The Museum Of Innocence

4 Love at the Office

MY FATHER was looking at a rather flashy commercial that my friend Zaim had made for Meltem, “ Turkey ’s first domestic fruit soda,” now sold all over the country. I watched it carefully and liked it. Zaim’s father, like mine, had amassed a fortune in the past ten years, and now Zaim was using that money to pursue ventures of his own. I gave him occasional advice, so I was keen to see him succeed.

Once I’d graduated from business school in America and completed my military service, my father had demanded I follow in my brother’s footsteps and become a manager in his business, which was growing by leaps and bounds, and so when I was still very young he’d appointed me the general manager of Satsat, his Harbiye-based distribution and export firm. Satsat had an exaggerated operating budget and made hefty profits, thanks not to me but to various accounting tricks by which the profits from his other factories and businesses were funneled into Satsat (which might be translated into English as “Sell-sell”). I spent my days mastering the finer points of the business from worn-out accountants twenty or thirty years my senior and large-breasted lady clerks as old as my mother; and mindful that I would not have been in charge but for being the owner’s son, I tried to show some humility.

At quitting time, while buses and streetcars as old as Satsat’s now departed clerks rumbled down the avenue, shaking the building to its foundations, Sibel, my intended, would come to visit, and we would make love in the general manager’s office. For all her modern outlook and the feminist notions she had brought back from Europe, Sibel’s ideas about secretaries were no different from my mother’s: “Let’s not make love here. It makes me feel like a secretary!” she’d say sometimes. But as we proceeded to the leather divan in that office, the real reason for her reserve-that Turkish girls, in those days, were afraid of sex before marriage-would become obvious.

Little by little sophisticated girls from wealthy Westernized families who had spent time in Europe were beginning to break this taboo and sleep with their boyfriends before marriage. Sibel, who occasionally boasted of being one of those “brave” girls, had first slept with me eleven months earlier. But she judged this arrangement to have gone on long enough, and thought it was about time we married.

As I sit down so many years later and devote myself heart and soul to the telling of my story, though, I do not want to exaggerate my fiancée’s daring or to make light of the sexual oppression of women, because it was only when Sibel saw that my “intentions were serious,” when she believed in me as “someone who could be trusted”-in other words, when she was absolutely sure that there would in the end be a wedding-that she gave herself to me. Believing myself a decent and responsible person, I had every intention of marrying her; but even if this hadn’t been my wish, there was no question of my having a choice now that she had “given me her virginity.” Before long, this heavy responsibility cast a shadow over the common ground between us of which we were so proud-the illusion of being “free and modern” (though of course we would never use such words for ourselves) on account of having made love before marriage, and in a way this, too, brought us closer.

A similar shadow fell over us each time Sibel anxiously hinted that we should marry at once, but there were times, too, when Sibel and I would be very happy making love in the office, and as I wrapped my arms around her in the dark, the noise of traffic and rumbling buses rising up from Halaskârgazi Avenue, I would tell myself how lucky I was, how content I would be for the rest of my life. Once, after our exertions, as I was stubbing out my cigarette in this ashtray bearing the Satsat logo, Sibel, sitting half naked on my secretary Zeynep Hanım’s chair, started rattling the typewriter, and giggling at her best impression of the dumb blonde who featured so prominently in the jokes and humor magazines of the time.