The Museum Of Innocence

34 Like a Dog in Outer Space

BUT INSTEAD of Füsun I saw Sibel. My pain was now so great, so all-consuming that when the office emptied out, I knew at once that if I remained by myself for too long I would feel as lonely as this dog after the Soviets sent him off in his little spaceship into the dark infinity of outer space. By calling Sibel to the office after hours, I gave her the legitimate expectation that we would be resuming our pre-engagement sex life. My well-intentioned fiancée was wearing Sylvie, a perfume I’d always liked, and these imitation net stockings that, as she knew very well, aroused me, with high-heeled shoes. She arrived elated, thinking that my “sickness” was retreating, and I could not bring myself to tell her that, quite to the contrary, I had called her here to rescue me from the scourge, however briefly; that I longed to embrace her as I had embraced my mother when I was a child. So Sibel did as she had done with such relish in the past: She walked me backward and sat me down on the divan, and proceeded to do her dumb secretary impression, cheerily peeling off her clothes, layer by layer, until, smiling sweetly, she sat on my lap. Let me not describe how the scent of her hair and her neck made me feel utterly at home, or how relaxed, even restored, I was by that familiar intimacy, because the reasonable reader, like the attentive museum visitor, will then assume that we went on to make love. He would be disappointed, as Sibel was, too. But it felt so good to embrace her that I had soon drifted off into a peaceful, happy sleep, and my dream was of Füsun.

When I woke up, in a sweat, we were still lying there in each other’s arms. The room was dark and we dressed in silence, Sibel lost in her own thoughts, and I wallowing in guilt. The headlights of the cars in the avenue and the purple sparks from the trolleybus rods illuminated the office just as they had in the days when we had made careless love.

Without discussion, we repaired to Fuaye, and when we sat down at our sparkling table in the crowded, bustling dining room, I thought once again how charming, beautiful, and understanding Sibel was. I remember that after we had talked about this and that for an hour, and laughed with various tipsy friends who had stopped by our table, we discovered from the waiter that Nurcihan and Mehmet had been in for supper earlier. But there was no avoiding the real issue indefinitely, as our evening was punctuated by longer and longer silences. I ordered a second bottle of Çankaya wine. By now Sibel was drinking a lot, too.

At last she said, “What’s going on with you? It’s time-”

“If I only knew,” I said. “There seems to be a part of my mind that doesn’t want to acknowledge the problem, or understand it.”

“So you don’t understand it either, is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes.”

“If you ask me, you know a lot more than I do,” said Sibel with a smile.

“What do you think I know so much more about than you do?”

“Do you ever worry what I might be thinking about your troubles?” she asked.

“I worry that if I don’t snap out of this, I’ll lose you.”

“Don’t worry about that,” she said, stroking my hand. “I’m patient and I love you dearly. If you don’t want to talk about it, then you don’t have to. And don’t worry, I don’t have any wild theories about all this. We have plenty of time.”

“What wild theories?”

“Well, for example, I’m not worried that you might be a homosexual or something,” she said, smiling at once, to show that she wanted to reassure me, too.

“Oh, thanks. What else?”

“I don’t think it’s a sexual illness or some deep childhood trauma, or anything like that. But I still think that it might help to see a psychologist. There’s nothing wrong with that. In Europe and America, everyone goes to them… Of course, you’d have to tell this person what you can’t tell me… Come on, darling, tell me, don’t be afraid. I’ll forgive you.”

“I am afraid,” I said with a smile. “Shall we dance?” “Then you admit there is something you know and I don’t.” “Mademoiselle, please don’t decline my invitation to dance.” “Oh, monsieur! I am engaged to a troubled man!” she said, and we rose to our feet.

I have recorded these details, and displayed these menus and glasses, to evoke the uncanny intimacy, the private language, and-if that’s the right word for it-the deep love that existed between us during those hot July nights when, seeking relief, we’d go to clubs and parties and restaurants and drink with abandon. It was a love fed not by sexual appetite but by a fierce compassion, and on nights when, having both had a lot to drink, we rose to dance, it wasn’t so far from physical attraction. As the orchestra in the background played “Lips and Roses,” or as the disc jockey (a new fixture in Turkey at that time) spun his 45s, the songs would filter through the leaves of the still and silent trees on humid summer nights and I would take my beloved fiancée in my arms, embracing her no less passionately than on the divan in the office, and however motivated to protect myself, I treasured our camaraderie and common bonds; breathing in the scent of her neck and her hair, I found peace, and I would see how senseless it was to feel as lonely as a canine cosmonaut in space; and assuming that Sibel would always be at my side, I would woozily draw her closer. As we danced under the gaze of other romantic couples, we would sometimes lurch, as if to take a drunken spill onto the floor. Sibel enjoyed these alcoholic trances we fell into, as they transported us from the everyday world. Outside in the streets of Istanbul, communists and nationalists were gunning each other down, robbing banks, throwing bombs, and spraying coffeehouses with bullets, but we had occasion, and license, to forget the entire world, all because of my mysterious ailment, which in Sibel’s mind gave life a certain depth.

Later, when we sat down at our table, Sibel would again drunkenly broach the subject, now not as something she understood but something she accepted without fully understanding. Thus, thanks to Sibel’s efforts, my mysterious moods, my melancholy, and my inability to make love to her amounted to no more than a premarital test of my fiancée’s compassion and commitment, a limited tragedy soon to be forgotten. It was as if our pain gave us the distinction of standing apart from our coarse, superficial, rich friends, even as we boarded their speedboats. We no longer needed to join the careless drunks who jumped from the pier into the Bosphorus at the end of a party. My pain, and my strangeness, had graced us with a degree of difference. It pleased me to see Sibel embrace my pain with such dignity, and this, too, drew us closer together. But even amid all this drunken earnestness, if I heard a City Line ferry blowing its sad whistle in the distance, or if I glanced into the crowd and in the least likely of places spotted someone I thought was Füsun, Sibel would notice the strange expression on my face and intuit painfully that the danger lurking in the shadows was far more fearsome than she’d thought.

And so it was that by the end of July, Sibel’s loving suggestion that I see a psychiatrist turned into a requirement, and unwilling to lose her wonderful compassion and companionship I agreed. The famous Turkish psychoanalyst who the careful reader will recall offering an analysis of love was at that time recently returned from America and working hard, with his bow tie and his pipe, to convince a narrow segment of Istanbul society that they could no longer do without his profession. Years later, when I was trying to establish my museum, and I paid him a visit to ask what he remembered of that era (and also to solicit his donation of that same pipe and bow tie), I discovered that he had no memory of the troubles I was suffering at the time; what’s more, he’d heard nothing of my painful story, which was by then common knowledge in Istanbul society. He remembered me as being like so many of his other patients at that time-perfectly healthy individuals who rang his bell only out of curiosity. I shall never forget how Sibel insisted on coming with me, like a mother taking her ailing child to the doctor, and how she said, “I’ll just sit in the waiting room, darling.” But I hadn’t wanted her to come at all. Sibel, with the felicitous intuition so prevalent in the bourgeoisies of non-Western countries, and most particularly Muslim countries, saw psychoanalysis as a “scientific sharing of confidences” invented for Westerners unaccustomed to the curative traditions of family solidarity and shared secrets. When, after talking about this and that and neatly filling out the necessary forms, I was asked what my “problem” was, I felt compelled to disclose that I had lost the woman I loved and now felt as lonely as a dog sent into outer space. But instead I said that I had been unable to make love to my beautiful and cherished fiancée since our engagement. And he asked me what was the cause of my loss of desire-a surprise since I thought he would be the one to answer this question. Today, so many years later, when I remember the words that came to my mind with God’s help, I still smile, but I also see some truth in them: “Perhaps I’m afraid of life, Doctor!”

This would be my last visit to the psychoanalyst, who could do no more than send me off with the words: “Don’t be afraid of life, Kemal Bey!”