The Museum Of Innocence

49 I Was Going to Ask Her to Marry Me

ON WEDNESDAY, May 19, 1976, at half past seven, I set out for Füsun’s family’s house in Çukurcuma, telling Çetin Efendi only that we were going over to return a child’s tricycle to Aunt Nesibe. I gave him the address and I sat back in my seat, watching rain pour down on the streets, as if someone had upended a giant glass. Not once during my thousands of dreams of our reunion had I imagined such a deluge, or even a light drizzle.

Stopping at the Merhamet Apartments to pick up the tricycle and the pearl earrings that my father had given me in a box, I got completely soaked. Still entirely contrary to my expectations, I felt the deepest peace in my heart. It was as if I had forgotten all the pain I had endured since last seeing her at the Hilton Hotel 339 days earlier. I remember even feeling thankful for every minute I had spent writhing in agony, because it had brought me to this happy ending. I blamed nothing and no one.

I saw stretching out before me the same wondrous life I’d seen at the beginning of my story. Stopping off at a florist on Sıraselviler Avenue, I had them make me a huge bouquet of red roses that was as beautiful as that prospect. To calm myself, I’d had a half glass of rakı before leaving home. Should I have stopped off for one more at a meyhane-one of the taverns in the side streets leading up to Beyoğlu? Impatience, like the pain, had taken hold of me. “Be careful!” warned a voice inside. “This time you can make no mistakes!” As we passed the Çukurcuma Hamam shrouded in rain, I suddenly realized what a good lesson Füsun had taught me with these 339 days of agony: She had won. I was ready to do whatever she wanted, to avoid the punishment of never being able to see her again. Once I had recovered from the initial excitement, once I was sure that Füsun was at my side, I was going to ask her to marry me.

As Çetin Efendi peered through the rain, trying to read the house numbers, I conjured up the proposal scene, which I had already imagined somewhere in my mind, hiding it from my consciousness: After entering the house, handing over the tricycle, making a few jokes, taking a seat and settling in-was I up to doing all this?-I would sip the coffee Füsun brought me, and then, summoning my courage, I would look straight into her father’s eyes and say point-blank that I had come to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage. The tricycle was just an excuse. We would laugh about it, like so many jokes we would use to keep from ever talking about the agonies, or the sorrows that had caused them. As I drank the Yeni Rakı her father would naturally serve me at the table, I would look into Füsun’s eyes and feast on the happiness that my decision had brought me. We could discuss the details of the engagement and the marriage at another time.

The car stopped in front of an old building; the rain made it impossible to see what sort of structure it was. My heart racing, I knocked on the door. Almost at once Aunt Nesibe answered. As I carried the tricycle inside, I remember how impressed she was by the sight of Çetin Efendi, who stood behind me holding an umbrella, and how delighted she was by the roses. I sensed unease in her expression, but I was not the least deterred, because I was climbing the stairs, and with every step, I was drawing closer to Füsun.

Füsun’s father was waiting on the landing. “Welcome, Kemal Bey.” I’d forgotten I’d seen him a year earlier at the engagement party, somehow imagining that we hadn’t embraced since the last of the old family meals at the Feast of the Sacrifice. Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible.

Then I thought I must be seeing Füsun’s sister, because there, standing behind her father in the doorway, I saw not Füsun, but a dark-haired beauty who resembled her. But even as I was thinking this, I realized that this was Füsun. It was a tremendous shock. Her hair was jet-black. “Her natural color, of course!” I told myself, as I tried to calm my nerves. I went inside. My plan had been to ignore her parents, hand her the flowers, and throw my arms around her, but I could tell from the look on her face, and her discomfort as she approached me, that she didn’t want me to embrace her.

We shook hands.

“Oh, what lovely roses!” she said, without taking them from my hands.

Yes, of course, she was very beautiful; she had matured. She could tell how distressed I was that our reunion was turning out so differently from what I’d imagined.

“Aren’t they lovely?” she said, now addressing someone else in the room.

I came eye to eye with the person she had indicated. The first thought to cross my mind was: “Couldn’t they have found another evening to invite over this sweet, fat adolescent neighbor?” But once again, even as the thought passed through my mind, I knew I was wrong.

“Cousin Kemal, let me introduce you, this is my husband, Feridun,” she said, trying to sound as if she’d just recalled a detail of minor significance.

I stared at this man called Feridun, not as a real person but as if he were an obscure memory I could not quite place.

“We married five months ago,” said Füsun, raising her eyebrows as if waiting for the penny to drop.

I could tell, from the way this fatso shook my hand, that he knew nothing. “Oh, I’m so pleased to meet you!” I said to him, and smiling at Füsun, now hiding behind her husband, I said, “You’re a very lucky man, too, Feridun Bey. Not only have you married a wonderful girl, but this girl is now in possession of a nifty tricycle.”

“Kemal Bey, we so wanted to invite you to the wedding,” said her mother. “But we’d heard your father was ill. My girl, instead of hiding behind your husband, why don’t you find a vase for those beautiful roses Kemal Bey is holding in his hands.”

My beloved, who had never once been absent from my dreams all year, took the roses from my hands with a small, elegant gesture, first bringing herself close enough for me to see the blush of her cheeks, her ever-inviting lips, her velvet skin, and her neck, and I would have done anything at that moment, just to know I could spend the rest of my life this close. I inhaled the fragrance of her exposed bosom before she drew back. I was dumbstruck, amazed at her reality, as one is amazed at the reality of the natural world.

“Put the roses in a vase,” said her mother.

“Kemal Bey, you’ll have a raki, won’t you?” said her father.

“Tweet tweet tweet,” said her canary.

“Oh, yes, I’d love one, yes, I’ll have a raki.”

They gave me two rakis on the rocks and I knocked them both back, on an empty stomach, hoping they would take immediate effect. I remember speaking for a time about the tricycle I’d brought with me, and a few childhood memories, before we sat down to eat. But alas, I was still sober enough to know that because she was married, I could show none of that lovely brotherly feeling that I’d hoped the tricycle would evoke.

Füsun sat across from me, as if by chance (she’d asked her mother where she should sit), but she would not look me in the eye. During these first minutes I was shocked enough to believe she had no interest in me. I, in turn, tried to look as if I had no interest in her, as if I were a well-meaning, wealthy cousin, here to give a wedding present to a poor relation, while many more important things weighed on my mind.

“Soooo, when can we expect children?” I asked, still playing this role, looking Feridun in the eye first, but failing then to address Füsun.

“We’re not thinking of having children right away,” said Feridun. “Perhaps after we’ve moved into our own house.”

“Feridun is very young, but he is one of the most sought-after screenwriters in Istanbul today,” said Aunt Nesibe. “He’s the one who wrote The Old Lady Who Sells Simits.”

All night I struggled to get it through my skull-as people say. At intervals all evening I conjured up the hopeful dream that this wedding story was a joke, that they’d gotten some neighbor’s fat son to masquerade as a childhood sweetheart, dressing him up as her husband, a final lesson to me that they would, at evening’s end, own up to. Eventually, as I learned more about the couple, I did accept that they were married, but then it was the various details of that reality that, as they were disclosed, I found unacceptable: Feridun Bey, this son-in-law who was living with his wife’s family, was twenty-two years old, and interested in film and literature; though he wasn’t making much money yet, in addition to screenplays for Yeşilçam, he wrote poetry. I discovered that as a distant relation on her father’s side, he’d played with Füsun as a child, and that, when he was a child, he had even ridden on the tricycle I’d brought back to the house. Hearing all this, I felt my very soul shriveling up inside me, irritated by the raki that Tarık Bey poured so solicitously into my glass. Whenever I entered a new house, I would always feel uncomfortable until I knew how many rooms it had, and which backstreet the balcony looked out on, and why a table had been positioned in a particular way, but now there were no such questions in my mind.

The only consolation was to sit across from her, to admire her, like a painting. Her hands were always moving, just as I remembered. Although married, she still didn’t smoke in front of her father, and that, alas, meant that I could not watch her light her cigarette in that lovely way of hers. But twice, she pulled back her hair the way she used to, and three times, when she was trying to join the conversation, she took a deep breath-like those she had always drawn when we quarreled-and raised her shoulders just slightly, as if waiting for her chance. Each time I saw her smile, hope and joy rose up inside me with the force of blooming sunflowers. I was reminded by her beauty, and by her gestures, which were so dear to me, and by her luminous skin, that the center of the world, the center to which I must travel, was at her side. All other people, places, and pastimes were nothing but “vulgar distractions.” It wasn’t just in my mind that I knew this, it was in my body; and so sitting across from her I longed to stand up and throw my arms around her. But when I tried to contemplate my situation, and what would happen next, I felt such an ache in my heart that I could think no more, and then it was not just for the benefit of the others that I played the part of the relative come to congratulate the young couple: It was also for my sake. Though our eyes hardly met during that meal, Füsun caught on at once, and as I carried on acting, she did everything one would expect from a happy young newlywed entertaining a wealthy distant relation come to call in his chauffeur-driven car, teasing her husband, feeding him spoonfuls of fava beans. All this made the eerie silence in my head echo.

The rain that had been pelting down ever faster on the way to the house showed no signs of abating. Tarık Bey had already told me, at the very beginning of the meal, that the neighborhood of Çukurcuma was, as the name implied, a topographical bowl, and that only after buying the house last summer did they learn it had flooded many times in the past, and so I went with him to the bay window to watch the torrent pouring down the hill. Many of their neighbors were out there, with their trousers rolled up and barefoot, using zinc buckets and plastic washtubs to bail out the water rushing over the curbs right into their houses, and arranging piles of stones and rags into makeshift levees. As two barefoot men struggled to clear a blocked grate with their hands, two women, one wearing a green and the other a purple headscarf, were pointing insistently at something in the torrent and shouting. At the table Tarık Bey had commented mysteriously that the sewers dating back to Ottoman times could no longer cope. Whenever the drumming of the rain increased, someone would say something like, “The heavens have opened up,” or “It’s the flood!” or “May God protect us,” and then rise from the table to gaze anxiously through the window at the floodwaters and the neighborhood, now transfigured in the pale lamplight. I, too, felt compelled to rise, in solidarity with their fears of flood, but I was so drunk I was afraid of being unable to stay on my feet, and knocking over tables and chairs.

“I wonder how your driver is doing out there?” said Aunt Nesibe as she gazed out the window.

“Should we get him something to eat?” asked the bridegroom.

“I could take it down,” said Füsun.

But Aunt Nesibe, sensing that I might not like this, changed the subject. For a moment I felt myself to be a lonely drunk under the suspicious scrutiny of the family standing by the bay window. So I faced them and smiled. Just then there was a clatter in the street below-a barrel had overturned-and we heard someone cry in pain. Füsun and I came eye to eye. But she immediately looked away.

How could she manage to show so little interest? This was what I wanted to ask her. But I wasn’t asking this question like some addled abandoned lover, who, when asked why he won’t leave his beloved alone, claims, I just wanted to ask her something! Well, all right, I was.

She’d seen me sitting here alone, so why didn’t she come and sit beside me? Why didn’t she seize this perfect opportunity to explain everything? Again we exchanged glances and again she looked away.

Now Füsun will come to sit at your side, said an optimistic voice inside me. And if she came, it would be a sign that one day she would give up on this misalliance, divorce her husband, and be mine.

The sky rumbled. Füsun drew away from the window and taking five steps floated to the table like a feather to sit across from me in silence.

“I beg you to forgive me,” she said in a whisper that pierced my heart. “I wasn’t able to come to your father’s funeral.”

The blue glare of a lightning bolt flashed between us like a swath of silk in the wind.

“I was waiting for you,” I said.

“I guessed that, but I would never have been able to come,” she said.

“That illegal awning over the grocery shop has been blown off-did you see?” said her husband, Feridun, as he returned to the table.

“We saw that, and it’s a shame,” I said.

“Not a shame at all,” said the father, returning from the window.

Seeing his daughter with her hands over her face, like a girl in tears, he first glanced anxiously at his son-in-law, and then at me.

“I still feel so bad about missing Uncle Mümtaz’s funeral,” said Füsun in a quivering voice. “I loved him so dearly. I was so upset.”

“Füsun loved your father very much,” said Tarık Bey. Passing his daughter, he kissed her head, and when he sat down he raised his eyebrow with a smile and poured me another raki. Then he offered me a handful of cherries.

I was still drunkenly imagining the moment when I would remove from my pocket my father’s velvet box with the pearl earrings, and then the single earring that belonged to Füsun, but that moment never seemed at hand. Churning up inside, I rose to my feet. But I could not stand up to offer her the earrings formally; on the contrary, I had to remain seated. From the way that father and daughter were looking at me, I knew that they, too, were waiting for something. Maybe they wanted me to go, but no, somehow the atmosphere in the room spoke of a deeper sort of anticipation. I dreamed this scene so many times, but in my dreams, of course, Füsun was not married, and just before I offered my presents, I had asked her mother and father for her hand. Now my intoxicated mind could not decide what to do with the earrings in this unforeseen situation.

I told myself that I couldn’t take out the boxes because of my cherry-stained fingers. “May I wash my hands?” I asked. Füsun could no longer ignore the storm raging within me. Feeling her father’s prodding gaze, which said, Show him where to go, daughter! she jumped to her feet in a panic. Seeing her standing before me, my memories of all our rendezvous a year earlier came to full life.

I wanted to embrace her.

We all know how the mind will work on two distinct planes when we’re drunk. On the first plane I was embracing Füsun as in a dream, as if we were meeting in a place beyond time and space. But on the second plane, we were around that table in the house in Çukurcuma, and a voice minding the second plane warned I must not embrace her, that to do so would be disastrous. But because of the rakı, this voice was delayed; instead of coinciding with my dream of embracing Füsun, it came five, six seconds later. During those five, six seconds, my will was free, and precisely for that reason I did not panic, but followed her up the stairs.

The closeness of our bodies, the way we walked upstairs-these too were like things from a dream out of time, and so they would remain in my memory for many years. I saw understanding and disquiet in her glances and I felt grateful to her for the way she expressed her feelings with her eyes. There, once again, it was clear that Füsun and I were made for each other. I had undergone all this anguish on account of this awareness and it did not matter in the least that she was married; just to feel as happy as I did now, climbing up the stairs with her, I was ready to undergo any further torment. To the visitor stubbornly wed to “realism” who cannot suppress a smile at this, having noticed how small that Çukurcuma house is, with the distance between that table and the upstairs bathroom being perhaps four and a half paces, not counting the seventeen steps, let me state with categorical and liberal-minded clarity that I would have readily sacrificed my very life for the happiness I felt during that brief interlude.

After closing the door to the bathroom on the top floor, I decided that my life was no longer in my control, that my connection to Füsun had shaped it into something beyond my free will. Only by believing this could I be happy, could I indeed bear to live. On the little tray before the mirror bearing Füsun’s, Aunt Nesibe’s, and Uncle Tarık’s toothbrushes, as well as shaving soap, brush, and razor, I saw Füsun’s lipstick. I picked it up and sniffed it, then put it into my pocket. I efficiently sniffed the towels hanging on the rack but detected nothing as I remembered it: Clean ones had evidently been put out in expectation of my visit. As I surveyed the small toilet, searching for one other object that might offer me consolation during the difficult days awaiting me after I’d left this place, I saw myself in the mirror, and from my expression I had a shocking intimation of the rift between my body and my soul. Whereas my face was drained by defeat and shock, inside my head was another universe: I now understood as an elemental fact of life that while I was here, inside my body was a soul, a meaning, that all things were made of desire, touch, and love, that what I was suffering was composed of the same elements. Between the howling of the rain and the gurgling of the water pipes, I heard one of the old Turkish songs that, in my childhood, would make my grandmother so happy whenever she heard it. There had to be a radio nearby. Between the low moan of the lute and the joyous chatter of the kanun was a tired but hopeful female voice, coming to me through the bathroom’s half-open window, saying, “It’s love, it’s love, the reason for everything in the universe.” With the help of this singer, I thus lived through one of my life’s most profoundly spiritual moments standing in front of the bath-room mirror; the universe was one, and one with all inside it. It wasn’t just all the objects in the world-the mirror in front of me, the plate of cherries, the bathroom’s bolt (which I display here), and Füsun’s hairpin (which I thankfully noticed and dropped into my pocket)-all humanity was one, too. To understand the meaning of this life, one first had to be compelled to see this unity by the force of love.

It was in this good-natured spirit that I took out Füsun’s orphaned earring and put it where her lipstick had been. Before taking out my father’s pearl earrings, the same music reminded me of the streets of old Istanbul, the stormy loves recounted by aging couples as they sat in their wooden houses listening to the radio, and the reckless lovers who ruin their lives because of passion. Inspired by the melancholy song on the radio, I understood that, as I had become engaged to another, Füsun was perfectly justified and indeed had had no choice but to save herself by marrying. I found myself verbalizing all this, as I peered in the mirror. I recognized in my eyes something of the innocence and playfulness I’d had as a child, and when I experimented with my reflection, I made a shocking discovery: By imitating Füsun, I could escape my own being by the strength of my love; I could consider-and even feel-all that passed through her heart and mind; I could speak through her mouth, understand how she felt a thing even as she felt it herself-for I was she.

The shock of my discovery must have kept me in the bathroom for an unusually long time. Someone coughed discreetly outside the door, I think. Or knocked: I can’t quite remember which, because “the reel had snapped.” That was how we’d put it when we were young, and blacked out at parties from too much drink, referring to those maddening interruptions at the cinema, when the projectionist’s life was in danger. How I left the bathroom, how I regained my seat, with what excuse Çetin had come upstairs and coaxed me through the door, of these things I have no recollection. There was also a silence at the table; I so remember that, but whether it was owing to the rain having eased up, or to my embarrassment, which could no longer be hidden or ignored, or simply to the defeat that was fast destroying me, with the pain that had become tangible-this I cannot say.

Far from being unnerved by the silence, the son-in-law was enthusing about the film business-perhaps I’d actually said my reel had snapped and he’d taken his cue from this-with a mixture of love and loathing, saying how bad Turkish films were, and how especially bad the films made at Yeşilçam, though the Turkish people were crazy about the cinema. These were perfectly ordinary opinions at the time. Amazing films could be made, if only one could secure a backer who was serious, resolute, and not overly greedy; he had written a screenplay in which he intended to cast Füsun, but what a shame it was that he could find no one to produce it. What concerned me was not that Füsun’s husband needed money and wasn’t shy about saying so; what preoccupied me was that Füsun would one day become a “Turkish film star.”

On the way home, semiconscious in the backseat while Çetin drove, I remember dreaming Füsun had become a famous actress. No matter how drunk we might be, there are moments when the leaden clouds of our pain and confusion disperse, when for a moment we see the reality we believe, or suspect, that everyone else knows: so here, as Çetin drove and I sat in the backseat, gazing out at the dark, flooded avenues, there was a moment of sudden recognition, and I understood that Füsun and her husband saw me as a rich relative who might help with their dreams of making movies. This was why they had invited me to supper. But deadened as I was by the raki, I felt no resentment; instead I continued wafting off into dreams about Füsun the actress so famous she was known all over Turkey, no ordinary actress but a glamorous film star: At the premiere of her first film, at the Palace Cinema, she would walk on my arm through the applauding crowd toward the stage. And the car was passing right through Beyoğlu at that moment, right in front of the Palace Cinema!