The Museum of Innocence Read online

  “What happened? Aren’t they giving you a visa?”

  “They asked me about my whole life. They even asked why I got divorced. Even how did I support myself. They even asked me that. So I’m not going to Europe. I don’t want visas from any of them.”

  “I can find another way to arrange things,” I said. “Or we could take a car ferry straight to Italy.”

  “Kemal, believe me, I no longer want to take this trip to Europe. I can’t even speak the languages, and it makes me ashamed.”

  “Darling, we could still see just a bit of the world…. In other places, there are people who live differently, and more happily. We can walk down their streets holding hands. There’s more to this world than Turkey.”

  “Ah, to be worthy of you I need to see some of Europe, is that it? Well, I’ve also given up on the idea of marrying you.”

  “We’ll be so happy in Paris, Füsun.”

  “You know how stubborn I can be, Kemal. Don’t pressure me, you’ll only make me dig in.”

  But I did press her, and years later, whenever I recalled how I’d insisted and felt the sting of remorse, I also remembered that it had been my fantasy for years to make love to Füsun in a hotel along the journey. With the help of Selim the Snob, who imported paper from Austria, Füsun’s visa came through one week later. It was around the same time that we were also able to obtain the documentation to take the car abroad. We were sitting in a box at the Palace Cinema when I gave Füsun her passport, whose pages were now covered with colorful visas for all the countries we’d be visiting en route to Paris; at that moment I felt a strange pride at being a good husband. Years before, when I was seeing ghosts of Füsun on every corner, I’d encountered her apparition at the Palace Cinema, too. Taking her passport, she smiled at first, before assuming a dour expression as she turned the pages, inspecting each visa in turn.

  Through a travel agency I booked three large rooms at the Hôtel du Nord in Paris, one for me, one for Çetin Efendi, and one for Aunt Nesibe and Füsun. I’d stayed at other hotels in Paris during the years Sibel was at a university, but like a student who dreams of the places he’ll go when he’s rich, I had a fantasy of the happy days I would spend one day in that venerable hotel, which seemed a place out of old films and memories.

  “There’s no need for this. Get married and then go,” my mother kept saying. “Come on, if you’re going to travel with the girl you love, why not make the most of it? … Why drag Nesibe and Çetin Efendi there with you? First get married; that way the two of you can fly to Paris and honeymoon by yourselves…I could talk to White Carnation and have the whole thing written up as the sort of romantic story that everyone loves, and then in two days it will be forgotten, yesterday’s news. That old world is gone, anyway. Everywhere you look it’s all parvenus from the provinces.”

  For my part, I kept saying: “And how am I supposed to manage without Çetin? Who’s going to drive me around? … Mother dear, you’ve only left the Suadiye house twice all last summer. Don’t worry, we’ll be back before the end of September. When you return to Nişantaşı at the beginning of October, Çetin will be there to drive you, I promise…. And Aunt Nesibe will find you a dress for the wedding.”

  77

  The Grand Semiramis Hotel

  ON AUGUST 27, 1984, at a quarter past twelve, Çetin parked the car in front of the house in Çukurcuma, ready to drive to Europe. It had been exactly nine years and four months since Füsun and I had met at the Şanzelize Boutique, but I did not give this coincidence much thought, nor did I dwell upon the ways in which my life and my character had changed in the intervening years. We had been delayed by my mother’s tears and ceaseless flow of advice, and also by the traffic, but none of it could dull my determination to end this chapter of my life and set out on our journey at once. After waiting endlessly for Çetin Efendi to load Aunt Nesibe’s and Füsun’s suitcases into the trunk, I grew outwardly petulant at the sight of smiling, waving neighbors and the children swarming around the car, but inside I felt a pride that I did not wish to acknowledge. As we headed down to Tophane, Füsun waved at Ali, returning from football practice. I told myself that soon Füsun and I would have a child like Ali.

  As we drove over the Galata Bridge, we opened the windows, happily breathing in that familiar Istanbul smell of sea and moss, pigeon droppings, coal smoke, car exhaust, and linden blossoms. Füsun and Aunt Nesibe were sitting in the back. I was in front with Çetin—just as in my dreams—and as we drove through Aksaray past the city walls, past one poor neighborhood after another, rumbling over the cobblestone streets, in and out of potholes, I would occasionally throw my arm over the back of the seat and turn around to give Füsun a contented smile.

  Outside the city limits, beyond Bakırköy, moving past little factories and depots, new neighborhoods and motels, I caught sight of Turgay Bey’s textile mill, which I’d visited nine years earlier, but now I could barely remember the jealousy that had stung me that day. Once the car had crossed the limits of Istanbul, all the suffering I’d endured for the love of Füsun was suddenly reduced to a sweet story that could be told in one breath. After all, a love story that ends happily scarcely deserves more than a few sentences! Perhaps this is why we became increasingly quiet once we’d left Istanbul behind. Even Aunt Nesibe—though full of mirth at the outset, and asking questions like, “Oh, we didn’t forget to lock the door, did we?” and admiring everything she saw through the window (even the emaciated old nags grazing in an empty lot)—had by the time we’d reached Büyükçekmece Bridge, fallen asleep.

  As Çetin was filling the tank at the Çatalca exit, Füsun got out of the car with her mother. After buying a packet of the local fol cheese from an old lady selling her wares beside the road, they went into the teahouse next door, ordered tea and simits to accompany the cheese, and tucked into their makeshift feast. As I sat down with them, it occurred to me that if we continued at this pace, our European tour would last months, not weeks. Did I complain? No! As I sat across from Füsun, silently watching her, I felt the same sweet ache spreading through my chest and my stomach as I’d felt in early adolescence at a dance party, or upon meeting a beautiful girl at the start of summer. It was not the deep and corrosive agony of thwarted love that had once been so familiar, but a requited lover’s sweet impatience.

  At 7:40 the sun shone into our eyes before sinking below the line of the sunflower fields. Not long after Çetin Efendi had turned on the headlights, Aunt Nesibe said, “For the grace of God, everyone, let’s not drive in this darkness!”

  On the two-lane road the trucks bearing down on us from the opposite direction did not even bother to dim their lights. Just past Babaeski, my eyes were drawn to the blinking purple neon sign of the Grand Semiramis Hotel; it seemed a good place to stop for the night. I asked Çetin to slow down; making a turn in front of Türk Petrol, we heard the dog’s woof, woof, woof warning us off. Çetin stopped in front of the hotel, where my heart began to beat wildly, bursting with feeling, and the awareness that at this place, after nine years of longing, my dreams would come true.

  The three-story hotel was quite clean and, except for its name, a modest establishment; the retired army officer at the desk (a cheerful picture of him armed and in uniform hanging above reception) accommodated my request for three rooms, one for Füsun and Aunt Nesibe, one for Çetin Efendi, and one for me. When I found mine, I lay down on the bed and, gazing at the ceiling, it occurred to me that enduring this entire journey while sleeping alone in the room next to Füsun’s might be even worse than having waited nine years.

  Later, as she entered the small dining room downstairs, I noticed that Füsun’s manner perfectly befitted the surprise I had prepared for her. It was the sort of entrance one might have made into the sumptuous salon hung with velvet curtains of a grand hotel in some glittering European seaside resort of the nineteenth century: She was beautifully made up and wearing a perfume that I had given her years earlier—Le Soleil Noir (I display the bottle here)�
�and her lipstick shade matched the red of her dress (also in this exhibit), which brought out the lustrous undertones of her black hair. Sitting at the other tables were tired families—workers returning from Germany; from time to time curious children and lustful fathers would turn around to look at us.

  “That red looks lovely on you tonight,” said Aunt Nesibe. “It will look even better in the hotel in Paris, and when we go out. But, darling, don’t wear it every night we’re on the road.”

  Aunt Nesibe shot me a look requesting that I second her advice, but no words came from my mouth. It wasn’t merely that, in fact, I wanted her to wear this dress every night, for in it she was so extraordinarily beautiful; it was also that I was as tense as a young lover who, sensing that his happiness is very close at hand, still fears what might go wrong; and so I was struck dumb. I sensed that Füsun, sitting just across from me, felt something of the same anxiety, as she avoided my gaze, and smoked awkwardly as a schoolgirl novice, turning away to exhale.

  As we looked over the hotel’s rather plain menu, which had been approved by Babaeski Council, there was a long, strange silence, as if this were the moment to review the last nine years of our lives.

  When a waiter finally appeared, I ordered a large bottle of Yeni Rakı.

  “Why don’t you have a drink tonight, too, Çetin Efendi, so that we can make a toast,” I said. “You won’t be driving me home after supper.”

  “God bless you, Çetin Bey, you’ve spent enough time waiting,” said Aunt Nesibe, full of appreciation. And then, still holding his attention, she looked at me and said, “If you have patience, and put yourself in God’s hands, there is no heart you cannot win, no fortress you cannot capture—isn’t that so?”

  When the raki arrived, I poured out a generous amount for Füsun—as I’d done for the others—adoring the way she smoked when she was nervous, staring at the tip of her cigarette. We’d all, Aunt Nesibe included, taken our raki on the rocks, and as the liquid clouded, we drank it in like some potion. After a while I relaxed.

  The world was a beautiful place, in truth. It was as if I were noticing this for the first time, though I had already known that I would be caressing Füsun’s fine body, her long arms, and her beautiful breasts for the rest of my life, that resting my head against her neck and breathing in her scent I would sleep in peace for years to come.

  I did as I’d done as a child, first concentrating to put out of my mind whatever the cause of my happiness, so that I might then look around me with fresh eyes and see the beauty of everything anew: on the wall a fetchingly elegant photograph of Atatürk in a frock coat, beside it a panorama of the Swiss Alps, a prospect of the Bosphorus Bridge, and—a souvenir of nine years ago—an image of Inge posing sweetly with a bottle of Meltem. I saw a clock showing the time to be twenty past nine, and a sign on the wall behind the reception desk warning that “couples will be asked to present a marriage certificate.”

  “Withering Slopes is on tonight. Should we tell them to find the channel?”

  “There’s still time, Mother,” said Füsun.

  A foreign couple in their thirties came into the dining room. Everyone turned around to look at them, and they greeted us politely. They were French. In those days very few tourists from the West came to Turkey, but those who did came mostly by car.

  When the time came, the hotel owner sat down in front of the television with his wife, who was wearing a headscarf, and his two grown daughters—one of whom I’d seen earlier in the kitchen—whose heads were not covered; with their backs to their guests, they settled in to watch the latest episode in silence.

  “Kemal Bey, you won’t be able to see from there,” said Aunt Nesibe. “Why don’t you come sit next to us?” whereupon I wedged my chair into the narrow space between Füsun and her.

  Withering Slopes was set in the Istanbul hills, but I cannot say that I took much of it in, with Füsun pressing against me with her bare arm! My left arm, especially my forearm, pressed against her, was aflame. My eyes were on the screen, but it was as if my soul had entered Füsun’s.

  A third eye, an inner one, feasted on Füsun’s neck, and her beautiful breasts, and the strawberry nipples at the tips of those breasts, and the whiteness of her stomach. Füsun kept pressing against me, and she slowly increased the pressure, so that the Batanay Sunflower Oil ashtray into which she stubbed out her cigarette, even the lipstick-stained cigarette ends, escaped my notice.

  When the episode had ended, the television was switched off for the night. The hotel owner’s elder daughter turned on the radio and found some sweet, light music that the French couple appreciated. Returning my chair to its rightful place, I very nearly tripped, having drunk so much. Füsun had had three glasses, by the report of my third eye, which kept count.

  “We forgot to make a toast,” said Çetin Efendi.

  “Yes, let’s make a toast,” I said. “In fact, the time has come for us to have a small ceremony. Çetin Efendi, you are now going to officiate.”

  With a flourish, I produced the engagement rings I had bought a week earlier at the Covered Bazaar, and took them out of their boxes.

  “This is the right way to do things, sir,” said Çetin Efendi, warming at once to the situation. “You can’t get married without first getting engaged. Let’s see now, could you present to me your hands?”

  Füsun had already offered hers, smiling excitedly.

  “There’s no turning back after this,” said Çetin Efendi. “But then there will be no need. You are going to be very happy, I’m sure of it…. Now, give me your other hand, Kemal Bey.”

  He slipped the rings on us, without delay, and we heard clapping: the French couple, who had been watching us, and a few other sleepy guests who joined in. Füsun was smiling prettily, looking at the ring on her hand with the delight of someone choosing rings at the jeweler’s.

  “Does it fit, darling?” I asked.

  “It fits,” she said, making no effort to hide her utter satisfaction.

  “It looks lovely on you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Dance, dance!” said the French couple.

  “Yes, let’s see you dance,” said Aunt Nesibe.

  The sweet music wafting from the radio was good for dancing. But was I able to stand?

  We both got up at the same time, and I took Füsun by the waist, enfolding her in my arms, feeling under my fingers her hips, her ribs, her spine.

  Füsun, less tipsy than I was, took the dance seriously, holding on to me with genuine emotion. I wanted to whisper into her ear, telling her how much I loved her, but I was suddenly struck shy.

  Actually, we were both rather drunk, but something kept us from letting ourselves go. A little later, when we sat down, the French couple clapped again.

  “I’d better be getting to bed,” said Çetin Efendi. “We have a long ride ahead of us. I should look the engine over in the morning before we go. We’re setting off early, aren’t we?”

  If Çetin hadn’t jumped up so abruptly, Aunt Nesibe might have lingered too.

  “Çetin Efendi, could you give me the keys to the car?” I asked.

  “Kemal Bey, we’ve all had a lot to drink tonight, so please, I beg you, don’t even touch that steering wheel.”

  “I’ve left one of my bags in the trunk, and it has my book in it.”

  As I took the key from his extended hand, Çetin Bey pulled himself up straight, and then he bowed down in the exaggerated gesture of respect he had once reserved for my father.

  “Mother, how am I going to get into the room without waking you?” Füsun asked.

  “I’ll leave the door unlocked,” said Aunt Nesibe.

  “Or I can come up with you now and take the key.”

  “There’s no hurry. The key will be in the lock on the inside of the door,” said Aunt Nesibe, “but I won’t turn it. Come up whenever it suits you.”

  When Aunt Nesibe and Çetin Efendi had left, we were at once more relaxed and more agitated. Füsun was acting lik
e a bride on her first night with a man, and she kept averting her eyes. But I sensed an emotion other than the accustomed bashfulness. I wanted to touch her. I reached out to light her cigarette.

  “Were you going to go up to your room to read your book?” asked Füsun, as she started to get up.

  “No, darling, I thought we could go for a spin in the car. The night is so beautiful.”

  “We’ve both had a lot to drink, Kemal. It’s out of the question.”

  “But we could be together.”

  “Just go upstairs and go to bed.”

  “Are you afraid I’ll wreck the car?”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Then let’s go; we can take a side road and get lost in those hills and forests.”

  “No, go upstairs and get to bed. I’m getting up now.”

  “Do you mean to leave me alone at the table on the night of our engagement?”

  “No, I’ll stay a bit longer,” she said. “Actually, it’s very nice sitting here.”

  As the French couple watched from their table, we must have sat at ours in silence for almost half an hour. From time to time our eyes met, but with each meeting our gaze was turned inward. There was a strange and eclectic film playing in my mind’s cinema, splicing together memories, fears, desires, and so many other things whose meanings I could not decipher. Later on, a large black fly hovering between our glasses became part of the film, too. My hand, and the hand with which Füsun was holding her cigarette, and the glasses, and the French couple kept drifting in and out of the frame. Besotted though I was with drink and love, there was still a part of me that needed to find a logic in the film, that wanted the world to see that there was nothing between Füsun and me but love and happiness. I was as determined to work this out as the drowsy fly scampering among the plates. I smiled at the French couple to make a show of our happiness, and they smiled back in the same way.

  “Why don’t you smile at them, too?”

  “I have smiled at them,” said Füsun. “What more do you want—a belly dance?”