The Museum Of Innocence

39 Confession

WE HAVE now come to the confession scene. It was my express desire that all the frames, backgrounds, everything in this part of my museum be painted a cold yellow. Yet it wasn’t long after our friends had left for Kilyos, and I had returned to my parents’ bed, that a giant sun rose from behind the hills of Üsküdar, casting a deep orange glow over the spacious bedroom. The echo of a ship’s horn rose from the Bosphorus. “Come on,” said Sibel, sensing my lack of enthusiasm, “let’s not stay here forever. Let’s try to catch up with them.” But seeing how I lay there, she knew I was not fit to go to the beach (though it had not crossed her mind that I was too drunk to drive); and that was not all: She sensed that my mysterious illness had brought us to the point of no return. I could tell that she wanted to avoid discussing it, because she kept averting her eyes from mine. But in the way that people will sometimes confront their worst fears without forethought (some call this courage), she was the one to broach the subject.

“Where were you actually, yesterday afternoon?” she asked. But she regretted the question at once, adding sweetly, “If you think this is going to be embarrassing for you later on, if you don’t want to tell me, then don’t.”

She lay down next to me on the bed, pawing me like an affectionate kitten, with such compassion but trepidation, too; sensing that I was about to break her heart, I felt ashamed. But the djinn of love had escaped Aladdin’s lamp and was prodding me, telling me that I could no longer keep this secret to myself.

“Do you remember that evening in early spring, darling, when we went to Fuaye?” I began with these harmless, careful words. “You saw that Jenny Colon bag in a shop window, and as we passed you said you liked it. We both stopped to look at it.”

My darling fiancée knew at once that this was about more than a handbag-that I was about to speak of something real and serious; as her eyes widened, I told her the story that readers will recall and visitors to the museum have known since viewing the very first object on exhibit. Nevertheless, displayed here is a series of small pictures of the most important objects; it will, I hope, serve as an aide-mémoire for visitors making their way through the extensive collection, or for those who are so impetuous as not to start at the beginning.

I told Sibel the story in careful chronological order. As I launched into the painful tale of my first encounter with Füsun, and the relationship that followed, my remorse was palpable, as was the aura of atonement; this endowed my lapse with the gravity of a great sin. But I may well have been the one to add these colors to my story, so as to lighten the tone of my rather ordinary crime, and to suggest I was talking about something from the distant past. Having, of course, omitted the details of sexual bliss at the heart of my tale, I made it sound like a typical Turkish man’s silly indiscretion on the eve of his marriage. I could not, seeing Sibel’s tears, continue with my original aim-to be straight with her-and I was sorry for having brought it up at all.

“You’re a disgusting person, and it’s only now I can see it,” said Sibel. Picking up an old bag of my mother’s-rose-printed, and full of her loose change-Sibel hurled it at me, and next came one of my father’s summer spectator shoes. Neither projectile hit its mark. The loose change went flying across the floor like broken glass. Tears were streaming from Sibel’s eyes.

“I broke this off ages ago,” I said. “But I was destroyed by what I did… This feeling has nothing to do with this girl or anyone else.”

“This is the girl whose table we visited at the engagement party, am I right?” Sibel asked, too afraid to mention her by name.

“Yes.”

“She’s a common shopgirl. She’s disgusting! Are you still seeing her?”

“Of course I’m not… Once we were engaged, I broke it off. And she has gone missing. I hear she married someone else.” (Even now, I am shocked that I could throw out this lie.) “This was why I was so withdrawn after the engagement, but that’s all over now.”

Sibel would cry a little, and then she would wash her face, pull herself together, and ask me more questions.

“So you can’t get over her, is that it?” This was how my clever fiancée summed up the truth in her own words.

What man with a heart could answer this question in the affirmative? “No,” I said reluctantly. “You don’t understand. To have treated a girl so badly, to have deceived you and broken our trust, to carry all this in my conscience, it wore me down. It took all the joy out of life.”

Neither of us believed what I was saying.

“Where were you after lunch yesterday?”

How I longed to tell someone-someone who would understand, someone other than Sibel-of having taken mementos of her into my mouth, how I had rubbed them against my skin, and how, as I did so, I conjured up images of her and burst into tears. All the same I was sure that if Sibel left me, I would lose my mind. What I needed to say was, Let’s get married right away. There were countless solid marriages-marriages that were the bedrock of our society-that had been made in an effort to forget stormy and unhappy love affairs.

“I wanted to play around with some of my childhood toys before we got married. I had a space gun, for example… It was still working. I guess you could call it a strange sort of nostalgia. That’s what I was doing there.”

“You are never to go back to that apartment again!” said Sibel. “Did you meet her there often?”

Before I could answer, she started sobbing. When I took her in my arms and caressed her, she cried even harder. As I embraced my fiancée I felt a deep gratitude-and an amity that was deeper than love; I treasured our closeness. After Sibel had cried for a very long while and dropped off to sleep in my arms, I, too, nodded off.

It was almost noon when I awoke; Sibel had been up for a good while, had showered and put on her makeup and even prepared my breakfast in the kitchen.

“If you want you can go buy some bread from the shop across the street,” she said in a cool voice. “But if you don’t have the energy, I can slice the stale bread and toast it.”

“No, I can go,” I said.

We had breakfast in the sitting room, which after the party looked like a war zone, at the table where my parents had sat across from each other for more than thirty years. Here I display an exact replica of the loaf I bought from the grocery store across the street. Its function is sentimental, but also documentary, a reminder that millions of people in Istanbul ate no other bread for half a century (though its weight did vary) and also that life is a series of repeated instances that we later assign-without mercy-to oblivion.

That morning Sibel was strong and decisive in a way that shocks me even today. “This thing you thought was love-it was just a passing obsession,” she said. “I’ll look after you. I’ll rescue you from this nonsense you got mixed up in.”

She’d used a lot of powder to conceal the puffiness under her eyes. To see her choosing her words so carefully, so as not to hurt me, even though she was in terrible pain herself-to feel her compassion-made me trust her all the more, and so certain was I that only Sibel could deliver me from my agony, that I decided then and there to agree to whatever she said. And so it was while we ate our breakfast of fresh bread, white cheese, olives, and strawberry jam that we agreed to leave this house and to stay away from Nişantaşı, these neighborhoods and streets, for a long while. The orange zone and red zone prohibitions were now in full force.

Sibel’s parents had by now returned to their house in Ankara for the winter, and so the winter, and so the yali in Anadoluhisarı was empty. They would turn a blind eye on our staying there alone together now that we were engaged, of this she was certain. I was going to move there with her at once, abandoning all the habits that had kept me in thrall to my obsession. As I packed my bags, I felt sad but also hopeful of recovery, like a lovesick girl dispatched to Europe. I remember that when Sibel said, “Take these, too,” throwing a pair of winter socks into my suitcase, I was struck by the painful thought that my cure might take a very long time.