The Museum Of Innocence

56 Lemon Films Inc.

ON FIRST discovering that his daughter had entered a beauty contest with the support and approval of her mother, Tarık Bey had been beside himself with fury, but loving his daughter dearly as he did, he could not resist her supplications when she burst into tears; afterward, though, when he heard what people said about her, he would regret tolerating the disgrace. There had been beauty contests during the first years of the Republic during Atatürk’s reign, and when girls walked down the catwalk in black swimsuits, they were, in Tarık Bey’s view, both manifesting their interest in Turkish history and culture, and also showing the entire world how modern they were, which was all to the good. But by the seventies, the contests had become the province of girls with no culture or manners and coarse hopes of becoming singers and models, and so the significance of beauty contests became something else altogether. The hosts of the old contests would ask the contestants, oh so politely, what sort of man they dreamed of marrying, as a refined way of clarifying that the girls were virgins. And while today’s hosts asked girls, “What do you look for in a man?” (the correct answer being “character”), they would grin and smirk like Hakan Serinkan. So Tarık Bey was adamant with his filmmaker son-in-law that while he and Füsun were living under his roof, his daughter was to have no further adventures of this nature.

Out of fear that her father might consider becoming a film star likewise objectionable and thwart her plans in various overt and covert ways, we continued to discuss the “art film” Feridun planned only in hushed tones. In my view, Tarık Bey pretended not to hear our whispering because he looked favorably on my interest in his family and enjoyed drinking and talking with me. And as the art film provided a plausible pretext for my visiting the Keskin family four times a week, it served only too well to conceal the real purpose of my appearances, so well known to Aunt Nesibe. During the first few months, whenever I looked at Feridun’s sweet and guileless face, it seemed to me that he knew nothing, but later I would begin to think that he was in on a counter plot, but trusted me with his wife, seeing me as no kind of threat-indeed someone to be made fun of behind my back-and in his desperate need for my backing, simply played along with the deception.

Toward the end of November, after much coaxing from Füsun, Feridun finished the final draft of his screenplay, and one evening after supper, while standing on the landing at the top of the stairs, and under Füsun’s frowning gaze, he ceremoniously handed the typescript over to me, as prospective producer, to solicit my decision.

“Kemal, I want you to read this carefully,” said Füsun. “I believe in this screenplay and I trust you. Don’t let me down.”

“I’d never let you down, my dear girl!” I pointed at the typescript in my hand. “Tell me, do you esteem the screenplay so highly because you’re meant to star in it, or is it because it’s meant to be an ‘art film’?” (A new concept in 1970s Turkey.)

“Both.”

“Then consider the film made.”

The screenplay was entitled Blue Rain, and there was nothing in it remotely to suggest an awareness of Füsun, or me, or our romance, or our story. Over the summer I had come to have respect for Feridun’s intelligence and his understanding of film; discussing cultivated and highly educated Turkish filmmakers longing to make art films in the manner of the West, he had very astutely identified their typical mistakes (imitation, artificiality, moralism, vulgarity, melodrama, and commercial populism, etc.), so why had he fallen into all the same traps? As I was reading this vexing screenplay, I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality. Even the three scenes, motivated by commercial considerations, in which Füsun’s character would appear nude (once making love, once pensively smoking a cigarette in a bubble bath, in the style of the French New Wave, and once wandering through a heavenly garden in a dream) were arty, insipid, and gratuitous!

My confidence in this project was never more than a pose, but after reading these scenes I was even more resolutely and angrily opposed than Tarık Bey would have been. But realizing that I had to keep the project alive for a while longer, I lavishly praised the script to both Füsun and her husband, going so far as to tell them that “as the producer” I was now ready to begin tryouts for actors and technicians, a zealousness for which I gently mocked myself, in the interest of making it more credible.

So with the onset of winter, Feridun, Füsun, and I delayed not a moment in visiting the backstreet haunts, the prospective production offices, and the coffeehouses where second-class actors, would-be film stars, bit players, and set workers played cards, as well as the bars where producers, directors, and semifamous actors were usually to be found from early evening, eating and drinking until the late hours. All these places were a ten-minute walk up the hill, and whenever I took this route I would remember how Aunt Nesibe had told me that Feridun had married Füsun in order to live within walking distance of such establishments. Some evenings I would collect them at the door, and some evenings we three-Feridun, with Füsun on his arm, and I-would walk together up to Beyoğlu, having had our supper with her parents.

Our most frequent destination was the Pelür Bar, popular with film stars and men with new money hoping to mingle with girls who hoped to become starlets, and the children of Anatolian landowners, now cast into the Istanbul business world by day and letting off steam in the evening, and moderately renowned journalists, film critics, and gossip columnists. All winter long we met many actors who’d played supporting roles in the films we’d seen that summer (including that mustached friend of Feridun’s who had played the crooked accountant), and we became part of that society of spirited, bitter, but ever hopeful souls who whiled away the evenings exchanging vicious gossip, recounting their life stories, and describing their ideas for films, and who couldn’t get through a day without the company of those like them.

They were very fond of Feridun, and because he held some of them in high esteem, had assisted some others, and wanted to ingratiate himself with the rest, he would go off to their tables, sitting with them for hours, leaving Füsun and me alone, though never happily on my part. When Feridun was with us, Füsun would address me as “Cousin Kemal,” only very rarely dropping this half-innocent pretense; if she did deign to speak to me sincerely, I read her change of register as a warning-about the men who came and went from our table, and her future life in the film world-that I ignored at my peril.

One evening after too much rakı, I found myself left alone with her again, and having tired of her aspirational fantasies and the pettiness of this milieu, I suddenly became convinced of the rightness of my next comment and of her receptiveness to it. “Take my arm, darling, let’s get up and leave this dreadful place together right now,” I said. “We could go to Paris, or Patagonia, to the other end of the world-it doesn’t matter so long as we forget all these people, and live happily ever after, just the two of us.”

“Cousin Kemal, how can you even say such a thing? Our lives are what they have become,” said Füsun.

After we’d been coming to the bar for several months, the drunken lot that gathered there every night (an “it” crowd in their own minds) didn’t bother us, having accepted Füsun as the young and beautiful bride and having pegged me with derisive suspicion as the “well-meaning idiot millionaire” who wanted to make an art film. But there were inevitably those who didn’t know us, or drunks who knew us but leered at Füsun anyway, or who had caught a glimpse of her from a distance while barhopping, or who nurtured an irrepressible longing to narrate their own life stories (this was an enormous crowd), and collectively they hardly left us alone. While I enjoyed it when a stranger joined us with a glass of raki in his hand, having taken me for Füsun’s husband, she would straightaway smile and correct them with an insistence that broke my heart every time, saying, “My husband is the fatso over there,” and emboldened the stranger to ignore me and attempt to make a pass at her.

Each attempt took a different form. Some claimed they were looking for a “dark-haired innocent-looking Turkish beauty” just like her to use in a photoroman; some would immediately offer her the lead in some new film on the prophet Abraham, headed imminently into production; some would gaze longingly into her eyes for hours saying nothing; while others would discourse on life’s little beauties and all the subtle wonders that no one paused to notice in this materialistic world, where only money mattered; then there were the ones who sat at remote tables reading the work of long-suffering imprisoned poets, poems about love, longing, and the nation; others from distant tables would either pay our tab or send us a plate of fruit. By the end of the winter we were frequenting these Beyoğlu haunts less, but every time we did go, we would inevitably see the same great hulking woman who often played the diabolical prison matron or the leading villainess’s bulky sidekick. She would invite Füsun to dance parties at her house, promising “lots of cultivated, well-schooled girls” like her. And there was always an old, squat little critic who wore bow ties and girded his enormous belly with suspenders; he would plant his ugly hand like a scorpion on Füsun’s shoulder, foretelling the “great fame” awaiting her, perhaps as the first Turkish actress to gain international renown, provided she gave careful consideration to every step she took.

Füsun would indeed give serious consideration to each and every film, photoroman, and modeling offer, however unsuitable or trivial; she would also remember the names of everyone she met, and in the case of film actors, no matter how obscure, she would shower them with outsize, even vulgar compliments, a want of proportion that I couldn’t help tracing back to her days as a shopgirl. Even as she tried to flatter and beguile everyone, she was also determined to achieve the often contradictory purpose of making herself seem interesting. Toward these ends she was ever more often pressing us to visit these places, and if I counseled against giving her phone number to everyone who made her an offer-“What would your father say?”-she would only snap at me that she knew what she was doing, even declaring that she needed options in the event that Feridun’s film failed to get made. I took deep offense at the implication and moved to another table, but then she would come over with Feridun and say, “Why don’t we three go out for supper, just like we did last summer?”

I had made two new friends among the hard-drinking film crowd of which I was slowly becoming a somewhat embarrassed fixture. One of them was a middle-aged actress named Sühendan Yıldız, who owed her fame as the “evil woman” entirely to her nose, which had been broken by one of Turkey ’s first cosmetic surgeons and reconstructed in a hideous new shape. The other was a character actor named Salih Sarılı, who having for years played authority figures like army officers and policemen, was now obliged to earn his keep by dubbing semi-legitimate domestic porn films, the absurdities of which enterprise he could be relied upon to recount in a chesty voice, often interrupted by a laugh and a hacking cough.

In a few years’ time I would discover that it was not just Salih Sarılı working in the domestic porn industry, but most of the actors we had befriended in the Pelür Bar, and this startled me as if I’d discovered that all my friends belonged to a secret society. Well-mannered middle-aged actresses and actors of strong types like Salih Bey would get by dubbing foreign films that were only moderately obscene, and during the sex scenes, moaning and screaming to suggest the details of the action that the film didn’t show. Most of these actors were married with children and admired for their gravitas; they would tell their friends that they had been forced to take on such work during the economic decline so as not to be entirely cut off from the film world, though at first they hid it from everyone, and especially their families. Even so, their ardent fans, particularly those in the provinces, would recognize their voices and write them letters of hatred or admiration. At the same time, far bolder, greedier actors and producers, most of them regulars at the Pelür, were involved in domestic productions that must go down in history as “the first Islamic porn films.” The “love scenes” in their films mixed sex with slapstick, as the gasping and moaning proceeded with ludicrous exaggeration, as the actors assumed all the positions that could be learned from European sex manuals bought on the black market, though all involved, male and female alike, would never remove their underpants.

At the Pelür, as Füsun headed off with Feridun, alighting at every table, meeting everyone she could, I would sit and listen to my two new middle-aged friends, more often the courteous Sühendan Hanım, dispense words of caution. I was, for example, to keep Füsun at all costs away from that producer over there, who looked respectable enough with his yellow tie, crisply ironed shirt, and little brush mustache, but whose greatest claim to fame was trapping women under thirty in his office above the Atlas Cinema where he had no qualms about locking the door and raping them, and afterward he would silence the crying girls with the offer of the lead in one of his films, which role, when the filming began, would turn out to be a bit part-that of the scheming German nanny who upsets the peaceful home of a rich Turkish man with a golden heart. I was to be likewise wary of Muzaffer the producer, also Feridun’s old boss, at whose side Feridun still spent so much time, laughing slavishly at every joke, hoping to win this man’s technical assistance for the art film. Not long ago, less than a fortnight, this scoundrel had been sharing a table with the owner of two medium-size production companies with whom he was in constant competition, and he had bet his rival a bottle of black market champagne that he could seduce Feridun’s wife within the month. (The films of that era offer copious examples of our fetish for that Western infidel luxury.) As I sat chatting with this renowned film star who had for so many years played the ordinary vixen (never the true she-devil), and who on account of the celebrity magazines was known to the entire Turkish nation as Conniving Sühendan, she would be knitting a tricolored woolen pullover for her beloved three-year-old grandson, and showing me the picture in Burda from which she was copying it. If anyone mocked her for sitting in the corner of the bar with balls of red, yellow, and navy blue wool on her lap, she would say, “At least I’m keeping busy while waiting for my next job, which is more than you drunks can say,” and if circumstances warranted she would discard her ladylike manners with some ease and launch into foul-mouthed invective.

The intellectuals, filmmakers, and pouting starlets frequenting places like the Pelür would be drunk by eight in the evening: Seeing how scandalized I was by the ensuing vulgarities, my world-weary friend Salih Sarılı gazed across the room with a romantic expression that recalled the noble, idealist policeman roles that he had personified for so many years, and, fixing his eyes on Füsun, who was sitting at a distant table, laughing with someone I didn’t know, he allowed that were he a rich businessman, he wouldn’t be bringing a beautiful relation to bars like this for the purpose of her becoming a star. This broke my heart. I was now obliged to add my actor-dubber friend to my list of “men who looked at Füsun in the wrong way.” Conniving Sühendan made a more oblique comment one day that I would never forget: My beautiful relative Füsun, she said, was a sweet and good and lovely girl, just the right age to become a very good mother, like the one who had given birth to the grandson for whom she was knitting the red, yellow, and navy blue pullover. But what were we doing here?

I, too, would eventually succumb to such anxieties. For every week Füsun was making new acquaintances in the film bars of Beyoğlu, admirers who were continually proposing to use her in this photoroman or that commercial. And so at the beginning of 1977 I signaled to Feridun that the time had come to decide on his technical team. From her friendly smiles and the way she touched me when she whispered funny stories into my ear, Füsun had led me to believe she would leave Feridun soon. As I was planning to marry her the “very next” moment, I told myself that it would be better for her, too, not to become too involved in this sordid world. We could make her an actress without cozying up to such people. It was at about this time that the three of us decided that our joint venture was better managed from an office than in the Pelür Bar. The moment had come to set up a company to finance Feridun’s films.

It was at Füsun’s jolly suggestion that we agreed to name the company after Lemon the canary. As one can gather from our business card, bearing the likeness of the charming bird, Lemon Films was located next door to the New Angel Cinema.

I arranged for 1,200 Turkish lira to be deposited every month in a personal account at the Beyoğlu branch of the Agricultural Bank. This sum was slightly more than the salaries I paid my two top managers at Satsat: Half would pay Feridun’s salary as the firm’s managing director, while the rest would cover the rent and the production costs.