The Museum of Innocence Read online

  “You seem preoccupied. It’s the engagement, I guess,” said my brother.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you very much in love?”

  “Of course.”

  With a smile both compassionate and worldly-wise, my brother turned back to watch the ball in midfield. In his hand was a Turkish Marmara cigar—he had taken up this habit two years earlier, “just to be original,” he said. The light wind blowing in from Leander’s Tower ruffling the teams’ great banners as well as the little red corner flags carried the stinging smoke right into my eyes, making them water just as the smoke from my father’s cigarettes had done when I was a child.

  “Marriage will do you good,” said my brother, his eyes still on the ball. “You can have children right away. Don’t wait too long and they can be friends with ours. Sibel is a woman with a lot of sense; she has her feet on the ground. While you sometimes get carried away with your ideas, she’ll provide a good balance. I hope you don’t wear out Sibel’s patience the way you did with all those other girls? Hey, what’s wrong with this ref? That was a foul!”

  When Fenerbahçe scored its second goal, we all leapt up—“Goooal!”—and threw our arms around one another and kissed. When the match was over, we were joined by Kadri the Sieve, an army buddy of my father’s, and a number of football-loving lawyers and businessmen. We walked up the hill with the shouting, chanting crowd and went into the Divan Hotel, where we talked football and politics over glasses of raki. And my thoughts turned again to Füsun.

  “Your mind is elsewhere, Kemal,” said Kadri Bey. “I guess you don’t like football as much as your brother.”

  “I do, but lately …”

  “Kemal likes football very much, Kadri Bey,” said my brother in a mocking tone. “It’s just that people don’t pass him many good balls.”

  “As a matter of fact I can give you the whole 1959 Fenerbahçe lineup from memory,” I said. “Özcan, Nedim, Basri, Akgün, Naci, Avni, Mikro Mustafa, Can, Yuksel, Lefter, Ergun.”

  “Seracettin was in there, too,” said Kadri the Sieve. “You forgot him.”

  “No, he never played on that team.”

  The discussion continued and as always in such situations, led to a wager, Kadri the Sieve betting that Seracettin had played on the 1959 team, and I betting that he hadn’t. The loser would buy dinner for the entire group of raki drinkers at the Divan.

  As we walked back to Nişantaşı, I parted from the other men. Somewhere in the Merhamet Apartments was a box in which I had kept all the photographs of football players I had collected from the packs of chewing gum that they used to sell once upon a time. It was just the sort of item my mother would banish to the apartment. I knew that if I could find that box, with all those pictures of football players and film stars that my brother and I had collected, Kadri the Sieve would be buying dinner for everyone.

  But as soon as I entered the apartment I understood that my real reason for coming again was to dwell on the hours spent there with Füsun. For a moment I looked at the unmade bed, the unemptied ashtrays at the head of the bed, and the unwashed teacups. My mother’s accumulated old furniture, the boxes, the stopped clocks, the pots and pans, the linoleum covering the floor, the smell of dust and rust had already merged with the shadows in the room to create a little paradise of the spirit in which my mind could wander. It was getting very dark outside, but still I could hear the cries and curses of the boys playing football in the garden.

  On that visit to the Merhamet Apartments, on May 10, 1975, I did indeed find the tin in which I had kept all the pictures of movie stars from Zambo, but it was empty. The pictures the museum visitor will view are ones I bought many years later from Hıfzı Bey, during days whiled away conversing with shivering and miserable collectors in various crowded rooms. What’s more, on reviewing my collection years later, I realized that during our visits to the bars frequented by film people—Ekrem Güçlü (who’d played the prophet Abraham) among them—we had met quite a few of these actors. My story will revisit all these episodes, as will the exhibit. Even then I sensed this room mysterious with old objects and the joy of our kisses would be at the core of my imagination for the rest of my life.

  Just as for most people in the world at the time, my first sight of two people kissing on the lips was at the cinema and I was thunderstruck. This was definitely something I’d want to do with a beautiful girl for the rest of my life. At the age of thirty, except for one or two chance encounters in America, I had still seen no couples kissing offscreen. It was not just when I was a child, though even then, the cinema seemed to be the place to go to watch other people kissing. The story was an excuse for the kissing. When Füsun kissed me, it seemed as if she was imitating the people she had seen kissing in films.

  I would now like to say a few things about our kisses, though I have some anxieties about steering clear of trivialities and coarseness. I want to tell my story in a way that does justice to its serious points regarding sex and desire: Füsun’s mouth tasted of powdered sugar, owing, I think, to the Zambo Chiclets she so liked. Kissing Füsun was no longer a provocation devised to test and to express our attraction for each other; it was something we did for the pleasure of it, and as we made love we were both amazed to discover love’s true essence. It was not just our wet mouths and our tongues that were entwined but our respective memories. So whenever we kissed, I would kiss her first as she stood before me, then as she existed in my recollection. Afterward, I would open my eyes momentarily to kiss the image of her a moment ago and then one of more distant memory, until thoughts of other girls resembling her would commingle with both those memories, and I would kiss them, too, feeling all the more virile for having so many girls at once; from here it was a simple thing to kiss her next as if I were someone else, as the pleasure I took from her childish mouth, wide lips, and playful tongue stirred my confusion and fed ideas heretofore not considered (“This is a child,” went one idea—“Yes, but a very womanly one,” went another), and the pleasure grew to encompass all the various personae I adopted as I kissed her, and all the remembered Füsuns that were evoked when she kissed me. It was in these first long kisses, in our lovemaking’s slow accumulation of particularity and ritual, that I had the first intimations of another way of knowing, another kind of happiness that opened a gate ever so slightly, suggesting a paradise few will ever know in this life. Our kisses delivered us beyond the pleasures of flesh and sexual bliss for what we sensed beyond the moment of the springtime afternoon was as great and wide as Time itself.

  Could I be in love with her? The profound happiness I felt made me anxious. I was confused, my soul teetering between the danger of taking this joy too seriously and the crassness of taking it too lightly. That evening Osman came over with his wife, Berrin, and their children to my parents’ place for supper. I remember that while we were eating, I kept thinking of Füsun, and our kisses.

  The next day I went to the cinema alone at lunchtime. I had no particular wish to see a film, but I couldn’t face eating in the usual little place in Pangaltı with Satsat’s aging accountants and the kindhearted, plump secretaries who so enjoyed reminding me what a sweetie I had been as a child. I wanted to be alone. To indulge my thoughts of Füsun and our kisses, longing for two o’clock to come, while joking with my employees, playing the “humble friendly boss” and all the while eating, would have been too much to manage.

  As I wandered through Osmanbey, down Cumhuriyet Avenue, gazing at the shop windows, I was drawn into a film by a poster advertising a Hitchcock week. This film too had a kissing scene with Grace Kelly. This cigarette I smoked during the five-minute intermission, this usher’s flashlight, and this Alaska Frigo ice cream (which I display as a reminder to all housewives and lazy truants who ever attended a matinee) should imitate the desire and solitude I knew as a youth. I savored the coolness of the cinema after the heat of the spring day, the stale air heavy with mold, the handful of cineastes whispering excitedly, and I loved letting my mind wande
r as I gazed into the dark corners and the shadows at the edges of the thick velvet curtains; the knowledge that I would soon be seeing Füsun sent wave after wave of delight radiating through my body. After leaving the cinema, I walked through the higgledy-piggledy backstreets of Osmanbey, passing little clothes shops, coffeehouses, hardware stores, and laundries where they starched and ironed shirts, until I reached Teşvikiye Avenue and I remember telling myself as I headed toward our meeting place that this would have to be our last time.

  First I would make an honest effort at teaching her mathematics. The way her hair tumbled onto the paper, the way her hand traveled across the table, the way she’d chew and chew a lead pencil, only to slip its eraser between her lips, as if sucking a nipple, the way her bare arm grazed my own from time to time—all this sent my head spinning, but I held myself in check. As she set out to balance an equation, Füsun’s face would fill with pride, and all of a sudden she would forget her manners and blow a puff of smoke straight at the book (and sometimes straight into my face), and throwing me a look from the corner of her eye, as if to say, Did you notice how fast I worked that one out?, she managed to ruin the whole thing because of a simple addition mistake. Unable to find her answer in a, b, c, d, or e, she would turn sad, and then upset, and she would make up excuses, like, “It wasn’t out of stupidity; it was carelessness!” So that she wouldn’t make the same mistake again, I would arrogantly tell her that being careful was a part of being clever, and I would watch the tip of her pencil pecking like the beak of a sparrow as she pounced on a new problem; she would pull at her hair nervously as she simplified an equation with some skill, and I would follow her work anxiously, with the same impatience, the same rising agitation. Then suddenly we would start to kiss, kissing for a long time before we’d make love, and while we made love, we would feel the entire weight of lost virginity, shame, and guilt—this we sensed in each other’s every movement. But I also saw in Füsun’s eyes her pleasure in sex, her growing amazement at discovering delights that she’d wondered about for so long. She called to mind an adventurer of old who, after years of dreaming of a distant legendary continent, sets out across the seas, and who, having crossed oceans, suffered hardships, and shed blood, finally steps onto its shores, to meet each tree, each stone, each creature with awe and enchantment, drawing from the same elation to savor each flower she smelled, each fruit she put into her mouth, exploring each novelty with a cautious, bedazzled curiosity.

  Leaving aside the man’s tool, what interested Füsun most was not my body, nor was it the “male body” in general. It was her own form and her own pleasure that most occupied her. She needed my body, my arms, my fingers, my mouth, to find the pleasure spots and potentials of her body, her soft skin. Lacking experience, Füsun was sometimes shocked by the possibilities of what I was teaching her as her eyes turned inward with a lovely haziness, pleasure spreading through her veins to the back of her neck and her head, like a gradually intensifying shiver, and she would follow pleasure’s flow with awe, sometimes letting out a blissful cry, then once more await my assistance.

  “Do that again, please? Do it like that again!” she whispered now and again.

  I was very happy. But this was not an elation I could weigh in my mind and understand. It was something that I felt on the nape of my neck when I answered the phone, or at the tip of my spine when running up the stairs, or in my nipples when ordering food at a Taksim restaurant with Sibel, to whom I was to become formally engaged in four weeks’ time. I would carry this feeling around with me all day, like a scent on my skin, sometimes forgetting it was Füsun who had given it to me, as when, on several occasions, I was in my office after hours, hurriedly making love to Sibel, and it seemed to me I was in the grace of one great, all-consuming beatitude.

  13

  Love, Courage, Modernity

  ONE EVENING, as we were eating at Fuaye, Sibel gave me a fragrance called Spleen that she’d bought for me in Paris; I exhibit it here. Though in fact I didn’t like wearing fragrance, I dabbed some on my neck one morning, just out of curiosity, and after we’d made love, Füsun noticed it.

  “Was it Sibel Hanım who bought this cologne for you?”

  “No. I bought it for myself.”

  “Did you buy it because you thought Sibel might like it?”

  “No, darling, I bought it because I thought you might like it.”

  “You’re still making love with Sibel Hanım, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Please don’t lie to me,” said Füsun. An anxious expression formed on her perspiring face. “I would consider it normal. Of course you are having sex with her, aren’t you?” She fixed her eyes on mine, like a mother gently steering a child away from his lie.

  “No.”

  “Believe me, lying will hurt me a lot more. Please tell me the truth. So why aren’t you making love, then?”

  “Sibel and I met last summer in Suadiye,” I said, wrapping my arms around Füsun. “Our winter home was closed for the summer, so we would come to Nişantaşı. Anyway, in the autumn she went to Paris. I visited her there a few times over the winter.”

  “By plane?”

  “Yes. This December, after Sibel finished university and returned from France to marry me, we used the summer house to meet through the winter. But the house in Suadiye would get so cold that after a while it took the pleasure out of sex,” I continued.

  “So you decided to wait until you had found a warm house?”

  “At the beginning of March, two months ago, we went back to the house in Suadiye one night. It was very cold there. While we were trying to light a fire the house filled with smoke, and we had an argument, too. After that Sibel came down with a bad case of the flu. She had a fever, wound up in bed for a week, and we didn’t ever want to go back there to make love.”

  “Which of you didn’t want to?” asked Füsun. “Her or you?” As curiosity consumed her, compassion gave way to desperation, and her expression, which a moment ago was saying, Please tell me the truth, now was pleading, Please tell me a lie. Don’t hurt me.

  “I think Sibel is hoping that if we make love less before we marry, I might prize the engagement, our marriage, and even her, a bit more,” I said.

  “But you’re saying that before all this you did make love.”

  “You don’t understand. This is not about making love for the first time.”

  “You’re right, it isn’t,” said Füsun, lowering her voice.

  “Sibel showed me how much she loved me, and how much she trusted me,” I said. “But the idea of making love before marriage still makes her uncomfortable…. I understand this. She’s studied in Europe, but she’s not as modern and courageous as you are….”

  There was a very long silence. Having spent years pondering the meaning of this silence, I think I can now summarize it in a balanced way. That last thing I’d said to Füsun had an implied meaning. I had suggested that what Sibel had done before marriage out of love and trust, Füsun had done out of courage and a modern outlook. I have suffered many years of remorse for labeling Füsun as “modern and courageous,” for the compliment also said that I would feel no special obligations to her just because she’d slept with me. If she was “modern,” she would not see sex with a man before marriage as a burden, and neither would she worry about being a virgin on her wedding day. Just like those European women we entertained in our fantasies, or those legendary women who were said to wander the streets of Istanbul. How could I have said those words believing Füsun would warm to them?

  Though I may not have understood everything quite so clearly during that silence, these thoughts went through my mind as I watched the trees in the back garden slowly swaying in the wind. After making love, as we lay in bed chatting, we would look out the window at those trees, the apartment houses behind them, the random flights of crows among their branches.

  “Actually, I’m not modern or courageous!” Füsun said, after a long while.

  At the t
ime I took these words to express her unease at discussing this weighty subject, and even humility, and I didn’t dwell on them.

  “A woman can love a man like crazy for years without once making love to him,” Füsun added cautiously.

  “Of course,” I said. There was another silence.

  “Are you telling me that you’re not making love at all right now? Why weren’t you bringing Sibel here?”

  “It never occurred to us,” I said, amazed that it hadn’t until after I’d met Füsun in the shop. “This used to be the place I’d come to study and listen to music with friends—whatever the reason, it was because of you that I remembered it.”

  “I can certainly believe that it never occurred to you,” said Füsun with skepticism. “But there’s a lie in what you said before that. Isn’t there? I don’t want you to tell me any lies. I can’t believe you aren’t having sex with her these days. Swear to me, please.”

  “I swear I’m not making love to her,” I said.

  “So when were you going to start making love to her again? Will it be when your parents go to Suadiye this summer? When are they due to leave? Tell me the truth. I’m not going to ask you anything else.”

  “They’re moving to Suadiye after the engagement party,” I mumbled shamefacedly.

  “So did you tell me any lies just now?”