The Museum of Innocence Read online

  50

  This Is the Last Time I’ll Ever See Her!

  IN THE morning I saw things as they really were. The night before, at the hands of those householders, my pride had been shattered, I had been ridiculed, even degraded, but I had myself abetted in the humiliation, I now saw, by getting so drunk. Though they knew how much in love I was with their daughter, Füsun’s parents must have been in on this plan, having condoned inviting me to supper, for no other purpose but to pander to their son-in-law’s childish, stupid dreams of becoming a filmmaker. I would never see these people again. When I felt my father’s pearl earrings in my jacket pocket, I was glad. I had given Füsun her own earring back, but I had not allowed my father’s valuable gift to be taken by these people who had designs on my money. After a year of suffering, it had also been salubrious to see Füsun one last time: The love I felt for her was owing not to her beauty or her personality; it was nothing more than a subconscious reaction to Sibel and the prospect of marriage. Though never having read a word of Freud, I recall appropriating the concept of the subconscious, widely bandied about in newspapers, to make sense of my life at that time. Our forebears had djinns that drove them to action against their will. And I had my “subconscious,” which had driven me not just into a year of such suffering on account of Füsun, but also now to embarrassment in ways I could never have imagined. I could no longer be its dupe; I needed to turn over a new leaf in my life, and forget everything to do with Füsun.

  My first defiant act was to take her letter of invitation from my breast pocket and rip this letter so carefully preserved in its envelope into tiny pieces. The next morning I stayed in bed until noon, determined at last to forbid this obsession that my subconscious had sent me. Giving a new name to my pain and degradation gave me a new strength with which to fight it. My mother, seeing me hungover from the night before, disinclined even to get out of bed, had sent Fatma Hanım to Pangaltı to buy prawns for lunch; she had them cooked in a casserole with garlic just the way I liked them, and for the vegetable some artichokes with olive oil and lots of lemon. Calmed by my decision never to see Füsun and her family again, I was savoring my lunch, enjoying every bite, even having a glass of white wine, as my mother did. She told me that Billur, the youngest daughter of the Dağdelen family, who had made their original fortune in railroads, had finished lycée in Switzerland and had just last week turned eighteen. The family, having since gone into construction, was now in difficult straits, and, being unable to repay various bank loans procured by pulling who knew what strings and paying heaven knew what bribes, the Dağdelens were now keen to marry off their daughter before these difficulties became public: It seemed bankruptcies were imminent. “Apparently the girl is very beautiful!” she then said, with an encouraging air. “If you want I can go and have a look at her. I can’t just sit around and watch you spend every night drinking with your men friends, like a gang of officers in the provinces.”

  “You go and take a look at this girl, Mother dear,” I said, without smiling. “I’ve tried my luck with a modern girl I chose for myself—I spent time with her and took time to know her, but it didn’t work out. Let’s try matchmaking this time.”

  “Oh my darling son, if only you knew how happy I am to hear you say this,” said my mother. “Of course, you could still get to know each other, and go out together…. You have a beautiful summer before you; it’s so lovely, you’re both young. Look, I want you to treat this one right. Shall I tell you why it didn’t work out with Sibel?”

  At that moment I realized that my mother knew all about Füsun, but that she wanted to find some other way of explaining a painful occurrence—just as our ancestors had blamed djinns rather than them-selves. Seeing this, I was deeply touched.

  “She was very ambitious, very haughty, very proud, that girl,” said my mother, looking straight into my eyes. She added, as if giving away a secret, “Anyway, from the time I heard she didn’t like cats, I had my doubts.”

  I had no memory of Sibel’s hatred of cats, but this was the second time my mother had used this as a reason to rail against her. I changed the subject. We drank our coffees together on the balcony, watching a small funeral below. Though she still shed a few tears now and again, saying, “Oh, your poor, dear father,” my mother was in good health; she had pulled herself together and her faculties were sound. She told me that the person in the coffin set on the funeral stone was one of the owners of the famous Bereket Apartments. As she located it for me, two buildings down from the Atlas Cinema, I found myself daydreaming about a premiere at the Atlas Cinema of a film starring Füsun. After lunch I left for Satsat, where, convinced that I could recover the “normal” life I’d had before Füsun, before Sibel, I threw myself into my work.

  Seeing Füsun had alleviated much of the pain I had suffered for so many months. As I worked in the office, part of me was thinking, in all sincerity, that I was lucky to have recovered from my lovesickness, and in this thought was a great serenity. As I carried on shuffling papers, I checked myself periodically, and I was glad to note that indeed I had no desire to see her. There was no longer any question of my returning to that dreadful house in Çukurcuma, that rat’s nest with its mud and its floods. My disdain was fueled less by love for Füsun than by resentment of her conniving family and that fatso they called their son-in-law. But I grew angry for feeling enmity for a mere boy, just as I cursed my stupidity in enduring a year of agony on account of this “love.” But was I really angry at myself? I wanted to believe that I had embarked on a new life, and that my heartache was over; these powerful new dark feelings were necessary proof my life had changed, and as such I needed them, genuine or not. So I resolved to see the old friends I had been shunning, to have fun, to go to parties, though for some time I kept my distance from Zaim and Mehmet, lest they bring back memories of Füsun and Sibel. Sometimes, after midnight, having had a lot to drink at a nightclub or a party, I would see my rage directed not at society’s idiocies, its tedious conventions, nor my own foolishness in succumbing to my obsession; my anger was directed at Füsun; in a walled-off corner of my mind, I would fretfully acknowledge that I was in perpetual argument with her, at times thinking secretly that she had chosen to reject the pleasant life I could have given her, in favor of this flooded rat’s nest in Çukurcuma, and so she was to blame for my natural inability to continue caring about someone who would bury herself alive in such a stupid marriage.

  I had a friend from my army days, Abdülkerim, the son of a wealthy Kayseri landowner. After our military service had ended, he had kept in touch with holiday and New Year’s cards, which he signed in a careful floral script, and so I had made him the Kayseri distributor for Satsat. Because I’d thought Sibel would find him far too “à la Turca” I had not spared him much time during his visits to Istanbul over the last few years, but four days after my visit to Füsun’s family, I took him to a new restaurant named Garaj that had found immediate favor with Istanbul society. As we reminisced, it was almost as if I were seeing my life through his eyes; to make myself feel better, I told him stories about the wealthy patrons entering and leaving the restaurant, sometimes even just before or after they had visited our table to offer us polite and affable handshakes. Before long it was clear that Abdülkerim was less interested in stories of ordinary human frailty, pain, and transgression than in the sex lives, scandals, and domestic peccadillos of rich Istanbullus whom he hardly knew; one by one he focused on each girl rumored to have had sex before marriage, or even before her engagement, and I did not like this. Perhaps this is why, by the end of the evening, having fallen into a contrarian frame of mind, I told Abdülkerim my own story, describing the love I’d felt for Füsun, but telling it as if it had all happened to some other rich idiot. As I told the story of the young rich man, much admired in society, who had fallen so madly in love with a “shopgirl,” only for her, in the end, to marry someone else, I was so anxious to keep Abdülkerim from suspecting that “he” was me that I pointed out a yo
ung man sitting at a distant table.

  “Well, no harm done. This promiscuous girl has been married off, so the poor man is off the hook,” said Abdülkerim.

  “Actually, when I think of what that man risked for love, I can’t help feeling a lot of respect for him,” I said. “He broke off his engagement for this girl….”

  For a moment Abdülkerim’s face lit up with gentle understanding; but then he turned to look covetously at Hicri Bey, the tobacco magnate, with his wife and two swanlike daughters, making their way toward the exit. “Who are those people?” he asked without looking at me. The younger of Hicri Bey’s two dark-haired daughters—her name was Neslişah, I think—had bleached her hair. I did not like the way Abdülkerim looked at them, half mocking, and half admiring.

  “It’s late. Shall we go?” I said.

  I asked for the bill. We said nothing to each other until we had left the restaurant and were saying our good-byes.

  I did not walk straight home to Nişantaşı; instead I headed for Taksim. I had returned Füsun’s orphaned earring to her, but not formally—in my stupor, I had merely left it in the bathroom. This was demeaning, both for them and for me. My pride demanded that I make it clear to them that this had been no mistake but something I’d done deliberately, intending she would find it. So I would have to apologize, and being secure in the knowledge that I would never see her again, I could smile at Füsun and say one last indifferent good-bye. As I walked through the door, Füsun would understand that this was to be her last glimpse of me, and perhaps she would panic, but I would elude her in a deep silence, as she had done to me for the past year. I would not even say that we would never see each other again, but I would wish her well in such a way that she could not conclude otherwise and would thus be undone.

  As I slowly made my way toward Çukurcuma through the back-streets of Beyoğlu, it crossed my mind that there was a chance Füsun might not be undone at all; it was possible she was perfectly happy, living in that house with her husband. But if that was the case, if she loved that dullard so much that she would choose to live penuriously in that rickety house, then I would surely have no wish to see her again anyway. Along the narrow streets, uneven sidewalks, and stairs, I looked through the half-drawn curtains to see families turning off their television sets and preparing for bed, or poor, elderly couples sitting across from each other, smoking their last cigarettes of the day, and it struck me on this spring evening, in the pale lamplight, that the people living in these silent backstreets were happy.

  I rang the doorbell. A bay window on the second floor swung open. “Who is it?” Füsun’s father called out into the darkness.

  “It’s me.”

  “Who?”

  As I stood there, wondering if I should run away, her mother opened the door.

  “Aunt Nesibe, I am sorry to disturb you at such a late hour.”

  “Never mind, Kemal Bey. Do come in.”

  As I followed her up the stairs, just as I had done on my first visit, I told myself, “Don’t be bashful! This is the last time you’ll see Füsun!” I went inside, fortified by my resolve never to let myself be degraded that way again, but as soon as I saw her, my heart began to pound and I felt embarrassed. She was sitting in front of the television with her father. When they saw me, they both jumped to their feet in a surprised confusion that softened apologetically when they noticed my furrowed brow and the liquor on my breath. During the first four or five minutes, which I do not like to remember, not at all, I told them laboriously how very sorry I was to have disturbed them, but that I had just been passing by and had something on my mind that I wished to discuss with them. In that interval I had discovered that her husband was not at home (“Feridun went out with his film friends”), but I couldn’t find a way to broach my subject. Her mother went into the kitchen to make tea. After her father got up without excusing himself, we found ourselves alone.

  “I’m very sorry,” I said, as we both kept our eyes on the television. “I meant no harm. It was because I was drunk that I left your earring next to the toothbrushes that evening, though I meant to hand it back to you properly.”

  “There wasn’t any earring near the toothbrushes,” she said with a frown.

  As we looked at each other, struggling to make some sense of this, her father came in holding a bowl of semolina and fruit helva, which he said was just for me. After taking one spoonful, I praised the helva to the skies. For a moment we were silent, as if it were for the helva that I had come here in the middle of the night. That was when I realized, as drunk as I was, that the earring had been an excuse: I had come here to see Füsun. And now she was teasing me, telling me she had not found the earring. During that silent interlude I remarked to myself that the pain of not seeing Füsun had been far more soul-destroying than the shame I had suffered in order to see her. I also knew at that moment that I was prepared to endure more situations like this to be spared the pain of not seeing her, though I was more defenseless in the face of shame than in that of longing. Caught now between the fear of humiliation and the fear of suffering her absence, I had no idea what to do, so I stood up.

  There, right across from me, I saw my old friend Lemon. I took one step toward its cage, coming eye to eye with the bird. Füsun and her parents had stood up with me, perhaps relieved to see me go. Again I was delivered to the dreadful awareness that had driven me from this wretched house the last time. Füsun was married now; I would not be able to lure her away. Remembering, too, what conclusion I had drawn following the last visit—that she was after my money—I resolved once more that this was the last time I’d ever see her. I was never going to set foot in this house again.

  Then the doorbell rang. This oil painting captures that moment when Lemon and I were staring at each other, while Füsun and her parents were staring at me and the canary from behind, just before the doorbell rang and we all turned to look at the door: I commissioned it many years after these events. Because the point of view is that of Lemon the canary, with whom I had identified in some strange way at that moment, none of our faces are depicted. It portrays the love of my life, viewed from the back, just as I remembered, and every time I see it, this painting brings me to tears; and let me add with pride that the artist has caught the night peeking through the parted curtains, the dark neighborhood of Çukurcuma in the background, and the room’s interior with perfect fidelity to my descriptions.

  Füsun’s father went over to the bay window to look down at the mirror that was mounted in such a way as to reflect the front and, announcing that it was one of the neighbors’ children ringing the bell, he went downstairs. There was a silence. I went to the door. As I put on my coat I lowered my head and stayed silent. As I opened the door, it occurred to me that all was not lost: This could be the “revenge” scene I had been preparing for a year now, but keeping this fact to myself, I simply said, “Good-bye.”

  “Kemal Bey,” said Aunt Nesibe. “We cannot begin to tell you how glad we were that you rang our bell as you were passing by.” She glanced at Füsun. “Don’t pay any attention to her pouting. She’s afraid of her father. If she weren’t, she’d have shown herself as happy as we were to see you.”

  “Oh, Mother, please,” said my beloved.

  It did cross my mind to begin the parting ritual with some pronouncement along the lines of Well, I can’t bear her hair being black, but I knew these words would ring false: I was willing to suffer all the pain in the world for her, and what’s more I knew that willingness would be the death of me.

  “No, no, she looks fine,” I said, looking meaningfully into Füsun’s eyes. “Seeing how happy you are has made me happy, too.”

  “It was seeing you that made us happy, too,” said Aunt Nesibe. “Now that your feet know how to get here, we hope you’ll visit us often.”

  “Aunt Nesibe, this is the last time I’ll be visiting you,” I said.

  “Why? Don’t you like our new neighborhood?”

  “It’s our turn now,”
I said with fake jocularity. “I’m going to talk to my mother and ask her to invite you over.” There was, I’d like to say, a certain indifference in the way I walked down the stairs, not once looking back at them.

  “Good-night, my son,” said Tarık Bey softly when I met him at the door. The neighbor’s child had given him a package, saying, “This is from my mother!”

  As I felt the fresh air cool my face, I thought how I would never again see Füsun, and for a moment I believed I had an untroubled, carefree, happy life before me. I imagined that Billur, the Dağdelens’ daughter, whom my mother was going to visit, would be charming. But with every step I took, farther from Füsun, I felt as if I were leaving a piece of my heart behind. As I walked up Çukurcuma Hill, I could feel my soul quivering in my bones, straining to return to the place I’d just left, but I still believed it was only a matter of letting this fever break and then I’d be over it.

  I’d come a long way. What I needed now was to find ways to distract myself, to remain strong. I went into one of the meyhanes that was about to shut, and sitting in the atmosphere of thick blue cigarette smoke I drank two glasses of raki with a slice of melon. When I went back out into the street, my soul was telling my body we had not gone far from Füsun’s house. At this point I must have lost my way. In a narrow street I came across a familiar shadow that sent an electric shock through me.

  “Oh, hello!” he said. It was Füsun’s husband, Feridun.