The Museum of Innocence Read online

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you think it over for a while.”

  I arranged to look thoughtful and for a brief time I did think. Meanwhile Füsun took my driver’s license from my jacket pocket and began to fiddle with it.

  “Ethem Bey, I have a middle name, too,” she said. “Never mind. Have you thought it over?”

  “Yes, I’ve thought it over. I didn’t tell you any lies.”

  “Just now, or in the recent past?”

  “Never,” I said. “We’re at a stage when there is no need for us to lie to each other.”

  “How is that?”

  I explained that we had no designs on each other, and neither were we connected by work, and though we hid it from the world, we were bound together by the purest and most elemental emotions, and by a passionate sincerity that left no room for deceit.

  “You’ve lied to me—I’m sure of it,” said Füsun.

  “It hasn’t taken you long to lose respect for me.”

  “Actually, I would have preferred it if you had lied to me … because people only tell lies when there is something they are terribly frightened of losing.”

  “Obviously, I am telling lies for you…. But I am not lying to you. But if you like, I can do the other, too. Let’s meet again tomorrow. Can we do that?”

  “Fine!” said Füsun.

  I embraced her with all my strength and breathed in the scent of her neck. It was a mixture of algae, sea, burnt caramel, and children’s biscuits, and every time I inhaled it a surge of optimism would pass through me, yet the hours I spent with Füsun did not change by one iota the course on which my life was set. This may have been because I took my bliss for granted. Still it was not because I fantasized myself to be (like all Turkish men) always in the right, or even that I imagined myself to be continually wronged by others; it was more that I was not yet aware of what I was experiencing.

  It was during these days that I first began to feel fissures opening in my soul, wounds of the sort that plunge some men into a deep, dark, lifelong loneliness for which there is no cure. Already, every evening, before going to bed, I would take the raki from the refrigerator and gaze out the window as I drank a glass alone in silence. Our apartment was at the top of a tall building opposite Teşvikiye Mosque, and our bedroom windows looked out on many other families’ bedrooms that resembled ours; since childhood I had found strange comfort in going to my dark bedroom to look into other people’s apartments.

  As I gazed out on the lights of Nişantaşı, it would occasionally occur to me that if I was to continue my happy, beautiful life in the manner to which I was accustomed, it was essential that I not be in love with Füsun. For this reason I felt it was important to resist befriending her or taking too great an interest in her problems, her jokes, and her humanity. This was not too difficult, as there was so little time left after we had done our math lessons and made love. When, after hours of lovemaking, we quickly dressed and left the apartment, I sometimes thought that Füsun was also taking care not to get “carried away” by her feelings for me. A proper understanding of my story depends, I think, on a full appreciation of the pleasure we took from these sweet shared moments. I am certain that the fire at the heart of my tale is the desire to relive those moments of love, and my attachment to those pleasures. For years, whenever I recalled those moments, seeking to understand the bond I still felt with her, images would form before my eyes, crowding out reason; for example, Füsun would be sitting on my lap, and I would have taken her large left breast into my mouth…. Or while drops of perspiration fell from the tip of my chin onto her graceful neck, I’d gaze with awe at her exquisite backside…. Or, after crying out rapturously, she would open her eyes for just one second…. Or at the heights of our pleasure, the look on Füsun’s face …

  But as I later came to understand, these images were not the reason for my elation, but merely provocative representations of it. Years later, as I struggled to understand why she was so dear to me, I would try to evoke not just our lovemaking but the room in which we made love, and our surroundings, and ordinary objects. Sometimes one of the big crows that lived in the back garden would perch on the balcony to watch us in silence. It was the spitting image of a crow that had perched on our balcony at home when I was a child. Then my mother would say, “Come on now, go to sleep. Look, the crow is watching you,” and that would frighten me. Füsun, too, had had a crow that had frightened her that way.

  On some days it was the dust and the chill in the room; on others it was our pallid, soiled, spectral sheets, our bodies, and the many sounds that filtered in from the life outside, from the traffic, from the endless noise of construction work and from the cries of the street vendors that led us to feel our lovemaking belonged not to the realm of dreams but to the real world. Sometimes we could hear a ship’s whistle from as far away as Dolmabahçe or Beşiktaş, and together we would try to guess what sort of ship it was, as children might do. As we continued to meet, making love with ever-escalating abandon, I came to locate the source of my happiness not only in that real world outside, but also in the tiny flaws on Füsun’s body, the boils, pimples, hairs, and her dark and lovely freckles.

  Apart from our measureless lovemaking with childlike abandon, what was it that bound me to her? Or else why was I able to make love to her with such passion? Did the pleasure of satisfying our ever-renewing desire give birth to love, or was this sentiment born of, and nurtured by, other things as well? During those carefree days when Füsun and I met every day in secret, I never asked myself such questions, behaving only like a child greedily gulping one sweet after another.

  14

  Istanbul’s Streets, Bridges, Hills, and Squares

  ONCE, WHEN we were talking aimlessly, Füsun happened to mention a teacher she’d liked at lycée, saying, “He wasn’t like other men!” and when I asked her what she meant by that, she did not answer. Two days later I asked her once again what she’d meant by his not being “like other men.”

  “I know you are asking this question in all seriousness,” said Füsun. “And I want to give you a serious answer. Shall I try to do that?”

  “Of course … Why are you getting up?”

  “Because I don’t want to be naked when I say what I have to say to you.”

  “Shall I get dressed, too?” I said, and when she didn’t answer I too got dressed.

  The cigarette packets exhibited alongside this Kütahya ashtray, retrieved from a cupboard elsewhere in the flat and brought to the bedroom, are—like the teacup (Füsun’s), the glass, and the seashell that Füsun kept fingering so nervously as she told her stories—assembled here to evoke the room’s heavy, draining, crushing atmosphere at that moment. Füsun’s girlish hair clip should remind us that the stories she told had happened to a child.

  Füsun’s first story was about the owner of a little shop on Kuyulu Bostan Street that sold tobacco, toys, and stationery. This Uncle Sleaze was a friend of her father’s, and from time to time he and Uncle Sleaze would play backgammon together. When Füsun was between the ages of eight and twelve, and most particularly during the summers, her father often sent her to this man’s shop for soft drinks, cigarettes, or beer; every time she went, Uncle Sleaze would say, “I don’t have the correct change. Why don’t you stay for a while. Let me give you a soft drink,” and having used such pretexts to keep her in the shop, when no one was around he’d find some other excuse (“Oh, look, my poor child, you’re perspiring”) to feel her up.

  When she was somewhere between ten and twelve, there was Shithead-with-a-Mustache, the neighbor who visited in the evenings once or twice a week with his fat wife. Her father liked this man very much, and while the two of them were listening to the radio and chatting, drinking tea and eating biscuits, this man would put his arm on her waist, or her shoulder, or the side of her buttocks, or her thigh and leave it, as if he had forgotten it was there, and all this in a way that no one else could see, so that even Füsun had a hard time understa
nding what exactly was going on. And sometimes this man’s hand would “accidentally” plop down on her lap, as a wily fruit might arrange to fall into a basket, and there it would quiver, moist and hot, fingering its way, with Füsun staying as still as if there were a crab crawling between her buttocks and her legs, this man all the while drinking tea with his other hand and engaging in the conversation in the room.

  When she was ten, she would ask her father if she could sit on his lap while he was playing cards, and when he said no (“Stop, my girl, I’m busy, can’t you see?”), one of his card-playing friends (Mr. Ugly) invited her onto his lap, saying, “Come over here and bring me luck,” and he went on to caress her in a way that she would later understand to be far from innocent.

  Istanbul’s streets, bridges, hills, cinemas, buses, crowded squares, and isolated corners were filled with these shadowy Uncles Sleaze, Shit-head, and Ugly, who, though they appeared like dark specters in her dreams, she could not bring herself to hate as individuals (“Perhaps it was because none of them ever really shook me to the core”). What Füsun found hard to reckon was that even though one of every two family visitors quickly turned into an Uncle Sleaze or a Mr. Shithead, her father never noticed them squeezing or touching her in the corridors or the kitchen. When she was thirteen, she was convinced that being a good girl obliged her not to complain about this pack of shifty, sleazy, loathsome men with their restless paws. During those same years, when a lycée “boy” who was in love with her (about which Füsun had no complaints) wrote “I love you” on the street, just in front of the house, her father pulled her to the window by her ear to point at the writing and gave her a smack.

  Because so many Shameless Uncles had a penchant for exposing themselves in parks, empty lots, and backstreets, she, like all presentable Istanbul girls, learned to avoid such places. Yet there were inevitably exceptions. One reason that these violations had not strained her optimism was that, even as they all repeated the secret refrain of the same dark music, the malefactors were at the same time eager to reveal their vulnerabilities. There was an army of followers—men who had seen her in the street, caught sight of her at the school gate, in front of the cinema, or on the bus; some would follow her for months on end, and she would pretend she hadn’t noticed them, but she never took pity on any of them (I was the one who’d asked if she had). Some of her followers were not so besotted, or patient, or polite: After a certain interval, they would start pestering her (“You’re very beautiful. Can we walk together? There’s something I’d like to ask you. Excuse me, are you deaf?”), and before long they’d get angry, saying rude things to her and cursing her. Some would walk about in pairs; some would bring along friends to show them the girl they had been following in recent days and get a second opinion; some would laugh lewdly among themselves as they followed her; some would try to give her letters or presents; some would even cry. Ever since one of her followers had pushed her into a corner and tried to force a kiss on her, she had stopped challenging them the way she occasionally used to do. By the age of fourteen, she knew all the tricks that men played and could read their intentions so men could no longer catch her unawares and touch her, and perhaps she no longer fell into their traps so easily, though the streets were never short of men finding imaginative new ways to touch her, pinch her, squeeze her, or brush her from behind. The men who stretched their arms out through car windows to fondle girls walking down the street, the men who pretended to trip on the stairs in order to press themselves against girls, the men who abruptly started to kiss her in the elevator, the men who took with their change an illicit stroke of her fingers—it had been some time since any of them could surprise her.

  Every man in a secret relationship with a beautiful woman is obliged to jealously hear various stories about the various men who were infatuated with, or putting the moves on, his beloved, reports to be greeted with smiles, an abundance of pity, and ultimately contempt. At the Outstanding Achievement Course there was a sweet, gentle, handsome boy her age who was always inviting her to go to the cinema or sit in the tea garden on the corner, and whenever he saw Füsun he was so excited that for the first few minutes he was speechless. One day when she mentioned that she didn’t have a pencil he gave her a ballpoint pen, and he was ecstatic to see her using it to take notes in class.

  At the same college there was an “administrator”—in his thirties, his hair always slick with brilliantine, edgy, obnoxious, and taciturn. He was ever finding excuses to call Füsun to his office, as in “Your identity papers are not complete,” or “One of your answer sheets is missing,” and once she was there, he’d begin discussing the meaning of life, the beauty of Istanbul, and the poems he had published until, seeing that Füsun was giving him not a word of encouragement, he would turn his back on her, gazing out the window, and he would hiss, “You may leave.”

  She would not even discuss the hordes—a woman in one instance—who came to the Şanzelize Boutique and fell in love with her on sight, and went on to buy loads of dresses, accessories, and trinkets from Şenay Hanım. Naturally, I pressed her for more details, and only to placate my curiosity, passing for concern, did she agree to talk about the most ridiculous one, a man in his fifties, short, fat as a jar, with a brush mustache, but stylish and rich. He would chat with Şenay Hanım, now and again pushing long French sentences out of his little mouth, and when he left the shop his cloud of perfume would linger for some time, upsetting Lemon the canary!

  As for the suitors found by her mother through a matchmaker (supposedly without Füsun’s knowing) there was one man she’d liked, who had been more interested in her than in marriage; she’d gone out with him a few times, liked him, and kissed him. Last year, during a music competition among many schools at the Sports Arena, she’d met a Robert College boy who’d fallen head over heels in love with her. He’d meet her at the school gate, and every day they’d leave together, and they’d kissed two or three times. Hilmi the Bastard, however, despite a flurry of dates, she’d not even kissed, because his sole aim in life seemed to be getting girls into bed. She’d felt close to Hakan Serinkan, the beauty contest emcee, not because he was famous, but because, in this place where everyone was conspiring backstage and being openly unfair to her, he’d gone out of his way to be gentle and kind; and because when it came time for the culture and intelligence questions that made the other girls so nervous, he’d whispered them to her backstage in advance, along with the answers. But later, when this old-style crooner had made insistent phone calls to the house, she’d refused to answer, and, anyway, her mother didn’t approve. Rightfully inferring jealousy—though she thought it had to do with the singer’s fame—she told me tenderly (but with obvious pleasure) that she had not been in love with anyone since the age of sixteen, and then she made a pronouncement that shocks me still. Although she, like most girls, enjoyed the perpetual celebration of love in magazines and television and songs, she didn’t regard the subject fit for idle talk, and was convinced that people exaggerated their feelings just to appear superior. For her, love was something to which one devoted one’s entire being at the risk of everything. But this happened only once in a lifetime.

  “Have you ever felt anything close to this?” I asked, as I lay down beside her on the bed.

  “Not really,” she said, but then she thought a bit and with a reserve born of willful scrupulousness, she told me about someone.

  There was a man so madly and obsessively in love with her that she had thought she could love him back—he was rich, handsome, a businessman, and “married, of course.” In the evenings when she left the shop he would pick her up in his Mustang at the corner of Akkavak Street. They would go to that place next to the Dolmabahçe Clock Tower where people parked and drank tea and looked at the Bosphorus or to that empty lot in front of the Sports Arena, and as they sat there in the dark, and sometimes in the rain, they would kiss for a long time, and then, forgetting his circumstances, this thirty-five-year-old man would ask her to marry him. I
could smile over this man’s predicament, suppressing my jealousy, much as Füsun intended, even as she told me what kind of car he had, what sort of work he did, and how lovely his large green eyes were; but when Füsun told me his name, I was flooded by an envy that confounded me. This man whom she intimately called Turgay, who had made his fortune in textiles, was a “business associate” and family friend of my father, my brother, and me. I often saw this tall, handsome, ostentatiously hale and hearty man strolling around Nişantaşı with his wife and children, a contented family man. Could my regard for him—as a committed family man, and an honest and hardworking businessman—have somehow inspired this great jealous surge? Füsun recounted how this man had come to the Şanzelize for months on end to “catch” her, and because Şenay Hanım was wise to him, he’d been obliged almost to buy out the entire shop.

  Şenay Hanım had pressured her, saying, “Don’t cause any heartbreak to my kind customer,” and so Füsun had accepted his presents, and then later, when she was sure of his affections, she had started to meet with him “out of curiosity,” and even felt “strangely close” to him. One snowy day, at Şenay Hanım’s insistence, she’d gone with this man to “help” a friend who’d opened up a boutique in Bebek; on the way back, they’d stopped in Ortaköy for a bite to eat, and after he’d drunk a few too many rakıs, “Turgay Bey the playboy factory-owner” began to press her to go with him to his garçonnière in a backstreet in Şişli, to “drink some coffee.” When Füsun turned him down, that “elegant, sensitive man,” losing all sense of proportion, said, “I’d buy you anything!” Thus rebuffed he then drove the Mustang to empty lots and backstreets trying to kiss her like before, until, with Füsun refusing his advances, he’d tried to “possess” her by force. “And all the while he was saying that he was going to give me money,” said Füsun. “The next evening, when the shop closed, I didn’t meet him. The day after that, he came to the shop, and either he’d forgotten what he’d done or he chose not to remember. He pleaded with me ardently, even leaving a Matchbox Mustang for me with Şenay Hanım. But I never got into that Mustang again. In retrospect, I should have been stern and told him never to come back again. But he was so in love with me, like a child, really; he was prepared to forget any rejection in the hope of having his love returned, and that moved me, so I couldn’t say it. He would come to the shop every day, buying so much and making Şenay Hanım very happy, and if he got me alone for a moment in some corner, his great green eyes almost wet, he would plead with me, saying, ‘Can’t we just go back to the way we were? I can pick you up every evening. We can drive around in the car. I don’t want anything else.’ After I met you, I started hiding in the back room every time he visited the shop. Now he doesn’t come round so often.”