Outside Turkish films, I mean.”

  Sadi, the headwaiter, was walking toward us, his face beaming at the sight of us, but when he saw how intently we were talking, he broke off the approach. I indicated with my head that he had been right to do so and turned back to Sibel.

  “I believe in Turkish films,” I said.

  “Kemal, in all these years I have never seen you go to a Turkish film, not even once. You don’t even go with your friends to the summer cinemas, just for a laugh.”

  “Life at the Fatih Hotel is just like a Turkish film, believe me,” I said. “At night, before I go to sleep, I walk around those desolate and impoverished streets. It does me good.”