The Museum of Innocence Read online

  “So you’ve changed your mind,” said Şenay Hanım. I could see a hint of mockery on her curled lips, but not for long. If I was embarrassed because of Füsun, she must have felt some shame for knowingly selling me a fake. We both fell silent. With torturous slowness, she retrieved the bag that had been restored to the arm of the mannequin in the window, dusting it off with the ritualized care of a seasoned shopkeeper. I directed my attention to Lemon the canary, who was having a dreary day.

  After I had paid and was on my way out with my purchase, Şenay Hanım said, “Now that you trust us, perhaps you can grace our shop more often.” She took obvious pleasure in her double meaning.

  “Of course.” If I didn’t buy enough from Şenay Hanım, might she plant the seed of suspicion in Sibel, who came into this shop from time to time? It grieved me less to imagine myself falling slowly into this woman’s trap than to catch myself making such petty calculations. I imagined that Füsun had gone to the Merhamet Apartments while I was out, and not finding me, had left. In the bright spring day the sidewalks were swarming with housewives out shopping, young girls clomping around in the latest platform shoes paired with ill-fitting short skirts, and pupils swarming out of the schools from which they had just been dismissed. Still searching for Füsun, I cast my eyes over the gypsy flower seller, and the vendor of black market American cigarettes (who everyone said was a plainclothes policeman), and the other denizens of Nişantaşı.

  A water tanker with the words LIFE—CLEAN WATER on its side sped by, and Füsun emerged from behind it.

  “Where have you been?” we said in unison, joyous smiles coming to our lips.

  “The witch stayed in during lunchtime, and she sent me off to a friend’s shop. So I got to the apartment late, and you weren’t there.”

  “I got worried, so I went to the shop. Look, I bought the bag as a memento.”

  Füsun was wearing the earrings of which one is displayed at the entrance to our museum. We walked down the street together. We turned off Valikonağı Avenue into Emlak Avenue, which was not so crowded. We had just passed the apartment that housed the dentist to whom my mother brought me when I was a child (as well as the doctor in whose office I had first felt the unforgettable hardness of the cold tongue depressor shoved into my mouth) when we saw that a crowd had gathered at the foot of the hill; a few others were running down to join it, while others still were coming toward us, their faces contorted by what they had seen.

  There had been an accident; the road was closed. Only a few minutes earlier the “Life–Clean Water” tanker had swerved into the left lane while heading down the hill and had crushed a dolmuş. The driver of the shared taxi was cowering in a corner, his hands trembling as he smoked a cigarette. The weight of the water tanker had crushed the long nose of a 1940s Plymouth that did the Taksim–Teşvikiye route. All that survived was the taxi meter. Beyond the ever-growing crowd of onlookers, amid the shards of glass and broken car parts, I saw the body of a woman trapped in the front seat, and recognized her as the dark-haired woman I’d passed on my way out of the Şanzelize Boutique. The street was now covered with debris. Taking Füsun by the arm, I said, “Let’s go.” But she paid me no mind. She stood there silently, staring at the woman pinned inside the wreck, until she had had her fill.

  By now the crowd had grown considerably, and I was beginning to feel uneasy, less on account of the dead woman inside the car (yes, she must have been dead by then) than out of fear that I might run into someone I knew, when at last a police car came into view; wordlessly we moved away from the accident. As we walked without speaking up the street where the police station was, straight to the Merhamet Apartments, we were fast approaching the “happiest moment of my life” mentioned at the beginning of this book.

  In the coolness of the Merhamet Apartments stairwell, I took her in my arms and kissed her. I kissed her again when we went into the apartment, but there was a certain shyness in her playful lips, a certain reserve in her manner.

  “I have something to say to you.”

  “Then say it.”

  “I’m afraid you might not take it seriously enough, or that you might react exactly the wrong way.”

  “Trust me.”

  “Well, I’m not sure I can, but I’m still going to tell you,” she said. She looked as if she’d made up her mind, as if the arrow had already left the bow and there was no longer any point in holding it back. “If you take it the wrong way, I’ll die.”

  “Forget the accident, darling, and please, just tell me.”

  She began to cry silently, just as she had done that afternoon in the Şanzelize Boutique, when she’d been unable to give me a refund. Her sobs were almost sullen, as those of a child who was furious at being wronged.

  “I’ve fallen in love with you. I’m head over heels in love with you!”

  Her voice was both accusatory and unexpectedly gentle. “I think about you all day long. I think about you from morning until night.”

  She covered her face with her hands and cried.

  Let me confess that my first impulse was to grin stupidly. But I didn’t. Instead I frowned, assuming a tender expression of concern, until finally I had overcome the force of my own feelings. Here, at one of the deepest, most profound moments of my life, there was something contrived in my demeanor.

  “I love you very much, too.”

  Though I was being utterly sincere, my words were neither as forceful nor as truthful as hers. She’d said it first. Because I’d said it after Füsun, my own truthful declaration of love had taken on a consoling, tactful, echoing tone. Now it didn’t matter if my feelings might in fact be stronger than hers, since Füsun had gone first in confessing the fearful dimensions of her sentiments, and so had lost the game. The “sage of love” within me (acquired from who knew what egregious experience) was crowing about Füsun’s misstep: By speaking too sincerely, she had lost. From this reaction I deduced that my jealous worries and obsessions would soon subside.

  When she began to cry again, she took out of her pocket a crumpled, childish hankie. I embraced her, and while caressing the lovely velvety skin on her neck and shoulders, I said there could be nothing more ridiculous than the idea of a beautiful girl like her, whom everyone adored, in tears just for having admitted to falling in love.

  Still crying, she said, “What do you mean—that beautiful girls never fall in love? If you know so much about everything, then tell me this …”

  “What?”

  “What’s going to happen now?”

  This was the real question, and she now fixed me with a look as if to say she was not going to be distracted by sweet generalities about love and beauty, and that it was of the utmost importance that I give her the right answer.

  I had no answer to give her. But this is how it seems now, so many years later. Sensing that such a question might come between us, I felt an unease for which I secretly blamed her and I began to kiss her.

  Driven by desire and helplessness, our kisses grew more passionate. She asked if this was the answer to her question. “Yes,” I said. Content with this, she asked, “Weren’t we going to do some mathematics?” When I had bestowed another kiss, by way of an answer, she acknowledged it by kissing me back. To embrace, to kiss—it felt so much more genuine than any contemplation of the impasse to which we had come, so full of the irresistible power of the present moment. As she peeled off her clothes, Füsun changed from a fearful girl made sad by helpless passion into a healthy and exuberant woman ready to give herself over to love and sexual bliss. Thus did we enter what I have called the happiest moment of my life.

  In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant “now,” even having lived such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happier moment to come. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is s
till young, carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse: If a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happiest moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so.

  But when we reach the point when our lives take on their final shape, as in a novel, we can identify our happiest moment, selecting it in retrospect, as I am doing now. To explain why we have chosen this moment over all others, it is also natural, and necessary, to retell our stories from the beginning, just as in a novel. But to designate this as my happiest moment is to acknowledge that it is far in the past, that it will never return, and that awareness, therefore, of that very moment is painful. We can bear the pain only by possessing something that belongs to that instant. These mementos preserve the colors, textures, images, and delights as they were more faithfully, in fact, than can those who accompanied us through those moments.

  We made love for the longest time, somewhere in the middle reaching the point when we were both out of breath; I had just kissed Füsun’s moist shoulders and entered her from behind, biting first her neck and then her left ear, and it was at this, the happiest moment of my life, that the earring whose shape I’d failed to notice fell from Füsun’s lovely ear onto the blue sheet.

  Anyone remotely interested in the politics of civilization will be aware that museums are the repositories of those things from which Western Civilization derives its wealth of knowledge, allowing it to rule the world, and likewise when the true collector, on whose efforts these museums depend, gathers together his first objects, he almost never asks himself what will be the ultimate fate of his hoard. When their first pieces passed into their hands, the first true collectors—who would later exhibit, categorize, and catalog their great collections (in the first catalogs, which were the first encyclopedias)—initially never recognized these objects for what they were.

  After what I call the happiest moment of my life had passed, and the time had come for us to part, and the fallen earring unbeknownst to us still nestled between the folds of the sheet, Füsun looked into my eyes.

  “My whole life depends on you now,” she said in a low voice.

  This both pleased and alarmed me.

  The next day it was much warmer. When we met at the Merhamet Apartments, I saw as much hope as fear in Füsun’s eyes.

  “I lost one of those earrings I was wearing,” she told me after we had kissed.

  So now I said, “I have it here, darling,” as I reached into the right-hand pocket of my jacket hanging on the back of a chair. “Oh, it’s gone!” For a moment I glimpsed a bad omen, a hint of malign fate, but then I remembered that I’d put on a different jacket that morning, because of the warm weather. “It must be in the pocket of my other jacket.”

  “Please bring it tomorrow. Don’t forget,” Füsun said, her eyes widening. “It is very dear to me.”

  18

  Belkıs’s Story

  THE ACCIDENT featured prominently in all the papers. Füsun hadn’t read them, but Şenay Hanım had talked about the dead woman all morning—until it seemed to Füsun as if people were coming into the shop just to talk about the accident. “Şenay Hanım is going to close the shop tomorrow at lunchtime, so that I can go to the funeral, too,” said Füsun. “She’s acting as if we all adored that woman. But that was not the case….”

  “What was the case?”

  “It’s true that this woman came to the shop a lot. But she’d take the most expensive dresses—the ones just in from Italy and Paris—and she’d say, ‘Let me try out this one and see how it goes,’ and after wearing it at some big party she’d bring it back, saying, ‘It doesn’t fit.’ Şenay Hanım would get angry—after everyone had seen the woman wearing that dress at that party, it would be hard to sell. Also this woman drove a hard bargain, so Şenay Hanım was always talking behind her back, but she didn’t dare cross her, because she was too well connected. Did you know her?”

  “No. But for a while she was the sweetheart of a friend of mine,” I said, stopping there because I reckoned I would better enjoy recounting the sordid background details to Sibel, yet I was amazed that this calculation left me feeling deceitful, since less than a week ago it would have caused me no discomfort to hide something from Füsun or even to tell her a lie—lies, it had seemed to me, were an inevitable and rather enjoyable consequence of the playboy life. I considered whether I could cut the story here and there, adapting it for her consumption, when I realized that this would be impossible. Seeing she had guessed that I was hiding something, I said this: “It’s a very sad story. Because this woman had slept with quite a few men, people spoke ill of her.”

  This wasn’t my true impression. That’s how recklessly I answered. There was a silence.

  “Don’t worry,” said Füsun, almost in a whisper. “I won’t ever sleep with anyone else for the rest of my life.”

  Returning to my office at Satsat, I felt at peace with myself, and for the first time in ages turning myself over to work, I took pleasure from making money. Together with Kenan, a new clerk who was a bit younger and bolder than I was, I went down the list of our hundred or so debtors, pausing now and again for a bit of levity.

  “So what are we going to do with Cömert Eliaçık, Kemal Bey?” he asked, with a smile and his eyebrows raised, seeing as the man’s name meant “Generous Open-Hand.”

  “We’ll just have to open his hand a little wider. We can’t help it if his name condemns him to loss.”

  In the evening, on the way home, I walked past the gardens of the old pasha’s mansion, which had not yet burned down, and I breathed in the fragrance of lindens, seeking the shadows of the plane trees of Nişantaşı, now in full blossom. As I considered men angrily blowing their horns in the traffic jam I felt content, the love storm had passed, I was no longer racked with jealousy, and everything was back on track. At home I took a shower. As I took a clean ironed shirt out of the wardrobe, I remembered the earring; not finding it in the pocket of the jacket where I thought I’d left it, I searched my wardrobe and every drawer, checked the bowl where Fatma Hanım put stray buttons, collar bands, and any spare change or lighters she found in my pockets, but it wasn’t there either.

  “Fatma Hanım,” I called softly. “Have you seen an earring around here?”

  The bright side room where my brother had lived until he married was scented with steam and lavender. Fatma Hanım had spent the afternoon ironing, and now, as she put away our handkerchiefs, shirts, and towels, she said she hadn’t seen “earrings or anything.” From the heap of unpaired socks in the basket, she pulled out one sock as if it were a naughty kitten.

  “Listen to me, Claw Nails,” she said, using one of her nicknames for me when I was a child, “if you don’t cut your nails, you won’t own a single sock without a hole in it. I’m not darning these for you anymore—that’s final.”

  “All right, Fatma Hanım.”

  In the sitting room, in the corner that overlooked Teşvikiye Mosque, my father, covered by a spanking white apron, was sitting in a chair, with Basri the barber cutting his hair, and my mother, as always, sitting across from him, bringing him up to date.

  “Come on over,” she said when she saw me. “I’m reporting the latest gossip.”

  Basri had been feigning concentration on his work, but stopped trimming and, with a grin that showed his huge teeth, made it clear he’d been listening attentively all along.

  “What’s the latest?”

  “You know how Lerzan’s younger son wanted to become a race car driver? Well his father wouldn’t let him, and so …”

  “I know. He crashed his father’s Mercedes. Then he rang the police saying it had been stolen.”

  “All right then. But did you hear what Şaziment did to marry her daughter off to the Karahans’ son? Where are you going?”

  “I’m not here for supper. I’m picking up Sibel. We’re invited out.”

  “Go tell Bekri so that he doesn’t fry the red mullet tonight for
nothing. He went all the way to the fish market in Beyoğlu today just for you. Promise you’ll come for lunch tomorrow so that we can eat them then.”

  “I promise!”

  The corner of the carpet had been rolled up to protect it from my father’s thin, white hair falling strand by strand onto the parquet floor.

  I got the car out of the garage and as I bumped over the cobblestone streets I turned on the radio, tapping my fingers on the steering wheel in time with the music. In an hour I had crossed the Bosphorus Bridge and was in Anadoluhisarı. Sibel heard me and ran out to the car seconds after I had honked the horn for her. The first thing I said was that the woman who had died in the crash the day before had once been Zaim’s lover (“You mean ‘ You-Deserve-It-All Zaim,’” she said with a smile); then I told her the whole story.

  “Her name was Belkıs; she was a few years older than me, thirty-two or thirty-three, I guess. She came from a poor family. After she entered society, her enemies began to gossip about her mother’s headscarf. In the late 1950s, when Belkıs was a lycée student, she’d met a boy at field day celebrations of the nineteenth of May, and they fell in love. This boy, Faris, was her age, the youngest son of the Kaptanoğlus, who had, as you know, made a fortune in shipping by then, to become one of Istanbul’s richest families. This romance between the rich boy and the poor girl was right out of some Turkish film and it went on for years. Their passion was so great or they were so stupid that these teenagers were making love and flaunting it. Certainly they should have married, but the boy’s family convinced themselves that the poor girl had surrendered her virtue just to trick him into marriage, and that everyone knew this, so they opposed the match. It’s clear that the boy lacked the strength, the cast of mind, and the personal income to stand up to his family, take the girl by the hand, and marry her. So the family’s solution was to pack the boy off to Paris with the girl to live out of sight as an unmarried couple. Three years later because of drugs or despair the boy somehow died in Paris. Instead of running off with a Frenchman and never returning to Turkey, as might be expected in such situations, Belkıs returned to Istanbul, and launched herself into affairs with a string of other rich men, enjoying quite a colorful love life, as she drew the silent envy of other society women. Her second lover was Sabih the Bear; when she left him, she had an adventure with the eldest Demirbağ boy, who was then on the rebound from another romance. Because her next lover, Rıfkı, was similarly afflicted, society men began to refer to her as the ‘Consoling Angel,’ and they all dreamed of having affairs with her. As for all those rich married women who had slept with no one in their lives but their husbands, or at the most taken a lover in shame and secrecy, never with much satisfaction—when they saw this Belkıs openly courting the most eligible bachelors, to say nothing of her secret married lovers, they were so jealous they would have found a way to drown her in a spoonful of water, given the opportunity. But no need. As hard living had already taken a toll on her looks and as she was short of funds it was becoming a struggle to keep herself presentable. So you could say the day of drowning was fast approaching. You could say that the accident put this woman out of her misery.”