The Museum of Innocence Read online

  The curfew lasted all day. From time to time we’d see an army truck hurtling down the avenue; from this we knew that politicians, journalists, and many others were being picked up from their houses and taken into custody, and we were thankful that we never had involved ourselves in politics. The newspapers had all produced special editions, welcoming the coup, and all day long I sat with my mother, reading them and watching the generals announce the coup, a recording played many times over, interspersed with old images of Atatürk. From time to time I went to stand by the window and admire the beauty of the empty streets. I was curious to know how things were with Füsun—how everyone was feeling at the house in Çukurcuma. There were rumors of house searches in certain neighborhoods, as had been done during the 1971 coup.

  “From now on we’ll be able to go out into the streets in peace,” my mother said.

  With the imposition of the ten o’clock curfew, the military coup cast a long shadow over my evening meals at the Keskins’. During the evening news broadcast on the country’s only television channel, the generals not only railed against politicians and dissident intellectuals but lectured the entire nation about the bad habits that had led them astray.

  But it wasn’t just politicians and dissident intellectuals—they were also jailing common swindlers, brothel keepers, tombala men who sold black market cigarettes, and anyone who’d violated a traffic ordinance, written a slogan on a wall, or been involved in a porn film. A large number of people linked with terrorism were summarily executed as examples to others. Whenever word of one of these events reached the Keskin table, everyone would fall silent. At such times I would feel closer to Füsun: part of the family. They no longer seized young, longhaired “hippie types” from the streets to shave off their beards, as in the previous coup, but they did immediately fire a slew of university lecturers. The Pelür Bar was emptied out with other such places. In the wake of the coup, I resolved that I, too, would put my life in order: I would drink less, mitigate the disgrace my love had caused, and, if nothing else, tame my urge to collect things.

  Less than two months later I found myself alone in the kitchen with Aunt Nesibe just before supper. I’d started coming to the house earlier, so that I could see more of Füsun.

  “My dearest Kemal, you know that street dog with the black ears that you bought us—the one on the television? Well, it’s gone missing…. Your eyes grow accustomed to things, so the moment they’re gone, you notice. Whatever happened has happened; it doesn’t matter to me—maybe the poor beast decided it was time to get up and go,” she said. She let out a sweet little laugh, but when she saw the harsh expression on my face, she became serious. “What shall we do?” she asked. “Tarık Bey keeps asking what happened to the dog.”

  “Let me take care of this,” I said.

  That evening I was too upset to speak. But in spite of my silence—or because of it—I was also unable to stand up and leave, a paralysis that intensified as it got close to the curfew hour. I think that Aunt Nesibe and Füsun were both aware of my predicament. Aunt Nesibe was obliged to say, “Oh please don’t be late!” several times. Only at five past ten was I able to leave the house.

  No one stopped us on the way back, and after we were home safe I spent a long time thinking about the meaning of these dogs, and why I kept bringing them to the Keskins’ only to remove them later; in fact, despite Aunt Nesibe’s insistence that she’d noticed the disappearance immediately, it had taken them an astonishing eleven months to see that the dog was gone; it seemed to me that it had happened now only because of the coup, and the prevailing sentiment that we should all put our houses in order. Almost certainly, most of those dogs sitting on lace doilies atop the television were holdovers from the days when dogs sat on radios. As people listened to the radio, their heads would naturally turn toward it, and then their eyes would seek out something for distraction, something that offered solace. After radios gave way to televisions as the altars for family meals, the dogs were transferred to the tops of television sets, but now, with all eyes glued to the screen, no one noticed these little creatures anymore. I could take them away whenever I pleased.

  Two days after that evening, I brought two china dogs to the Keskins.

  “I was walking through Beyoğlu today when I saw these in the Japanese Market,” I said. “It’s almost as if they were designed to sit on our television.”

  “Oh, what a lovely pair they make,” said Aunt Nesibe. “But why did you go to such trouble, Kemal Bey?”

  “I was sorry about the one with the black ears going missing,” I said. “Actually, I used to worry that he was lonely, sitting up there on the television. When I saw how happy these two were together, I said to myself that it would be nice to have a frisky pair of dogs up there on the television.”

  “Were you really worried the dog was lonely up there, Kemal Bey?” said Aunt Nesibe. “What a curious man you are. But that’s why we love you.”

  Füsun was smiling tenderly at me.

  “I get upset to see things thrown away and forgotten,” I said. “They say the Chinese used to believe that things had souls.”

  “Before we Turks came here from Central Asia, we spent a huge amount of time with the Chinese; there was something about this on television just the other day,” said Aunt Nesibe. “You weren’t here that evening. Füsun, do you remember the name of the program? Oh, you’ve put the dogs where they belong, and don’t they look lovely. But do you think they should be facing each other, or looking at us? Right now I just can’t make up my mind.”

  “The one on the left should face us, and the one on the right should face his friend,” Tarık Bey said suddenly.

  Sometimes, at the strangest moment in a conversation, when we all thought he wasn’t even listening, Tarık Bey would suddenly make a judicious comment that showed how he grasped the details even better than we did.

  “If we do it like that, the dogs can be friends, and they won’t get bored, but they’ll also keep an eye on us, and be part of the family,” he continued.

  As much as I longed to touch them, I kept my hands off those dogs for more than a year. By 1982, the year I finally took them away with me, I had begun to leave money in a discreet corner to cover the cost of the things I took, or else I would bring over some quite expensive replacement the very next day. During those last years, many strange objects of the same form but different function—dogs that were also pincushions, and dogs that were also tape measures—had their time on top of the television.

  66

  What Is This?

  FOUR MONTHS after the coup we were on our way home from the Keskins’ one night when, fifteen minutes before curfew, Çetin and I were stopped by soldiers checking people’s identity cards on Sıraselviler Avenue. I was stretched out comfortably on the backseat, and as all my papers were in order I had nothing to fear. But as he took my identity card from me, the soldier gave me a dubious look. When I saw his eyes light upon the quince grater at my side, I grew nervous.

  By instinct, or by force of habit, I’d picked up the grater at the Keskins’ when no one was looking. It made me so happy that I’d been able to leave early without making too much of an effort, and, just before this, I’d taken the prize out of my coat pocket, like a hunter wishing to cast a proud look over a woodcock he’d just bagged, and I’d left it sitting on the seat beside me.

  The moment I’d arrived at the Keskins’ house that evening, I’d breathed in the lovely fragrance of quince jelly. While we were talking about this and that, Aunt Nesibe mentioned that she and Füsun had been boiling the fruit all afternoon over a low flame, and that they’d had a nice mother-daughter chat. It pleased me to imagine how, while her mother was busy with something else, Füsun had slowly stirred the jelly with a wooden spoon.

  After inspecting their occupants’ identity cards, the soldiers let some cars continue on their way. In other cases they ordered all the passengers out of the car and subjected them to careful body searches.

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sp; Çetin and I got out of the car as ordered. They studied our identity cards carefully. We complied when directed to place our hands on the Chevrolet, like culprits in a film. The two soldiers searched the glove compartment and looked under the seats and everywhere else. The sidewalks of Sıraselviler Avenue, hemmed in on both sides by apartment houses of some height, were wet, and I remember, too, that quite a few passersby turned to look at us. As the curfew drew closer and no people remained in the streets, I could see just ahead that the lights were out in the windows of Sixty-Six, the famous brothel that took its name from its street number, and that, in our last year of lycée, everyone in my class had visited. Mehmet knew quite a few of the girls.

  “Whose is this?” asked one of the soldiers.

  “It’s mine,” I said.

  “What is it?”

  I suddenly realized that I would be unable to say that it was a quince grater. If I did, it seemed to me they would instantly understand that I was obsessed with Füsun and had for years been visiting four or five times a week the house she shared with her family, such a hopeless and humiliating situation as to oblige them to see me as a man with strange inclinations, harboring evil. My head was foggy after an evening of clinking raki glasses with Tarık Bey, but when I think back on this episode so many years later, I do not believe this was the reason for my miscalculation. Only a few minutes earlier this quince grater had been part of the Keskins’ kitchen, and now it seemed so incongruous in the hands of this well-meaning officer from (I thought) Trabzon, that it unexpectedly sounded a deeper chord—something to do with living on this earth, and being human.

  “Is this thing yours, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it then, brother?”

  Again I fell silent, surrendering to despair—a new symptom of paralysis; I wanted this soldier, this brother of mine, to understand the wrong I had done without my telling him, but it wasn’t to be.

  I’d had a classmate in primary school who was odd and rather stupid. Whenever the teacher called him up to the blackboard to ask if he’d done his math homework, he would fall silent just as I had done now, refusing to say yes or no; so weighed down was he by guilt and failure that he could only stand there, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, until the teacher went mad with fury. What I did not understand as I watched him with such amazement in that classroom was that if a person were to fall into such a silence even once, it would never again be possible for him to open his mouth; he would remain silent for years, even centuries. When I was a child, I was happy and free. But that night on Sıraselviler Avenue, so many years later, I discovered what it meant to be unable to talk. I had already had intimations that my passion for Füsun would ultimately turn into such a story of stubborn introversion. My love for her, my obsession, or whatever one could call it—it had rendered me incapable of diverting myself onto a path that would lead me to sharing this world freely with another. Even in the early days I’d known deep in my heart that mutuality could never happen in the world I’ve been describing, and so I’d turned inward, to seek Füsun there. I think that Füsun knew, too, that one day I would find her inside me. In the end everything would be fine.

  “Officer, that is a grater,” said Çetin Efendi. “An ordinary quince grater.”

  How had Çetin recognized the grater?

  “So why couldn’t he tell me that himself?” He turned to me. “Look, we’re under martial law here…. Are you deaf or what?”

  “Officer, Kemal Bey is so sad these days….”

  “Why is that?” asked the officer, though his job left no room for compassion. “Get back in the car and wait!” he barked. Then he walked away holding the quince grater and our identity cards.

  The grater sparkled for a moment in the glare of the bright lights of the cars waiting behind us, before I saw it disappear inside the small army truck just ahead of us.

  Inside the Chevrolet, Çetin and I began to wait. The closer it got to curfew, the faster people were driving by, and in the distance we saw cars racing around the corners of Taksim Square. The silence between us was further laden with the fear and guilt that I felt whenever I was searched or my card was being checked or I was simply in the presence of the police. We listened to the car clock ticking, and to keep the silence we remained perfectly still.

  I imagined the grater being pawed by a captain inside the truck, and it made me uneasy. As I sat there waiting in silence, I was slowly swamped by anxiety, imagining the pain I would suffer should those soldiers confiscate the quince grater; even years later I would vividly remember how intense this anxiety was. Çetin turned on the radio. Announcers were reading out various bulletins related to the state of martial law: the wanted list, the prohibitions, the list of suspects who had been caught…. I asked Çetin if he could change the station. After a bit of crackling we were able to find a more agreeable program from a distant country. As we tried to distract ourselves, a few drops of rain fell onto the windshield.

  Twenty minutes after the beginning of the curfew, one of the soldiers came back and handed us our identity cards.

  “It’s all settled. You can go,” he said.

  “What if someone stops us for being out after the curfew?” Çetin asked.

  “You can say we stopped you,” said the soldier.

  Çetin started the engine. The soldier cleared the way for us. But I stepped out of the car and went over to the army truck.

  “Sir, I think you still have my mother’s quince grater….”

  “Now look at that, it turns out you aren’t deaf and dumb after all, and look how beautifully you speak.”

  “You can’t keep this on your person, sir, it could be used as a weapon and cause serious injury!” said another soldier, one of higher rank. “But fine, take it, just be sure you don’t bring it out with you again. What line of work are you in?”

  “I’m a businessman.”

  “Do you pay your taxes on time?”

  “I do.”

  They didn’t say anything more. I’d suffered a little heartbreak, but I was glad to be reunited with the grater. As Çetin drove us home, slowly and carefully, I realized I was happy. These dark, empty streets that now belonged to Istanbul’s dog packs, these avenues so ugly by daylight, hemmed in by concrete apartment buildings in such dreadful condition that it sapped my will just to look at them—now they looked alluringly mysterious, like poems.

  67

  Cologne

  IN JANUARY 1981, over lunch at Rejans, Feridun and I talked business as we drank our raki and ate our bluefish. Feridun was making commercials with Yani, a cameraman he knew from the Pelür, and while that caused me no misgivings, he was upset about doing such work “for the money.” Having observed the precocious ease with which Feridun had mastered the art of always looking comfortable and taking life’s pleasures as they came, I might at one time have found it hard to understand his moral qualms; but because suffering had caused me to mature beyond my years, I had come to realize that most people are not what they appear.

  “I have a screenplay that’s ready to go,” Feridun said then. “If I’m going to work for the money, it would be better to be working on that. It’s a little crude but it has good prospects.”

  It was at the Pelür Bar that I’d first heard screenplays described as “ready” or “absolutely ready” to be filmed; it meant that the screenplay had passed the board of censors or had been granted all the permissions from the state that would guarantee its safe passage. In times when very few screenplays with popular appeal passed the censors, directors and producers whose livelihood depended on making one or two films a year were prepared to shoot screenplays they’d not even considered, provided they were “ready.” Over many years of the board’s smoothing over the edges, and cutting the prickly bits out of everything that was interesting or original, films had assumed a dreary uniformity, and so for most directors it was no hardship to make a film about which they knew nothing.

  “Is the plot suitabl
e for Füsun?” I asked Feridun.

  “Not in the slightest. It’s a very suggestive role, perfect for Papatya. The actress will have to wear revealing clothing, and she also has to strip. Plus the leading man has to be Tahir Tan.”

  “It can’t be Tahir Tan.”

  We bickered for some time about Tahir Tan, as if the heart of the matter were not our using Papatya instead of Füsun in our first film together. “Let us not be ruled by emotions!” Feridun said, insisting the time had come to forget the incident at the Huzur Restaurant. Suddenly our eyes met. How much was he thinking of Füsun at that moment? I asked what the film was about.

  “A rich man seduces a beautiful girl who happens to be his distant relation, and then he abandons her. The girl, having lost her virginity, takes her revenge by becoming a singer…. As it happens, the songs were written for Papatya…. Hayal Hayati was going to make this film, but when Papatya refused to become his slave he got angry and pulled out. The screenplay was left in the lurch. It’s a great opportunity for us.”

  The screenplay, songs, and all else about this film were so bad as to be not just unsuitable for Füsun but a discredit to Feridun. Though my beauty had been sulking through every supper, bolts of lightning flashing in her eyes whenever she looked at me, I thought there might be a virtue in making Feridun happy, at least, and so before the lunch was over, encouraged by the raki, I agreed to back the film.

  In May 1981 Feridun began to shoot his “ready screenplay,” called Broken Lives, after the eighty-year-old novel of the same name by Halit Ziya; but there the resemblance ended, for this tale of love and family ties in the Ottoman mansions of the Westernized bourgeoisie and the imperial elite was a world away from the screenplay set in the muddy streets and gazinos of 1970s Istanbul. Sustained only by rage and pure will, our heroine (played by Papatya, who earnestly threw herself into the part) becomes famous for the love songs she performs in the gazinos as she devotes many patient years to plotting her revenge against the man who took her virginity; unlike the heroine of the novel, she is miserable not because she is married but because she cannot marry.