The Museum of Innocence Read online

  70

  Broken Lives

  A WEEK after the curfew was pushed back to eleven o’clock, Feridun made it home with just half an hour to spare. For some time he had not been coming home at night, saying the shooting had run late and he had slept on the set. That night he came in drunk, and very obviously miserable. Seeing us sitting at the table, he forced himself to utter a few pleasantries, but he couldn’t keep it up for long. When his eyes met Füsun’s, he took on the air of a soldier just returned from a long and disastrous campaign, and saying little more he went upstairs to his room. Füsun should have risen from the table and followed her husband up, but she didn’t.

  I had fixed my eyes on hers and was watching her carefully. She knew my eyes were on her. She lit a cigarette, smoking it casually, as if nothing had happened. (She no longer took care to blow the smoke to one side, having lost the old pretense of shame to be smoking in front of her father.) She stubbed it out without much expression. I suddenly found myself unable to stand up, an affliction from which I thought I’d recovered, but here it was as if it had never left me.

  At nine minutes to eleven, as Füsun placed a new Samsun between her lips, a bit more deliberately than usual, she gave me a long, cautious look. We told each other so much with our eyes at that moment that I felt as if we had been talking freely all evening. Of its own accord, my hand reached out, and I lit the cigarette between her lips. For a moment Füsun did what Turkish men only see in foreign films, touching the hand that was holding the lighter.

  I, too, lit a cigarette, smoking it slowly, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. With every moment I felt the curfew drawing closer. Aunt Nesibe was fully aware of what was going on, but, frightened by the seriousness of the situation, she didn’t say a word. As for Tarık Bey, he, too, almost certainly realized how strange a turn things had taken, but he couldn’t quite figure out whether he needed to pretend he hadn’t noticed. I left the house at ten past eleven. I think this was the night that the idea dawned on me that Füsun and I would in fact marry. I was so ecstatically happy to realize that Füsun would prefer me in the end that I forgot what great jeopardy I had put myself in, and Çetin, too, by going out into the streets after the curfew. After dropping me off in front of the house in Nişantaşı, Çetin Efendi would leave the car at a garage on Nigâr the Poetess Street, only a minute’s drive away, and from there he would have to walk through the backstreets to his home in the old shantytown nearby, trying to avoid detection. But I was too happy that night to worry, and like a child I couldn’t sleep.

  Seven weeks later, during the premiere of Broken Lives at the Palace Cinema in Beyoğlu, I was with the Keskins at the house in Çukurcuma. As the wife of the director, Füsun should naturally have attended the premiere, as I should have done, being the producer and owning more than half of Lemon Films, but neither of us did. Füsun needed no excuse, as she and Feridun weren’t talking, her husband having scarcely been home that summer: Almost certainly he was living with Papatya. He’d drop by the house in Çukurcuma every other week to collect a few things from his room—a shirt, or a book. I would hear of these visits only indirectly, from Aunt Nesibe’s hints and asides, but despite my extreme curiosity, I dared not raise this “forbidden” subject. From the looks she gave me, and her general demeanor, it was clear that Füsun had prohibited any mention of the matter in my presence. But it was Aunt Nesibe who eventually informed me that a fight had broken out during one of Feridun’s visits.

  I calculated that if I went to the premiere, Füsun would read about it in the papers and, getting upset, would certainly punish me. Still, as the film’s producer, I would be conspicuous by my absence. Just after lunch that day I had Zeynep Hanım ring Lemon Films to say that my mother was very ill, and that I would therefore be unable to leave home.

  That evening, around the time that Broken Lives was to be shown for the first time to the cineastes and journalists of Istanbul, it was raining. When Çetin picked me up in Nişantaşı, I told him to take me to the Keskins’ via Taksim and Galatasaray instead of Tophane. As we passed in front of the Palace Cinema I peered through the raindrops on the windows and saw a few well-dressed people walking to the premiere holding umbrellas, and the fancy posters and announcements paid for by Lemon Films, but it was not at all like the Palace Cinema premiere I had imagined for Füsun’s first film.

  No one mentioned the premiere over supper. Tarık Bey, Aunt Nesibe, Füsun, and I chain-smoked as we ate macaroni with meat sauce, yogurt with cucumbers and garlic, tomato salad, white cheese, and then the ice cream I’d brought from Ömür in Nişantaşı and put straight into the freezer on arrival. We kept rising from the table to look out the window at the rain, the water pouring down Çukurcuma Hill. As the evening dragged on I was tempted on several occasions to ask Füsun how her bird painting was going, but from her harsh expression and her frowns I deduced that this was not an opportune moment.

  Though the critics belittled Broken Lives in vicious terms, it met with such enthusiasm among audiences in both Istanbul and the provinces that it was pronounced a box office hit. During the last scenes, when Papatya sings two bitter, anguished songs about her misfortune, it was women in the provinces who cried hardest, but people of all sorts, young and old, left the humid, airless cinemas with puffy eyes. In the penultimate scene, when Papatya kills the evil rich man who had tricked her, staining her honor when she was still a child, but who now stands before her, pleading for his life, there was universal exultation. This scene made such an impression, becoming so familiar that the actor playing the part of the evil rich man (Ekrem Bey, our friend from the Pelür, who typically played Byzantine priests and Armenian militants) stopped going out for a time, tired of being punched and spat upon in the streets. The film was also praised for bringing back the crowds that had stayed away from cinemas during the “terror years”—as people now alluded to the period preceding the military coup. And with the revival of the cinemas, the Pelür Bar had filled up again, too: Sensing the resuscitation of the film business, its former regulars were again coming every day to strike deals or just to be seen. On a windy, rainy night at the end of October, two hours before the curfew, when—at Feridun’s insistence—I dropped by the Pelür, I saw that my reputation there was much enhanced; to use the expression of the day, I was in my element. The commercial success of Broken Lives had transformed me into a prominent producer to whom many were also prepared to attribute a quick wit and slyness, and everyone from cameramen to famous actors sought to sit for a while at my table and befriend me.

  By the end of that evening, though my head was swimming from the compliments, the attention, and the drink, I remember sitting down with Hayal Hayati, Feridun, Papatya, and Tahir Tan. Ekrem Bey, at least as drunk as I was, kept needling Papatya with mischievous jokes about the photographs of the rape scene that the papers had been reprinting incessantly; but Papatya responded with a good-natured smile, saying that she would never sleep with a penniless, decrepit rooster. At the next table was a dandified critic who had ridiculed her for appearing in such a “vulgar melodrama;” Papatya tried for a time to provoke Feridun into giving him a good thrashing, but the effort was fruitless.

  After the film, Ekrem Bey received numerous invitations to appear in bank commercials, though he confessed that he could not understand why: Evil men weren’t supposed to be in demand for commercials. But in those days, with everyone talking about the bankers offering 200 percent interest, and these bankers fanning the flames with big advertisements in newspapers and on television using Yeşilçam’s most famous faces, the film community was well disposed toward them. Still, as I was in the drunken eyes of the Pelür’s clientele a modern businessman (by Hayal Hayati’s definition, “A businessman who loves culture is modern”), whenever such subjects came up there was a respectful silence, which, it was hoped, I would fill with my opinion. In the wake of the box office success, I had been credentialed a farsighted “ruthless capitalist;” and everyone forgot that I had firs
t come to the Pelür years ago to make Füsun a star, just as they had forgotten Füsun herself. Just reflecting on how fast Füsun had been forgotten caused my love for her to flare up inside me, and I would want to see her at once, and then thinking about how she had been able to resist being drawn into this tawdry world to the point of staining her reputation, I loved her all the more—and once again I would congratulate myself on keeping her away from these malevolent people.

  It was an aging unknown, a friend of Papatya’s mother’s, who had dubbed the songs for Papatya in the film. Now, thanks to the success of Broken Lives, Papatya was going to make a record in which she sang the songs herself. That October evening we agreed that Lemon Films should back this venture, too, and also get started on a sequel to Broken Lives. Actually, the decision to do the sequel was not ours; it was what the cinemas and distributors of Anatolia called for unanimously, and so insistently that any refusal by Feridun would have been seen as “spitting in the face of success,” to use another expression of the day. Whatever her intentions, by the end of the film Papatya’s character had, like all girls, good or evil, who had lost their virginity, died without realizing her dream of a happy family life. We decided that the best solution was to reveal that Papatya had not really died at all, that having been wounded, she had feigned her death to keep herself safe from other evil men. The sequel’s first scene would be in the hospital.

  It was three days later that Milliyet ran an interview with Papatya in which she announced that shooting was soon to begin. By now there was an interview with her in the papers every day. When Broken Lives had first opened, the papers had dropped hints that Papatya and Tahir Tan were having a secret affair in reality, but the life had gone out of this rumor, and now Papatya was denying it. When we spoke on the phone at around this time, Feridun informed me that all the most famous actors now wanted to play opposite Papatya, and that, anyway, Tahir Tan wasn’t suited for the part. For in her latest interviews Papatya had begun revealing that, though she had kissed men, she’d of course never been truly intimate with one. Her fondest and truly most indelible memory remained her first kiss, this with her teenaged sweetheart on a summer’s day, in a vineyard buzzing with bees. Sadly, the youth had been martyred while fighting against the Greeks in Cyprus. And after that Papatya had considered intimacy with any man inconceivable, concluding that only another lieutenant might be able to mend her heart. Feridun allowed that he didn’t approve of such lies, but Papatya insisted that she’d only told them to help get the sequel past the censors. Feridun made little effort to conceal his relationship with Papatya from me; it was in keeping with his nature as one who picked no fights and had no quarrels, only carrying on, forever the naïf, never bitter or less than sincere—and for this I genuinely envied him.