The Museum of Innocence Read online

  Once they’d been lit, our fake Marlboros, which were produced in the Socialist Republic of Bulgaria and smuggled into Turkey on ships and fishing boats, would burn—just like the real Marlboros produced in America—all the way to the end. But Samsuns would always flame out before that. The tobacco was coarse and moist, not ground well enough, and the cigarettes often contained what looked to be chips of wood, as well as undried lumps of the plant and thick-veined leaves. For this reason, Füsun was in the habit of softening the cigarette before she smoked it by rolling it between her fingers, and over time I had acquired this habit, too, rolling my cigarette between my fingers, just as she did, before lighting up, and I loved it when our eyes met as we were both doing this.

  During my first years with the Keskins, Füsun would smoke in a way as if to suggest she was half trying to hide it from her father. Covering her cigarette with the curved palm of her hand, and not using the Kütahya ashtray that her father and I used, but tipping her ashes onto the small saucer of a coffee cup, “without anyone seeing.” Her father and Aunt Nesibe and I were heedless of where our smoke went, but when she had to exhale, Füsun would suddenly turn her head to the right, as if about to whisper a secret into the ear of the classmate sitting beside her, directing the fast cloud of dark blue smoke to a point far from the table. I loved to see her face clouding with guilt, panic, and affected shame: It reminded me of our math lessons, and I believed then that I would love her all my life.

  The anxious adherence to the forms of deference that we associate with traditional families—sitting straight and never crossing one’s legs or smoking or drinking in front of one’s father—had over time slowly disappeared. Tarık Bey certainly saw his daughter smoking, but he didn’t respond as one might expect a traditional father would, seeming content with the other gestures by which Füsun showed her respect. It was a great joy to study the myriad social refinements of which anthropologists seem to have so little understanding, and most especially these rituals that allowed families to act “as if” they were respecting tradition, even as they broke with it. This “as if” culture did not seem to me duplicitous: Whenever I watched Füsun making these sweet and lovely gestures, I would remind myself that I was only able to see the Keskins at all because every time I visited we all acted “as if” I wasn’t sitting there as the suitor, as I truly was. I was able to see Füsun by reason of acting as if I were merely a distant relation come to visit, however frequently.

  When I was not at the house, Füsun would smoke her cigarettes almost down to the filter, as I could tell from those butts she’d left around the house before I arrived. I always knew which ones were hers, not by the brand but rather by the way she’d stubbed them out, which bespoke her mood.

  When I came for the evening, she would smoke her cigarettes as Sibel and her friends smoked their long, thin, stylish American “ultralights”—never smoking the whole cigarette but putting it out midway.

  Sometimes she would stub it out with evident anger, sometimes with impatience. I had seen her stub out a cigarette in anger many times, and this caused me disquiet. Some days she would put out her cigarette against the surface of the ashtray with a series of short, insistent taps. And sometimes, when no one was looking, she would press it down hard, and very slowly, as if crushing the head of a snake, so that I would think that the collected resentment of her whole life was being expressed with this cigarette stub. At times, when watching television, or listening to the conversation at supper, when her mind was clearly elsewhere, she would snuff the cigarette without even turning her head to look. Quite often, if she needed to free her hand to pick up a spoon or a large pitcher, I would see her doing the job with one quick movement. When she was feeling joyous or glad, she would sometimes press what was left of the cigarette against the ashtray, extinguishing it with the sudden force of her forefinger, as if trying to kill an animal without causing it pain. If she was working in the kitchen, she would do as Aunt Nesibe did, removing the cigarette from her mouth and holding it for a moment under the tap before throwing it into the bin.

  This variety of methods ensured that every cigarette to leave her hand had its special shape, and its own soul. Back in the Merhamet Apartments I would retrieve the butts from my pocket for careful examination, likening each to some other form. For example, I would see some as little black-faced people with their heads and necks smashed, their trunks made crooked by the wrongs others had done them; or I would read them as strange and frightening question marks. Sometimes I likened the cigarette ends to crayfish or the smokestacks of City Line ferries; sometimes I saw them as exclamation marks, one warning me to take heed of lurking danger of which another was an omen; or as just so much foul-smelling rubbish. Or I would see them as expressions of Füsun’s soul, even fragments of it, and as I lightly passed my tongue over the trace of lipstick on the filter, I would lose myself in communion with her.

  When those visiting my museum note that beneath where each of the 4,213 cigarette butts is carefully pinned, I have indicated the date of its retrieval, I hope they will not grow impatient, thinking I am crowding the display cases with distracting trivia: Each cigarette butt in its own unique way records Füsun’s deepest emotions at the moment she stubbed it out. See, for example, the three cigarette butts I collected on May 17, 1981, when the filming of Broken Lives began at the Peri Cinema: All are roughly bent, folded upon themselves, and compacted, perfectly recalling the terrible awkwardness of Füsun’s silence that day, her refusal to say what was upsetting her, and her vain attempts to pretend nothing was wrong.

  As for this pair of well-crushed butts, I trace one of them back to the evening we saw a film called False Bliss, which aired on television around that time, with our friend Ekrem from the Pelür (better known as Ekrem Güçlü, the famous star who had once played the prophet Abraham) as the hero. Füsun had stubbed out that cigarette just after he had intoned, “The greatest mistake in life, Nurten, is to want more, to try to be happy,” while Nurten, his poverty-stricken beloved, cast down her eyes in silence.

  Some stains on a few of the straighter butts come from the cherry ice cream Füsun ate on summer evenings. Kamil Efendi, the ice cream vendor, would trundle his three-wheeled pushcart through the cobblestone streets of Tophane and Çukurcuma on summer evenings, shouting “Eye-es Gream!” and slowly ringing his bell; in the winters he would sell helva from the same cart. Once Füsun told me that she’d seen Kamil Efendi’s cart being repaired by Beşir, the man to whom she’d taken her own bicycle when she was a child.

  When I look at another pair of cigarette butts and read the dates recorded beneath them, I think of other warm summer evenings, of fried eggplant with yogurt, of standing together with Füsun at the open window, she holding a small ashtray in one hand, repeatedly tapping her ash into it with the other. Whenever Füsun chatted with me in front of the window she would always affect this pose, and I would imagine her as a woman at a stylish party. Had she wished, she could have tapped the ash into the street, as I, like all Turkish men, did, or she could have stubbed out the cigarette on the windowsill before shooting it like a dart through the window; she could even have tossed it out still burning, with one flick of the hand, to watch it spiral down through the darkness. But no, Füsun would do none of these things, and I followed her example of poise and elegance. Someone viewing us from afar might take us for a couple enjoying polite conversation in a European country, where men and women could be at ease together; he might imagine us at a party and assume we had retired to a quiet corner to get to know each other better. We would not look into each other’s eyes; we would look through the open window, laughing as we chatted about the film we had just seen on television, or remarked on the oppressive summer heat, or the children playing hide-and-seek in the street below. Just then a light breeze would blow in from the Bosphorus, bringing a strong whiff of seaweed, which blended with the overpowering scent of honeysuckle, the fragrance of Füsun’s hair and skin, and the pleasing smoke from this cigare
tte.

  Sometimes, when Füsun was stubbing out her cigarette, our eyes would unexpectedly meet. If she was watching a love story, or engrossed in the endless succession of shocking events in a documentary about the Second World War, with a dirge playing in the background, Füsun would stub out her cigarette without ceremony, and without showing much intent. However, if, as in the case of this specimen, our eyes happened to meet, a charge passed between us, jolting us both, as we remembered at the same time why I was sitting at that table, and her stub would reflect the particular confusion she was feeling, thereby endowing the butt with an unusual shape. Hearing a ship blow its horn from a very great distance, I would then imagine the universe, and my life, as those aboard the ship might view it.

  Some nights I would take only one cigarette butt away with me, and some nights I would take away a few; then at the Merhamet Apartments, picking them up one by one, I would recall various “moments” belonging to the past. Of all the objects I collected, it was the cigarettes that I found to correspond most truly to Aristotle’s moments.

  By now I no longer needed to pick up the objects accumulated in the Merhamet Apartments; I had only to see them once and I could remember the past Füsun and I had shared, the evenings we had spent together at the dinner table. I had associated each and every object—a porcelain saltshaker, a tape measure in the form of a dog, a can opener that looked like an instrument of torture, a bottle of the Batanay sunflower oil that the Keskin kitchen never lacked—with a particular moment, and as the years passed, it seemed as if these remembered moments expanded and merged into perpetuity. And so looking at any of the things gathered in the Merhamet Apartments, even only to remember them, was like looking at the cigarette butts: one by one, they would recall the particles of experience until I had summoned up the entire reality of sitting at the dinner table with Füsun and her family.

  69

  Sometimes

  SOMETIMES WE’D do nothing but sit there in silence. Sometimes Tarık Bey, tiring of the show—we all did on occasion—would begin to peer at the paper from the corner of his eye. Sometimes a car would clatter noisily down the hill, blowing its horn, and there would be a hush as we listened to it pass. Sometimes it would rain and we would listen to the raindrops against the windowpanes. Sometimes we would say, “How hot it is.” Sometimes Aunt Nesibe, forgetting that she’d left a cigarette burning in the ashtray, would light up another in the kitchen. Sometimes I would discreetly stare at Füsun’s hand for fifteen or twenty seconds, and feel my adulation grow. Sometimes, during the commercials, a woman would appear on the screen to acquaint us with something that we at the table were eating at that very moment. Sometimes there would be an explosion in the distance. Sometimes Aunt Nesibe would rise from the table to throw one or two more pieces of coal into the stove, or sometimes Füsun would do it for her. Sometimes I’d think that on my next visit I should bring Füsun a bracelet instead of a hair clip. Sometimes I would forget what a film was about even as we were watching it, and though I continued to watch, I would think about my primary school days in Nişantaşı. Sometimes Aunt Nesibe would say, “Why don’t I brew some linden tea?” Sometimes Füsun yawned so beautifully that I would think that she had forgotten the entire world and that she was drawing from the depths of her soul a more peaceful life, as one might draw cold water from a well on a hot summer day. Sometimes I would say to myself that I should not stay there a moment longer, that I should get up and leave. Sometimes, after the barber who worked until all hours in the shop on the ground floor across the street had sent off his last customer, he would lower his iron shutters very fast, and in the silence of the night the echo would reverberate throughout the neighborhood. Sometimes they’d cut off the water, and for two days we’d go without. Sometimes we would notice something other than flames flickering inside the coal stove. Sometimes I would come for supper two nights in a row, because Aunt Nesibe said, “You liked my beans in olive oil, so why don’t you come again tomorrow, before they all get eaten up?” Sometimes conversation turned to the Cold War between America and the USSR—the Soviet warships that passed through the Bosphorus by night, and the American submarines that plied the Marmara. Sometimes Aunt Nesibe would say, “It’s turned very hot this evening!” Sometimes I could tell from Füsun’s expression that she was daydreaming, and I would long to visit the country in her imagination, although everything seemed hopeless—my life, my lethargy, and even the way I sat there. Sometimes the objects on the table looked to me like mountains, valleys, hills, depressions, and plateaus. Sometimes a funny thing happened on television, and we would all burst out laughing at once. Sometimes it would seem ridiculous the way we all got sucked into whatever was happening on the screen. Sometimes I was bothered by the way Ali the neighbor’s child climbed onto Füsun’s lap and nestled up to her. Sometimes Tarık Bey and I would discuss the vagaries of the economic situation, man to man, and in low voices that suggested conspiracies, deceptions, and dirty tricks. Sometimes Füsun would go upstairs and linger, which was upsetting. Sometimes the phone would ring, and it would be a wrong number. Sometimes Aunt Nesibe would say, “Next Tuesday I’m going to make candied squash.” Sometimes a gang of three or four men would hurtle down the hill, yelling and singing football songs as they continued in the direction of Tophane. Sometimes I would help Füsun pour coal into the stove. Sometimes I would see a cockroach scurrying across the kitchen floor. Sometimes I would sense that Füsun had taken off her slipper underneath the table. Sometimes the watchman would blow his whistle right in front of the door. Sometimes Füsun would get up to tear off the forgotten pages of the Saath Maarif Takvimi one by one, and sometimes I would. Sometimes, when no one was looking, I would take another spoonful of semolina helva. Sometimes the picture on the television would go fuzzy, and Tarık Bey would say, “Could you see what you can do, my girl?” and Füsun would fiddle with a button on the back of the set, while I watched the back of her. Sometimes I would say, “I’ll smoke one more cigarette, and then I’ll go.” Sometimes I would forget Time altogether, and nestle into “now” as if it were a soft bed. Sometimes I felt as if I could see the microbes, bugs, and parasites inside the carpet. Sometimes Füsun would go to the refrigerator between programs and take out cold water, while Tarık Bey paid a visit to the bathroom upstairs. Sometimes they’d cook stuffed squash, tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers in clarified butter and eat it two nights in a row. Sometimes when supper was over Füsun would rise from the table, go over to Lemon’s cage, and speak to him like a friend, and I would fantasize that she was really talking to me. Sometimes on summer evenings a moth would fly in through the open bay window and flutter faster and faster around the lamp. Sometimes Aunt Nesibe would mention an old piece of neighborhood gossip that she had only just heard, telling us, for example, that Efe the electrician’s father was a famous gangster. Sometimes I would forget where I was and think we were alone together; I would forget myself and show Füsun all my love, gazing at her lovingly for the longest time. Sometimes a car passed so quietly its presence was announced only by the shuddering of the window. Sometimes we heard the call to prayer coming from Firuzağa Mosque. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, Füsun would rise from the table and go over to the window that looked down the hill, and stand there for a long while, as if waiting for someone she missed very deeply, and this would break my heart. Sometimes, while watching television, I would think of something very different, imagining, for example, that we were passengers who had met in the restaurant aboard a ship. Sometimes on summer evenings, after spraying the whole top floor with Temiz İş, Clean Work, Aunt Nesibe would come downstairs with the insecticide, to give those rooms “a quick onceover” and kill more flies. Sometimes Aunt Nesibe spoke about Süreyya, the former queen of Iran, of her anguish when the Shah divorced her for failing to give him an heir, and of her life in high society in Europe. Sometimes Tarık Bey would cry, “How could they put a disaster like that man on television again?” Sometimes Füsun would wear the same outfit two d
ays in a row, though to me it still looked different. Sometimes Aunt Nesibe would ask, “Does anyone want ice cream?” Sometimes I saw someone in the apartment across the way go to the window to smoke a cigarette. Sometimes we ate fried anchovies. Sometimes I observed that the Keskins sincerely believed there was justice in the world, and that the guilty were punished, if not in this life, then in the next. Sometimes we would fall silent for a long time. Sometimes we would not be the only ones: It would be as if the entire city had gone quiet. Sometimes Füsun would say, “Father, please don’t pick at the food like that!” and then I would feel as if they couldn’t even feel at home at their own table, because of me. Sometimes I would think the exact opposite, and I would delight in noticing that everyone seemed at ease. Sometimes, after lighting her cigarette, Aunt Nesibe would get so involved with whatever was happening on television that she would forget to blow on the match until it had burned her hand. Sometimes we would eat baked macaroni. Sometimes a plane would fly overhead in the black sky, headed toward the airport at Yeşilköy. Sometimes Füsun would wear a blouse that revealed her long neck and a bit of cleavage, and as I watched television it was all I could do not to stare at the whiteness of her lovely throat. Sometimes I would ask Füsun, “How’s the picture going?” Sometimes the television would say “Snow tomorrow,” but it wouldn’t come. Sometimes an oil tanker would blow its mournful, anxious horn. Sometimes we’d hear gunshots in the distance. Sometimes the next-door neighbor slammed his front door so hard that the cups in the cupboard behind me rattled. Sometimes the phone would ring and Lemon, mistaking it for a female canary, would begin to sing with joy, and we would all laugh. Sometimes a couple would come to visit, and I would feel a bit shy. Sometimes when the Üsküdar Musical Society Women’s Chorus was performing old Turkish songs on television, Tarık would join in without leaving his seat. Sometimes two cars would meet nose to nose in the narrow street, and with both drivers too stubborn to give way, an argument would begin, with curses flying, and before long the two would have stepped out of their cars to fight. Sometimes there would be a mysterious silence in the house, the street, the entire neighborhood. Sometimes I brought them salted fish as well as cheese pastries and smoked fish. Sometimes we would say, “It’s awfully cold today, isn’t it?” Sometimes, at the end of a meal, Tarık Bey would reach into his pocket with a smile and bring out a few Ferah brand peppermint sweets and offer them to us all. Sometimes two cats at the door began to wail wildly, and then they would screech and begin to claw at each other. Sometimes at supper Füsun would wear the earrings or the brooch I had brought her that very day, and I would tell her in a low voice how well she looked. Sometimes we were so affected by the reunions and kisses in love stories that it was as if we had forgotten where we were. Sometimes Aunt Nesibe would say, “I put very little salt in this, so, please, whoever wants more, add more if you wish.” Sometimes we’d see lightning in the distance, and the sky would rumble. Sometimes while we were watching a film, or a series, or a commercial, someone we knew from the Pelür would appear, someone we’d joked about, and I’d want to exchange looks with Füsun, but she would avert her eyes. Sometimes there’d be a power outage and we could see our cigarette embers in the dark. Sometimes someone would pass the front door whistling a familiar tune. Sometimes Aunt Nesibe would say, “Oh, I’ve smoked too many cigarettes this evening.” Sometimes my eyes would fix on Füsun’s neck, and for the rest of the evening I would make a point of not looking at it again, without too much trouble. Sometimes we’d suddenly fall silent, and Aunt Nesibe would say, “Someone has just died somewhere.” Sometimes Tarık Bey would be unable to get one of his new lighters to work, and I could tell it was time to bring him a new lighter as a present. Sometimes Aunt Nesibe would bring out something from the refrigerator and ask us what had happened in the film while she’d been away. Sometimes, just across Dalgiç Street, we’d hear a domestic quarrel, and the screams as the husband beat the wife would upset us. Sometimes on winter nights we’d hear the boza seller ringing his bell, crying, “Genuine vefaa!” as he passed our door, and I would have the urge to drink some. Sometimes Aunt Nesibe would say, “Aren’t you a bundle of joy today!” Sometimes I’d try very hard not to reach over and touch Füsun. Sometimes, especially on summer evenings, a breeze would stir, slamming the doors. Sometimes I thought about Zaim, and Sibel, and all my old friends. Sometimes flies would land on our food on the table, annoying Aunt Nesibe. Sometimes Aunt Nesibe would take mineral water out of the refrigerator for Tarık Bey and ask me, “Would you like some, too?” Sometimes, before it had even turned eleven, the watchman would pass by blowing his whistle. Sometimes I was overcome by an unbearable longing to say, “I love you!” when all I could do was offer Füsun a light. Sometimes I would notice that the lilacs I had brought on my last visit were still sitting in a vase. Sometimes amid a silence someone in one of the neighboring houses would open a window and toss out rubbish. Sometimes Aunt Nesibe would say, “Now who is going to eat this last meatball?” Sometimes while watching the generals on television I would remember my army days. Sometimes I would be utterly convinced that I was not the only inconsequential one; it was all of us. Sometimes Aunt Nesibe would say, “Who can guess what we have for dessert today?” Sometimes Tarık Bey would have a coughing fit and Füsun would get up to fetch him a glass of water. Sometimes Füsun would wear a pin I’d bought her years earlier. Sometimes I’d begin to think what I was watching on television had a subtext. Sometimes Füsun would ask me a question about an actor, literary luminary, or professor we saw on television. Sometimes I helped take the dirty plates into the kitchen. Sometimes there was a silence at the table, because all our mouths were full of food. Sometimes one of us would yawn, somehow inducing another of us to do the same, until having all caught the contagion we would laugh. Sometimes Füsun would become so engrossed in the film on television that I’d long to be that film’s hero. Sometimes the smell of grilled meat would linger in the house all evening. Sometimes I thought I was abundantly happy, just to be sitting next to Füsun. Sometimes I would say, “It’s about time we went out to eat on the Bosphorus one evening,” to encourage the making of plans. Sometimes I was absolutely positive that life itself wasn’t somewhere else, but right there, at that table. Sometimes we’d argue about something—the lost royal cemeteries of Argentina, the gravity on Mars, how long a person could hold his breath underwater, why it was dangerous to ride motorcycles in Istanbul, the shape of chimney rocks in Capadocia—prompted by nothing more than something we’d seen on television. Sometimes a harsh wind would blow, and the windows would moan, and the stovepipes would clank ominously. Sometimes when Tarık Bey recalled how, five hundred years earlier, Mehmet the Conqueror’s galleys had passed Boğazkesen Avenue, only fifty meters from where we were sitting, on their way to the Golden Horn, he would say, “And the man was only nineteen years old!” Sometimes Füsun would rise from the table after supper and go over to Lemon’s cage, where after a moment I would join her. Sometimes I would say to myself, “It’s good that I came here tonight!” Sometimes Tarık Bey would send Füsun upstairs to fetch the newspaper, the lottery ticket, or his spectacles, or whatever else he had forgotten there, and Aunt Nesibe would call up the stairs, saying, “Don’t forget to put out the lights!” Sometimes Aunt Nesibe said we could go to Paris to attend a distant relation’s wedding. Sometimes Tarık Bey would say, “Quiet!” in a forceful voice, and, gesturing with his eyes, direct our attention to a noise coming through the ceiling, and we would be unable to tell whether the creaks we had heard were from a mouse or a burglar. Sometimes Aunt Nesibe would ask her husband, “Is it loud enough for you, darling?” because as time went on, Tarık Bey was slowly losing his hearing. Sometimes the silence that consumed us would have a mysterious air. Sometimes it would snow, and it would stick on the window frames and on the sidewalk. Sometimes there were fireworks, and we would all rise from the table to see whatever we could of the colors streaming across the sky, and later, the smell of gunpowder wafted
through the open window. Sometimes Aunt Nesibe would ask, “Shall I fill your glass, Kemal Bey?” Sometimes I would say, “Shall we have a look at your painting, Füsun?” and we would go into the back room, and as Füsun and I looked at her painting, I realized this was the time when I was always happy.