The Museum Of Innocence

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 time 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?”

“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.