The Museum of Innocence Read online

  After our driving lessons in the park, when the sun was low in the sky, we would go to Emirgân for coffee and soda on the edge of the Bosphorus, or to a coffeehouse in Rumelihisarı for tea from a samovar, and these pleasures never failed to neutralize the aggravations of the lessons. But let no reader infer from this that we carried on like giddy lovers.

  “We’re making better progress at these lessons than we did with mathematics!” I said once.

  “We shall see,” Füsun replied cautiously.

  Sometimes we would sit at the table and drink our teas in silence, like some long-married couple who had run out of things to say to each other; as we admired the Russian tankers passing by, or the City Line ferries on their way to Heybeliada, or (as happened once) the Sam-sun heading out on its tour of the Black Sea ports, we seemed lost in misery, in dreams of other lives and other worlds.

  Füsun didn’t pass her second test either. This time they set her the very difficult task of maneuvering into an imaginary parking space while driving up a hill in reverse. When she made the Chevrolet tremble and judder again, they ordered her out of the car in the same humiliating way.

  I had been watching from a distance with a mixed crowd of retired policemen, applicants, letter writers, teaboys, and various gawkers; when one of them saw a bespectacled examiner once again take the wheel from Füsun, he said, “They flunked that chick,” and a couple of others laughed.

  As we drove back toward the house, Füsun was too upset to speak. Without asking her first, I parked the car in Ortaköy and sat down in a little meyhane in the market, where I ordered us some rakı with ice.

  “Life is short but very sweet, Füsun,” I said after a few swigs of rakı. “The time has come to stop letting these fiends get the better of you.”

  “How can they be so vile?”

  “They want money. So let’s pay them.”

  “Do you believe women can never be good drivers?”

  “It’s not what I think, but it is what they think.”

  “It’s what everyone thinks.”

  “Darling, I beg you, don’t be so stubborn about this as well,” I said, hoping almost at once that Füsun had not heard me say this.

  “I’m not stubborn in anything, Kemal,” she said. “But when your pride or your honor is being trampled on, you can’t just bow your head. Now I’m going to ask something of you, and I would like you to listen, please, and take it seriously. I am going to get my license without paying a bribe, Kemal, and on no account are you to interfere. Don’t you dare pay a bribe behind my back, and don’t try to pull any strings, either, because I’ll know if you do, and I will be extremely upset.”

  “All right,” I said, looking down.

  We drank our rakıs saying little more to each other. It was almost evening, and this meyhane in the middle of the market was empty. Impatient flies were perched uncertainly on its trays of fried mussels and little meatballs with thyme and cumin. Years later I went back for another look at that ramshackle meyhane whose memory is so dear to me, but the entire building had been razed and in its place were now shops selling evil eyes, trinkets, and other tourist souvenirs.

  That evening, after we’d left the restaurant and were getting back into the car, I took Füsun by the arm.

  “Do you know what, sweetheart? That was the first time in eight years we have eaten in a restaurant, just the two of us.”

  “Yes,” she said. The light that flickered for a moment in her eyes made me inordinately happy. “I have something else to say to you. Give me the keys, I’m going to drive the car.”

  “Of course.”

  The junctions and hills of Beşiktaş and Dolmabahçe made her perspire a little, but even though she’d had a bit to drink, she was able to steer the Chevrolet as far as Firuzağa Mosque without incident. When I picked her up three days later from the usual spot, she wanted to drive the car again, but the city was crawling with police and I talked her out of it. Despite the hot weather, our lesson went amazingly well.

  As we were driving back I looked at the whitecaps on the windy Bosphorus and said, “If only we’d brought our swimsuits!”

  The next time we went out, when Füsun left the house in the usual floral print dress, she was wearing underneath it the blue bikini displayed here. After our lesson, at Tarabya Beach, she did not take off her dress until just before she jumped off the seawall into the water. For one brief moment of embarrassment, I could see my beloved’s body, and then she swam away, so fast you might have thought she was fleeing me. The bubbles and the churning water in the wake of her plunge, the beautiful light, the midnight blue of the Bosphorus, her bikini—all this gathered in my mind to form an indelible image, a feeling. I spent years searching out that sentiment, and those wondrous colors, in the old photographs and postcards of Istanbul’s troubled collectors.

  I jumped into the sea right after her. A strange voice inside warned of monsters and evil creatures perhaps lurking underwater, waiting to attack her. I needed to reach her in time and protect her from the depths of the waves. I remember that I was giddy as I searched for her in the choppy sea, that I swam as fast as I could, panicked at the thought that happiness might escape my grasp, and that at one moment at the height of my panic I couldn’t breathe. Füsun had been carried away by the Bosphorus currents! At that moment I wanted to die with her; I wanted to die at once. Just then the capricious waves of the Bosphorus opened up and there was Füsun right in front of me. Both of us breathless, we faced each other with the smiles of happy lovers. But when I tried to get closer, so that I might touch her, kiss her, she pulled a long face, like some modest girl with scruples; without further dallying, she did a cool breaststroke away from me. I swam after her, doing the same stroke. As I swam I admired the movement of her beautiful legs, the sweet roundness of her buttocks. Only much later would I notice how far we were from shore.

  “Enough!” I said. “Stop running away from me. This is where the currents begin. They could sweep us both up, and we could die.”

  I turned around, and when I saw how far away the shore was, I was afraid. The city surrounded us, the European shore now seeming almost as distant as the Asian shore behind us. There was Tarabya Bay, and the Huzur, the restaurant where we’d eaten on so many occasions, and all the other restaurants lining the shore, and the Tarabya Hotel, and the cars, minibuses, and red buses snaking along the shore road, and the hills rising above it, and the shantytowns above Büyükdere—the entire city had receded.

  It was as if I were looking at a panoramic miniature painting, not just of the Bosphorus and the city, but of the life I’d left behind. It felt like a dream, this sense I had of being far from the city and my own past. To have reached the middle of the city, in the middle of the Bosphorus, to be so distant from everyone else but together with Füsun, felt like the chill of death. When a wave larger than the others hit Füsun unexpectedly and she let out a shriek, and wrapped her arms around my neck and shoulders to hold on, I knew then that only death would part us.

  Just after this fiery touch—we can call it an embrace—she used the excuse of an approaching coal freighter to swim away. She swam gracefully and very fast, so fast I had a hard time keeping up. As soon as she had climbed to the shore, Füsun left me for the bathhouse. None of this called to mind two lovers without shame about each other’s bodies. We were as shy, quiet, and prudish as if we’d just been introduced by our families with marriage in mind: We couldn’t even look at each other unclothed.

  By driving to and from her lessons, and sometimes to the city proper, Füsun had soon learned to drive well. But she did not pass the road test in early August either.

  “I flunked, but never mind. Let’s forget about those evil men,” said Füsun. “Shall we go to the seaside?”

  “Let’s go.”

  Like so many applicants who came to the road test with friends, and had their photos taken as if departing for their military service, only to fail the test, Füsun left the scene at the wheel, smokin
g and honking like an oafish truck driver. (When I went back many years later, those once ugly, bald, garbage-strewn hills had been transformed into luxury housing estates, complete with swimming pools.) We continued our lessons at Yıldız Park until the summer’s end, but by now the driver’s license was just an excuse for going to a restaurant or the beach. A few times we rented a rowboat from the wharf next to the Bebek ferry station, and together we’d row out to a place far from the jellyfish and the oil slicks, where the bay met with the currents, and there we’d jump into the sea. One of us would keep hold of the rowboat, to keep it from being swept away by the currents, holding the other with his—or her—free hand. I loved renting a rowboat in Bebek, not least for the pleasure of holding hands with her.

  This love finally flowering between us after eight long years was not something we embraced with joy; rather we approached it with great caution, like a friendship that beckons but is nevertheless exhausting. The eight years we’d lived through had buried our love deep within, yet it still made itself felt even at moments when we were paying it least attention. But when I saw that Füsun had no taste for risking the dangers of any greater intimacy before marriage, I, too, resisted my never absent desires to embrace or kiss her. I had begun to entertain the idea that couples who lost their heads and capitulated to desire before they wed, heedless of the consequences, were not likely destined for marital bliss, but rather for disillusionment and depression. As for Hilmi the Bastard, Tayfun, and Mehmet, whom I ran into now and again, I had begun to grow disdainful of these friends of mine, who still patronized brothels and bragged about their womanizing. At the same time, though, I dreamed that after Füsun and I were married I would find release from my obsessive thoughts and reunite with my friends, and everyone in my old circle, with the contentment that only maturity can confer.

  At the end of the summer Füsun took another test with the same examiners and failed once more. This unleashed the usual tirades about male prejudice against Istanbul’s women drivers, and she railed against them with that same expression on her face I remembered from so many years earlier, when she’d told me about the sleazy “uncles” who had pawed and molested her.

  Early one evening, following our driving lesson, we went to Sariyer Beach, and as we sat there drinking Meltem (an indication that Zaim’s campaign with Papatya had worked somewhat) we saw a friend of Mehmet’s named Faruk, together with his fiancée, and at that moment I felt a strange sort of shame. This was not on account of Faruk’s having paid many visits to the yali in Anadoluhisarı during the summer of 1975 or his having witnessed the sort of life Sibel and I had led there; I was ashamed because Füsun and I showed no joy as we sat there silently drinking Meltem. The silence stemmed from our awareness that this would be our last trip to the beach. The first storks flying past us in the evening sky overhead announced to us that this beautiful summer would soon come to an end. One week later, when the beaches closed with the first rains, neither Füsun nor I had any urge to go to Yıldız Park to practice driving.

  After failing three more times, Füsun finally passed her road test in early 1984. They had tired of her, and they understood by then that she was never going to pay a bribe. To celebrate the occasion, that night I took her and Aunt Nesibe and Tarık Bey to the Maksim Gazino to hear Müzeyyen Senar sing old Turkish songs.

  74

  Tarik Bey

  THAT EVENING we all went out to Bebek Maksim, all of us got drunk, and after Müzeyyen Senar came out on stage, everyone at the table began to sing along. As we joined in with the refrains, we would look into one another’s eyes and smile. Looking back so many years later, I imagine it had the aura of a farewell ceremony. Actually, it was Tarık Bey, and not Füsun, who most loved Müzeyyen Senar’s singing, but I’d thought it would delight Füsun to see her father drinking and blissfully harmonizing with Müzeyyen Senar as he did renditions of songs like “There’s No One Else Like You.” The most memorable thing about the evening for me was noticing for the first time that Feridun’s absence had become ordinary. That evening I reflected happily on how much time I’d spent alone with Füsun and her parents.

  Sometimes the passage of time would be marked by seeing a building torn down, or discovering that a little girl had become a high-spirited, buxom woman with children of her own, or I’d notice that some store to which my eyes had grown accustomed had been boarded up, and I would feel anxious. When I saw, at around this time, that the Şanzelize Boutique had closed, I was pained not only at the loss of my own memories, but equally by a sudden feeling that life had gone on without me. In the window where Sibel had spied the counterfeit Jenny Colon handbag nine years earlier, coils of Italian salamis were now hanging, and wheels of hard yellow cheese, as well as the European brands of bottled salad dressings, the pastas and soft drinks just entering the Turkish market.

  And whereas before I had always enjoyed sitting with my mother at the dinner table and listening to her gossip about children, families, and weddings, it was at around this time that such reports began to unsettle me. As my mother, displaying her customary hyperbole, told of how my childhood friend Faruk the Mouse already had his second child—“a strapping boy!”—though he’d been married for only a short time—“three years!”—and as I thought about having been unable to share my life with Füsun, my joy would drain away, but my mother, noticing nothing, would just keep talking.

  Ever since Şaziment had (at last) managed to marry off her elder daughter to the Karahan boy, they’d stopped going to ski in Uludağ every February, preferring to spend a month in Switzerland with the rest of the Karahan clan, and taking Şaziment’s younger daughter with them. This younger daughter had found herself a rich Arab prince who was staying in the same hotel, and Şaziment had almost succeeded in marrying her off as well when it emerged that the prince had another wife back in his own country—a harem, even. As for the Halis family of Ayvalık, their eldest son—“You remember, the one with the longest chin,” said my mother with a laugh, which I could not help sharing—my mother had heard from Esat Bey, her neighbor in Suadiye, that the boy had been caught on a winter’s day at their summer house in Erenköy with the German nanny. The eldest son of Maruf the tobacco king—when we were children, we’d played together with shovels and pails in the sandboxes of city parks—had been kidnapped by terrorists, a development my mother was shocked to learn I had not heard about, not even when he was released following the payment of a ransom. Yes, they’d managed to keep the matter from the press, but because the family had been so slow to cough up the money, everyone had been “scandalized” for months on end by the matter—so how could I not have heard?

  I was worried that my mother might have intended this question as a dig about my visits to Füsun’s family; maybe she was remembering that whenever I came home on summer evenings with wet swimming trunks, and both she and Fatma Hanım would ask whom I’d gone swimming with, how I’d reply, “I’m working very hard, Mother dear,” and try to change the subject (as if it had eluded my mother what dreadful shape Satsat was in). It made me sad that after nine years I’d still found no ways of intimating to my mother my obsessive love for Füsun, let alone confiding in her; I would long for her to tell me another pointless story so that I could forget my troubles. One night she described in great detail about how Cemile Hanım, whom I’d seen at the Majestic Garden Cinema with Füsun and Feridun many summers ago, being no longer able to afford the upkeep on her eighty-year-old mansion, had, like Mükerrem Hanım, another of my mother’s friends, taken to renting it out to producers of historic melodramas, only to see “that huge, lovely mansion” burned down, ostensibly due to faulty electrical equipment during filming, though everyone knew the family had deliberately set the fire to erect an apartment building in the mansion’s place. The narrative was so vivid that I was in no doubt about my mother’s full awareness of my close ties to the film world, the particulars of which Osman must have furnished her.

  Though I’d been amused to read in the papers
about Melikhan, the former foreign minister, who had taken a fall having caught his foot on a carpet at a ball and died two days later of a brain hemorrhage, my mother didn’t mention it, fearing perhaps that it might remind me of Sibel and the engagement. There were other pieces of news that my mother saw fit to withhold, but that I’d heard from Basri, the Nişantaşı barber. It was he, for instance, who informed me that my father’s friend Fasih Fahir and his wife, Zarife, had bought a house in Bodrum; that Sabih the Bear was actually a very decent person “underneath it all;” that gold was actually a foolish investment right now; that prices were bound to fall; that there would be a lot of fixing at the horse races that summer; that even without a hair left on his head, the famously wealthy Turgay Bey, out of attachment to the habits of a gentleman, still came in for regular haircuts; that two years ago Basri had been offered the Hilton concession, but being a “man of principle” (the meaning of which he did not elaborate) he had declined—and in this same spirit proceeded to ply me for any information I might have on this and that. It would irritate me to realize that Basri and all his rich Nişantaşı clients knew all about my obsession for Füsun, and lest I give them more to gossip about, I would sometimes go to Cevat, my father’s old barber in Beyoğlu, and from him I would hear tales of the Beyoğlu hoodlums (by now referred to as the mafia) and the film world. It was from him, for example, that I heard of Papatya’s involvement with Muzaffer, the famous producer. None of my sources, however, talked to me about Sibel or Zaim, or about Mehmet and Nurcihan’s wedding. From this, if nothing else, I should have deduced the universal awareness of my sorrow and suffering, but I didn’t: My informants’ tact seemed as natural to me as their oft-repeated indiscreet accounts of all the bankers going bankrupt, stories I always welcomed.