The Museum Of Innocence

24 The Engagement Party

THESE POSTCARDS of the Istanbul Hilton were acquired some twenty years after the events I describe; I picked up some of them while strolling through small museums and flea markets in this city and elsewhere in Europe, and others I purchased in transactions with Istanbul’s foremost collectors in the course of assembling the Museum of Innocence. When, after a lengthy bargaining session with the famously neurotic collector Halit Bey the Invalid, I was able to acquire one of these postcards depicting the hotel’s modernist international-style facade, and granted permission to touch it, I was reminded not just of the evening of my engagement party, but of my entire childhood. When I was ten, my parents attended the opening of the hotel, a very exciting occasion for them, along with all of Istanbul society, as well as the long-forgotten American film star Terry Moore. We could see the new building from our house, and though at first it looked foreign against Istanbul ’s tired old silhouette, during the years that followed my parents grew accustomed to it, going there whenever they could. Representatives from the foreign firms to whom my father sold goods-they were to a man all interested in “Oriental” dancing-all stayed at the Hilton. On Sunday evenings, when we would go as a family to eat that amazing thing called a hamburger, a delicacy as yet offered by no other restaurant in Turkey, my brother and I would be mesmerized by the pomegranate-colored uniform with gold braids and flashy buttoned epaulettes of the doorman with the handlebar mustache. In those years so many Western innovations made their first appearance in this hotel that the leading newspapers even posted reporters there. If one of my mother’s favorite suits got stained, she would send it to the dry cleaner at the Hilton, and she liked to drink tea with her friends at the patisserie in the lobby. Quite a few of my friends and relatives had their weddings in the grand ballroom on the lower level. When it became clear that my future in-laws’ dilapidated house in Anadoluhisarı was not quite suitable for the engagement party, the Hilton was everyone’s first choice. And it enjoyed one other distinction: The Hilton had been, since the day it opened, one of the few civilized establishments in Turkey where a well-heeled gentleman and a courageous lady could obtain a room without being asked for a marriage certificate.

There was still plenty of time to spare when Çetin Efendi dropped my parents and me at the revolving doors, which were shaded by a canopy in the form of a flying carpet.

“We still have half an hour,” said my father, who always cheered up the moment he stepped into this hotel. “Let’s go and have something to drink.”

After we had chosen a corner of the lobby with a good view of the entrance, my father greeted the elderly waiter, who recognized him, and ordered “quick rakıs” for the men and tea for my mother. We enjoyed observing the evening crowds and-as the appointed time grew closer-watching our guests arrive, and reminiscing about the old days. Acquaintances, curious relations, and other party guests paraded just in front of us one by one in their chic outfits, but the thick leaves of a potted cyclamen shielded us from view.

“Aaah, look how much Rezzan’s daughter has grown; she’s so sweet,” my mother said. “They should ban miniskirts on anyone who doesn’t have the legs,” she said, frowning at another guest. Then: “It wasn’t us who seated the Pamuk family all the way at the back!” she said in answer to a question posed by my father, whereupon she pointed out some other guests: “Look at what’s become of Fazıla Hanım. She used to be such a beauty, but nothing remains of it. Oh, I wish they had left her at home, if only I hadn’t seen that poor woman like this… Those headscarf people must be relations of Sibel’s mother… I’ve had no use for Hicabi Bey since he left that lovely rose of a wife and his children to marry that coarse woman. I’m going to thrash Nevzat the hairdresser-that shameless man gave Zümrüt exactly the same style as me. Who are these people? Look at the noses on that couple-my God, don’t they look just like foxes?… Do you have any money on you, my son?”

“What for?” my father said.

“The way he came racing home, changing into his clothes as if he were just dashing off to the club, instead of going to his engagement party. Kemal darling, look at you, did you even remember your wallet?”

“I did.”

“Good. Stand up straight when you walk, all right? Everyone’s watching you… Come on now, it’s time for us to get going.”

My father gestured to the waiter to bring him a single raki, and after looking me in the eye, and gathering my own need for one, he repeated the hand gesture, indicating me this time.

“Now, you’re not overdoing it, are you?” my mother said to my father. “I thought you’d picked yourself up and shaken off that gloom you’ve been wearing like an old coat.”

“Can’t I drink and enjoy myself at my son’s engagement party?”

“Oh, how beautiful she looks!” said my mother when she saw Sibel. “And her dress, it’s gorgeous; those pearls look perfect. But this girl is such a splendid creature that anything would look wonderful on her. What a charming sight, how elegant that dress looks on her, don’t you think? My son, do you have any idea how lucky you are?”

Sibel was embracing two friends who had walked past us just a few minutes earlier. The girls were taking scrupulous care with the long, thin filtered cigarettes they had just lit, making an exaggerated effort not to muss each other’s hair, makeup, or dress; their lovely bright red lips touched nothing as they exchanged kisses, giggling as they looked each other over and showed each other necklaces and bracelets not often removed from their boxes.

“Any intelligent person knows that life is a beautiful thing and that the purpose of life is to be happy,” said my father as he watched the three beauties. “But it seems only idiots are ever happy. How can we explain this?”

“Here it is, one of the best days in the boy’s life, so why are you spouting such thoughts, Mümtaz?” said my mother. She turned to me. “Go on, my son, what are you waiting for? Go to Sibel. Spend every moment at her side, share her joy!”

I put down my glass, and as I came out from behind the potted plant and walked toward Sibel I saw her face light up. “Where have you been?” I asked as I kissed her.

After Sibel had introduced me to her friends, we both turned around to watch the great revolving door.

“You look so beautiful, my darling,” I whispered in her ear. “No one else comes close.”

“And you’re very handsome… But let’s not stand here.”

All the same we continued to stand there, and not at my insistence. As people came flowing into the hotel-friends and strangers, guests and a handful of well-dressed tourists-heads kept turning to look at us, and Sibel liked being the center of so much admiring attention.

It is only now, so many years later, as I recall each and every person who came through those revolving doors, that I realize how insular and intimate was this circle of rich, Westernized families, and how familiar we all were with everyone else’s business. There was the Halis boy, known to us since the days when my mother would take us to Maçka Park to play with our pails and shovels, and whose family fortune in olive oil and soap from Ayvalık did not prevent him from taking a wife with the same lantern jaw as everyone else in his clan (“inbreeding!” my mother charged)… There was Kadri the Sieve, my father’s friend from the army, and mine from football matches, the former goalkeeper and now a car salesman, arriving with his daughters, each glittering with earrings, bracelets, necklaces, and rings… The thick-necked son of a former president, who had gone into business and blackened his good name with corruption, arriving with his elegant wife… And Doctor Barbut, who’d taken out the tonsils of every member of Istanbul society in the days when that operation was still fashionable-it wasn’t just me but hundreds of other children as well who went into a panic at the mere sight of his briefcase and camel-hair coat…

“Sibel’s still holding on to her tonsils,” I said, as the doctor gave me a warm embrace.

“Well, these days modern medicine has more modern ways of scaring beautiful girls into submission,” said the doctor, repeating one of his oldest jokes as he gave me a wink.

As Harun Bey, the handsome representative for Siemens in Turkey, passed by, I feared my mother would notice and get annoyed. She judged this serene, mature man to be “an oaf, a disgrace,” for undaunted by all the society cries of “Scandal! Calamity!” he had taken as a third wife the daughter of his second wife (in other words, his stepdaughter). With his cool manner and his sweet smile, he had eventually been accepted back into the fold, though he still had to bear the occasional glare. Then there was Cüneyt Bey with his wife, Feyzan. Cüneyt Bey had bought up for next to nothing the factories and other assets of the Greeks and Jews who were sent off to work camps when they were unable to pay the “wealth tax” imposed on minorities during the Second World War. Though his overnight transformation from loan shark to industrialist offended my father, it was more by reason of jealousy than righteousness, and he was still a treasured friend. Their eldest son, Alptekin, had been my classmate in primary school, and when we discovered that their younger daughter, Asena, had been Sibel’s, we were all so pleased as to agree the lot of us should get together very soon.

“Don’t you think it’s time to go downstairs now?” I said.

“You’re very handsome, but you must learn to stand up straight,” Sibel said, unknowingly parroting my mother.

Our cook, Bekri Efendi, Fatma Hanım, Saim Efendi the janitor, and his wife and children came through the revolving doors, one behind the other, looking very bashful in their best clothes, and each in turn shook Sibel’s hand. Fatma Hanım and Saim Efendi’s wife, Macide, had taken the chic scarves my mother had brought them from Paris and fashioned them to look like traditional headscarves. Their pimply sons were in suits and ties, and though they did not stare at her, they could not hide their admiration for Sibel. After that we saw my father’s friend Fasih Fahir and his wife, Zarife. My father didn’t like it that his dear friend was a Freemason, and at home he would rail against the clandestine network of “influence and privilege” that had infiltrated the world of business, clucking his tongue whenever he pored over the lists of Turkish Masons put out by anti-Semitic publishing houses; but whenever Fasih was expected at the house, my father would hide away all the books with names like Inside the Masons and I Was a Mason that had so fascinated him.

Just behind him was a woman known to everyone in society, whom at first glance I mistook for one of our guests: Deluxe Şermin, the only female pimp in all of Istanbul (and perhaps the entire Muslim world). Around her neck was the purple scarf that was her trademark (since it concealed a scar from a knife wound, and she could never take it off) and at her side, in impossibly high heels, was one of her beautiful “girls.” Walking into the hotel like guests, they headed straight for the patisserie. And here was the strange, bespectacled Faruk the Mouse (as children we used to go to each other’s birthdays, because our mothers were friends), and there, behind him, were the Maruf boys, onetime playmates of mine, as our nurses were friends. Their family, whom Sibel knew well from the club Cercle d’Orient, had made a fortune in tobacco.

The aged and rotund former foreign minister, Melikhan, who was to present our rings, came through the revolving doors with my future father-in-law, and because he had known Sibel as a child, he threw his arms around her and kissed her. He looked me over and turned back to her.

“I’m very happy for you!” he said. “And he’s handsome! Congratulations, my boy,” he said, and he shook my hand.

Sibel’s girlfriends, all smiles, came to join us. The former foreign minister took on the air of a playboy, heaping extravagant praise on them for their dresses, their jewelry, and their upswept hair, in that tongue-in-cheek way that is the preserve of indulged old men, and when he had kissed each one on the cheek he went downstairs, as if never more pleased with himself.

“I’ve never liked that bastard,” said my father, heading down the stairs.

“For God’s sake, let it go!” said my mother. “Watch the steps.”

“I can see them,” said my father. “I’m not blind yet, thank God.” When he saw the view from the garden- Dolmabahçe Palace and beyond it the Bosphorus, Üsküdar, and Leander’s Tower-and the crowd of chattering guests, he cheered up. I took him by the arm, and as we walked among the waiters offering colorful canapés, we began the long process of greeting our guests, offering each kisses on the cheek and a suitable interval of small talk.

“How proud you must be of your son, Mümtaz Bey. He’s the spitting image of you at that age… I feel as if I’m looking at you when you were young.”

“I’m still young, madam,” said my father. “But I’m afraid I don’t recognize you…” Then he turned to me. “Would you mind letting go of me?” he whispered sweetly. “You’re holding my arm too tight and I’m not lame.”

I discreetly extracted myself. The garden sparkled with beautiful girls. Most were wearing stylish open-toed high heels, and I imagined the expectant and joyful care with which they must have painted their toenails fire engine red. Though they were in sleeveless or backless dresses with plunging necklines, it cheered me to see how much more at ease they were in this fashion than they were in their usual short skirts. Just like Sibel, they were clutching small shimmering handbags with metal clasps.

Sometime later Sibel took me by the hand and introduced me to a large number of relatives, childhood friends, classmates, and other chums I’d never heard of.

“Kemal, I’d like to introduce you to a very dear friend of mine,” she said each and every time, her face beaming, and she would go on to praise that person in a voice that, for all its joyous sincerity, still carried the weight of obligation. The joy was most certainly the effect of life having gone her way, exactly the way she planned. She had devoted such an effort to the perfect placement of every pearl on her dress, made sure every crimp and curl was in impeccable harmony with every curve on her body, and now with the evening proceeding so smoothly, she assumed that she could just as smoothly slip into a happy future. This was why Sibel treated each passing moment, each new face, each embrace, as a fresh cause for jubilation. From time to time she would nestle up to me, and with maternal attentiveness she would use her thumb and her forefinger to pick off an imaginary hair or piece of lint from my shoulders.

Whenever there was a pause in the greeting and joking, I raised my head to survey the guests and the waiters carrying trays of canapés among them and I could tell from the level of laughter and chatter that the drinks were beginning to relax them. All the women were lavishly made up and extravagantly dressed. In their filmy, tight-waisted, sleeveless dresses, they looked as if they would soon be feeling the chill, while the men seemed trussed up in their stylish white suits, buttoned up as tightly as boys in their outgrown holiday best-and ties that were colorful by Turkish standards, aping the wide, loud, patterned “hippie” ties so fashionable three or four years earlier. It was clear that many rich, middle-aged men had either not heard or refused to believe that the rage for big sideburns, Cuban heels, and long hair had finally run its course. The effect of these overlong and now outdated sideburns, kept in deference to fashion, together with the more traditional black mustaches, was to make the men’s faces look very dark. As the smells of aftershave and brilliantine (applied with particular liberality on the thinning hair of men over forty), the ladies’ heavy perfumes, the clouds of cigarette smoke to which everyone contributed, more out of habit than for pleasure, the odor of cooking oil from the kitchens-as the confluence of odors swirled into the spring breeze, I was reminded of being a child at my parents’ parties. Even the elevator music that the orchestra (the Silver Leaves) was playing, half ironically, to set the mood for the evening, whispered to me that I was happy.

By now the guests, especially the elderly, had tired of standing, and hungry people were already looking for their tables, with little children forging ahead (“Granny! I found our place!” “Where? Stop, don’t run, you’ll fall”). Just then, the former foreign minister came up from behind to take me by the arm. With consummate diplomatic skill he drew me to one side to remind me that he had known Sibel since she was a child, and to impress on me, at great length, how elegant and refined she was, and what charming, cultured people her parents were, illustrating these points with examples from his own fond memories.

“Old, sophisticated families like theirs are in short supply these days, Kemal Bey,” he said. “You are in the world of business, so you know better than I do that we’re being swamped by ill-mannered nouveaux riches, and provincials with their headscarf-wearing wives and daughters. Just the other day I saw a man with two wives trailing him, draped in black from head to toe, like Arabs. He’d taken them out for ice cream to Beyoğlu… So tell me, are you ready to marry this girl and do everything to make her happy for the rest of your life?”

“Yes, sir, I am,” I said. I could not help noticing that the former minister was disappointed by the lack of jolliness in my reply.

“Engagements are not to be broken. It means that this girl’s name will be linked with yours until the end of your lives. Have you given this serious thought?”

The guests were already pouring in and forming a circle around us.

“I have.”

“Well then, let’s get you engaged so that we can eat. If you would take your place…”

I could tell he hadn’t warmed to me, but that did not dampen my mood. The former foreign minister began by telling the assembled guests a story from his army days. He, like Turkey itself, had been very poor forty years ago, and he recounted, with genuine feeling, how he and his dear departed wife had become engaged without fanfare or ceremony. He declared his high regard for Sibel and her family. There wasn’t much wit in what he said, but even the waiters who had retired to the side holding their trays smiled as if listening to an entertaining story. When Hülya, the sweet, bucktoothed ten-year-old whom Sibel loved dearly (and who was utterly fascinated by her), came forward with the silver tray bearing the rings I display here, the crowd fell silent. Sibel and I were so excited, and the former foreign minister so distracted, that we got into a hopeless muddle about which ring went where. But by now the guests were ready for a laugh, and so when a few people cried out, “Not that finger, it goes on the other hand,” a general titter circulated through the crowd, until the rings finally found their proper places, and then the former foreign minister cut the ribbon binding them, to a spontaneous round of applause sounding like a flock of pigeons taking flight. Even though I had prepared myself for this, the sight of so many people I had known all my life clapping for us and warmly smiling made me as giddy as a child. But this was not what set my heart racing.

For in the back of the crowd, standing next to her mother and father, I’d seen Füsun. A rapturous wave washed over me. As I kissed Sibel’s cheeks, as my mother came to our side and I embraced her, and then my father, and my brother, I realized what it was that had made me so joyful, though I still thought I could hide it, not just from the crowd, but from myself, too. Our table was right on the edge of the dance floor. Just before we sat down I saw Füsun sitting with her parents at the very back, right next to the table for the Satsat employees.

“You both look so happy,” said my brother’s wife, Berrin.

“But we’re so tired, too,” said Sibel. “If this is what it takes to pull off an engagement party, just imagine how tiring the wedding is going to be.”

“You’ll be very happy on that day, too,” said Berrin.

“How do you define happiness, Berrin?” I asked.

“Goodness, what a question,” said Berrin, and she behaved as if she were considering her own happiness, but because even to joke about such a thing made her uncomfortable, she smiled bashfully. Amid the babble of conversation, the guests’ chatter, occasional cries, the clink of knives and forks, and the strains of music, we both heard my brother’s loud, shrill voice as he regaled someone with a story.

“Family, children, and good company,” Berrin said. “Even if you’re not happy”-here, she indicated my brother with her eyes-“even when you’re having your worst day you live your life as if you are. All sorrows fade away when you’re surrounded by your family. You should have children right away. Have lots of children, just like peasants.”

“What’s going on here?” said my brother, joining us. “Tell me what you’re gossiping about.”

“I’m telling them to have children,” said Berrin. “How many should they have?”

No one was looking, so I downed my half glass of raki in one gulp.

A little later Berrin whispered into my ear: “That man at the end of the table, and that charming girl next to him-who are they?”

“That’s Nurcihan, Sibel’s dear friend since lycée days-they also went to France together. Sibel has seated her next to my friend Mehmet, hoping to get something started.”

“Doesn’t look very promising so far!” said Berrin.

Sibel felt a mixture of admiration and compassion for her friend Nurcihan. When they were students in Paris, Nurcihan had had several love affairs, which she’d courageously consummated, even moving in with a few of these men (Sibel had enviously told me all these stories), and all the while keeping this life secret from her wealthy parents in Istanbul; but with time these adventures had left her feeling sad and drained, so now, under Sibel’s influence, she was plotting a return to Istanbul. “But for obvious reasons,” I added, after telling all this to Berrin, “she’ll need to fall in love with someone who appreciates her worth, someone at her level, who won’t be troubled by her French past, or her old lovers.”

“Well, if you ask me, it’s not happening tonight,” she whispered. “What sort of business is Mehmet’s family in?”

“They have money. His father is a well-known building contractor.”

As Berrin saucily raised an eyebrow in snobbish suspicion, I told her that although his family was very religious and conservative, Mehmet was a trusted friend of mine from Robert College, an honest and decent man who had for years refused to let his headscarf-wearing mother arrange a marriage for him to an educated Istanbul girl, because he wanted to marry someone of his own choosing, a girl he could go out with. “But so far he’s got nowhere with the modern girls he’s found for himself.”

“He’ll never get anywhere,” said Berrin with a knowing air.

“Why not?”

“Just look at him. You can tell that type from a mile off,” said Berrin. “Men like him from the heart of Anatolia… Girls would rather marry him through a matchmaker because they know if they go gallivanting about town with him too much, a man like this will secretly begin to think of them as whores.”

“Mehmet doesn’t have that mentality.”

“But he’s from that mold. That’s what his family is like, that’s where he comes from. A girl with brains doesn’t judge a man by the way he thinks. She looks at his family, at the way he deports himself.”

“You do have a point,” I said. “I’ve seen brainy girls like this-no need to mention names-who shy away from Mehmet, even when he’s clear he’s serious about them, but when they’re around other men, even when they’re not sure the men would marry them, they’re much more relaxed, and much better at getting the ball rolling.”

“Exactly,” said Berrin proudly. “I can’t tell you how many men in this country treat their wives with disrespect even years later, just for having allowed them some intimacy before marriage. Let me tell you something: Your friend Mehmet has never really been in love with any of those girls who did not allow him to approach them. If he had been, those girls would have sensed it, too, and they would have treated him differently. I’m not saying they would have slept with him, of course, but they would have let him get close enough to make marriage a possibility.”

“But the reason that Mehmet couldn’t fall in love with them was that they wouldn’t let him get close enough, because they were conservative and frightened.”

“That’s not the way it works,” said Berrin. “You don’t have to sleep with someone to be in love. The sex is not what matters. Love is Leyla and Mecnun.”

I said something like “Hmmmmm.”

“What’s going on over there?” my brother shouted from the other end of the table. “Tell us, please! Who’s sleeping with whom?”

Berrin gave him a look that said, There are children listening! Then she whispered into my ear. “That’s the crux of it,” she said. “Why can’t this seemingly meek Mehmet of yours fall in love with any of these girls he wants to meet, or start something serious with them?”

Out of respect for Berrin’s intelligence, I was tempted for a moment to tell her that Mehmet was an incorrigible patron of whorehouses. He had “girls” he visited regularly in four or five private establishments in Sıraselviler, Cihangir, Bebek, and Nişantaşı. Even as he struggled in vain to form deep attachments with the women he met at work-virgins in their early twenties with lycée diplomas-he’d continued to frequent the high-class brothels for wild all-nighters with girls impersonating Western movie stars, though when he drank too much it became obvious what a hard time he had keeping up the pace, or even thinking straight. Nevertheless, when we emerged from a party in the wee hours, instead of returning to his house where his father was forever fretting over his worry beads and his mother brooded in her headscarf, and everyone, including his sisters, kept the fast during Ramadan, he would bid us good-bye and head to one of the pricier brothels of Cihangir or Bebek.

“You’re drinking rather a lot this evening,” said Berrin. “Slow down a little. There are a lot of people here and they’re all watching the family.”

“Fine,” I said, as I lifted my glass with a smile.

“Just look at Osman, how responsible he is,” said Berrin. “Then look at you, so mischievous at your own engagement… How could two brothers be so different?”

“Actually,” I said, “we’re very similar. And anyway, from now on I’m going to be even more serious and responsible than Osman.”

“Well, don’t go overboard. People can be so boring when they’re too serious,” Berrin began, and she continued in this half-hectoring vein until, much later, I heard, “You’re not even listening to me.”

“What? Of course I’m listening.”

“All right, then tell me what I just said!”

“You said, ‘Love has to be the way it is in the old legends. Like Leyla and Mecnun.’”

“I knew you weren’t listening to me,” said Berrin with a half smile, from which I could see she was worried about me. She turned to Sibel, to see if she had noticed what condition I was in. But Sibel was talking to Mehmet and Nurcihan.

That I’d not been able to put Füsun out of mind all this while; that throughout my conversation with Berrin I’d felt her presence behind me, at her table in the back; that I kept wondering how she was doing and what she must be thinking-I’d been trying to hide this from myself just as I’ve been keeping it from my readers, but enough! You already know that I failed. So from now on I’ll be straight with you.

I found an excuse to leave the table. I can’t remember what pretext I came up with. I cast my eyes over the back of the garden, but I couldn’t see Füsun. The place was very crowded, and as always, with everyone talking at once, shouting to be heard, and children shrieking as they played hide-and-seek among the tables, and the clink of knives and forks going on over their heads-a cacophony the orchestra only exacerbated-it added up to quite a roar. I walked through this infernal din toward the back, hoping to catch sight of Füsun.

“Many congratulations, my dear Kemal,” I heard someone say. “How much longer till the belly dance?”

This was Selim the Snob, who was sitting at Zaim’s table. I laughed, as if he’d said something hilarious.

“You’ve made an excellent choice, Kemal Bey,” a nice matron told me. “You probably don’t remember me. I’m your mother’s…”

But before she could make the connection, a waiter with a tray pushed me aside to make his way between us. By the time I had gathered my bearings, the well-wishing woman had been carried away in the flow of the crowd.

“Let me see your ring!” said a child, roughly twisting my hand.

“Stop, don’t be rude!” said the child’s fat mother, seizing the child roughly by the arm. She lunged, as if to slap him, but the brat was wise to her ways and wriggled out just in time. “Come here and sit down!” cried his mother. “I’m so sorry… and congratulations.”

A middle-aged woman I’d never seen before was laughing herself red in the face, but when our eyes met she suddenly became serious. Her husband introduced himself-he was a relation of Sibel’s, but apparently we’d both done our military service at the same time in Amasya-and he invited me to sit down with them. I surveyed the tables at the back of the garden, hoping to catch sight of Füsun, but she seemed to have vanished into thin air. Misery spread through my body.

“Are you looking for someone?”

“My fiancée is waiting for me, but of course I’d love to sit down and have a drink with you…”

They were very pleased, and at once they pushed together their chairs to make room for one more. No, I didn’t need a place setting, just a little more raki.

“Kemal, my friend, have you ever been introduced to Admiral Erçetin?” the man asked, pointing at the gentleman across the table.

“Yes, of course,” I said. In fact I had no memory of him.

“Young man, I am Sibel’s father’s aunt’s sister’s husband!” the admiral told me humbly. “I congratulate you.”

“Please excuse me, Admiral. I didn’t recognize you out of uniform. Sibel speaks highly of you.”

In fact, Sibel had told me how a distant cousin of hers had years ago spent the summer in Heybeliada and fallen in love with a handsome naval officer; thinking that this admiral must be one of those grandees that rich families treat so well so as to have someone to pull strings whenever they have dealings with the state, or when they need to arrange the deferment of some son’s military service, I hadn’t paid particular attention to her tale. I now had a strange urge to ingratiate myself by saying, “When is the army going to step in, sir? How much longer can we be pushed to the brink by communists on the one side and reactionaries on the other?” but I was composed enough to know that if I said these things in my present addled state, I would be judged drunk and disrespectful. Suddenly something prompted me to stand up, and there, in the distance, I saw Füsun.

“I’m afraid I’m neglecting our other guests. I think I’d better get up, gentlemen!”

As always after drinking too much, I felt like my own ghost trying to take its first solo walk outside the body.

Füsun had returned to her table in the back. In a dress with spaghetti straps, her bare shoulders had a healthy glow. She’d had her hair done, too. She was so very beautiful that even from that distance it filled my heart with joy and excitement to catch a glimpse of her.

She acted as if she hadn’t seen me. Four tables closer was the fidgety Pamuk family, and so, to close the distance between me and Füsun, I went over to greet Aydın and Gündüz Pamuk, who at some point had done some business with my father. All the while I kept my antennae tuned to Füsun’s table, whose proximity to the Satsat table had created the opportunity for my young and ambitious employee Kenan, who could not take his eyes off Füsun, to strike up a conversation with her.

Like so many formerly rich families that had squandered their fortunes, the Pamuks had turned in on themselves and found it upsetting to come face-to-face with new money. Sitting with his beautiful mother, his father, his elder brother, his uncle, and his cousins was the chain-smoking twenty-three-year-old Orhan, nothing special about him beyond his propensity to act nervous and impatient, affecting a mocking smile.

Rising from the tedious Pamuk table, I walked straight over to Füsun. How to describe the expression on her face when she realized that she couldn’t ignore me-that I had been so bold as to approach her with love in my eyes? At once she blushed, her deep pink skin glowing with life. From the looks Aunt Nesibe was giving me, I guessed that Füsun had told her everything. First I shook her hand, which was dry, and then I shook hands with her father, who had long fingers and slender wrists like his daughter’s, and he gave no sign of knowing anything. When it was my beloved’s turn, I took her hand, and with tenderness and propriety, I kissed her on both cheeks, furtively inhaling the tender spots on her neck and below her ears that had brought me such pleasure only hours ago. The question I couldn’t get out of my head-“Why did you come?”-now took the form of “How good of you to come!” She had put on just a bit of eyeliner and some pink lipstick. With her perfume, the makeup gave her an exotic womanly air. But her eyes were red and puffy like a child’s, so I knew that after we had parted that afternoon she had gone home and spent the early evening crying; but no sooner had I worked this out than she assumed the demeanor of a confident, well-bred woman who knew her own mind.

“Kemal Bey, I know Sibel Hanım. You’ve made a very wise choice,” she said bravely. “Congratulations.”

“Oh, thank you.”

“Kemal Bey,” her mother said at the same time. “I can only imagine how busy you are. God bless you for giving so much of your time to helping our daughter with her mathematics.”

“Her exam is tomorrow, isn’t it?” I asked. “She should be heading home early to get plenty of rest.”

“I understand you have every right to be concerned,” said her mother. “But while she was working with you she got very upset. Give her your permission to have a little fun for an evening.”

I gave Füsun a compassionate, teacherly smile. With all the noise from the crowd and the music, it seemed that no one could hear us. I saw in the looks Füsun was giving her mother the same flashes of anger I’d seen during our trysts in the Merhamet Apartments; I took one last look at her beautiful, half-exposed breasts, her wondrous shoulders, and her childish arms. As I turned away I felt happiness overwhelm me like a giant wave crashing.

The Silver Leaves were playing “An Evening on the Bosphorus,” their version of “It’s Now or Never.” If I didn’t believe with all my heart that absolute happiness in this world can only happen while living in the present and in the arms of another, I would have chosen this instant as “the happiest moment of my life.” For I had concluded from Füsun’s mother’s words and her own hurt and angry looks that she could not bring herself to end our relationship, and that even her mother seemed to have resigned herself to this state of affairs, though with certain expectations. If I proceeded with great care and let her know how much I loved her, Füsun, I now understood, would be unable to break off relations with me for as long as I lived! The manly pleasures outside the realm of morality that God granted just a few favored slaves-the happiness that my father and my uncles had had only a taste of, and rarely before their fifties, not before they had suffered terrible torment-it seemed to me now that I was going to be able to enjoy the same good fortune-partaking of all the pleasures of a happy home life with a beautiful, sensible, well-educated woman, and at the same time enjoying the pleasures of an alluring and wild young girl-all this while I was still in my thirties, having scarcely suffered for it, or paid a price. Though not at all religious, I have engraved in my memory what I still regard as a postcard of bliss, sent by God: the image of merry guests, now dispersed to the outer reaches of the garden, and beyond them among the plane trees and the colored lamps, the landscape, the lights of the Bosphorus and the deep blue sky.

“Where have you been?” said Sibel. She’d come out to look for me. “I was worried. Berrin said you had had a bit too much to drink. Are you all right, darling?”

“Yes-I did overdo it in there, but I’m feeling better now, dear. My only problem now is that I’m too happy.”

“I’m also very happy, but we have a problem.”

“What?”

“It’s not working with Nurcihan and Mehmet.”

“Well, if it’s not to be, it’s not to be. What matters tonight is that we’re happy.”

“No, no, they both want this. If only they could let their guard down a little, I’m positive they’d be on the road to marriage in no time. But they just can’t seem to break the ice. I’m afraid that they’ll miss their chance.”

I watched Mehmet from a distance. He just couldn’t get Nurcihan to warm to him, and when he realized how clumsy he’d been he got angry and damned himself into still further awkwardness.

I motioned to Sibel to sit with me at a small service table piled high with clean plates. “We may be too late for Mehmet… It may not be possible to find him a proper, decent wife.”

“Why?”

As her eyes grew large with fear and curiosity, I told Sibel that Mehmet would never find happiness anywhere but in a heavily perfumed room with red lamps. I ordered a raki from the waiter who darted over as soon as we were seated.

“You seem to know quite a bit about these places!” said Sibel. “Did you visit them with him before you knew me?”

“I love you so much,” I said, putting my hand on hers, and I didn’t mind when the waiter shot an inquisitive glance at our engagement rings. “But Mehmet must surely be wondering if he can ever be deeply in love with any decent girl. In fact he must be panicking.”

“Oh, what a pity!” said Sibel. “It’s all because of those girls who shied away from him…”

“Well, he shouldn’t have scared them off. The girls are right to be careful. What happens to them if they have slept with a man and he doesn’t marry them? If word gets out and she’s left in the lurch, what is she to do?”

“It’s something she just knows,” said Sibel carefully.

“What is?”

“Whether she can trust a man or not.”

“It’s not so simple. Many girls suffer terribly, being unable to make up their minds. Or else they give in to desire but are too afraid to take any pleasure from it… I don’t even know if there is any girl out there who can enjoy it for what it is and damn the consequences. And Mehmet, if he hadn’t listened to all those stories of sexual freedom in Europe with his mouth watering, he might not have got it into his head that he had to have sex with a girl before marrying her, just to be modern or civilized; he’d probably have been able to make a happy marriage with a decent girl who loved him. Now look at him, squirming in that chair next to Nurcihan.”

“He knows that Nurcihan slept with men in Europe… I know this intrigues him, but it scares him, too,” said Sibel. “Come on, let’s go give him a hand.”

The Silver Leaves were playing “Happiness,” a mawkish piece of their own composing. But I was in the mood and it moved me. As I felt my love for Füsun coursing through my veins-such pain, and such bliss-I was nevertheless able to appear paternalistic, lecturing Sibel that Turkey, too, would probably be modern like Europe in a hundred years’ time, and that when that day arrived everyone would be free of worries about virginity and what people thought, free to make love and be happy as it is promised one in heaven. But until then most people would continue to agonize over love, and suffer sexual pain.

“No, no,” said my beautiful and good-hearted fiancée. “If we can be this happy today, then so can they. Because we’re definitely going to get Nurcihan and Mehmet married.”

“Okay, then, what’s the plan?”

“What a fine sight-engaged for only an hour and already off in a corner by yourselves?” This was a portly gentleman neither of us knew. “May I join you, Kemal Bey?” Without waiting for an answer he grabbed a chair from the side and sat down next to us. He was relatively young, perhaps in his forties, to be sporting a white carnation on his lapel and wearing a sickly sweet perfume, for women, and enough of it to make one faint. “When the bride and groom retire to a corner, a wedding loses its joy.”

“We’re not a bride and groom yet,” I said. “We’re only engaged.”

“But everyone is saying that this splendid engagement party is more sumptuous than the grandest wedding, Kemal Bey. Where might you have the wedding, apart from the Hilton?”

“Excuse me, but with whom have I the pleasure of speaking?”

“Forgive me, Kemal Bey, you have every right. We writers assume that everyone knows who we are. My name is Süreyya Sabır. You may know me by my pen name, ‘White Carnation,’ in Akşam.”

“Yes, of course, there can’t be anyone in Istanbul who doesn’t read you to find out the latest society gossip,” said Sibel. “I always assumed you were a woman-you know so much about fashion and clothes.”

Carelessly I interrupted her to ask, “Who invited you?”

“Thank you for the compliment, Sibel Hanım. But in Europe, refined men with a knowledge of fashion are not uncommon. And Kemal Bey, the Turkish press regulations allow journalists to attend gatherings that are open to the public, on condition that we show this press card. By statute, any gathering announced by invitation is ‘open to the public.’ All the same, I have never once attended a party to which I had not been invited. I am here this lovely evening at the invitation of your esteemed mother. Because of her modern outlook, she knows the value of what you call society gossip, which I prefer to call news, so she invites me to many of her parties. So great is the trust between us that sometimes when I can’t attend a particular party we’ll speak of it on the phone the next day, and when I sit down to write I quote her word for word. Because-like you, my dear girl-she pays precise attention to everything and never gives false reports. There has never been a mistake in my society news column, Kemal Bey, and there never will be.”

Sibel mumbled something like, “I’m afraid you misunderstood Kemal’s question. He meant nothing by it.”

“Just now there were a number of vipers saying Istanbul ’s entire supply of black market whiskey and champagne must be in this room. Our country is suffering from a shortage of foreign currency reserves, we don’t have the wherewithal to keep our factories going or to buy diesel! There are some, Kemal Bey-jealous enemies of wealth-who would write articles asking, ‘Where does all this black market alcohol come from?’ just to cast a cloud over this lovely evening… Because I would never dream of trying to upset you, I shall forget your thoughtless words at once, for all eternity. Because we have a free press in Turkey, I shall ask that you answer a single question truthfully.”

“Of course, Süreyya Bey.”

“Just a moment ago I caught you two wrapped up in a serious discussion, and I was curious. What were you talking about, so soon after your engagement?”

“We were wondering whether the guests had enjoyed their food,” I said.

“Sibel Hanım, I have good news for you,” said White Carnation in joyous tones. “Your future husband just doesn’t know how to tell a lie!”

“Kemal has a very good heart,” said Sibel. “What we were talking about was this: Who knows how many people at this gathering are in anguish over who knows what trouble with love, marriage, or even sex.”

“Oooh, yes,” said the gossip columnist, at her uttering of the word that had recently been discovered by the press, indeed, had turned into something of a fetish; and because he couldn’t decide whether it was better for him to act as if he had just heard an admission worthy of scandal, or whether he might be better advised to show his empathy for the depth of human suffering, for a moment he fell silent. “You, of course, are modern, happy people, at ease in this new age,” he said at last. “You’ve put all this pain behind you.” He did not say this sardonically, but with an effortless sincerity cultivated through experience, which taught that in difficult situations the best thing was always to flatter people. Feigning feeling for others not as fortunate as we, he began to tell tales about our guests: the daughter who was hopelessly in love with so-and-so’s son; the girl who was being ostracized by good families for being too free in her ways while all the men lusted after her; the mother who had set her cap for a certain rich playboy as her son-in-law; the slovenly son of another wealthy family who had fallen in love, though he was promised to another. Sibel and I could not help but be entertained by his stories, and when White Carnation saw this he relished telling them all the more. He was just explaining that all these “disasters” would be obvious once the dancing had begun, when my mother arrived to tell us we were being very rude, and everyone was looking at us; she ordered us back to our table.

No sooner had I taken my seat next to Berrin than the image of Füsun fired up in my mind’s eye with full force, as if a television set had just been plugged in. But this time the light from that image exuded joy, not sadness, illuminating not just this evening but my entire future. For a brief moment I recognized myself among those men whose real source of happiness is their secret lover, but who pretend it is their wives and children-I, too, was acting as if it was Sibel who made me happy, and we weren’t even married yet.

After chatting for a while with the gossip columnist, my mother came over to our table. “Take care around these journalists, will you?” she said. “They write all sorts of lies; they do terrible mischief. And then they make threatening calls to your father, asking him to buy more advertising space. Why don’t you two get up and start the dancing. Everyone is waiting for you.” She turned to Sibel. “The orchestra is warming up. Oh how sweet you are, how beautiful.”

Sibel and I danced to a tango that the Silver Leaves were playing. All the guests were watching, and this gave our happiness the illusion of depth. Sibel draped her arm over my shoulder as if to embrace me, and pressed her face against my chest as close as if we were dancing alone in a dark corner of a discotheque; from time to time she smiled and murmured something, and after we’d made a turn I would look over her shoulder at whatever person she had remarked on a moment ago-the waiter whose heavy tray had not prevented his pausing to smile at our bliss, or her mother weeping for joy, or a lady whose hair resembled a bird’s nest, or Nurcihan and Mehmet turning their backs on each other now that we had left them alone, or the ninety-year-old gentleman who had made his fortune during the Great War and who could no longer eat without the help of his servant, who was wearing a string tie-but I did not once look at the back of the garden, where Füsun was sitting. As Sibel kept up her cheerful chatter, it was better if Füsun didn’t see us.

There was a burst of applause; it didn’t last long, and we carried on dancing as if nothing had happened. When other couples got up to dance, we returned to our table.

“You did very well. You looked so good together,” said Berrin. At that point, I think, Füsun was not yet among the dancers. Sibel was fretting so over Nurcihan and Mehmet’s lack of progress that she asked me to speak to Mehmet. “Tell him to come on a little stronger,” said Sibel, but I did nothing. Berrin got involved at this point, and in a whisper she told us that forcing the issue was a bad idea; she’d been watching the whole thing from her side of the table and it wasn’t just Mehmet; they had both been standoffish, or at least nervous, and if they didn’t like each other there was no point in pushing them together. “No,” said Sibel, “weddings cast a kind of spell. It’s at weddings that many people meet the person they end up marrying. It’s not just girls that get into the mood at weddings; it’s boys, too. But you have to help them along…” “What are you talking about? Tell me, too,” said my brother as he joined the whispering conversation, and once he had been apprised of things, he pointed out in hortatory tones that while the days of arranged marriages were over, Turkey wasn’t Europe, and there weren’t many ways couples could get to know each other, with the result that a lot of the burden had fallen on the shoulders of well-meaning informal matchmakers. Then, apparently forgetting that Nurcihan and Mehmet had sparked the debate, he turned to Nurcihan, saying, “I imagine, for example, that you would never consent to a marriage arranged by a matchmaker, am I right?”

“So long as the man is nice, it doesn’t matter how you find him, Osman Bey,” said Nurcihan with a giggle.

We all laughed as if we’d heard something so outrageous it could only be a joke. But Mehmet turned deep red and looked away.

“Don’t you see?” Sibel whispered into my ear a bit later. “She frightened him off. He thought she was making fun of him.”

I was not watching the people on the dance floor at all. But when our museum was established, Mr. Orhan Pamuk recalled that Füsun had danced with two people early on. He didn’t know or couldn’t remember her first dance partner, though I worked out that it must have been Kenan from Satsat. The second, however, was the young man with whom I had exchanged glances a short time earlier while visiting the Pamuk family table-Orhan Pamuk himself, as he proudly told me years later. Those interested in Orhan Bey’s own description of how he felt while dancing with Füsun should look at the last chapter, entitled “Happiness.”

While Orhan Bey was dancing the dance that he would describe to me with utter frankness many years after the fact, Mehmet decided he had had enough of Nurcihan’s giggles and our double entendres about love, marriage, matchmakers, and “modern life” and left the table. At once our spirits dropped.

“That was very rude of us,” said Sibel. “We broke the boy’s heart.”

“Don’t say that looking at me,” said Nurcihan. “I didn’t do any more than you did. You’ve all had a lot to drink and you’re having a good time. Mehmet is the one who is frustrated in life.”

“If Kemal brings him back to the table, will you behave nicely, Nurcihan?” asked Sibel. “I know you could make him very happy. And he you. But you have to treat him well.”

It seemed to please Nurcihan to see Sibel so openly determined to set her up with Mehmet. “No one’s talking about getting married tomorrow,” she said. “He met me, he could have said one or two nice things to me.”

“He is trying. He’s just not used to talking with a girl as self-possessed as you are,” said Sibel; giggling, she whispered the rest of what she had to say into Nurcihan’s ear.

“Do you people know why boys in this country never learn how to flirt with girls?” asked my brother. He assumed that charming expression he wore whenever he’d had something to drink. “There’s nowhere to flirt. We don’t even have our own word for ‘flirt.’”

“I remember your idea of flirting,” said Berrin. “Before we got engaged, you’d take me to the cinema on Saturday afternoons… You’d bring a portable radio with you, so that you could find out about the Fener match during the five-minute intermission.”

“Actually, I didn’t bring the radio with me to tune in to the match, but to impress you,” said my brother. “I was proud to be the owner of the first transistor radio in Istanbul.”

Then Nurcihan admitted that her mother used to brag about being the first person in Turkey to use an electric blender. She went on to tell us how, in the late 1950s, years before canned tomato juice became available, her mother was offering her friends tomato, carrot, celery, beet, and radish juice when they came over to play bridge, and as the ladies were all sipping from crystal glasses, she would proudly take them into the kitchen to show them the first electric blender to arrive in the country. As we listened to light music from that era, we remembered how the Istanbul bourgeoisie had trampled over one another to be the first to own an electric shaver, a can opener, a carving knife, and any number of strange and frightening inventions, lacerating their hands and faces as they struggled to learn how to use them. We talked about all those tape recorders brought back from Europe that usually broke on first use, and the hair dryers that blew the fuses, the coffee grinders that frightened the servant girls, the mayonnaise makers for which no spare parts were to be found in Turkey, but which no one had the heart to throw away and so relegated to a remote corner of the house to gather dust. Meanwhile, as we were laughing about all this, You-Deserve-It-All Zaim sat down in the seat Mehmet had vacated, and within four or five minutes he had managed to enter the swim of the conversation and was whispering into Nurcihan’s ear, making her laugh.

“What happened to that German model of yours?” Sibel asked Zaim. “Did you ditch her like all the others?”

“Inge wasn’t my lover. She’s gone back to Germany.” Zaim spoke without losing any of his good humor. “We were just business associates, and I was only taking her out to show her Istanbul by night.”

“So you’re telling me you were just friends,” said Sibel, using one of the expressions newly popularized by the celebrity magazines.

“I saw her today, at the cinema,” said Berrin. “She turned up on the screen, sipping that soft drink with that same beckoning smile.” She turned to her husband. “I went at lunchtime-the power was out at the hairdresser’s. I went to the Site-it was Jean Gabin with Sophia Loren.” She turned to Zaim. “I see her everywhere-in every single kiosk in the city; and it’s not just children drinking Meltem now, it’s everyone. You’re to be congratulated.”

“We timed it well,” said Zaim. “We’ve been lucky, too.”

Seeing the puzzlement in Nurcihan’s eyes, and knowing that Zaim would expect me to explain, I quickly informed Nurcihan that my friend was the owner of Şektaş, the company that had recently launched Meltem, and that he’d also introduced us to Inge, a lovely German model who could be seen in the advertisements all over the city.

“Have you had the opportunity to taste our fruit-flavored soft drinks?”

“Of course I have. I especially liked the strawberry,” said Nurcihan. “Even the French haven’t been able to put out something that good in years.”

“Do you live in France?” asked Zaim.

Zaim invited all of us to visit the factory that weekend, also promising a Bosphorus cruise and a picnic in Belgrade Forest just outside the city limits. The entire table watched him and Nurcihan. A short while later they got up to dance.

“Go find Mehmet,” said Sibel. “Get him to rescue Nurcihan from Zaim.”

“Are we sure she wants to be rescued?”

“I don’t want to see my friend swallowed whole by this embarrassing Casanova whose only ambition in life is to lure girls into bed.”

“Zaim has a very good heart, and he’s honest. He just has a weakness for women. Can’t Nurcihan have a bit of fun here as she did in France? Is it absolutely necessary for her to get married?”

“French men don’t look down on a woman just because she’s slept with a man before marriage,” said Sibel. “But here even a little fun can get you a reputation. Besides, I don’t want to see Mehmet’s heart broken.”

“I don’t either. But I also don’t want other people’s love affairs to overshadow our engagement.”

“You don’t seem to appreciate the pleasures of matchmaking,” said Sibel. “If these two get married, just think of it, Nurcihan and Mehmet could be our closest friends for years.”

“I doubt Mehmet is going to be able to peel Nurcihan away from Zaim tonight. He shies away from confrontations with other men at parties.”

“That’s why you have to go have a word with him, tell him not to be scared. I’ll handle Nurcihan, don’t you worry. Go-go and bring him back here right away.” As I stood up she gave me a tender smile. “You’re very handsome,” she said. “Don’t stop and gab. Come back at once and take me off to dance.”

It had occurred to me that I might run into Füsun as I made my way from table to table in search of Mehmet, through the crowds of merry, shouting, half-intoxicated revelers, shaking my hand. There were three friends of my mother’s who had come to our house every Wednesday during my childhood to play bezique. With the same spontaneity that must have prompted them all to dye their hair the exact same shade of brown, they and their three husbands simultaneously began waving to me from their table, calling “Ke-maaaal” as if summoning a child. Next I saw an importer friend of my father’s who ten years later would be notorious for bringing down the minister of customs and excise who’d asked him for an obscenely large bribe, which he’d delivered inside an enormous baklava box packed with stacks of bills with a picture of Antep on the top. He’d later released to the public verbatim the intimate conversation that had ensued, recorded on the tape machine he’d secured under his arm with Gazo brand tape. He is now etched in my memory with his white tuxedo, his gold cuff links, his manicured nails that were doused in the perfume that remained on my hand long after he shook it.

As it was with so many of the faces in the photographs my mother trimmed so meticulously for arrangement in our albums, I found many of the faces in the crowd so familiar, so close, that it made me terribly uneasy when I was unable to work out the relations among them-who was whose husband, or whose sister.

“Kemal darling,” said an amiable middle-aged woman at just that moment. “Do you remember proposing to me when you were six years old?” It was only when I saw her stunning eighteen-year-old daughter that I recognized her. “Oh, Aunt Meral, your daughter looks just as you did then!” I said to my mother’s second cousin. When the mother told me that they were regretfully obliged to leave early, because the daughter was taking the university exam the next day, I realized that between me and my jovial aunt there were as many years-twelve, to be exact-as between me and her gorgeous daughter, an awareness that produced a momentary stupor, before I yielded to the urge to glance in the very direction I had been avoiding, but Füsun was not visible at the table in the back or on the crowded dance floor. It was shortly thereafter that this photograph was taken of me with “Ship-Sinker Güven,” who ran an insurance company. You can’t see my face, just my hand in the photo that I acquired years later from a collector whose home was littered with piles and piles of photographs of weddings and other parties from the Hilton. In another that would be taken three seconds later, the gentleman banker in the background would be shaking my hand, having introduced himself as an associate of Sibel’s father, this revelation having caused me to remember with some surprise that every time-that is to say, both times-I had been to Harrods in London, I’d seen this gentleman banker lost in thought as he was picking out an appropriately dark suit for himself.

Making my way through the crowd, stopping to pose for souvenir photographs, I marveled at how many brunettes had bleached their hair blond; and how many of the rich, flashy men were wearing almost identical ties, watches, rings, and thick-soled shoes, and how their mustaches and sideburns were trimmed to equally disturbing uniformity, but at the same time I recalled that I knew them all and that we had many fond memories in common, and this was enough to stir a wave of nostalgia, and also wonderment at the blessed life before me, and the unparalleled beauty of the summer evening that carried the scent of mimosa. I greeted Turkey’s first Miss Europe, who had, after the age of forty, and two failed marriages, devoted herself to fund-raising balls sponsored by associations working on behalf of the poor, the disabled, and the orphaned (“Forget idealism, my dear, she takes a percentage,” my mother used to say), and who visited my father’s office once every two months, seeking his support. I remarked on the beauty of the evening to the lady whose shipping magnate husband had been shot in the eye and killed during a family feud, and who had, ever after, been teary-eyed at family gatherings. It was with great respect that I shook the soft hand of Celâl Salik (I display a column by him here), then Turkey ’s best-loved, strangest, and most courageous columnist. I sat down for a photograph with the sons, daughter, and grandchildren of the late Cevdet Bey, one of Istanbul ’s first Muslim businessmen. At another table of some guests invited by Sibel, I entered into a wager about the likely outcome of The Fugitive, the television series that had captivated all of Turkey and whose final episode was to be aired the following Wednesday: Dr. Richard Kimble had been hunted down for a crime he didn’t commit, and being unable to prove his innocence, would always, always be on the run!

In the end I did find Mehmet comfortably perched on a stool in the bar adjacent to the garden, drinking raki with Tayfun, a classmate of ours.

“Oooh, all the bridegrooms are here at last,” said Tayfun as I sat down to join them. It was not just that we were delighted to see each other; his remark brought back happy memories that caused us all to smile. During our last year at Robert College the three of us would often hop into Tayfun’s father’s Mercedes on an afternoon and head for a glitzy brothel lodged in an old pasha’s mansion in the hills above Emirgân, where every time we would sleep with the same charming, lovely girls. These girls, who’d joined us for a spin in the car a few times and for whom we felt a deep affection we were at pains to conceal, charged us much less than they did the aging loan sharks and drunken businessmen they serviced in the evenings. The madam, an old, high-class prostitute, always treated us courteously, as if we were meeting at a society ball at the Cercle d’Orient in Büyükada. But every time she saw us in our school jackets and ties, clearly on our lunch hour, in the hallway where in the evenings her miniskirted girls would sit on divans, smoking and reading photoromans while waiting for customers, the madam would burst out laughing, and call out, “Giii-iirls! Your schoolboy bridegrooms are here!” Thinking it might cheer Mehmet up to recall those happy days, I reminded him of the time when, having drifted off to sleep after making love in those rooms warmed by the spring sun streaming through the closed shutters, we gave as our excuse to the aged schoolmistress: “We were studying biology, madam,” and that from then on, “studying biology” was our code word for visiting the brothel. We remembered there was a sign on the front of the mansion, READING CRESCENT HOTEL-RESTAURANT, and that the girls had botanical aliases-Flower, Leaf, Daphne, Rose. Once on an evening visit we’d just retired upstairs with the girls when a famous tycoon turned up with his German partners; knocking on our doors, the madam had quickly extracted her girls and sent them downstairs to belly dance for the foreign guests. As consolation, we were given permission to sit quietly at a table in the back of the restaurant to watch. And as they gyrated in their sparkling, sequined harem outfits, we knew it was us, and not the aging moneybags, whom they were trying to entrance. We spoke with longing of watching them dance, knowing that we’d loved them and that we’d never forget our times in that place.

Whenever I returned from America for summer vacation, my chums Mehmet and Tayfun were always keen to fill me in on the latest bizarre developments, for every time there was a new chief of police, the rules of engagement changed. For example, there was an establishment occupying a seven-story Greek building on Sıraselviler Avenue; for a time the police were raiding it daily, but sealing off only one floor, obliging the girls there to take their admirers to another one that was, nonetheless, adorned with the same furniture and mirrors… In one of the side streets of Nişantaşı there was an old mansion where the bouncers ejected any guest or interested party whom they deemed not rich enough. And then there were the mobile services of Deluxe Şermin, whom I’d seen earlier that evening at the hotel entrance, and who a dozen years ago had been known to cruise around in her finned 1962 Plymouth, making a tour of the Park Hotel, the Divan, and Taksim, stopping occasionally for her two or three girls to be claimed. If you phoned ahead, she would even do “home deliveries.” My friends’ wistful tones suggested that they had found far greater satisfaction in these places, and with these girls, than they ever could in the company of “good” girls atremble with worries about their honor and virginity.

I couldn’t see Füsun at her table, but her mother and father were still sitting there. I ordered another raki and asked Mehmet about the newest establishments. Tayfun boasted that he had all the most up-to-date information on the newest and most luxurious brothels, and then, as if to prove the point, he presented me with a malicious recitation of famous deputies caught during vice raids, married acquaintances who once spotted in the waiting room would gaze abruptly out the window to avoid his eye, and generals well known for their presidential aspirations who had died of heart attacks in the arms of twenty-year-old Circassian girls in beds overlooking the Bosphorus, though the official story would have them dying in bed beside their wives. As a soft, sweet, melody laden with memories played in the background, I could see that Mehmet balked at Tayfun’s venom. I changed the subject, reminding him that Nurcihan had come back to Turkey to marry, adding that she had even told Sibel she liked him.

“She’s dancing with Zaim the Sodaman,” said Mehmet.

“Only to make you jealous,” I said, without once looking at the couple on the dance floor.

After a few moments of coyness, Mehmet admitted that he had found Nurcihan attractive, and that if she “really was serious” then of course he would be glad to sit next to her and whisper sweet nothings, and that if everything worked out, he would be grateful to me for life.

“Then why didn’t you treat her well from the very beginning?”

“I don’t know, I just couldn’t.”

“Come on, let’s go back to the table, before someone takes your place.”

Heading to the table, stopping en route to embrace many guests, I was glancing at the dance floor, scanning it for Nurcihan and Zaim, when I saw Füsun dancing… with Satsat’s young and handsome new clerk Kenan… Their bodies were far too close… An ache spread through my stomach as I returned to my seat.

“What happened?” asked Sibel. “No matter, it’s not going to happen with Nurcihan, she’s just mad about Zaim. Just look at the way they’re dancing. Oh, don’t look so sad. I’m sure you did your best.”

“You’ve got it wrong. Mehmet’s willing.”

“Then why are you looking so grim?”

“I’m not.”

“My darling, it’s very clear that the joy has gone out of you,” said Sibel with a smile. “It’s about time you stopped drinking.”

The orchestra going without pause from one number to the next was now playing a slower, more soulful tune. At the table there was a silence, a very long one, and I could feel jealousy’s venom mixing with my blood. But I did not wish to acknowledge this. Neither Mehmet nor I was looking at the dance floor, but I could tell from the looks on people’s faces that the change in tempo had pushed couples there closer together, to the pleasure of some at the table and the annoyance of others. My brother was talking, and after so many years I can’t remember a thing he said, but I do remember trying to pay close attention. Just then the orchestra began to play a number even more syrupy and romantic than the one before, and now even Berrin and Sibel, oblivious a moment ago, were registering reactions to the sight of the dancing couples as they wrapped their arms around each other even tighter. My heart and mind were in utter disarray.

“What were you saying?” I asked Sibel.

“What? I wasn’t saying anything. Are you all right?”

“Shall we send the Silver Leaves a note, requesting a short break?”

“Why? Oh, for goodness’ sake, let the guests dance,” said Sibel. “Look, even the shy ones are dancing with the girls they’ve had their eyes on all evening. Believe me, half of them will end up marrying these same girls.”

I did not look. Neither did I let my eyes meet Mehmet’s.

“Look, here they come,” said Sibel.

For a moment I thought it was Füsun approaching with Kenan, and my heart began to race. But it was Nurcihan and Zaim who were returning to the table. My heart was still beating madly. I jumped up and took Zaim by the arm.

“Come, let me introduce you to a special drink at the bar,” I said, and I took him over there. As we made our way through the crowd, again through a gauntlet of hugs and kisses, Zaim exchanged a few pleasantries with two girls who’d shown interest in him. Seeing how hopelessly one of them gazed at him (she had long black hair and the Ottoman hooked nose) I remembered hearing gossip about her falling desperately in love a few summers earlier, and attempting suicide.

“All the girls adore you,” I said when we sat down. “What’s your secret?”

“Believe me, I don’t do anything special.”

“Did nothing special happen even with the German model?”

Zaim flashed a coy, cool smile. “I’m not at all happy about my reputation,” he said. “If I ever found someone as wonderful as Sibel, I’d really want to get married, too. I have to congratulate you-I mean it. Sibel is a fabulous girl. And I can see in your eyes how happy you are.”

“Actually I’m not so happy right now. This is what I wanted to talk to you about. I need some help.”

“I’d do anything for you, you know that,” he said, looking deep into my eyes. “Trust me, and tell me right away.”

As the bartender was preparing our rakıs, I looked over at the dance floor. Had Füsun, swaying with the sentimental swill, let her head fall onto Kenan’s shoulder? That part of the floor was too dark for me to see, and every attempt to catch sight of her refreshed my pain.

“There’s a girl who’s a distant relation of my mother’s,” I said. “Her name’s Füsun.”

“The one who was in the beauty contest? She’s dancing over there.”

“How do you know?”

“She’s too beautiful,” said Zaim. “I see her whenever I walk past that boutique in Nişantaşı. Like everyone else, I slow down when I’m passing and look inside. She has the sort of beauty you just can’t get out of your head. Everyone knows who she is.”

Worrying that Zaim might now say something that would make it awkward for both of us, I said, “She’s my lover.” I saw a ripple of jealousy cross my friend’s face. “Just to see her dancing with someone else causes me pain right now. I might even say I am madly in love with her. I’m trying to think of a way out. I wouldn’t want something like this to go on for too long.”

“Yes, the girl is wonderful, but the situation couldn’t be worse,” said Zaim. “And you’re right, you can’t let something like this go on for too long.”

I didn’t ask him why. Nor did I ask myself whether it was in fact jealousy or contempt I saw in my friend’s face. But it was clear that I couldn’t tell him right away what I wanted him to do. I felt a need to tell him first about the depth and sincerity of this thing between Füsun and me; I wanted him to respect it. But as I began to reveal how I felt for Füsun, it was clear to me that my drunkenness would allow me to express only the most ordinary parts of the story, and that if I attempted emotional candor he would think me feeble and laughable, and even, despite his own dalliances, hold it against me. I suppose that in the end what I really wanted from my friend was his recognition, not of how sincere I was, but how lucky, and how happy. So it seems all these years later, but at the time, I myself could not acknowledge these things at all, and so, while we both watched Füsun dancing, and my head was spinning with drink, I told Zaim my story. I told him that I was the first man Füsun had ever slept with, describing the bliss we had discovered making love, and of our lovers’ quarrels and a string of other strange particulars that happened to pop into my head at that moment. “In short,” I said, suddenly inspired, “what I want more than anything else in life right now is to hold on to this girl until I die.”

“I understand.”

When I perceived in him a manly sympathy, free of reproach for my selfishness or moral judgment of my happiness, I relaxed.

“What’s upsetting me right now is that she’s dancing with Kenan, the young clerk at Satsat. She’s putting his job in jeopardy just to make me jealous… Of course, I’m also worried that she’ll actually fall for him. For truth be told, Kenan would be an ideal husband for her.”

“I understand,” said Zaim.

“In a short while I am going to invite Kenan to my father’s table. What I would like you to do is to go straight over to Füsun and keep her busy, shadow her every move, like a good football defender, so that I don’t die of jealousy tonight-and so that I can get to the end of this evening without succumbing to fantasies of firing Kenan. Füsun and her parents will be leaving soon, as she is taking the university entrance exam tomorrow. And anyway, this impossible love affair of ours must end very soon.”

“I can’t be sure your girl will take much interest in me tonight,” said Zaim. “There’s another matter, too.”

“What?”

“I can see Sibel is trying to keep me away from Nurcihan,” said Zaim. “She wants to get something going between her and Mehmet. But I think Nurcihan likes me. And I like her, a lot. So I’d like you to help me with this a little. I know Mehmet is our friend, but let us compete on a level field.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I couldn’t get very far this evening, not with Sibel and Mehmet working against me, and now if I have to defend this girl of yours from the clerk, that will cut into the time I can spend with Nurcihan. So you have to make it up to me. Promise me now that you will bring Nurcihan with you to the picnic at the Meltem factory.”

“I promise.”

“Why does Sibel want to keep me away from Nurcihan anyway?”

“Well, you do make an impression, with your German models, and your dancers… Sibel doesn’t like those things. She wants to marry her friend off to someone she trusts.”

“Please tell Sibel that I’m not a bad person.”

“I tell her all the time,” I said as I stood up. There was a silence. “I appreciate the sacrifices you’re making for me,” I said. “But when you are minding Füsun, be careful, don’t let yourself fall for her. Because she’s very sweet.”

Zaim’s expression, so full of understanding, liberated me from feeling shame for my jealousy. It brought me peace, if only short-lived.

Back at my parents’ table I told my father, who had drunk himself into a stupor, that I wanted to introduce a very clever and industrious young clerk named Kenan, who was sitting at the Satsat table. So as not to inflame the other ambitious Satsat employees, I jotted down a note in my father’s name and gave it to Mehmet Ali, a waiter who’d known us since the time the hotel had first opened, instructing him to pass it to Kenan at the next pause in the music. At that moment, my mother reached out and tried to grab my father’s raki, saying, “You’ve had enough,” and in the tussle, spilled some on his tie. They were serving ice cream in glasses when the Silver Leaves took a break. In those days, we would all enjoy a cigarette before each new course. The bread crumbs, the tumblers smeared with lipstick, the stained napkins, overflowing ashtrays, lighters, dirty plates, and crumpled cigarette packets all fired painful sensations in my muddled mind that the evening’s end was fast approaching. At one point, a little boy, perhaps six or seven years old, climbed onto my lap, and Sibel seized the excuse to come over to sit beside me and play with him. The sight of this moved my mother to remark, “What a lovely way you have with him.” People were still dancing. A few moments later my young, handsome, dapper clerk had joined the table and as the former foreign minister rose to his feet, a courtly Kenan told him and my father what an honor it was to meet them both. After the former foreign minister had lumbered off, I explained how Kenan Bey had given considerable thought to Satsat’s potential expansion into the provinces, and that he was particularly knowledgeable about Izmir. I praised him at length so that everyone at the table could hear. My father then began to ask him the same questions he asked all the new clerks. “What foreign languages do you speak, my child? Do you read books, do you have any hobbies, are you married?” “He’s not married,” my mother said. “Just a moment ago he was dancing very nicely with Nesibe’s daughter, Füsun.” “She’s blossomed into quite a beauty,” said my father. “Don’t let this father and son wear you down with business talk, Kenan Bey,” said my mother. “You must want to get back to your friends.” “Not at all, madam! The honor of meeting Mümtaz Bey-meeting all of you-is much more important.” “Such a courteous, refined young man,” my mother whispered, though loud enough for Kenan to hear. “Shall I invite him over one evening?”

When my mother liked or generally approved of someone, she would make sure he heard it when she discreetly told us so, because she enjoyed seeing in his embarrassment proof of her own power. My mother was smiling with this satisfaction when the Silver Leaves resumed with a very slow, sentimental number. I saw Zaim escort Füsun to the dance floor. “Let’s talk about Satsat’s chances in the provinces now, while my father is here, too,” I said. “My son, are you telling me that you are going to talk business now, at your own engagement party?” “Madam,” said Kenan to my mother, “you may not be aware of this, but three or four times a week, when everyone else has gone home, your son stays very late and carries on working.” “Sometimes Kenan and I work late together,” I added. “Yes. Kemal Bey and I enjoy our work,” said Kenan. “Sometimes when it’s very late we make up expressions that rhyme with the names of the people who owe us money.” “That’s fine,” said my father. “But what do you do with the bounced checks?” “I would like for us to meet the distributors to discuss this, Father,” I said.

As the orchestra played one slow dance after another, our talk ranged from possible innovations at Satsat, to the places of entertainment that my father had frequented in Beyoğlu when he was Kenan’s age, to the methods adopted by İzak Bey (my father’s first accountant), to whose table we now turned, raising our glasses in what must have seemed to the accountant a puzzling tribute, after which we went on to contemplate what my father hailed as the beauties of youth and of this evening, and, he added in jest, of “love.” Despite my father’s pressing the matter, Kenan would not be made to admit whether or not he was in love. This did not stop my mother from grilling him about his family, and upon learning that his father was employed by the city council and had for years worked as a streetcar driver, she said with a sigh, “Oh how beautiful they were, those old streetcars!”

More than half the guests had left by now. My father was having a hard time keeping his eyes open.

As my mother and father kissed us each on our cheeks, preparing to take their leave, my mother said, “Don’t you stay out too late either, my son,” looking into Sibel’s eyes, not mine.

Kenan wanted to return to his friends at the Satsat table, but I wouldn’t let him go. “Let’s find my brother and discuss this shop we might open in Izmir,” I said. “It’s not often that the three of us are together in one place.”

I took it upon myself to introduce Kenan to my brother, and my brother (who had known him for some time) raised an eyebrow in disdain, declaring that I must be seriously drunk. Then he looked at Berrin and Sibel, nodding in the direction of the glass in my hand. Yes, I had downed two glasses of raki at around that time, one after the other, because every time I caught a glance of Zaim dancing with Füsun, the raki was my only relief from a ridiculous jealousy. As my brother talked to Kenan about the logistics of collecting on overdue accounts, everyone at our table, including Kenan, watched Zaim dancing with Füsun. Even Nurcihan, who had her back to them, sensed that Zaim had taken an interest in someone else and she was becoming uneasy. At one point I said to myself, “I am happy.” As drunk as I was, I still felt as if everything was going to go my way. On Kenan’s face I recognized an all too familiar species of disquiet, and so I took this long, slender glass (see exhibit) and poured a consoling raki for my ambitious greenhorn friend, who, on account of his bosses having taken a sudden interest in him, had lost the girl he’d been holding in his arms only a few minutes before. At that moment, Mehmet finally asked Nurcihan to dance, and Sibel turned to give me a conspiratorial wink, adding sweetly, “You’ve had enough, darling. Don’t have any more.”

Charmed by her solicitude, I took Sibel to the dance floor, and the moment we got there I knew I had made a mistake. The Silver Leaves were playing “A Memory from That Summer,” which called to mind the previous summer, when Sibel and I had been so happy, and as the music evoked these memories with arresting force-just as I hope the exhibits in my museum are doing-Sibel embraced me as if for the first time. How I wanted in return to embrace with the same ardor my fiancée, the one with whom I was to share the rest of my life. But I could think only of Füsun. Because I was trying to catch a glimpse of her in the crowd, because I did not want her to see me in a warm embrace with Sibel, I held myself back. I let the other couples distract me. They smiled at me affectionately, as people will at seeing a groom a little worse for wear at the end of his engagement party.

At one point we came shoulder to shoulder with the best-loved columnist of that era dancing with an attractive dark-haired woman: “Celâl Bey, love has nothing in common with a newspaper column, does it?” I said. When Mehmet and Nurcihan came alongside us, I treated them as if they’d been lovers for ages. I slurred an attempt at a quip in French to Zümrüt Hanım, who spoke French whenever she visited my mother, even when there was no one around, supposedly to keep the servants from understanding her. By now Sibel had given up on having a dance she would remember forever, and was whispering into my ear, telling me how sweet I was when I was drunk, apologizing for having forced me into matchmaking, which she’d done, she insisted, only to make our friends happy, and alerting me that the fickle Zaim had moved on from Nurcihan and set his sights on that girl who was my distant relation. Frowning, I told her that Zaim was a very good person, and a trusted friend. I added that Zaim had wanted to know why she was treating him so badly.

“So you were talking about me with Zaim? What did he say?” said Sibel. During the break between songs, we came alongside Celâl Salik the columnist again. “I’ve worked out something love has in common with a good newspaper column, Kemal Bey,” he said. “What is it?” I asked. “Love, like a newspaper column, has to make us happy now. We judge the beauty and power of each by how deep an impression it makes on the soul.” “Master, please write that up in your column one day,” I said, but he was listening not to me but to his raven-haired dance partner. At that moment I noticed Füsun and Zaim beside us. Füsun had placed her head very close to his neck and was whispering to him, and Zaim was smiling gaily. It seemed to me that they could see us perfectly well, but were pretending not to notice as they spun around the dance floor.

Without losing a beat I maneuvered Sibel in their direction and then, like a pirate ship pursuing a merchant galleon, I caused us to ram Füsun and Zaim from the side.

“Oh, excuse us,” I said with a silly laugh. “How are you?” The confused joy on Füsun’s face brought me back to my senses and at once I spied in my drunkenness a good excuse for bold action. I turned to Zaim, proferring Sibel’s hand. “May I offer you the honor of this dance?” Zaim took his hand off Füsun’s waist. “You two are going to have to get to know each other better,” I said, “and you might as well start now.” Completing my gesture of self-sacrifice, I put my hands on their backs and pushed them together. As Sibel and Zaim began to dance, with obvious reluctance, Füsun and I looked for a moment into each other’s eyes. Then I put my hand on her waist and with a few gentle turns, moved her as far away as I could, like any elated suitor preparing to abscond with his sweetheart.

How to describe the peace that came over me the moment I took her in my arms? The noise of the crowd that had so addled me, the ungodly racket that I had taken to be the aggregate of the silverware, the orchestra, and the roar of the city-now I knew what I’d heard was only my disquiet at being far from her. Like a baby who will stop crying only in the arms of one particular person, I felt a deep, soft, velvety bliss of silence spreading through me. From her expression I could see that Füsun felt the same; taking the enveloping silence as our mutual recognition of shared enchantment, I wished that the dance would never end. But soon I realized that her half of the silence meant something altogether different from mine. Füsun’s silence harked back to the question I had brushed off earlier as a joke (“What will become of us?”), and now I had to give an answer. I decided that this was what she had come for. The interest that men had shown her this evening, the admiration that I’d seen even in the eyes of the children-all this had given her confidence, had lightened her suffering. Now she might even be able to view me in perspective, as a “passing fancy.” As I began, in my drunkenness, to realize that the night was coming to an end, I was seized by the terrifying thought of losing Füsun.

“When two people love each other as we do, no one can come between them, no one,” I said, amazed at the words I was uttering without preparation. “Lovers like us, because they know that nothing can destroy their love, even on the worst days, even when they are heedlessly hurting each other in the cruelest, most deceitful ways, still carry in their hearts a consolation that never abandons them. Trust me that after tonight I’ll stop all this, I’ll sort this out. Are you listening to me?”

“I’m listening.”

When I was sure that no one dancing nearby was looking at us, I said, “We met at an unfortunate time. In the early days neither of us could have known how rare this love was between us. But now I am going to put everything right. Our most immediate concern is your exam tomorrow. This evening you shouldn’t waste any more time worrying about us.”

“Then tell me, what is going to happen now?”

“Tomorrow, as always” (for a moment, my voice trembled) “at two o’clock, after you’ve finished your exam, let’s meet at the Merhamet Apartments. Then I’ll be able to tell you what I plan to do next, without having to rush. If I fail to win your trust, then you never have to see me again.”

“No, tell me now, and I’ll come.”

How sweet it was to imagine in my drunken stupor that she would come to me at two o’clock the next day, that we would make love as always, that we would remain together until the end of my days, and as I touched her wondrous shoulders and her honey-colored arms, I resolved that I would do everything I could, whatever it took.

“No one will ever come between us ever again,” I said.

“All right then, I’ll come tomorrow after the exam, and you, God willing, won’t have gone back on your word, and you’ll tell me how you’re going to do this.”

While we both remained standing, perfectly straight, with my hand lovingly clamped on her hip, and in time to the music, I tried to tug her closer to me. She resisted, refusing to lean into me, and that excited me all the more. But when it became apparent that my attempt to wrap my arms around her in front of everyone was being viewed not as a sign of love but proof of my drunkenness, I pulled myself together and relented.

“We have to sit down,” she said. “I feel as if everyone is looking at me.” She was leaving my arms. “Go right home and get some sleep,” I whispered. “During the exam, just think about how much I love you.”

When I got back to our table there was no one there except for Berrin and Osman, both frowning and bickering with each other. “Are you all right?” said Berrin.

“Perfectly fine,” I said, gazing upon the disordered table and the empty chairs.

“Sibel didn’t want to dance anymore, and Kenan Bey took her with him to the Satsat table, where they were playing some sort of game.”

“It’s good that you danced with Füsun,” said Osman. “In the end, it was wrong for our mother to give her the cold shoulder. It’s important for Füsun and everyone else to know that the family takes an interest in her, that the nonsense with the beauty contest is forgotten, and she can depend on us. I worry for the girl. She thinks she is too beautiful,” he said in English. “That dress is too revealing. In six months she’s gone from being a child to a woman; she’s really bloomed. If she doesn’t marry the right sort of man very soon, first she’ll get a reputation and that can lead only to misery. What was she telling you?”

“Apparently she is taking her university entrance exam tomorrow.”

“And she’s still here dancing? It’s after midnight.” He watched her walk toward her table. “I really did like your Kenan, by the way. I say she should marry him.”

“Shall I tell them both?” I shouted, having moved away from him already. I had been doing this since childhood. Whenever my brother began to speak, I would do the opposite of what he asked, and retreat to the most remote corner, ignoring the fact that he was still talking.

In later years I would often reflect on my bliss and joy at that point in the evening, on my way from our table to the tables in the back where the Satsat employees, Füsun, and her parents were sitting. I had just put everything right, and in thirteen hours and forty-five minutes I would meet Füsun at the Merhamet Apartments. A brilliant future beckoned, and the promise of happiness sparkled like the Bosphorus at our feet. Even as I laughed with the lovely girls now weary of dancing, their dresses in charming (and revealing) disarray, and I joked with the last of the guests, and old friends, and affectionate aunties I’d known for thirty years, a voice inside me warned that if I continued on this path, I’d end up marrying not Sibel but Füsun.

Sibel had joined the untidy Satsat table, where they were holding a mock séance, really just a drunken game based on no particular knowledge of spiritualism. When they were unable to summon any spirits, the group began to disperse. Sibel moved over to the next table, which was empty except for Kenan and Füsun, with whom she immediately struck up a conversation before I could join them. Seeing me approaching, Kenan asked Füsun to dance. Füsun, having seen me, turned him down, saying that her shoes were pinching her toes, and with youthful pride Kenan responded as if the point of it were not Füsun but the dance, and went off as the Silver Leaves played one of the evening’s fast numbers to do the latest step with someone else. So now, at the edge of the Satsat table, by now almost empty, a chair awaited me between Füsun and Sibel. So I went and sat down between Füsun and Sibel. How I wish someone had taken a photograph of us that I might have now displayed!

I sat down to discover with contentment that Füsun and Sibel were discussing spiritualism like two Nişantaşı ladies who had been acquainted for years but still maintained a social distance, their language markedly formal, almost ceremonial. Füsun, whom I’d assumed had little religious education, declared that souls certainly existed, “as our religion decrees,” but that for us in this world to attempt communication with them was a sin. Here she glanced at her father at the next table. This idea had come from him.

“Three years ago I disobeyed my father and went with some classmates to a séance-just out of curiosity,” said Füsun. “I was asked for a name and I remembered a childhood friend who was very dear to me, though I’d lost touch with him, and without pausing to think, I wrote his name down, just to play along… But this name I’d written down, without really believing, just for the fun of it-well, his spirit did come and I felt so guilty.”

“Why?”

“I could tell from the way the coffee cup was rattling that my lost friend Necdet was in enormous pain. It was rattling as if it had a life of its own, and I felt that Necdet must be trying to tell me something. Then suddenly the coffee cup went still… Everyone said that this person must have died at that very moment… How could they have known?”

“How did they know?” asked Sibel.

“That same night I was at home and looking through my drawers for a missing glove, and I found a handkerchief that Necdet had given me as a present many years before. Maybe it was a coincidence. But I don’t think so. I learned a lesson from this. When we lose people we love, we should never disturb their souls, whether living or dead. Instead, we should find consolation in an object that reminds you of them, something… I don’t know… even an earring.”

“Füsun, darling, time to go home,” said Aunt Nesibe. “You have your exam tomorrow morning, and your father can barely stay awake.”

“Just a minute, Mother!” said Füsun in a firm voice.

“I don’t believe in séances, either,” said Sibel. “But if I’m invited to one, I never pass it up, because I like watching the games people play, and seeing what they fear.”

“But if you love someone, and you miss them terribly, which would you do?” asked Füsun. “Would you gather up your friends and try to summon his spirit, or would you look for some old possession of his, like a cigarette box?”

As Sibel groped for a polite answer, Füsun shot up out of her seat and, reaching over to the next table, picked up a handbag, which she placed in front of us. “This handbag reminds me of my embarrassment… my shame for having sold you a fake,” she said.

When it was on Füsun’s arm earlier I had not recognized it as “that” bag. But hadn’t I bought it in the Şanzelize Boutique from Şenay Hanım, shortly before the happiest moment in my life, and, after having run into Füsun in the street, hadn’t I taken it back with us to the Merhamet Apartments? Just yesterday that talismanic Jenny Colon bag was still there. How could it be here now? I was like some spectator dumbfounded by a juggler’s trick, and my head was spinning.

“It looks very good on you,” said Sibel awkwardly. “So lovely with the orange, and your hat, that when I first saw it I felt jealous. I was sorry I’d returned it to you. How beautiful you are!”

It occurred to me that Şenay Hanım must have had more than one fake Jenny Colon bag in stock. Having sold one to me, she might have put another in the window, and even lent a third to Füsun for this evening.

“After you realized that the bag was a fake, you stopped coming to the Şanzelize,” said Füsun, smiling graciously at Sibel. “This upset me, because of course you were right.” Opening the bag, she showed us the inside. “Our craftsmen make excellent fakes of European products, bless them, but never enough to fool someone with your experienced eye. But now I must say something.” She swallowed and fell silent, and I feared she was going to cry. But she pulled herself together, and with a frown she recited the speech that she must have rehearsed at home. “For me, it’s not in the least important whether something is or isn’t a European product. And it’s not in the least important to me either if a thing is genuine or fake. If you ask me, people’s dislike of imitations has nothing to do with fake or real, but the fear that others might think they’d ‘bought it cheap.’ For me, the worst thing is when people care about the brand and not the thing itself. You know how there are some people who don’t give importance to their own feelings, and care only about what other people might say”-here she glanced in my direction. “This handbag will always remind me of tonight. I congratulate you. It’s been an evening I’ll never forget.” She rose to her feet, and as she squeezed our hands, my darling girl kissed us each on the cheek. As she turned to leave, she noticed Zaim approaching the next table and she turned back to Sibel. “Zaim Bey is a very good friend of your fiancé, isn’t he?” she asked.

“Yes, they’re very close,” said Sibel. As Füsun took her father’s arm, Sibel turned to me and asked, “What did she mean by that question?” but there was no contempt for Füsun in her expression. I saw instead something akin to excitement, even adoration.

As Füsun headed slowly for the stairs, flanked by her mother and father, I watched her from behind with love and pride.

Zaim came and sat down beside me. “You know, at that Satsat table behind us, they’ve been having quite a laugh at your expense all evening,” he said. “As your friend, I thought you should know.”

“You must be joking! What exactly could they be laughing about?”

“Well, I didn’t hear it directly, of course. Kenan told Füsun. And she told me… And she was quite upset, too. Apparently it’s general knowledge at Satsat that every night at quitting time, you and Sibel would meet there for a romp on the divan in the corner office. This is what all the snickering was about.”

“What’s happened now?” asked Sibel as she came back to us. “You’re depressed again, aren’t you?”