The Museum of Innocence Read online

  Even as a child, I’d always treasured the coolness of the Beyoğlu cinemas as the streets grew warmer with the progress of spring. Füsun and I would meet in Galatasaray, and after considering all the posters we would select a theater, buy our tickets, and step into the cool, dim, and mostly empty seats, where, by the light reflected off the curtains, we would find a secluded place at the back, to hold hands, and watch the film at leisure, like people with all the time in the world.

  At the beginning of summer, when the cinemas began to show two or three films for the price of one, I remember a day when I’d sat down, adjusting my trousers to be as comfortable as possible, setting my newspapers and magazines on the empty seat beside me, thus deferring my blind search for Füsun’s hand, and before I could act, it landed on my lap like an impatient sparrow, opening expectantly on my belly for a moment, as if to ask, Where are you? And at that moment, moving faster than my soul, my hand wrapped itself longingly around hers.

  Those Beyoğlu theaters with summertime double features (the Emek, the Fitaş, and the Atlas) and even those showing three films (the Rüya, the Alkazar, and the Lale) did away with the traditional five-minute intermission midfilm; and so it would not be until the lights went up between features that we would see what sort of an audience we’d been sitting with. During these intervals, as we watched the lonely men in wrinkled clothes, holding wrinkled newspapers, sprawled or reclining or doubled over in the seats of these huge, mildewy, dimly lit halls, and the elderly dozing in corners, and those desirous souls who had such a hard time wrenching themselves from the dream world of the film back to the reality of the dusty, murky theater, Füsun and I would exchange our news in whispers, though never holding hands. It was at one such interval, in a box at the Palace Cinema, that Füsun whispered the words I’d been awaiting for eight years: She and Feridun were officially divorced.

  “The lawyer has the papers,” she said. “Now I am legally a divorcée.”

  In that instant the gilded ceiling of the Palace Cinema, its faded glamour and its peeling paint, and its curtains, and its stage, and its drowsy slouching patrons, engraved itself forever in my memory. Even as recently as ten years ago, couples still used theater boxes at the Atlas and the Palace as they used Yıldız Park, to hold hands and kiss in private; while Füsun wouldn’t let me kiss her while we were sitting in a box, she did not stop me from resting my hand on her legs or petting her knees.

  My last meeting with Feridun reached the necessary resolution, but contrary to my hopes and expectations, it left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I’d been shocked by Füsun’s insistence at the İnci Patisserie that they’d never made love, and by her demand that I believe this, because, after all, I (like so many men in love with married women) had been secretly clinging to this idea for eight long years. This is, in fact, the crux of our story, for it explains why I had been able to stay in love with her so long.

  Had I dwelled long and hard and openly on the notion of Füsun and Feridun’s enjoying full marital relations (a painful proposition I’d tested once or twice with no desire to repeat the experience), my love could not have survived. Yet, when, following years of successful self-deception, Füsun had commanded that I had no choice but to believe it, I immediately and unequivocally told myself that it couldn’t be true, and indeed even bristled at the thought that she was tricking me. But as Feridun had in fact left her after six years of marriage, the deception clung by a reed of hope, though a moment’s thought to the contrary would make me unbearably jealous and also angry at Feridun, keen to humiliate him. We had muddled through eight years without conflict precisely because I’d felt no anger toward this man. Eight years on, it was easy to understand how their happy sex life had permitted Feridun to tolerate me, especially at the beginning. Like any man who is happy with his wife but also enjoys the company of friends, Feridun had wanted to spend the evenings in the coffeehouse relaxing and talking about work. As I looked into Feridun’s eyes, I was obliged to accept another fact I had long hidden from myself: that my presence had curtailed the happiness Füsun might have shared with her husband during the early years of their marriage.

  It was during my last meeting with Feridun that I first heard the murmurings of the jealousy that had been lying voiceless and dormant for eight years, in the oceanic depths of my consciousness, and I decided then and there, as I had with certain old friends of my circle, that I would never see him again. Those who knew how, for many years, Feridun had been like a brother to me, and those who had pined for Füsun before I even knew her, may find it inscrutable that I should have borne him such ill will just as things were going my way. Suffice it to say that after so many years of seeing Feridun as an enigma, I was coming to understand him, and with that, let us close the subject.

  Feridun’s eyes betrayed his own jealousy, though small, of the happiness Füsun and I had before us. But during that long final lunch at the Divan Hotel, we plied ourselves with enough raki to relax us; and so after ironing out the details of transferring full rights to Lemon Films to Feridun’s name, we were able to turn to another subject that soothed and charmed us both: Feridun was soon to start shooting his art film, Blue Rain.

  I’d drunk so much that with an unsteady gait I went straight home, without even stopping off at Satsat, and immediately fell into bed. I remember remarking to my worried mother when she came to check on me, before dropping off, “Life is beautiful!” Two days later, on an evening when the skies were ripped open by thunder and lightning, Çetin drove my mother and me to Çukurcuma. My mother pretended to have forgotten her refusal to attend Tarık Bey’s funeral, and being agitated, as she always was on such occasions, she did not stop talking the whole way. “Oh, look how nicely they’ve done those sidewalks,” she said as we came closer to Füsun’s house. “I’ve always wanted to see this neighborhood. What a lovely hill that is. What nice snug places they seem to have here.” As we entered the house, a cool wind swept up the dust from the cobblestones, presaging rain.

  My mother had previously telephoned Aunt Nesibe with her sympathies, and the two women had met a few times. And yet this visit to ask for Füsun’s hand seemed at first to be a condolence call, the occasion to express our regrets at Tarık Bey’s passing. But everyone felt that the regrets expressed went far deeper. After the requisite pleasantries and formalities (“How lovely it is here. Oh how I’ve missed you. I can’t tell you how sad we were to hear …”) Aunt Nesibe and my mother embraced and began to cry, whereupon Füsun fled the room, running upstairs.

  When a lightning bolt struck somewhere nearby, the two women released each other and straightened up. “Dear God!” my mother said. Then, as the rain came pouring down and the sky continued to rumble, the twenty-seven-year-old divorcée brought us coffee on a tray that she carried as daintily as any eighteen-year-old who has just entered society. “Nesibe, Füsun is your spitting image!” said my mother. “How clever and knowing she looks when she smiles. What a beauty she’s become!”

  “No, she is much more intelligent than I am,” said Aunt Nesibe.

  “Mümtaz, may he rest in peace, he always used to say that Osman and Kemal were more intelligent than he was, but I was never sure he believed it. Who says the younger generation must have more brains than we do?” my mother said.

  “The girls are certainly smarter,” said Aunt Nesibe. “Did you know, Vecihe”—for some reason, she was unable to, or wouldn’t, address her as “Sister Vecihe” in her old reverential way—“what I regret most in life?” She went on to tell how for a long time she’d dreamed of opening a shop and making a name for herself, but could never find the courage, only to live to see “people who don’t even know how to hold a pair of scissors or sew a stitch now own the finest fashion houses.”

  Together we went to the window to watch the rain and the runoff pouring down the hill.

  “Tarık Bey, may he rest in peace, was very fond of Kemal,” said Aunt Nesibe as she sat down at the table. “Every evening he’d say, ‘Let’s wai
t a little longer. Kemal Bey might be coming.’”

  I could tell that my mother did not care for these words at all.

  “Kemal knows his mind,” said my mother.

  “Füsun knows what she wants, too,” said Aunt Nesibe.

  “They’ve already made their decision,” said my mother.

  But that was as close as my mother got to asking Aunt Nesibe for her daughter’s hand.

  Aunt Nesibe and Füsun and I each drank our usual glass of raki; my mother drank only rarely, but she asked for a glass, too, and after two sips turned cheerful—not so much because of the effect of ingesting the raki itself, but because of the fragrance, as my father used to say. She recalled the days when she and Nesibe had stayed up until dawn to complete an evening gown. They both enjoyed reminiscing about the weddings and dresses of that era.

  “Vecihe’s pleated dress was so celebrated that afterward other women in Nişantaşı asked to have an identical one made for them. Some of them even bought the same material in Paris, placing it right on my lap, for me to sew, but I refused,” said Aunt Nesibe.

  When Füsun rose ceremoniously from the table and went over to Lemon’s cage, I got up, too.

  “For God’s sake, don’t bother with that bird while we’re still eating!” my mother cried. “Don’t worry, you have plenty of time left to spend together…. Stop, stop right there, I’m not letting either of you back at the table until you’ve washed your hands.”

  I went upstairs to wash, and Füsun, who could have washed her hands downstairs in the kitchen, followed me up. At the top of the stairs I took her by the arms and kissed her passionately. It was a deep and mature kiss, lasting ten or twelve seconds. Nine years ago we had kissed like children. But there was nothing childish about this kiss, with its slow, powerful soulfulness. Then Füsun went downstairs ahead of me, at a run.

  We got through supper with little further merriment, and keeping a close watch on what we said; as soon as the rain had let up, we left.

  “Mother dear, you forgot to ask for the girl’s hand,” I said, as we were driving home in the car.

  “How often did you go over there, all these years?” my mother asked. When she saw me at a loss for words, she snapped, “Whatever is done, is done…. But Nesibe said one thing that really hurt. Maybe it’s because you hardly ever stayed in to eat supper with your mother that it broke my heart to hear it.” She stroked my arm. “But don’t worry, my son, I didn’t mind. Even so, I just couldn’t bring myself to ask for her hand, as if she were still a lycée girl. She’s been married and divorced; she’s a full-grown woman. She has a head on her shoulders, and she knows what she’s doing. You two have talked everything over and agreed on everything. So why the need for all the pomp and ceremony? If you ask me, even an engagement is unnecessary…. Stop prolonging things and creating fodder for gossips—just get married…. Don’t bother going to Europe, either; these days you can find everything you want in the shops in Nişantaşı, so what’s the point of trudging over to Paris?”

  Seeing my determined silence, she closed the subject.

  When we got home, before going to bed, my mother said, “You were right, though. She’s a beautiful woman, and intelligent. She’ll be a good wife for you. But be careful, she looks as if she’s suffered a great deal. I may not know the half of it, but take care not to let the anger, the grudge, whatever it is she’s harboring inside her, poison your life.”

  “It won’t!”

  Quite to the contrary, with every day, the bond between us grew stronger, and with it our attachment to life, to Istanbul, its streets, its people, and all else. Sometimes while holding hands in a cinema, I would feel a light shiver passing through her. Sometimes she would lean into me, or even rest her head gently on my shoulder. She would sink into her seat to get closer, and I would take her hands between mine, sometimes stroking her leg, like a feather’s touch. During the first weeks Füsun had not liked sitting in a box, but now she didn’t object. Holding her hand allowed me to measure her reflexive responses to the film, just as a doctor might with the tips of his fingers probe a patient’s innermost parts, and I drew enormous pleasure from taking the pulse of her emotional responses to the film.

  During intermission, there was cautious talk about the preparations for our trip to Europe, and about beginning to appear together in public, but I never mentioned my mother’s thoughts on an engagement party. I, too, had slowly come to see that an engagement party would bring only trouble, encouraging a lot of gossip, and causing disquiet even inside the family: If we invited a great many the gossip would be of how many we’d invited; if we invited fewer the gossip would be of how few. It seemed to me that Füsun was slowly coming to the same awareness, or at least I thought this was why she, too, avoided talk of the engagement. So it was without discussion that we somehow agreed to skip the engagement and marry at once after our return from Europe. As we smoked our cigarettes during the intervals between films, and at the Beyoğlu patisseries we’d gotten into the habit of visiting afterward, our greatest pleasure was dreaming up things we’d do on our trip. Füsun had bought a book written for Turks called Europe by Car and always took it along to the cinema, and as we turned the pages we would plan our itinerary. We would spend our first night in Edirne, then drive straight through Yugoslavia and Austria. I bought my own guidebooks, as well, and Füsun especially liked to look at the photographs of Paris in them. “Let’s go to Vienna, too,” she would say. Sometimes staring at the pictures of Europe in a book, she would fall into a strange, mournful silence as she drifted off into a daydream.

  “What’s wrong, darling? What are you thinking?” I would ask her.

  “I don’t know,” Füsun would say.

  Because Aunt Nesibe, Füsun, and Çetin had never been outside Turkey before, they were applying for their first passports. To save them from the torture of visiting the various state bureaucracies and the torment of waiting in all those long lines, I brought in Selami, the police chief who took care of such matters for Satsat. (Careful readers will remember that it was this same retired constable whom I had asked to track down Füsun and her family eight years before.) Anchored by love, I had not been outside Turkey for nine years, and so it was I came to discover that I no longer felt the need for travel, where before, if I’d been cooped up in this country for more than three or four months, I’d be out of sorts.

  It was a hot summer day when we went to sign papers at the Security Services Passport Office at the Governor’s Headquarters in Babıali. This old building, once home to prime ministers, pashas, and grand viziers, had since been the scene of numerous raids and political murders described in lycée history books, but as with many great Ottoman buildings that had survived into the Republican era, its former gilded splendor had worn away, as thousands of weary souls entered it daily to spend hours standing in line, first to acquire documents, then to have them stamped, and then signed, an eternity that inevitably led to arguments and scuffles, the whole scene suggesting Judgment Day. In the heat and humidity, the documents in our hands quickly turned soggy.

  Toward evening we were sent to the Sansaryan Building in Sirkeci for another document. As we walked down Babıali Hill, just before the old Meserret Coffeehouse, Füsun stepped into a small teahouse without asking permission of any of us and sat down at a table.

  “What is it with her now?” said Aunt Nesibe.

  While she and Çetin Efendi waited outside, I went in.

  “What’s wrong, darling, are you tired?”

  “I’ve had it. I don’t want to go to Europe anymore,” said Füsun. She lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply. “The rest of you can go, by all means—get your passports—but I’ve run out of energy.”

  “Darling, hang on, we’re almost there.”

  She held out for a while longer, showing a bit of temper, but in the end, inevitably, she came with us, my beauty. We endured a similar tantrum when applying for visas at the Austrian Consulate. Hoping to save them from the queues and humil
iating interviews, I’d prepared documents describing Aunt Nesibe, Füsun, and also Çetin Efendi as highly paid “specialists” in Satsat’s employ. They granted us all visas, all but Füsun, who because of her young age, looked suspicious, and was called for a visa interview. I went in with her.

  Six months earlier, an angry applicant who had been repeatedly denied visas over many years had shot an employee of the Swiss Consulate in the head four times; following that incident the visa sections of consulates had instituted strict security measures. Now applicants were no longer permitted to converse face-to-face with European visa officials, but rather, like death row prisoners in American films, were separated from the officials by bars and bulletproof glass, and obliged to converse by phone. Still people would crowd the entrance, prodding and pushing as they struggled to reach the visa section, or to enter the garden or courtyard. Turkish staffers (particularly in the German Consulate, where it was said that in the space of two days they became “more German than the Germans”) would scold the crowd for failing to line up decorously, shoving them around and singling out the ill-attired to say, “You’re wasting your time here,” by way of thinning the herd. And so most applicants were practically jubilant to be granted interviews, taking their place nervously before the bars and the bulletproof glass, like so many students sitting down to a difficult exam, peaceful and compliant as lambs.

  Because we’d pulled strings, Füsun had no need to wait in any queue, and went into the interview smiling; but when, shortly, she emerged, she was purple in the face, and without so much as looking in my direction she went out to the street. I followed her out, catching her when she paused to light a cigarette. She wouldn’t tell me what had happened, but went into the National Sandwich and Refreshment Palace, where, having taken a seat, she announced, “I don’t want to go to Europe anymore. I give up.”