The Museum of Innocence Read online

  That evening I went to Beyoğlu; as I walked the length of İstiklal Avenue I was surprised to see it so empty. Outside the big cinemas like the Palace and Fitaş, where they now showed sex films, there were only a few fidgety men. When I passed through Galatasaray Square, I realized how close I was to Füsun’s house. Sometimes, on summer nights, the whole family would stroll up to Beyoğlu for ice cream. Perhaps we might cross paths. But I could not see a single woman in the streets, or a single family. When I reached Tünel, I again became uneasy about being so close to Füsun’s house, so I walked in the opposite direction to resist its pull. Passing alongside the Galata Tower I walked down to the bottom of Yüksekkaldırım. At the corner where Yüksekkaldırım crossed the street of the bordellos, there was the usual crowd of wretched men. Like everyone else, they were looking up at the play of the orange light against the black clouds.

  I crossed the Galata Bridge with the crowd watching the fire in the distance. Even those trawling for mackerel from the bridge could not take their eyes off the flames. Without my willing it, my feet followed the crowd as far as Gülhane Park. The lights in the park were out—because either, like most of Istanbul’s streetlamps, they had been shattered by stones hurled in rage, or because there’d been a power cut—but the flames rising from the tanker were so intense that the whole of this large park, and Topkapı Palace, to which it had once belonged, together with the mouth of the Bosphorus, and Üsküdar, Salacak, and Leander’s Tower, were as bright as day. The light in the park, coming directly from both the fire and the orange light reflecting off the clouds, provided the cozy glow of a lampshade in a European sitting room, making the large, restless crowd of onlookers seem happier and more peaceful than they really were. Or else the pleasure of watching a spectacle had lifted their spirits. This throng had come from all parts of the city—by bus, by foot, and by car, rich and poor, some obsessively and others simply curious. I could see grandmothers in headscarves; young mothers with their sleeping children in their arms, clinging to their husbands; unemployed men hypnotized by the fire; drivers sitting in their cars and their trucks, listening to music; and street vendors who had rushed in from all quarters to hawk helva, stuffed mussels, fried liver, and lahmacun; as well as tea vendors darting among the crowd with their trays. Arranged around the base of the Atatürk statue were the men who sold meatballs and hot sausages stuffed in bread; they had lit the grills in their glass-covered carts, and the pleasant aroma of grilled meat filled the air. The boys hawking ayran and soda (but not Meltem) had turned the park into a market. I bought a tea from one street vendor, and, finding a place on one of the benches, next to a poor, old, and toothless man, I felt my own happiness as I watched the flames.

  I returned each day until the end of the week, by which time the fire was beginning to die. Sometimes the faint flames would flare up again, rising in a wave to the height we had seen on the first day, again casting an orange glow on the faces of those watching the fire with such fear and awe, as the flames bathed not just the mouth of the Bosphorus, but Haydarpaşa Station, the Selimiye Barracks, and Kadıköy Bay in shades of orange, and sometimes gold. At such moments I would stand motionless with the rest of the crowd, entranced by the view. A while later we would hear an explosion and watch the embers fall, or try to listen as the flames silently shrank. It was the spectators’ cue to settle in for eating and drinking and chatting.

  During one of these evenings at Gülhane Park, I spotted Nurcihan and Mehmet, but I ran off before they could see me. That I longed to see Füsun there with her parents, and that this had perhaps been my reason for joining this crowd every evening—it was only after seeing a family whose three shadows resembled theirs that I realized this. It was just as it had been during the summer of 1975, now four years past: Every time I saw anyone who looked like Füsun, love would make my heart race. The Keskins were, I thought, just the sort of family to believe most sincerely in the power of disasters to bind us together. I had to visit their house before the fire on the Independenta was extinguished; we would live through this catastrophe together, and their fellowship would help me put all the bad things behind me. Could this fire mark the beginning of a new life for me?

  There was another evening when as I was looking for a place to sit in the crowded park I ran into Tayfun and Figen. To my great relief, they did not mention the column in Akşam, or indeed any other society gossip; they did not even seem to be aware that there was any talk about me, which so pleased me that I left the park with them, as the flames were beginning to die down; we got into their car and went to one of the new bars that had opened up in the backstreets of Taksim, where we drank until morning.

  The next day—on Sunday evening—I went to the Keskins’. I had slept all day and eaten lunch with my mother. By evening I was feeling optimistic, hopeful, even happy. But the moment I walked into the house and came eye to eye with Füsun, all my dreams were destroyed: She was joyless, hopeless, hurt.

  “What’s new, Kemal?” she said, mimicking a carefree and well-satisfied woman of the world—or rather, her idea of one. But my beauty’s heart wasn’t in it; even she knew she was faking.

  “Nothing much,” I said brazenly. “I haven’t had time to come over; there’s been so much happening at the factory, and the firm, and the business.”

  In a Turkish film, when a certain intimacy has been established between the young hero and heroine, an understanding matron will cast a certain glance of contentment their way, so that even the most inattentive viewer will appreciate the development and share in the emotions…. Well, that is how Aunt Nesibe gazed upon Füsun and me. But soon afterward I could tell from the way she averted her eyes that the gossip column had caused a great deal of pain in this house, and that Füsun had spent many days crying, just as she had done after the engagement party.

  “Why don’t you bring out some raki for our guest, my girl?” said Tarık Bey.

  For three years now Tarık Bey had been acting as if he knew nothing of the situation, always greeting me with warm sincerity, treating me like a relation who’d simply come to supper, which I had always respected. But now it grieved me to see him show so little interest in his daughter’s anguish, my own helplessness, and our shared predicament. Let me now make the heartless observation that I refrained from making, even to myself: Tarık Bey had almost certainly deduced what I was doing there, but his wife had prevailed upon him to accept that it was better “for the family” for him to pretend to know nothing.

  “Yes, Füsun Hanım,” I said, assuming her father’s contrived manner. “Why don’t you give me my usual rakı, so that I can savor the full happiness of coming home.”

  Even today I cannot explain why I said this, or what I meant by it. Let us just say that my misery came to my lips. But Füsun understood the sentiment behind the words, and for a moment I thought that she would begin to cry. I noticed our canary in its cage. I thought about the past, and my life, the flow of time, the passing years.

  We lived through our most difficult moments during those months, those years. Füsun had not risen to stardom, and I had not succeeded in coming any closer to her. Our impasse had become a public disgrace; we’d been humiliated. It was just as it had been on those evenings when I could not stand up—I saw us unable to stand up and remove ourselves from this predicament. For as long as we continued to see each other four or five times a week, it would be impossible for either of us to start a new life, and this we both knew.

  That evening, toward the end of supper, I uttered the usual invitation with more sincerity than ever. “Füsun,” I said, “it’s been so long since I’ve seen what’s happening to your painting of the dove.”

  “The dove has been finished for ages now,” she said. “Feridun found a lovely picture of a swallow. I’ve started on that now.”

  “This swallow is by far the best one yet,” said Aunt Nesibe.

  We went into the back room. Staying with the formula of the other Istanbul birds perched on various parts of the
house—balustrades, windowsills, and chimneys—she had placed a dainty swallow in the bay window of our dining room, overlooking the street. In the background you could see the cobblestones of Çukurcuma Hill, depicted in a strangely childish perspective.

  “I’m so proud of you,” I said, my voice heavy with defeat despite my best efforts. “One day everyone in Paris should see these!” I said. As always, what I really longed to say was something like “My darling, I love you so much, and oh, how I’ve missed you. It was so painful being far away from you, and what bliss this is, to see you!” But it was as if the painting’s flaws had become the flaws of the world in which we lived, and it was while examining the dove painting, sadly noting its simplicity, innocence, and lack of sophistication, that I understood this.

  “It’s turned out beautifully, Füsun,” I said carefully, inside me nursing a deep pain.

  If I say that the painting contained elements recalling Indian miniatures painted under British influence, and Chinese and Japanese bird paintings, with Audubon’s attention to detail, and even the bird series that came packaged with a brand of chocolate biscuits sold in stores across Istanbul, please bear in mind that I was a man in love.

  We looked at the views of the city that served as backgrounds for Füsun’s paintings of Istanbul birds, but far from lifting my heart, this exercise brought me sorrow. We loved our world very much, we belonged to it, and that meant we ourselves were part of the picture’s innocence.

  “Maybe you could paint the city and the houses in more vibrant colors one of these days….”

  “Never mind, my dear,” said Füsun. “I’m just passing the time, you know.”

  She picked up the picture she’d been showing me and put it to one side. I looked at her lovely art supplies—the tubes of paint, the brushes, the bottles, and the cloths stained with all sorts of colors. Like the bird paintings, these things were neatly arranged. Near them were Aunt Nesibe’s thimbles and materials. I slipped a colored porcelain thimble into my pocket, and an orange pastel pencil that Füsun had been fiddling with a short time before. It was during these, our darkest days, and most especially the last months of 1979, that I stole the most things from the Keskin household. By now these objects were no longer just tokens of moments in my life, nor merely mementos; to me they were elemental to those moments. For example, the matchboxes on display in the Museum of Innocence: Füsun touched every one of them, leaving behind the scent of her hands with its hint of rosewater. As with so many other things on exhibit in my museum, whenever I held any of these matchboxes back at the Merhamet Apartments, I was able to relive the pleasure of sharing a table with Füsun, and gazing into her eyes. But even before that, whenever I dropped a matchbox into my pocket, pretending not to notice what I had done, there was another reason to rejoice. I may not have “won” the woman I loved so obsessively, but it cheered me to have broken off a piece of her, however small.

  To speak of “breaking off” a piece of someone is of course to imply that the piece is part of the worshipped beloved’s body. But three years on, every object and person in that house in Çukurcuma—her mother, her father, the dining table, the stove, the coal carrier, the china dogs on the television, the bottles of cologne, the cigarettes, the rakı glasses, the sweets bowls—had merged with my mental image of Füsun. I managed to see Füsun three or four times a week, and as happy as this made me, with each week I still took (“stole” would be the wrong word) from her house (from her life) three or four things, sometimes as many as six or seven, and during the most miserable phases, between ten and fifteen, and having got them to the Merhamet Apartments, I felt triumphant. What bliss it was to hold a saltshaker with which Füsun had so daintily salted her food without taking her eyes off the television—to slip it into my pocket, to know that it was there while I chatted and sipped my raki, to know that I had taken possesion of this trophy was to find the strength to stand up and leave when the evening had drawn to its conclusion. After the summer of 1979, an object in my pocket was the key to prying me out of my chair. Years later, when I fell in with Istanbul’s weird and obsessive collectors; when I visited their houses packed to the rafters with paper, rubbish, boxes, and photographs, every time trying to understand how these soul mates of mine felt about their soda bottle caps or pictures of film stars, and what meaning a new acquisition held—I would remember how I’d felt every time I took something from the Keskins’ house.

  65

  The Dogs

  MANY YEARS after the events I am relating here, I set out to see all the museums of the world; having spent the day viewing tens of thousands of strange and tiny objects on exhibit in a museum in Peru, India, Germany, Egypt, or any number of other countries, I would down a couple of stiff drinks and spend many hours walking the streets of whatever city I was in. Peering through curtains and open windows in Lima, Calcutta, Hamburg, Cairo, and so many others, I would see families joking and laughing as they watched television and ate the evening meal; I would invent all sorts of excuses to step into these houses, and even to have my picture taken with the occupants. This is how I came to notice that in most of the world’s homes there was a china dog sitting on top of the television set. Why was it that millions of families all the over world had felt the same need?

  I first asked myself a more modest version of this question at the Keskin house. As I would come to know later, the china dog that I noticed upon first walking into the family’s apartment on Kuyulu Bostan Street in Nişantaşı had, before television came to Turkey, sat atop the radio around which the family gathered every evening. As in so many houses I saw in Tabriz, Tehran, the cities of the Balkans, in the East, in Lahore and even Bombay, at the Keskins’ house, the dog was set on a handmade lace doily. Sometimes a small vase would sit alongside it, or a seashell (once Füsun picked up the television shell and, smiling, put it to my ear, so that I, too, could listen to the oceanic murmuring trapped inside it), or the dog would be propped against a cigarette box, as if standing guard. Sometimes it was these cigarette boxes and ashtrays that determined where the dog was placed. It was, I thought, Aunt Nesibe who saw to these mysterious arrangements, which might make one think the dog was about to nod—or even to pounce on the ashtray—though there was one evening in December 1979, when, while admiring Füsun, I saw her change the position of the china dog on the television. At a moment when nothing would draw notice to the dog or the television set, when we were all sitting at the table, waiting for her mother to serve the food she had prepared, she had shifted it with an impatient flick of the wrist. But this does not explain the dog’s presence in the first place. In later years it would be joined by another dog guarding another cigarette box. For a time there was a fashion for plastic dogs that really did nod their heads; you often saw them in the back windows of private cars and shared taxis; the fashion came and went in the blink of an eye. Little was said about these dogs; if the Keskins began to remark on the comings and goings of these dogs, it was because my interest in their belongings was now evident to them. By the time the dogs sitting on the television set began to change with regularity, Aunt Nesibe and Füsun had either guessed or knew for a fact that I was taking them away, as I did so much else.

  Actually, I had no desire to share my collection with others, nor did anyone know I was hoarding things—I was ashamed of what I was doing. After having taken all those matchboxes, and Füsun’s cigarette butts, and the saltshakers, the coffee cups, the hairpins, and the barrettes—things not difficult to pick up, because people rarely notice them missing—I began to set my sights on things like ashtrays, cups, and slippers, gradually beginning to replace them with new ones.

  “You know that doggie on top of the television, the one we were talking about the other day? Well, it ended up at my house. Our Fatma Hanım was just putting it away when she dropped it on the floor and broke it. I’ve brought this to replace it. Aunt Nesibe, I was in the Spice Bazaar, buying birdseed and rapeseed, and I saw it in one of the shops there….”

&
nbsp; “Oh, what lovely black ears it has,” Aunt Nesibe would say. “He’s a real street dog…. Come here, old black ears! Now sit. The poor creature brings us peace!”

  She took the dog from my hand and placed it on the television set. Sometimes the dogs set there brought us peace by their mere presence, much as the clock ticking on the wall did. Some looked threatening, others ugly and utterly charmless, but even these dogs made us feel as if we were sitting in a place guarded by dogs, and perhaps to feel thus protected was what brought us peace, as the neighborhood echoed with the militants’ gunfire and the outside world seemed more surreal with every passing day. The black-eared dog was the most charming of the scores of dogs that came to rest on the Keskins’ television during those eight years.

  On September 12, 1980, there was another military coup. By instinct I’d woken up before everyone else that morning; seeing that Teşvikiye Avenue and the streets leading off it were all empty, I knew at once what had happened: In those days, coups came every ten years. From time to time army trucks came down the avenue, filled with soldiers singing martial songs. I turned on the television at once, and after watching the images of flags and military parades and listening to the generals who had seized power, I went out onto the balcony. I liked seeing Teşvikiye Avenue so empty, and the city so silenced, so the rustling leaves of the chestnut trees in the mosque courtyard soothed me. Exactly five years earlier I had stood on this balcony with Sibel after our end-of-summer party, at exactly this hour in the morning, and admired the same view.

  “Oh good, I’m so glad. The country was on the brink of disaster,” said my mother as she watched the frontier folk singer with the handlebar mustache sing of war and heroism. “But why have they put this ugly brute on television? Bekri won’t be able to make it in today, so Fatma, you’ll have to cook. What do you have for us in your refrigerator?”