The Museum Of Innocence

37 The Empty House

AT THE end of August, as flocks of storks flew over the Bosphorus, the house in Suadiye and the Princes’ Islands, leaving Europe to fly for Africa, we decided, at my friends’ steady insistence, to go ahead with the end-of-summer party I was in the habit of giving in the empty apartment in Teşvikiye Avenue just before my parents’ return from their summer home. Sibel busied herself with the shopping, shifted the tables around, took the carpets out of mothballs and rolled them out over the parquet floors, and instead of going to help her, I again dialed Füsun’s home number for old times’ sake. For a few days now it had been ringing and ringing without answer, and that had worried me. This time, when I heard the broken tones that indicated the line was cut off, the pain in my stomach spread to every part of my body, every part of my mind.

Twelve minutes later, having passed through streets I’d been evading studiously since marking them in orange, I found myself walking like a wraith toward Füsun’s family’s house in Kuyulu Bostan Street. Looking up at the windows from a cautious distance, I could see that the curtains were gone. I rang the doorbell; no one answered. I knocked gently on the door before pounding it, and still no one answered, and I thought I was going to die. “Who’s there?” cried the janitor’s old wife from the dark basement apartment. “Haaa, the people in number three, they’ve moved. Those people have left.”

I told her I was interested in renting the apartment. Slipping her twenty lira, I used her key to let myself in. Dear God! How can I describe the loneliness of those empty rooms, or the state of the crumbling tiles in that tired and disintegrating kitchen, the dilapidated tub in which my lost love had bathed throughout her life, the mystery of the gas heater that had scared her so, the bare nails in the wall, and the shadows where for twenty years frames and mirrors had hung? The scent of Füsun in the rooms, the shadow falling in a corner, the layout of this house where Füsun had spent her whole life, these rooms that had made her the person she was, the walls and the flaking paint-I lovingly imprinted all these details in my memory. There was this wallpaper, of which I tore off a large piece to take with me. And the handle of the door to the small room I assumed had been hers-thinking about her hand grasping this handle for eighteen years, I pried it off and dropped it into my pocket. The porcelain handle of the toilet chain in the bathroom came loose even more easily.

From the heap of discarded papers and rubbish in the corner, I extracted the arm of a baby doll that had once been Füsun’s. I slipped that into my pocket, along with a large mica marble and a few hairpins that I had no doubt were hers. Imagining the comfort I would eventually extract from these things in privacy, I relaxed. Why, I asked the janitor’s wife, had the tenants chosen to leave after so many years? She said they had been haggling with the owner over the rent for ages. “It’s not as if rents are lower in other neighborhoods,” I said. Money was losing value, and prices were going up.

“So where did these people move to?” “We don’t know,” said the janitor’s wife. “They were cross with us when they left, and with the owner. Imagine, after twenty years, such a falling-out.” I felt I would suffocate on the spot.

It was then that I realized how I had always depended on the hope that one day I would come here, ring their doorbell, plead my way in, and see Füsun. Now that I’d been robbed of this chance I had not even realized I was counting on, I didn’t know where I would turn next.

Eighteen minutes later I was in the Merhamet Apartments, lying on our bed, finding such relief as I could from the new objects recovered from the empty apartment. Sure enough, these things that Füsun had touched, these objects that had made her who she was-as I caressed them, and gazed at them, and stroked them against my shoulders, my bare chest, and my abdomen-released their analgesic and soothed my soul.