The Museum of Innocence Read online

  It took me another hour to convince him that I had a meeting I couldn’t cancel, and that, no, it wouldn’t do for the big boss to phone Satsat and call off his son’s appointment.

  “So that’s what you learned in America,” he said. “I’m impressed.”

  I didn’t want to refuse my father his happiness, so I drank another glass of raki, though all the while I kept glancing at my watch, not wanting to be late for my rendezvous with Füsun, on this of all afternoons.

  “Don’t rush off, my son, let’s sit here a little longer. See how easy we are with each other, a lovely conversation between father and son. Give me a moment before you go off to get married and forget us!” my father said.

  “Father dear,” I said, as we were leaving, “I can see how much you’ve suffered, and I will never forget this invaluable advice you’ve given me today.”

  As he got older, whenever he was overcome by a great emotion my father’s lips would quiver at the edges. He took my hand and squeezed it with all his might. When I squeezed his in return, just as hard, it was as if I’d squeezed a sponge hidden in his cheeks, because suddenly his eyes welled.

  He quickly composed himself, calling for the bill, and on the way home, as Çetin drove so carefully that the car scarcely rumbled over the cobblestones, he dozed off.

  Once at the Merhamet Apartments, I didn’t suffer much indecision. After Füsun arrived, we kissed for a very long time, and then I took the velvet box from my pocket, explaining that I smelled of spirits because I’d had lunch with my father.

  “Open it,” I said.

  And she did so, with great care.

  “These are not my earrings,” she said. “These are pearl.”

  “Do you like them?”

  “Where is my earring?”

  “It vanished into thin air, and then one morning I looked at my bedside, and there it was, with its mate. I put them both into this velvet box to reunite them with their beautiful owner.”

  “I’m not a child,” said Füsun. “These are not my earrings.”

  “They are in spirit, darling—as I see it, anyway.”

  “I want my own earring.”

  “I’m giving you these as a present,” I said.

  “I couldn’t ever wear these…. They’re very expensive. Everyone would want to know where they’re from….”

  “Don’t wear them, then. But don’t refuse my present.”

  “But this is something you’ve given me to replace my earring…. If you hadn’t lost the one I left behind, you would never have brought me these. I have no way of knowing what you really did with it, if you actually lost it.”

  “I’m sure it will turn up one day, in some drawer at home.”

  “One day …” said Füsun. “How easily you say that. How irresponsible you are. When do you expect it to turn up exactly? How long will I have to wait?”

  “Not very long,” I said, scrambling to save the moment. “It will be the day I take that tricycle and come to your house to have supper with your parents.”

  “I’ll be waiting to hear from you, then,” said Füsun. Then we kissed. “You reek of drink.”

  But I went on kissing her, and as we began to make love we forgot all our troubles. As for the earrings my father had bought for his lover—I left them at the flat.

  22

  The Hand of Rahmi Efendi

  AS THE DAY of the engagement party approached, I was so distracted by the preparations that there was no time left to worry about affairs of the heart. I recall sounding out my friends at the club, whom I’d known since childhood and whose fathers were my father’s friends, and had long conversations on how to procure the champagne and other “European” beverages that we hoped to serve to our guests at the Hilton. May I remind visitors entering my museum in the future that in those days the import of foreign alcohol was strictly, one might even say jealously, limited by the state, and that even the state lacked the foreign currency reserves to pay importers for the full quantities allowed under the quotas, with the result that very little champagne, whiskey, or indeed any foreign alcohol came into the country legally. But there was never any shortage of champagne, whiskey, or American cigarettes, for delicatessens in rich neighborhoods were well stocked with black market goods, as were the bars in the city’s most fashionable hotels, and likewise the thousands of tombala men who roamed the streets with their bags of black market raffle tickets. Anyone organizing an elaborate party felt compelled to offer “European” drinks, and it was left to the host to hunt down provisions for the hotel. Most head barmen at the larger establishments knew one another and would in such situations depend on colleagues to funnel extra bottles their way, thus ensuring that unusually large functions came off without an embarrassing shortfall. Still one had to be mindful that the society pages enjoyed reporting the day after an event how much “real foreign” alcohol had been served, and how much of it was mere Ankara Viski.

  If ever I had a free moment amid all this, Sibel would pick up the phone and we’d be off to see a new house with an enviable view, either in the hills above Bebek and Arnavutköy, or in the then emerging neighborhood of Etiler. Like her, I came to enjoy standing in these unfinished apartments that still smelled of plaster and cement, imagining the bedroom and the dining room, trying to figure out where the long divan we had seen in a Nişantaşı furniture store might be placed to provide the best possible prospect of the Bosphorus. At parties in the evenings Sibel did not rest from her day’s calculations and only too happily regaled friends with impressions of the new neighborhoods, discussing our plans with others, apartment locations, their advantages and drawbacks; whereas I, feeling oddly constrained by shame, would change the subject, talk to Zaim about football, the success of Meltem soda, or the new bars, clubs, and restaurants that had just opened for the summer. My secret bliss with Füsun had made me more subdued in the company of friends, and more and more I preferred to watch the goings-on from the sidelines. Sorrow was slowly consuming me, though at the time I couldn’t see it clearly, recognizing it only now, so many years later, as I tell this story. Then I noticed only that I had become more “quiet,” as others were noting, too.

  “You’ve been pensive lately,” said Sibel late one night as I was taking her home in the car.

  “Really?”

  “We haven’t exchanged a word for half an hour.”

  “That lunch I had with my father a while ago … my mind keeps going back to it. He can deny it, but to me he sounds like a man preparing for death.”

  On Friday the sixth of June, eight days before the engagement party and nine days before Füsun’s university entrance exam, my father, my brother, and I went with Çetin in the Chevrolet to a house between Beyoğlu and Tophane, just below Çukurcuma Hamam, to offer our condolences. The deceased, an old employee from Malatya, had been with my father since he’d first gone into business. This kindly, hulking man was a part of the company family, and he’d been running errands for as long as I could remember. He had an artificial hand, his real one having been crushed in a machine on the factory floor. My father, who had liked this hardworking man a great deal, had transferred him to the office, and that was when we’d gotten to know him. In the beginning, my brother and I were terrified of the artificial hand, but because of Rahmi Efendi’s big smile and his unfailing kindness to us, in time he made the hand into a toy for us. Once, I remember Rahmi Efendi going into an empty room, putting his artificial hand to one side, and spreading out his prayer rug; then he knelt down to say his prayers.

  Rahmi Efendi had two strapping sons who were as good-hearted as he was. They both kissed my father’s hand. His still buxom, pink-skinned, but careworn wife burst into tears the moment she saw my father, wiping her eyes with the edges of her headscarf. As he consoled her with a sincerity that neither my brother nor I could ever have matched, embracing the two sons and kissing their cheeks, he managed, in no time, to make all the other visitors in the room feel as if they shared one soul, one heart
. At the same time, however, my brother and I were each overcome by a crisis of guilt, he speaking in a didactic tone of voice, and I unable to resist reciting memories.

  At times like this what matters is not our words but our demeanor, not the magnitude or elegance of our grief but the degree to which we can express fellowship with those around us. I sometimes think that our love of cigarettes owes nothing to the nicotine, and everything to their ability to fill the meaningless void and offer an easy way of feeling as if we are doing something purposeful. My father, my brother, and I each took a cigarette from the packet of Maltepes offered to us by the elder son of the deceased, and once they were all lit with the same burning match that the teenager artfully offered us, there followed a strange moment when all three of us crossed our legs and set about puffing in unison, as if enacting a ritual of transcendental importance.

  A kilim hung on the wall in the way Europeans hang a painting. It must have been the unfamiliar taste of the Maltepe that caused me to entertain the illusion that I was having deep thoughts. The most important matter in life is happiness. Some people are happy, and others are not. Of course, most people fall somewhere in the middle. I myself was very happy in those days, but I didn’t want to recognize it. Now, all these years later, I think that the best way to preserve happiness may be not to recognize it for what it is. I ignored it then, not out of a wish to protect it, but rather out of a fear of a great misery fast approaching, a fear that I might lose Füsun. Was it this that had made me so touchy and subdued?

  As I looked around the small, threadbare, but immaculate room (there was a lovely barometer of the type so fashionable in the 1950s, and a beautifully executed framed calligraphy saying Bismallah), there was a moment when I thought I was going to join with Rahmi Efendi’s wife in crying. On top of the television was a handmade doily, and upon that was displayed a china dog. The dog looked as if it was about to cry, too. Nevertheless I remember that I felt comfort at seeing that dog, and thought about Füsun.

  23

  Silence

  AS THE day of my engagement party approached, the silences between Füsun and me grew longer and deeper, and though we met every day for at least two hours, making love with ever greater passion, these silences infiltrated us like a poison.

  “They’ve sent my mother an invitation to the engagement party,” she said. “My mother was very pleased, and my father said we had to go, and they want me to come, too. Thank God the university exam is the next day, so I won’t have to fake an illness to stay home.”

  “My mother sent the invitation,” I said. “Under no account should you come. I don’t even want to go myself.”

  I’d been hoping that Füsun would answer saying, “Then don’t go!” but she said nothing. As the day of the engagement party drew near, we would embrace more forcefully, even perspiring more profusely, each wrapping arms and legs around the other, in the manner of longtime lovers who, when reunited, are desperate to close even the least space between them; and then we would lie there, quiet and still, as we watched the tulle curtains flutter in the breeze entering through the door.

  Until the day of the engagement party, we met daily at the same time in the Merhamet Apartments. We never discussed our predicament, the engagement, what would happen afterward, instinctively avoiding any subject that called to mind these concerns. But this avoidance could precipitate great silences. We would listen to the shouts and curses of the children playing football outside. Though in the early days we’d also refrained from discussing what was to become of us, there had nevertheless been no end of cheerful chatter, about our relatives in common, and evil men, and everyday Nişantaşı gossip. Now we were saddened to see our carefree days had ended so quickly. We felt the loss, a kind of unspoken misery. But the dreadful ache did not drive us apart—in a strange way it brought us closer together.

  I sometimes caught myself thinking that I would be able to continue seeing Füsun after the engagement. This heaven, in which everything would go on as before, slowly evolved from a fantasy (let’s call it a dream) into a reasonable hypothesis. If she and I could be this passionate, this generous, making love, then she could not possibly leave me, or so I reckoned. In fact, this was my heart talking, not my reason. I was hiding these thoughts even from myself. But in one part of my mind I was paying close attention to Füsun’s words and actions, hoping they might tell me what she was thinking. Because Füsun was well aware of this scrutiny, she gave me no clues, and so the silences grew longer still. At the same time she was watching what I did, and making her own desperate calculations. Sometimes we would stare at each other like spies trying to probe each other’s secrets. Here I display Füsun’s white panties with her childish white socks and her dirty white sneakers, without comment, to evoke our spells of sad silence.

  The day of the engagement party was soon upon us, and all the guessing came to naught. That day there was a champagne and whiskey crisis (one of the dealers had refused to surrender the bottles without cash in hand), and once I had resolved it I went to Taksim to have a hamburger and an ajran at the Atlantic, my favorite buffet since childhood, and then on to my childhood barber, Cevat the Chatterbox. In the late 1960s, Cevat had moved shop from Nişantaşı to Beyoğlu, whereupon my father and the rest of us had moved on to another Nişantaşı barber named Basri, but whenever I happened to be in the neighborhood, and in the mood for some fun, I would go to Cevat’s place just down the road from Ağa Mosque for a shave. Cevat was overjoyed to hear it was the day of my engagement party, and he went on to give me a “groom’s shave,” sparing no luxury, using imported shaving foam and a lotion he assured me was odorless, applying it with close attention to every hair and follicle. I walked all the way back to Nişantaşı, to the Merhamet Apartments.

  Füsun arrived at the usual time. A few days earlier, I had muttered that we’d better not meet on Saturday, as her exam was on the next day, but after working so hard, she’d wanted to rest her mind. After all, she’d skipped work at the Şanzelize Boutique for two days on the pretext of studying for her exam. The first thing she did when she walked in was to sit down at the table and light a cigarette.

  “I think about you so much that there’s no room in my mind for mathematics,” she said, laughing self-mockingly, as if what she’d said meant nothing, as if it were a stock phrase taken from a film, but then she turned deep red.

  Had she not blushed so deeply, and betrayed such sorrow, I would have gone along with the joke. We would have acted as if it hadn’t occurred to either of us that this was the day of my engagement party. It wasn’t that way, though. An overwhelming and unbearable sorrow weighed down on both of us that no amount of joking and no amount of distracting talk could assuage; we understood that even sharing the misery would not make it lighter, that the only escape from it was making love. But the melancholy inhibited our lovemaking and finally tainted it. At one point Füsun lay stretched out on the bed, as if she were a patient listening to her pain, and watching mournful clouds pass overhead. I stretched out beside her and joined her in looking at the ceiling. The children playing football outside had gone quiet, and all we could hear was the ball being kicked around. Then the birds stopped singing, until there was nothing to hear. Then, in the distance, a ship blew its horn, and then another.

  We shared a whiskey in a glass that once belonged to Ethem Kemal—my grandfather, who was her great-grandmother’s second husband—and we began to kiss. As I write these words I feel I should take care not to cause undue upset to those concerned souls who have taken an interest in my story, for a novel need not be full of sorrow just because its heroes are suffering. As always, we fiddled with the things in the room—my mother’s discarded dresses, hats, and china figurines. As always, we kissed each other gracefully, having become so proficient in this art. Instead of pulling you into our melancholy, let me say that it felt as if Füsun’s mouth had melted into mine. As our kisses grew ever longer, a honeyed pool of warm saliva gathered in the great cave that was our mo
uths combined, sometimes leaking a little down our chins, while before our eyes the sort of dreamscape that is the preserve of childish hope began to take form—and we surveyed it as if through a kaleidoscope. From time to time, one of us would, like a ravenous bird taking a fig into its beak, suck upon the other’s upper or lower lip, as if about to swallow it, biting the imprisoned lip, as if to say, “Now you’re at my mercy!” and having enjoyed this adventure of lips, and the frisson of being at someone else’s mercy, and awakening, at that moment, to the thrilling prospect of complete surrender, not just of one’s lips but of one’s entire body to a lover’s mercy, we recognized that the gap between compassion and surrender is love’s darkest, deepest region.

  After making love we both fell asleep. When a sweet breeze blew in through the balcony, lifting the tulle curtains and dropping them like a silk veil onto our faces, we both awoke with a start.

  “I dreamt I was in a field of sunflowers,” said Füsun. “And the sunflowers were swaying strangely in the breeze. For some reason they scared me. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t.”

  “Don’t be afraid,” I said. “I’m here.”

  I won’t say how we left, how we dressed and reached the door. After telling her to stay calm during her exam, and warning her not to forget her registration card, and assuring her that everything would go well, that she was sure to attain the score she needed, I said the thing that I had been repeating in my mind for days, thousands of times over, trying to make it sound as natural as possible.

  “Let’s meet at the same time tomorrow, okay?”

  As she averted her eyes, Füsun said, “Fine.”

  I watched with love as she took her leave, and I knew at once that the engagement party would be a great success.

  24

  The Engagement Party

  THESE POSTCARDS of the Istanbul Hilton were acquired some twenty years after the events I describe; I picked up some of them while strolling through small museums and flea markets in this city and elsewhere in Europe, and others I purchased in transactions with Istanbul’s foremost collectors in the course of assembling the Museum of Innocence. When, after a lengthy bargaining session with the famously neurotic collector Halit Bey the Invalid, I was able to acquire one of these postcards depicting the hotel’s modernist international-style facade, and granted permission to touch it, I was reminded not just of the evening of my engagement party, but of my entire childhood. When I was ten, my parents attended the opening of the hotel, a very exciting occasion for them, along with all of Istanbul society, as well as the long-forgotten American film star Terry Moore. We could see the new building from our house, and though at first it looked foreign against Istanbul’s tired old silhouette, during the years that followed my parents grew accustomed to it, going there whenever they could. Representatives from the foreign firms to whom my father sold goods—they were to a man all interested in “Oriental” dancing—all stayed at the Hilton. On Sunday evenings, when we would go as a family to eat that amazing thing called a hamburger, a delicacy as yet offered by no other restaurant in Turkey, my brother and I would be mesmerized by the pomegranate-colored uniform with gold braids and flashy buttoned epaulettes of the doorman with the handlebar mustache. In those years so many Western innovations made their first appearance in this hotel that the leading newspapers even posted reporters there. If one of my mother’s favorite suits got stained, she would send it to the dry cleaner at the Hilton, and she liked to drink tea with her friends at the patisserie in the lobby. Quite a few of my friends and relatives had their weddings in the grand ballroom on the lower level. When it became clear that my future in-laws’ dilapidated house in Anadoluhisarı was not quite suitable for the engagement party, the Hilton was everyone’s first choice. And it enjoyed one other distinction: The Hilton had been, since the day it opened, one of the few civilized establishments in Turkey where a well-heeled gentleman and a courageous lady could obtain a room without being asked for a marriage certificate.