The Museum of Innocence Read online

  “But life is not as simple as these films, actually,” said Füsun, as if disturbed to see me so fanciful. “But I am enjoying myself. I’m glad you’ve come with us.”

  For a moment we were silent. What I wanted to say was, It is enough for me to sit beside you. Had it been by chance that our arms had stayed pressed together for so long? How excruciating it was, longing to express these hidden thoughts, knowing that the crowds at the cinema like the whole world in which we lived would not allow it. Through the loudspeakers hanging from the trees we heard Orhan Gencebay’s song from the film we’d seen two months ago in the hills of Pendik, overlooking the Sea of Marmara. “Once you were my sweetheart….” It summoned all my memories of the summer, now passing before my eyes like a picture show, those sublime moments of sitting in Bosphorus restaurants drunkenly admiring Füsun and the moon on the sea.

  “I’ve been very happy this summer,” I said. “These films have taught me how. The important thing in life is not to be rich…. What a pity it is … all this agony … this suffering…. Don’t you think?”

  “A film about life and agony,” said my beauty, as her face clouded, “should be sincere.”

  When one of the children squirting soda at one another came hurtling toward her, I took Füsun by the waist and pulled her toward me. A bit of the soda had splashed on her.

  “You sons of donkeys!” said one old man as he slapped one of them on the neck. He looked to us for approval, and his eyes fell on my hand, still on Füsun’s waist.

  How close we were to each other in that cinema garden, not just physically but spiritually! Füsun, fearful of the way I was looking at her, backed away, walking through the crowd of brats to reach for the soda bottles sitting arranged in the laundry basin; she had already broken my heart.

  “Let’s buy one for Çetin Efendi, too,” said Füsun. She had two bottles opened.

  I paid for the sodas and then I took one over to Çetin Efendi, who would never join us in the “family section” when we went to films, but sat alone in the section for single men.

  “You shouldn’t have, Kemal Bey,” he said with a smile.

  When I turned around I saw a child staring in awe as Füsun drank straight from her soda bottle. The child was bold enough to approach us.

  “Are you an actress, sister?”

  “No.”

  Because the fashion has now passed, let me remind my readers that in those days this question was a way of telling girls they were pretty, and served as a popular pickup line for playboys wishing to approach well-groomed girls in outfits slightly more revealing than the norm, and who were not exactly upper-class. But this child, who looked to be about ten years old, had no such motives. He insisted: “But I’ve seen you in a film.”

  “Which one?” asked Füsun.

  “Autumn Butterflies, and you were wearing the same dress, you know….”

  “What part was I playing?” Füsun asked, smiling with pleasure at this child’s fantasy.

  But the child, now realizing his mistake, fell silent.

  “Let me ask my husband now,” she said to spare the little boy’s feelings. “He knows all these films.”

  You will have understood that when Füsun said “husband,” and looked across the chairs to pick him out in the crowd, and the child realized I was not the man in question, I felt wounded. But spurred on by the joy of being so close to her, drinking soda with her, I said this: “The child must have sensed that we’ll be making a film soon that will make you a star.”

  “So you’re saying that you really are going to shell out the money to make this film? Please don’t take offense, Cousin Kemal, but Feridun is too embarrassed even to bring up the subject, but let me tell you, we’re sick and tired of waiting.”

  “Is that so?” I said. I was dumbstruck.

  53

  An Indignant and Broken Heart Is of No Use to Anyone

  I DID not say another word all night. Because so many languages describe the condition I was in as “heartbreak,” let the broken porcelain heart I display here suffice to convey my plight at that moment to all who visit my museum. The pain of love no longer manifested itself as panic, hopelessness, or anger, as it had done the previous summer. By now it had become a more viscous substance that coursed through my veins. Because I had been seeing Füsun every other day if not every day, the heartache of absence had lessened, and I had developed new habits to cope with the new milder pain of her presence; after a summer of careful practice these habits had become second nature, making me a new man. I no longer spent my days battling with my pain; instead I could suppress it, veil it, or act as if there were nothing wrong with me.

  The new pain, the pain of presence, was in fact the pain of humiliation. It seemed that Füsun did take care to spare me pain of that kind, shying away from subjects and situations that might wound my pride. But in the face of those crude last words of hers, I finally realized that to pretend nothing was amiss was no longer possible.

  I had tried at first pretending not to hear them reverberating in my mind: “shell out the money … We’re sick and tired of waiting.” But my feeble mumbled rejoinder (“Is that so?”) was proof that I had heard her. I could not, therefore, act as if no offense had been taken; and, anyway, who could have missed my grim expression, which spoke of spirits plummeting and utter humiliation. Her insult ringing in my head, I went back to my chair and sat down, still clutching my soda bottle. It was hard for me to move. The worst part was not even those cutting words, but Füsun’s evident awareness of my humiliation and the upset it caused me.

  I forced myself to think of something else, ordinary matters. I remember asking the same question I would ask myself in my youth whenever I thought I would explode from boredom, surrendering to metaphysical musing, as in: “What am I thinking now? Am I thinking that I’m thinking?” After repeating this sentence silently many times over, I turned to Füsun in a decisive way and said, “They want us to return the empties,” and, taking the empty bottle from her hand, I stood up and walked away. In my other hand was my own bottle. There was still some soda in it. No one was looking, so I poured my soda into Füsun’s bottle, handing mine, now empty, back to the boys selling the sodas. So I was able to return to my seat with Füsun’s bottle, which I display here.

  Füsun was talking to her husband; they didn’t notice me. I cannot recall a single thing about the film we watched next. This is because the bottle that had touched Füsun’s lips only a few moments earlier was now in my trembling hands. I had no interest in anything else. I wanted to return to my own world, to my own things. This bottle would remain for many years on the bedside table at the Merhamet Apartments, meticulously preserved. Visitors will recognize it by its shape as a bottle of Meltem soda, the soda launched at the time our story begins, and now available throughout the country, but the soda inside was not Zaim’s highly praised recipe. For already very poor imitations of our first great national soda brand were turning up everywhere. There were little local pirate soda plants operating underground that would collect empty Meltem bottles, fill them with the cheap counterfeit, and distribute them to unsuspecting or indifferent vendors. When he noticed me with the bottle against my lips as we drove back in the car, Feridun, quite unaware of my conversation with his wife, said, “This Meltem soda is great stuff, isn’t it, brother?” I told him that the soda wasn’t “genuine” Meltem, from which he deduced the scheme and felt compelled to comment: “In the backstreets of Bakırköy there’s a secret propane-filling depot. They fill Aygaz canisters with cheap cooking gas. We bought it, too, once. Brother Kemal, please believe me when I tell you—the fake burned better than the real thing.”

  I brushed the bottle against my lips with care. “This one tastes better, too,” I said.

  As the car rumbled over the silent backstreets, passing through pools of pale lamplight and shuddering gently over the cobblestones, the shadows of trees and leaves flickered on the windshield as they do in dreams. Sitting in the front next t
o Çetin the chauffeur as always, I could feel my heart swelling painfully, so I did not turn around to look at them, even when the usual talk about the films began. Çetin Efendi was not inclined to join these conversations we had on the way home, and it was perhaps because the silence was making even him uncomfortable that he ventured to observe how certain parts of the film were not credible. An Istanbul chauffeur would never scold the young lady he worked for, not even politely, as in the film, he insisted.

  “But he’s not really a chauffeur,” said Feridun the son-in-law. “He’s the famous actor Ayhan Işık.”

  “You’re right, sir,” said Çetin. “And that’s why I liked it. In a way, it was educational…. As entertaining as the films we’ve seen this summer have been, I love them more for offering lessons about life.”

  Füsun was silent, as was I. When I heard Çetin Efendi say “this summer,” my pain grew sharper. For his words reminded me that these lovely summer nights were drawing to a close: No longer would we be coming to these cinema gardens to see films; the joy I’d known sitting beside Füsun under the stars would soon be a memory, and I was ready to talk about anything that might have popped into my head, just to hide my distress from her, but my lips remained pressed so tightly shut one couldn’t have pried them open with a knife. I was sinking into a bitterness that would, I suspected, last a very long time.

  I didn’t want to see Füsun at all, or indeed anyone who would have befriended me just to help her husband make a film—in other words, just for money. It was a bald fact and in a way thrilling that she would not even bother to conceal her venal purpose, thrilling because I knew I could never be attracted to such a person, and in this recognition I could glimpse an easy break.

  That night, when I dropped them off in the car, contrary to custom, I appointed no date for the next trip to a cinema. For three days I did not get in touch. It was during this period that I began to exhibit (first in the recesses of my mind, but gradually in a more pronounced way) a new manner of brooding. I thought of it as “diplomatic pique,” for it derived less from the pain of heartbreak than from a sense of protocol: Abuse of friendship must be answered accordingly so as to decry such behavior and preserve our pride. Obviously the retribution I had in mind for Füsun was a refusal to back her husband’s film, and with it the death of her dreams of becoming a movie star. “Let’s see what happens,” I told myself, “if this film doesn’t get made!” Having come to feel my previously formal pique viscerally I began, on the second day, to imagine in some detail the ways in which Füsun might be suffering in reaction to her punishment. Unfortunately in my imagination it was the dimming of her as yet unrisen star that upset Füsun and not the prospect of no longer seeing me. Perhaps this was not an illusion, but the truth.

  The pleasure of imagining Füsun remorseful had, by the second day, overwhelmed my visceral pique. By the evening of that day, as I sat eating silently with my mother in Suadiye, I realized I had begun to miss Füsun. My viscera having healed, I knew that I could only maintain my pique for the sake of punishing her. As I ate my supper I tried to put myself in Füsun’s place and adopt a cruel pragmatism. I imagined the agony and remorse I’d be feeling if I were a beautiful young woman, on the verge of starring in a film directed by my husband, when with a thoughtless remark I had shattered the feelings of the wealthy producer, and with them, the hope of becoming a star. But for my mother’s continued interruptions (“Why didn’t you finish your meat? Are you going out this evening? Summer’s almost over. We don’t have to wait until the end of the month—we can go back to Nişantaşı tomorrow. How many glasses does that make for you tonight?”) I might have succeeded in putting myself in Füsun’s place.

  In the course of my drunken struggle to guess what Füsun might be thinking, the possibility occurred to me that from the moment I’d heard the ugly words (“So you’re saying that you really are going to shell out the money….”) provoking my “diplomatic pique,” a vengefulness in me had been exposed. I wanted to take revenge on Füsun, but because it both frightened and shamed me to entertain such a wish, I instead convinced myself that I “never wanted to see her again.” This was the more honorable way, as it would allow me to take my revenge with a clear conscience, whereas exaggerating my visceral pique could only serve to excuse the sin by cloaking my desire to punish her in a victim’s innocence. Realizing this, I decided to forgive Füsun and go to see her, and having so decided, I began to see everything in a more positive light. Still, before I could go see them again, I would have to engage in more thinking, as well as self-deception.

  After supper I went out to Baghdad Avenue, where, years ago, when I was young, I had so often “promenaded” with my friends, and as I walked down the wide sidewalks, I again tried as hard as I could to put myself in Füsun’s shoes, to figure out precisely how Füsun would interpret the situation were I to stop punishing her. In a blinding flash it came to me: A beautiful woman like her, a woman with brains who knew what she wanted, would have no trouble finding another producer to back her husband’s film. A scorching and jealous regret overtook me. The next day I sent Çetin off to find out what was playing in the open-air cinemas of Beşiktaş, which investigation led me to decide that there was “an important film not to be missed.” Sitting in my office at Satsat with the receiver pressed to my ear, listening to the phone ringing in Füsun’s house, my heart began to pound as I realized that, whoever answered, I would be unable to speak naturally.

  As nothing natural could come of trying to satisfy the conflicting demands of visceral and diplomatic pique, I felt compelled at least to prolong the latter for as long as no apology was forthcoming. So it was that we passed our last summer evenings in Istanbul’s cinema gardens, our dignity chastened, having little fun, speaking even less, feigning mutual indignation. My grimace was infectious—and of course Füsun responded in kind. I resented her obliging me to make this pretense, and now this in turn would make me genuinely indignant. Over time, the persona I assumed in her presence came to supplant my true self. It must have been then I first came to realize that for most people life was not a joy to be embraced with a full heart but a miserable charade to be endured with a false smile, a narrow path of lies, punishment, and repression.

  While these Turkish films kept telling us that one could find “the truth” leaving behind this “world of lies,” by now I could no longer believe in the films we saw in the open-air cinemas, with ever dwindling audiences. I could no longer submit to that sentimental realm. By the end of summer, the Star Cinema in Beşiktaş was so empty that it would have looked strange for me to sit too close to Füsun, so I left a seat empty between us, and as the winds grew colder, my contrived sulking hardened into icy remorse. Four days later we went to the Club Cinema in Feriköy, but instead of a film, there were beds with penniless boys tended by headscarf-wearing aunties, and it amused us when we realized that the city council had organized a circumcision ceremony, complete with acrobats, magicians, and dancers, for families who couldn’t afford their own rite. But when the good-hearted mustached mayor saw how pleased we were and asked us to join them, Füsun and I, both so determined to present each other a cold shoulder, declined. It was infuriating to see her responding to my diplomatic pique with her own no less contained version while also keeping the pantomime subtle enough for her husband not to notice.

  I managed not to call them for six days. It bothered me that neither Füsun nor her husband had ever once called me. If we were not going to make this film, what excuse could I have for calling them? If I wanted to carry on seeing them, I would have to give them some money, an unbearable truth, one I couldn’t accept.

  The last film we went to was at the Majestic Garden Cinema in Pangaltı at the beginning of October. It was a warm night, and there were some others in attendance. I was hoping that on this beautiful evening, probably the last of the summer, our recriminations, the diplomatic standoff, might end. But before we took our seats, something happened: I ran into Cemile Hanım, the
mother of a childhood friend. She had also been one of my mother’s bezique partners in those days, but it was as if she grew ever poorer with age. We exchanged looks, as if to say, What are you doing here? in the manner of people who come from old money and feel ashamed and guilty at the loss of their fortunes.

  “I was curious to see Mükerrem Hanım’s house,” said Cemile Hanım, as if making a confession.

  I did not understand what she meant. I assumed that some interesting person named Mükerrem Hanım lived in one of the old wooden houses whose interiors you could see from the cinema garden, and so I sat down next to Cemile Hanım, that we might look into this house together. Füsun and her husband went to sit six or seven rows in front of us. When the film began I realized that it was the house in the film she was referring to as Mükerrem Hanım’s. This was the princely abode in Erenköy of a prominent aristocratic family—I used to ride past it on my bicycle when I was a child. After falling on hard times, they (like so many old families of my mother’s acquaintance) had taken to renting out their villas to Yeşilçam Films as sets. Cemile Hanım was not here to cry her eyes out watching a film called More Bitter Than Love, but to see the wood-inlaid rooms of an old pasha’s house serving fictively as the home of an evil family who were evidently new money. I should have stood up and gone to sit next to Füsun. But I couldn’t, for a strange shame had immobilized me. I was like a teenager refusing to sit with his parents at the cinema, but also unwilling to acknowledge the source of his shame.

  This shame, mingling with my affected pique, which I remain reluctant to acknowledge even so many years later, made it easier to sustain the pretense of being offended. When the film was over, I rejoined Füsun and her husband, whom Cemile Hanım gave a careful look up and down. Füsun was sulking even more than before, and I had no recourse but to respond in kind. On the way back, the silence in the car was hard to bear, and so I fantasized about throwing off this role in which I had cast myself with an unexpected joke, bursting into mad laughter, or getting drunk—but all in vain.