The Museum of Innocence Read online

  It was two years earlier, at the office and also from friends, that I’d begun to hear about all the bankers who’d gone bankrupt, and all the investors who’d lost their fortunes—stories I enjoyed because they proved the utter brainlessness of the Istanbul rich, not to mention their slave masters in Ankara. For her part, my mother relished saying, “Your dear departed father always did insist that no one should trust those conniving bankers!”—a subject she warmed to since, unlike so many others in our circle, we’d not fallen prey to them. (Though I sometimes suspected that Osman had secretly invested some of the profits from his new ventures with them.) My mother felt bad for any friends who’d been fleeced—Kadri the Sieve, whose beautiful daughter she had once hoped I would marry, Cüneyt Bey and Feyzan Hanım, Cevdet Bey and his family, the Pamuks—but when it came to the Lerzans, she would profess amazement that they should have consigned their entire fortune to a “so-called banker” who was the son of an accountant in one of their own factories (and who had worked his way up from security guard), a man who had only recently risen from the shantytowns with no financial credentials, but with an office of some sort, an advertisement on TV, and a checking account with a reputable bank. Closing her eyes as if she would faint and shaking her head half in jest, she would say, “They could at least have gone to someone like Kastelli, who’s so close to those actor friends of yours.” I would never dwell on the subject of my actor friends; when she marveled that “sensible, reasonable people” (including, as readers will recall, Zaim) could be so harebrained, I would enjoy chiming in.

  Tarık Bey numbered among those my mother dismissed as stupid. He had invested money with Kastelli the banker, who had hired so many of the famous actors we knew from the Pelür to appear in his commercials. When Tarık Bey had admitted losses two years earlier, I’d assumed them to be small, as he gave no indication of serious suffering or hardship.

  On Friday, March 9, 1984, two months after Füsun got her driver’s license, when Çetin dropped me off at the house in Çukurcuma at suppertime, I saw that all the windows and curtains were open, and the lights were on upstairs and downstairs, this despite Aunt Nesibe’s perennial upset at the waste of electricity when a single light was left on upstairs at suppertime; without fail, she would say, “Füsun, my girl, the bedroom light’s still on,” and without delay Füsun would go straight upstairs to turn it off.

  Steeling myself for a family quarrel between Feridun and Füsun, I went upstairs. No one was seated at the table where we’d eaten supper for so many years, nor could I see any food. The television was on, and sitting before it were two neighbors—an old lady and her husband—who seemed at a loss as to what to do. Out of the corners of their eyes they were watching our actor friend Ekrem Bey, who, dressed as the grand vizier, was making a speech about infidels.

  “Kemal Bey,” said the neighbor, Efe the electrician. “Tarık Bey has passed away. Please accept our condolences.”

  I ran upstairs, instinct taking me not to the master bedroom but to Füsun’s room—the little bedroom I had dreamed of for so many years.

  My lovely was lying doubled up in bed and crying. When she saw me she straightened herself, and I sat down beside her. We instantly threw our arms around each other, embracing with all our strength. She rested her head between my neck and chest, weeping convulsively.

  Dear God, what great happiness it was to hold her in my arms! I felt the world’s profundity, its unbounded beauty. With her head resting on my shoulder, her chest pressed against mine, I felt as if it were not just she but the entire world in my arms. Her shaking upset me, grieved me deeply, in fact, but what bliss it brought me, too! I stroked her hair with care and tenderness, combing it gently with my fingers. Every time my hand returned to her roots so my fingers could pass once more through her hair, her entire body quaked as she burst into tears once more.

  I called to mind my own father’s death so that I might better share in her grief. But much as I’d loved my father, there’d always been a tension between us, a rivalry of sorts. Füsun, by contrast, had loved her father deeply, tirelessly, and without effort or reservation, just as one might love one’s home, and one’s street, and the sun that shone down on them. And it seemed to me that her tears were shed not just for her father but also for the state of the world, and the course of life.

  “Don’t worry, my darling,” I whispered into her ear. “Everything will be fine from now on. From now on everything will work out. We are going to be very happy.”

  “I don’t want anything anymore!” she said, wailing more fiercely. As I felt her shudder in my arms, I looked long and hard at the furniture, the drawers, the little nightstand, Feridun’s film books, and so much else. For eight years, how much I had longed to come into this room where Füsun kept all her dresses, and all her other belongings.

  As her sobbing intensified, Aunt Nesibe came in. “Oh Kemal,” she said, “what are we going to do? How can I live without him?” Sitting down on the bed, she, too, began to cry.

  I spent the night in Çukurcuma. Sometimes I would go downstairs to sit with the friends and acquaintances who had come to offer condolences, and then I would go back upstairs to comfort Füsun, still crying in her room; I would stroke her hair and give her a fresh handkerchief. As her father’s body lay in the next room, and the friends and acquaintances gathered together downstairs sat drinking tea and smoking cigarettes and watching television in silence, Füsun and I lay side by side, locked in an embrace, for the first time in nine years. I breathed in the scent of her neck, her hair, her skin perfumed with the scent that the exertions of crying had released. Then I would go back downstairs to serve the guests.

  Feridun was unaware of what had happened, and that night he did not come to the house. It is only now, years later, that I can fully appreciate the thoughtfulness of the neighbors in acting as if it was entirely natural that I be there, indeed as if I were Füsun’s husband. I’d met them all in the course of my visits to Çukurcuma, sometimes in the street, and sometimes when they called at the house, and to offer them tea and coffee, to empty their ashtrays, to offer them pastries hurriedly acquired from the corner bakery was for me a welcome distraction, as it was for Füsun and Aunt Nesibe. At one point three men—the Laz carpenter whose shop was just up the hill, the eldest son of Rahmi Bey (whose artificial hand will be familiar to all museum visitors), and an old friend who often came to play cards with Tarık Bey in the afternoons—embraced me each in turn, repeating the traditional entreaty not to die with the dead. But as I grieved for Tarık Bey, there was also inside me a boundless will to live; as I considered the new life now awaiting me, I felt deeply happy, and on this account ashamed.

  After the banker he’d invested with went bankrupt and fled the country, Tarık Bey began to spend time at an association set up by a number of other “banker victims” (as the newspapers liked to call them). The association had been established to find a legal means of recovering the money that the retirees and petty clerks had lost to the bankers, but in this it had been unsuccessful. As Tarık Bey would sometimes relate to us, barely containing his laughter, the members (whom he sometimes described as a “brainless rabble”) were so fractious that planning discussions would typically degenerate into argument, with victims kicking and punching one another. Sometimes, after a great deal of shouting, they would force through a petition, which they’d submit to the ministry or leave at the door of a bank or a newspaper with no professed interest in helping them. Some members would pelt banks with rocks, bellowing their grievances, sometimes assaulting bank clerks. After several unsavory incidents in which bankers’ doors had been kicked down and their homes and offices looted, Tarık Bey distanced himself from the association, but that summer, while Füsun and I were sweating for her driver’s license and swimming in the sea, he’d begun attending meetings once again. That afternoon some development at the association had particularly annoyed him, and he’d gone home complaining of chest pains; as the doctor who’d come hours too late
was able to confirm with one look, he’d died of a heart attack.

  Füsun was all the more distraught at not having been at home when her father died. Tarık Bey must have lain in bed for a long time, waiting for his wife and daughter. Aunt Nesibe had taken Füsun along that day to a house in Moda to finish a dress that was a rush order. In spite of all the assistance I had given the family, from time to time Aunt Nesibe still went off with that sewing box with the picture of Galata Bridge on it, to work at various houses at a daily rate. In no way was I insulted, as other men might have been, by Aunt Nesibe’s persistence; rather, I was impressed that she still sewed, even though she knew she could count on me for support. Still, I was troubled whenever I heard that Füsun had accompanied her, asking myself what my beauty, my one and only, could be doing in those strangers’ houses; but she went only rarely, and even more rarely spoke to me about those sewing day trips, though when she did she always described them as pleasant excursions, in terms reminiscent of her mother’s visits to Suadiye so many years ago, with such joy in her voice as she told me of drinking ajran on the Kadıköy ferry, and of throwing simits to the seagulls, that I hadn’t had the heart to tell her that when we were married and living among the rich, neither of us would enjoy meeting those people whose houses she’d visited as a seamstress.

  Long after midnight, when everyone had left, I curled up on the divan in the back room downstairs. To sleep in the same house with Füsun, for the first time in my life … this was the greatest happiness. Before drifting off to blissful sleep, I listened first to Lemon rattling about in his cage, and then to the ships sounding their whistles.

  I woke up with the morning call to prayer; by now the ships on the Bosphorus were more insistent, and in my dream Füsun’s ferry ride from Karaköy to Kadıköy had merged with Tarık Bey’s death.

  From time to time, I heard foghorns, too, and the whole house was bathed in the pearly white that was particular to foggy days. Passing in silence through the white dreamscape, I made my way up the stairs. There, on the bed where she and Feridun had spent the first happy nights of their marriage, I found Füsun fast asleep, with her arms draped around her mother. I sensed that Aunt Nesibe had heard me. I gave the room one last careful peek: Füsun really was asleep, and Aunt Nesibe was pretending.

  Going into the other room, I gently lifted the sheet they’d draped over him, and looked for the first time at Tarık Bey’s body. He was still wearing the jacket he’d put on to attend the meeting at the banker victims’ association. His face was ashen, the blood having gathered at the nape of his neck. It was as if the stains and moles and wrinkles on his face had grown larger in death. Was this because his soul had left him, or because his body had already begun to decay and change shape? Death’s terrifying presence was much stronger than the love I felt for Tarık Bey. Rather than feel for him, or put myself in his shoes, I wanted only to flee. But I did not leave the room.

  I’d loved Tarık Bey because he was Füsun’s father, because we’d spent so many years at the same table, drinking raki and watching television. But as he’d never really opened himself up to me, I’d never felt truly close to him. In truth, we’d never been fully satisfied with each other, but in spite of that we still managed to get along.

  As I thought all this over, I realized that Tarık Bey, like his wife, had known from the beginning that I was in love with his daughter. Or rather, I did not so much realize this as confess it to myself. He’d almost certainly known very early on that I’d been so irresponsible as to sleep with his daughter when she was but eighteen years old, and, inevitably, dismissed me as a heartless rich man, a boorish philanderer. As I was the one who had forced him to marry his precious girl off to a penniless boy with no prospects, he could not but have hated me! But he had never once shown his resentment; or perhaps I had never once wanted to see it. I might say he had both resented and forgiven me, as thieves and gangsters keep company by turning a blind eye on one another’s iniquities and disgraces. This was why, after the first few years, he’d ceased to be the man of the house, just as I had ceased to be the guest: We had become partners in crime.

  As I looked at Tarık Bey’s frozen face, a long-suppressed memory surfaced: I was reminded of the fear and awe that had printed itself on my father’s face as he faced death. Tarık Bey’s heart attack had lasted longer: He’d met death and struggled with it, and so on his face there was no awe. He’d bitten his lips on one side, as if to fight the pain, and the other side of his mouth was open, as if grinning. At the table he’d always had a cigarette in that corner of his mouth, and a raki glass in front of him. But in the room there was no charge issuing from the objects that had surrounded him in life; there was only the fog of death and the void.

  The white light flooding the room came mostly from the left-hand side of the bay window. Looking outside I saw the narrow street was empty. Because the bay window extended as far as the middle of the street, I could imagine myself suspended above it in midair, in fog so thick that I could only just see the corner where the street met Boğazkesen Avenue, the entire neighborhood asleep in the fog, a cat confidently slinking slowly down the street.

  Just over his bed, Tarık Bey had hung a framed photograph from his days as a teacher at Kars Lycée: It showed him standing with his students at the end of a play they had performed in the famous theater that dated back to the time when the city had belonged to the Russians. The top of the bedside table and its half-open drawer also brought back strange memories of my father. It emanated a sweet fragrance, a mixture of dust, medicine, cough syrup, and yellowing paper. Above the drawer I saw a water glass containing his false teeth and a book by his beloved Reşat Ekrem Koçu. Inside the drawer there were old medicine bottles, cigarette holders, telegrams, folded doctors’ reports, newspaper articles about bankers, electric and gas bills, coins now gone out of circulation, and many other odds and ends.

  Before any of the day’s visitors gathered at the Keskin house, I left for Nişantaşı. My mother was up and having breakfast in bed, eating from a tray Fatma Hanım had brought her and propped on a pillow: boiled eggs, marmalade, black olives, and toasted bread. She perked up when she saw me. When I told her about Tarık Bey, her face dropped, and she looked genuinely sorry. I could tell that she felt Nesibe’s grief. But beneath that I sensed something else.

  “I’ll be going back there,” I said. “Çetin can bring you to the funeral.”

  “I’m not going to the funeral, my son.”

  “Why not?”

  First she gave two ridiculous excuses. “There’s been no announcement in the papers. Why are they in such a big hurry?” and “Why aren’t they having the funeral at Teşvikiye Mosque? Everyone else started their funeral processions there.” I could see that she felt deeply for Nesibe, whom she’d liked so much, and with whom she’d had such good fun during the days when Nesibe had come to the house to sew. But underneath there was something else, something unyielding. When she saw how unsettled I was by her refusal, and how determined to know the true reasons for it, she lost her temper.

  “Do you want to know why I’m not going to the funeral?” she said. “Because if I do, you’ll marry that girl.”

  “Where did you get that idea? She’s married already.”

  “I know. It will break Nesibe’s heart. But my son, I’ve known all about this for years. If you insist on marrying her, it won’t be a pretty picture to most people.”

  “Does it really matter, Mother dear? People will always talk.”

  “Please, I beg of you, don’t take offense.” Looking very serious, she set her toast on the tray, and next to it, her knife, smeared with butter; and she looked intently into my eyes. “At the end of the day, what other people say has no importance whatsoever. Of course, what’s important is the truth, the honesty of our feelings. I have no complaints about that, my son. You fell in love with a woman…. And that’s wonderful, my son. I can’t complain about that. But has she ever loved you? What has she done over the past eig
ht years? Why has she still not left her husband?”

  “She’s going to leave him, I am certain of it,” I lied ashamedly.

  “Look, your dear departed father was smitten with a poor woman young enough to be his daughter…. He was obsessed with her. He even bought her a house. But he kept everything hidden; he didn’t make a fool of himself as you have done. Even his closest friend had no idea.” She turned toward Fatma Hanım, who had just entered the room, and said, “Fatma, we’re having a little talk.” When Fatma had withdrawn, shutting the door behind her, my mother continued. “Your dear departed father was a man of character and intelligence, and a gentleman, too, but even he had his weaknesses and desires. Years ago you asked me for the key to the Merhamet Apartments and I gave it to you, but knowing you to be your father’s son, I warned you. ‘For goodness’ sake, be careful,’ I said. Didn’t I? My son, you didn’t listen to me at all. All right, you say to me that if it’s your fault, where is Nesibe’s sin in all this? What I can never forgive is this torture she and her daughter have subjected you to, these ten long years.”

  I did not say, It’s been eight, not ten, Mother. “All right, Mother,” I said. “I know what to say to them.”

  “My son, you can’t find happiness with that girl. If you could, you’d have found it by now. I don’t think you should go to the funeral either.”

  I did not infer from my mother’s words that I had ruined my life: Quite to the contrary, she’d reminded me, and I felt this all the time now, that I was soon to share a happy life with Füsun. And so I was not in the least angry with her; I even smiled as I listened to her lecture, my only wish being to return to Füsun’s side at once.