The Museum of Innocence Read online

  The device by which the Keskin family actually kept time was the television, which, like our radio during the fifties and sixties, was always on. In the days of radio, no matter what the broadcast—a piece of music, a discussion, a mathematics lesson, whatever—you would hear a soft blip on the hour and the half hour, for the benefit of those who cared to know. In the evenings, when we watched television, there was no need for such a signal, as most people had no need to know the time unless they were trying to find out what was on television.

  Every evening at seven o’clock, when the enormous clock appeared on the screen a minute before TRT, the country’s only television station, began its news program, Füsun would look at her wristwatch (displayed here) as Tarık Bey looked at one of the many pocket watches I saw him use over that eight-year period—either to confirm they had the correct time or to adjust their watches to it. They would do this. It was deeply satisfying to watch Füsun sitting at the supper table, gazing at the enormous clock on the screen and squinting, pressing her tongue against the inside of her cheek as she calibrated her watch with the seriousness of a child copying her father. From my very first visits, Füsun was aware how much I enjoyed this spectacle. When she adjusted her watch, she knew I was observing her lovingly, and when she got the time right, she would look at me and smile. “Do you have the time right now?” I would ask her just then. “Yes, I’ve got it!” she would say to me, with a smile that was even warmer.

  As I would slowly come to understand over the eight years, it was not merely to see Füsun that I went to the Keskin house but to live for a time in the world whose air she breathed. This realm’s defining property was its timelessness. And so it was that Tarık Bey advised his wife to “forget time.” When people come to visit my museum and view all the Keskins’ old possessions—especially all these broken, rusting clocks and watches that haven’t worked for years—I want them to notice how strange they are, how they seem to exist out of time, how they have created among themselves a time that is theirs alone. This is the timeless world whose air I inhaled during my years with Füsun and her family.

  Beyond this timeless space was the “official” time outside, with which we kept in touch through television, radio, and the call to prayer; when we talked about finding out what time it was, we were organizing our relations with the outside world, or so I felt.

  Füsun did not adjust her watch because life as she lived it called for a clock that was accurate to the second, so that she could be punctual for work or some meetings; like her father, the retired civil servant, she did so as a way of acceding to a directive signaled to her straight from Ankara and the state, or so it seemed to me. We looked at the clock that appeared on the screen before the news much as we looked at the flag that appeared on the screen, while the national anthem was playing at the end of the broadcasting day: As we sat in our patch of the world, preparing to eat supper or bring the evening to a close by turning off the television, we felt the presence of millions of other families, all doing likewise, and the throng that was the nation, and the power of what we called the state, and our own insignificance. It was when we were watching flags, Atatürk programs, and the official clock (once in a while, the radio would refer to the “national time”) that we were most keenly aware that our messy and disordered domestic lives existed outside the official realm.

  In Physics Aristotle makes a distinction between Time and the single moments he describes as the “present.” Single moments are—like Aristotle’s atoms—indivisible, unbreakable things. But Time is the line that links these indivisible moments. Though Tarık Bey asked us to forget Time—that line connecting one present moment to the next—no one except for idiots and amnesiacs can succeed in forgetting it altogether. A person can only try to be happy and forget Time, and this we all do. If there are readers who sneer at the things my love for Füsun taught me, at these observations that arise from my experiences during the eight years at the house in Çukurcuma, I would like to ask them please to be careful not to confuse forgetting about Time with forgetting about clocks or calendars. Clocks and calendars do not exist to remind us of the Time we’ve forgotten but to regulate our relations with others and indeed all of society, and this is how we use them. When looking at the black-and-white clock that appeared on the screen every evening, just before the news, it was not Time we remembered but other families, other people, and the clocks that regulated our business with them. It was for this reason that Füsun studied the clock on the television screen to check if she’d adjusted her watch “perfectly,” and perhaps it was because I was looking at her with love that she smiled so happily—and not because she’d remembered Time.

  My life has taught me that remembering Time—that line connecting all the moments that Aristotle called the present—is for most of us a rather painful business. When we try to conjure up the line connecting these moments, or, as in our museum, the line connecting all the objects that carry those moments inside them, we are forced to remember that the line comes to an end, and to contemplate death. As we get older and come to the painful realization that this line per se has no real meaning—a sense that comes to us cumulatively in intimations we struggle to ignore—we are brought to sorrow. But sometimes these moments we call the “present” can bring us enough happiness to last a century, as they did if Füsun smiled, in the days when I was going to Çukurcuma for supper. I knew from the beginning that I was going to the Keskin house hoping to harvest enough happiness to last me the rest of my life, and it was to preserve these happy moments for the future that I picked up so many objects large and small that Füsun had touched, and took them away with me.

  Late one evening, during the second of the eight years, when the television stopped broadcasting for the night, I listened to Tarık Bey’s memories of his time as a young teacher in Kars Lycée. If he had fond memories of these unhappy years, when he was alone and scraping by on a low salary, suffering many misfortunes, it was not because bad memories grow rosier with the passage of time, as most people believe, but because he enjoyed talking about the good moments (the particles of Now) from that troubled phase of his life (beads inevitably strung on that evil line, Time). It was after he had noted this paradox one evening that he remembered for some reason the “East-West” watch he’d bought while in Kars, which he brought out to show me had two faces, one in Arabic numerals, and the other in Roman.

  Let me elaborate this theme with another timepiece: when I see this slender Buren wristwatch that Füsun began to wear in April 1982, what appears before my eyes is the moment when I gave it to Füsun on her twenty-fifth birthday, and the moment when, after she had taken it out of its now lost box, with her parents elsewhere (and Feridun not at home), she kissed me on the cheek, behind the open kitchen door, and the moment when we were all sitting together and she joyously showed the watch to her parents, and the moment when her parents, having long accepted me as an eccentric member of the family, each thanked me in turn. For me, happiness is in reliving those unforgettable moments. If we can learn to stop thinking of our lives as a line corresponding to Aristotle’s Time, treasuring our time instead for its deepest moments, each in turn, then waiting eight years at your beloved’s dinner table no longer seems such a strange and laughable obsession but rather (as I would discover much later) assumes the reality of 1,593 happy nights at Füsun’s dinner table. Today I remember each and every evening I went to supper in Çukurcuma—even the most difficult, most hopeless, most humiliating evenings—as happiness.

  55

  Come Again Tomorrow, and We Can Sit Together Again

  FOR EIGHT years, assuming no flood or snow had closed the roads, and he was not ill or on holiday, and the car was in good repair Çetin Efendi drove me to Füsun’s house in my father’s Chevrolet. I was careful not to break that rule. After the first few months he’d made friends in the local teahouses and coffeehouses. He would never leave the car right in front of the Keskins’ house, parking instead near those places with names like
the Black Sea Coffeehouse or the Evening Teahouse; he’d go into one of these establishments and as he watched the same television program that we were watching at Füsun’s house, he would read the paper, join in the conversation and sometimes a game of backgammon, or watch the men playing a card game known as Konken. After the first few months, everyone in the neighborhood knew us both on sight, and unless Çetin Efendi was exaggerating, they thought of me as a humble man who faithfully visited his poor distant relations just for the pleasure of their company, and for the love they felt for him.

  Over the eight years there were of course those who claimed I had dark and evil designs. There was idle gossip not worthy of serious consideration: I was there to buy all the ruined houses in the neighborhood for next to nothing, only to demolish them and build apartments; I was looking for unskilled laborers to work for a pittance in my factories; I was a deserter from the army; or I was Tarık Bey’s illegitimate child (which would make me Füsun’s older half brother). But the reasonable majority had deduced, from the bits of information that Aunt Nesibe judiciously dispensed now and again, that I was a distant relation of Füsun’s, involved in a film project with her husband that would make her a movie star. From what Çetin told me over the years, I understood that there was nothing unacceptable about these circumstances, and that even if the Çukurcuma neighborhood did not have any particular affection for me, as a rule they looked favorably on me. In any event, by the second year they had come to see me almost as one of their own.

  It was a mixed neighborhood: Galata dockworkers, clerks and owners of small shops in the backstreets of Beyoğlu, Romany families who had moved there from Tophane, Kurdish Alevi families from Tunceli, the impoverished children and grandchildren of the Italians and Levantines who had once worked as clerks in Beyoğlu or Bank Street, a handful of the old Greek families who, like them, still could not find it in them to leave Istanbul, and various employees of bakeries and depots, taxi drivers, postmen, grocers, and penniless university students. This multitude did not coalesce into the sort of united community one saw in the traditional Muslim neighborhoods of Fatih, Vefa, and Kocamustafapaşa. But from the help I was continually offered, from the interest the young men took in any unusual or expensive cars that cruised its streets, from the speed with which news and gossip spread through the neighborhood, I inferred a sort of connectedness, a tentative solidarity, or at the very least the buzz of shared experience.

  The house in which Füsun’s family, the Keskins, lived was on the corner of Çukurcuma Avenue (popularly known as Çukurcuma Hill) and the narrow lane known as Dalgıç Street. As you can tell from the map, it was a ten-minute walk through the neighborhood’s steep and winding streets to Beyoğlu and İstiklal Avenue. Some evenings, on our way home, Çetin would take those winding streets up to Beyoğlu, and sitting in the backseat smoking a cigarette I would gaze inside the houses and the shops and at the people on the sidewalks. Lining these narrow streets were dilapidated wooden houses, overhanging the sidewalks as if on the verge of collapse, and vacant buildings abandoned by the latest wave of Greeks immigrating to Greece; these, and the stovepipes that the impoverished Kurdish squatters in those same buildings stuck through their windows, gave night a fearsome guise. Even at midnight, neighborhoods near Beyoğlu were still alive with small, dark bars, meyhanes, cheap nightclubs that described themselves as “drinking establishments,” snack bars, grocery shops that sold sandwiches, lottery shops, tobacconists where you could also buy narcotics, black market cigarettes, or whiskey, and even music shops selling records and cassettes, and though all these places were in miserable condition, they struck me as cheerful and lively. Of course, I would only feel this way if I had left Füsun’s house in a peaceful frame of mind. There were many nights when I left the Keskin household thinking that I would never go back again, and, revolted by the ugliness of the hurly-burly street, as Çetin drove the car I would lie down miserably on the backseat, as if passed out. Most unhappy evenings of this order date back to the early years.

  Çetin would pick me up from Nişantaşı a little before seven in the evening; we’d run into a bit of traffic in Harbiye, Taksim, and Sıraselviler, and then wind our way through the backstreets of Cihangir and Firuzağa, passing in front of the historic Çukurcuma Hamam as we rolled down the hill. Somewhere along the way I would ask Çetin to stop the car and buy a package of food or a bunch of flowers. Not every time I visited, but on average every other time, I would bring a funny little present for Füsun—some Zambo Chiclets, a brooch or a barrette decorated with butterflies that I had found in Beyoğlu or the Covered Bazaar—and I would give it to her very lightheartedly, as if it were half a joke.

  Some evenings, to avoid the traffic, we would go via Dolmabahçe and Tophane, turning right onto Boğazkesen Avenue. Without fail throughout that eight-year period, every time we turned onto the Keskins’ street, my heart would begin to race just as it had done when as a child I turned in to the street where my school was, and I felt a disquiet in which joy mingled with panic.

  Having tired of paying rent for an apartment in Nişantaşı, Tarık Bey had used his savings to buy the building in Çukurcuma. The Keskins’ apartment entrance was on the first floor. They also owned the little ground-floor apartment, and over the eight years a series of tenant families drifted in and out like ghosts, never involving themselves in our story. The entrance of this small apartment (which would later become a part of the Museum of Innocence) was on the side street—Dalgıç Street—and so I rarely crossed paths with the people who lived there. I did hear that Füsun had befriended one of the tenants—a girl named Ayla, who shared the apartment with her widowed mother while her fiancé was doing his military service—and that they’d go together to the cinema in Beyoğlu, but Füsun hid her neighborhood friends from me.

  During the first months, when I rang the doorbell at Çukurcuma Hill, it was always Aunt Nesibe who would descend the flight of stairs to let me in. In all other instances, even if the doorbell rang in the evening, she would always send Füsun down. This was her way of making it clear to me that from my very first visit everyone knew why I was there, and for that purpose she was my natural mediator. But there were times when I felt as if Feridun really didn’t suspect a thing. As for Tarık Bey, living as he did in a world of his own, he never gave me much cause for concern.

  In the same spirit, Aunt Nesibe always took it upon herself to say something to make my presence seem natural as soon as she opened the door. Her conversation starters were usually inspired by whatever they were watching on television: “A plane was hijacked. Did you hear about it?” “They’re showing pictures of the bus crash and they’ve left out none of the horror.” “We’re watching the prime minister’s visit to Egypt.” If I arrived before the news, Aunt Nesibe would always say with the same conviction: “Oh wonderful, you’re just in time. The news is just beginning!” And sometimes she’d add, “We’ve made those cheese pastries you like so much,” or “This morning Füsun and I made some lovely vine-leaf dolmas, you’re going to love them.” If her chatter to diffuse the situation seemed too forced, I would feel ashamed and remain silent. But most of the time I would cheerily reply, “Is that so?” or “Oh wonderful, just in the nick of time,” and go upstairs repeating the rejoinder with exaggerated enthusiasm when I saw Füsun, hoping to hide the shame and joy I felt at that moment.

  “Oh dear, I hope I didn’t miss the plane crash, too,” I said once.

  “The plane crash was yesterday, Cousin Kemal,” Füsun replied.

  In the winter, I could say things like “How cold it is!” or “Are we having lentil soup?” as I was taking off my coat. After February 1977, when the installation of a buzzer allowed them to admit me without coming downstairs, I had to make my opening gambit as I was walking into the apartment, and that was harder. If Aunt Nesibe saw me struggling to find a way into the domestic routine, she’d draw me in at once: “Oh, Kemal Bey, don’t just stand there, sit right down, before your pastry gets cold;” i
f not she’d make a more typical reference to current events: “The man shot up an entire coffeehouse and now he’s bragging about it.”

  I would frown and take my seat straightaway. My presents also helped me with awkward first moments after my arrival. During the early years, I’d bring pistachio baklava, Füsun’s favorite, or water pastries from Latif, the renowned bakery in Nişantaşı, or hors d’oeuvres like salted bonito and taramasalata. Always handing whatever it was to Aunt Nesibe, and without much fanfare. “Oh, you shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble!” Aunt Nesibe would say. Then I would give Füsun her special present or leave it somewhere for her to find later, diverting attention by offering Aunt Nesibe a jolly reply: “I was just passing by the shop, and the pastries smelled so good I couldn’t resist!,” adding a few words of praise for whatever Nişantaşı patisserie I had visited. Then I would take my place discreetly, very much like a pupil who has come to class late, and suddenly my mood would lift. After sitting at the table for some time, I would eventually come eye to eye with Füsun. These were the sublime moments that repaid any amount of trouble I had gone to.