The Museum of Innocence Read online

  “Three years ago I disobeyed my father and went with some classmates to a séance—just out of curiosity,” said Füsun. “I was asked for a name and I remembered a childhood friend who was very dear to me, though I’d lost touch with him, and without pausing to think, I wrote his name down, just to play along…. But this name I’d written down, without really believing, just for the fun of it—well, his spirit did come and I felt so guilty.”

  “Why?”

  “I could tell from the way the coffee cup was rattling that my lost friend Necdet was in enormous pain. It was rattling as if it had a life of its own, and I felt that Necdet must be trying to tell me something. Then suddenly the coffee cup went still…. Everyone said that this person must have died at that very moment…. How could they have known?”

  “How did they know?” asked Sibel.

  “That same night I was at home and looking through my drawers for a missing glove, and I found a handkerchief that Necdet had given me as a present many years before. Maybe it was a coincidence. But I don’t think so. I learned a lesson from this. When we lose people we love, we should never disturb their souls, whether living or dead. Instead, we should find consolation in an object that reminds you of them, something … I don’t know … even an earring.”

  “Füsun, darling, time to go home,” said Aunt Nesibe. “You have your exam tomorrow morning, and your father can barely stay awake.”

  “Just a minute, Mother!” said Füsun in a firm voice.

  “I don’t believe in séances, either,” said Sibel. “But if I’m invited to one, I never pass it up, because I like watching the games people play, and seeing what they fear.”

  “But if you love someone, and you miss them terribly, which would you do?” asked Füsun. “Would you gather up your friends and try to summon his spirit, or would you look for some old possession of his, like a cigarette box?”

  As Sibel groped for a polite answer, Füsun shot up out of her seat and, reaching over to the next table, picked up a handbag, which she placed in front of us. “This handbag reminds me of my embarrassment … my shame for having sold you a fake,” she said.

  When it was on Füsun’s arm earlier I had not recognized it as “that” bag. But hadn’t I bought it in the Şanzelize Boutique from Şenay Hanım, shortly before the happiest moment in my life, and, after having run into Füsun in the street, hadn’t I taken it back with us to the Merhamet Apartments? Just yesterday that talismanic Jenny Colon bag was still there. How could it be here now? I was like some spectator dumbfounded by a juggler’s trick, and my head was spinning.

  “It looks very good on you,” said Sibel awkwardly. “So lovely with the orange, and your hat, that when I first saw it I felt jealous. I was sorry I’d returned it to you. How beautiful you are!”

  It occurred to me that Şenay Hanım must have had more than one fake Jenny Colon bag in stock. Having sold one to me, she might have put another in the window, and even lent a third to Füsun for this evening.

  “After you realized that the bag was a fake, you stopped coming to the Şanzelize,” said Füsun, smiling graciously at Sibel. “This upset me, because of course you were right.” Opening the bag, she showed us the inside. “Our craftsmen make excellent fakes of European products, bless them, but never enough to fool someone with your experienced eye. But now I must say something.” She swallowed and fell silent, and I feared she was going to cry. But she pulled herself together, and with a frown she recited the speech that she must have rehearsed at home. “For me, it’s not in the least important whether something is or isn’t a European product. And it’s not in the least important to me either if a thing is genuine or fake. If you ask me, people’s dislike of imitations has nothing to do with fake or real, but the fear that others might think they’d ‘bought it cheap.’ For me, the worst thing is when people care about the brand and not the thing itself. You know how there are some people who don’t give importance to their own feelings, and care only about what other people might say”—here she glanced in my direction. “This handbag will always remind me of tonight. I congratulate you. It’s been an evening I’ll never forget.” She rose to her feet, and as she squeezed our hands, my darling girl kissed us each on the cheek. As she turned to leave, she noticed Zaim approaching the next table and she turned back to Sibel. “Zaim Bey is a very good friend of your fiancé, isn’t he?” she asked.

  “Yes, they’re very close,” said Sibel. As Füsun took her father’s arm, Sibel turned to me and asked, “What did she mean by that question?” but there was no contempt for Füsun in her expression. I saw instead something akin to excitement, even adoration.

  As Füsun headed slowly for the stairs, flanked by her mother and father, I watched her from behind with love and pride.

  Zaim came and sat down beside me. “You know, at that Satsat table behind us, they’ve been having quite a laugh at your expense all evening,” he said. “As your friend, I thought you should know.”

  “You must be joking! What exactly could they be laughing about?”

  “Well, I didn’t hear it directly, of course. Kenan told Füsun. And she told me…. And she was quite upset, too. Apparently it’s general knowledge at Satsat that every night at quitting time, you and Sibel would meet there for a romp on the divan in the corner office. This is what all the snickering was about.”

  “What’s happened now?” asked Sibel as she came back to us. “You’re depressed again, aren’t you?”

  25

  The Agony of Waiting

  I DID NOT sleep at all that night. In fact, Sibel and I had been meeting at Satsat only rarely, but this was hardly an extenuating circumstance in the indictment I feared would cost me Füsun. Toward dawn I dozed off briefly. The moment I woke up I shaved and went for a walk. I took the long way back, passing in front of the Technical University’s 115-year-old Taşkışla Building, where Füsun was takıng her exam. Around the door, through which Ottoman soldiers sporting fezzes and pointed mustaches had once passed on their way to drill, mothers in head-scarves and chain-smoking fathers sat in rows waiting for their children. Some were reading newspapers; others were chatting or looking blankly up at the sky. I could not see Aunt Nesibe among them. Between the windows in the stone facade, sixty-six years on, you could still see the bullet holes left by the Action Army upon the deposition of Sultan Abdülhamit. Fixing my eyes on one of those high windows, I said a prayer, asking God to help Füsun answer the questions, and to send her skipping joyously back to me when the exam was over.

  But Füsun did not come to the Merhamet Apartments that day. I told myself her anger would pass. As the strong June sun filtered through the curtains and the room grew steadily hotter, I waited two hours past our usual meeting time. It hurt to look at the empty bed, so I went out for another walk. As I walked through the park, past soldiers idly killing time and children feeding the pigeons under the gaze of their families, and people reading their newspapers on the benches at the edge of the sea or watching the ships go by, I tried to convince myself that Füsun would come at the usual time the next day. But she did not come the next day, or the four days that followed.

  Every day I went to the Merhamet Apartments at the customary hour, to begin my wait. Having realized that getting there early only aggravated my pain, I resolved not to arrive before five minutes to two. I would go into the apartment trembling with impatience, and during the first ten or fifteen minutes hopeful anticipation would ease the pain, an excitement wreathing my head down to the tip of my nose even as my heart ached and my stomach cramped. From time to time I would part the curtains to look down at the street and inspect the rust on the lamppost in front of the entrance, and then I’d tidy the room a bit. I would listen to footsteps passing one floor below, and from time to time I would hear high heels clicking past in that decisive way of hers. But they would continue on without slowing down, and I would realize with pain that the woman who had entered the building, lightly shutting the door behind her in such a familiar way,
was in fact someone else.

  I have here the clock, and these matchsticks and matchbooks, because the display suggests how I spent the slow ten or fifteen minutes it took me to accept that Füsun was not coming that day. As I paced the rooms, glancing out the windows, stopping in my tracks from time to time, standing motionless, I would listen to the pain sluicing within me. As the clocks in the apartment ticked away, my mind would fixate on the seconds and the minutes to distract itself from the agony. As the appointed hour neared, the sentiment “Today, yes, she’s coming, now” would bloom inside me, unbidden, like spring flowers. At such moments I wanted time to flow faster so that I could be reunited with my lovely at once. But those minutes would never pass. For a moment, in a fit of great clarity, I would understand that I was fooling myself, that I did not want the time to flow at all, because Füsun might never come. By two o’clock I was never sure whether to be happy that the hour had arrived, or sad that with every passing minute her arrival was less likely, and the distance between me and my beloved would grow as that between a passenger on a ship leaving port and the one he had left behind. So I would try to convince myself that not so very many minutes had passed, toward this end I would make little bundles of time in my head. Instead of feeling the pain every second of every minute, I resolved to feel it only once every five! In this way I would take the pain of five discrete minutes and suffer it all in the last. But this too was for naught when I could no longer deny that the first five minutes had passed—when I was forced to accept that she was not coming, the forestalled pain would sink into me like a driven nail. In the subsequent desperation I would repeat the exercise, struggling to tell myself that Füsun had often been ten or fifteen minutes late for our meetings, an assertion I was not really sure of, but which allowed me a respite at least for four-fifths of the next five-minute bundle, and hope would return, as I dreamed that in a moment’s time she would ring the bell, that in just a moment she would be there with me, as suddenly as the second time we met. I would imagine what I’d do when she rang the bell—whether I would be angry at her for not having come for so many days, or whether I would forgive her on sight. These fleeting dreams would mix with memories when my eyes lit upon this teacup, from which Füsun drank during our first encounter, or upon this little old vase that she picked up for no reason while impatiently pacing the apartment. After fending off the ever more hopeless awareness that the fourth and fifth five-minute bundles had come and gone, my reason would force me to accept that on that day Füsun would not be coming, and at that moment the agony inside was such that I could do nothing but throw myself like an invalid onto the bed.

  26

  An Anatomical Chart of Love Pains

  THIS DEPICTION of the internal organs of the human body is taken from an advertisement for Paradison, a painkiller on display in the window of every pharmacy in Istanbul at the time, and I use it here to illustrate to the museum visitor where the agony of love first appeared, where it became most pronounced, and how far it spread. Let me explain to readers without access to our museum that the deepest pain was initially felt in the upper left-hand quadrant of my stomach. As the pain increased, it would, as the overlay indicates, radiate to the cavity between my lungs and my stomach. At that point its abdominal presence would no longer be confined to the left side, having spread to the right, feeling rather as if a hot poker or a screwdriver were twisting into me. It was as if first my stomach and then my entire abdomen were filling up with acid, as if sticky, red-hot little starfish were attaching themselves to my organs. As the pain grew more pervasive and intense, I would feel it climb into my forehead, over the back of my neck, my shoulders, my entire body, even invading my dreams to take a smothering hold of me. Sometimes, as diagrammed, a star of pain would form, centered on my navel, shooting shafts of acid to my throat, and my mouth, and I feared it would throttle me. If I hit the wall with my hand, or did a few calisthenics, or otherwise pushed myself as an athlete does, I could briefly block the pain, but at its most muted I could still feel it like an intravenous drip entering my bloodstream, and it was always there in my stomach; that was its epicenter.

  Despite all its tangible manifestations, I knew that the pain emanated from my mind, from my soul, but even so I could not bring myself to cleanse my mind and deliver myself from it. Inexperienced in such feeling, I was, like a proud young officer ambushed in his first command, forced into a mental rout. And it only made matters worse that I had hope—with every new day, new dreams, new reasons that Füsun might appear at the Merhamet Apartments—which by making the agony bearable prolonged it.

  In my more lucid moments, I would think that she was scorning me, punishing me, not just for the engagement but for hiding from her my trysts with Sibel at the office, for letting my jealousy get the better of me at the engagement party and playing tricks to keep her away from Kenan, and also, of course, for failing to solve the mystery of the earring. But I also felt, most powerfully, that her denial of the unparalleled happiness we had shared was no less a punishment for her than for me, and that, like me, she would not be able to bear it for long. For I had to endure the pain, face the torment stoically, so that when we met, she might yet feel compelled to acknowledge my suffering. But all such calculation was overshadowed by remorse—having recklessly invited her to the party, and having failed to recover the missing earring or to teach her mathematics properly, or to return her childhood tricycle to her house, and attend the promised supper with her family. The pain of regret was shorter and more contained; it would make itself felt in the back of my legs and in my lungs (see diagram), mysteriously sapping my strength. But it was no less debilitating, leaving me barely able to stay on my feet, longing to collapse onto a bed.

  Sometimes I wondered whether this was all happening because her entrance exam had gone badly. Afterward in my guilty dreams I would give her long, exacting math lessons; my pain would abate, especially when the math lessons were over and we would make love. But the dream would end abruptly when I remembered that she had broken the promise made while we danced at the engagement party—to come to me as soon as the exam was over—and when I recalled that she had not even furnished me with an excuse, I would begin to feel angry at her, my resentment fed, too, by her lesser crimes—trying to make me jealous at the party, listening while the Satsat employees joked at my expense. These grievances I would use to distance myself from her, thus answering with my silence her desire to punish me.

  By half past two Friday afternoon, and with that day’s recognition that she wasn’t coming despite my every petty resentment, conjured hope, and self-deceiving trick, I collapsed in defeat. The pain had now become fatal, eating me up like a wild beast without pity for its prey. I lay like a corpse on the bed, inhaling her fleeting scent on the sheets, remembering how happily we’d made love there, only six days earlier, asking myself how I would live without her, even as jealousy irresistibly mixed with the anger. I imagined Füsun wasting no time taking a new lover. This shameful and debilitating fantasy had come into my head at other times, too, but now I was unable to fend it off, imagining as my rival Kenan, or Turgay Bey, or any number of other admirers, even Zaim, whoever fetched up first. A woman like her, who had taken such pleasure from lovemaking, would certainly not refrain now from seeking the same pleasure with others, particularly with her anger toward me driving her to revenge. Though in one part of my mind I could see these feelings for what they were, I surrendered, nevertheless, allowing this degrading dream to engulf me. Resolving that desire and anger would drive me mad, I rushed out of the apartment and made straight for the Şanzelize Boutique.

  I remember my heart pounding with hopeless hope as I raced down Teşvikiye Avenue. Fueled by the certitude that seeing her would restore me, I gave no thought to what I might say. The moment I saw her, my pain would disappear, at least for a time—this I knew. She had to hear me out; there were things I had to say. This wasn’t what we’d agreed at the dance—we were to have gone to a patisserie to talk.
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  The little bell on the door of the Şanzelize Boutique rang and my heart seized up. The canary was gone. I had already worked out that Füsun was not there either, but out of fear and helplessness I tried to convince myself that she was hiding in the back room.

  “Kemal Bey, welcome,” Şenay Hanım said with a diabolical smile.

  “I’d like to take a look at that white embroidered evening bag in the window,” I whispered.

  “Oh, yes, that’s a very nice piece indeed,” she said. “You’re very discerning. Whenever something beautiful comes to the shop, you’re the first to see it, and you snap it up. This just came in from Paris. Note the precious stone in its clip. There’s a change purse inside, and a mirror, all made by hand, of course.” As she lumbered over to the window to extract the bag, she carried on exaggerating its finer points.

  I glanced through the curtains into the back room. Füsun was not there. When the woman brought me this elegant floral bag, I pretended to examine it carefully and accepted without question the exorbitant price quoted. As the witch was wrapping it up, she spent a very long time telling me how impressed everyone had been by the engagement party. Just to keep the transaction going, I told her to wrap up a pair of cuff links that I happened to notice. Emboldened by the pleasure I saw on her face, I asked, “So what’s become of that relation of ours? Hasn’t she come in today?”

  “Oh dear, didn’t you know? Füsun quit suddenly.”

  “Is that so?”

  She’d guessed at once that I’d come looking for Füsun, and deduced from this that we were no longer seeing each other, and now she was eyeing me closely, trying to figure out what had happened.

  I managed to contain myself, asking her nothing. Despite my pain, I reached calmly into my pocket, to hide the fact that I was not wearing my engagement ring. As I paid her I noticed her looking at me with a certain compassion: It was as if, having both lost Füsun, we had been drawn closer together. And yet I could not help casting a further incredulous glance in the direction of the back room.