The Museum Of Innocence

58 Tombala

I SPENT New Year’s Eve 1976 playing tombala with the Keskins. Perhaps I remembered this now because I’ve just been speaking about the beauty I’d found in my life. But it is also important, because celebrating the New Year with the Keskins was proof that my life had changed irrevocably. Having broken off with Sibel, I had been obliged to stay away from our circle of mutual friends, and now, visiting the Keskins four or five times a week, I had mostly abandoned my old habits, but until that New Year’s Eve, I would still have myself and those around me believe that I was continuing my old life, or at least that I could return to it whenever I chose.

As for the acquaintances I no longer saw-so as to keep a distance from Sibel, avoid upsetting people with bad memories, and save myself the bother of explaining why I’d disappeared-it was Zaim who kept me abreast of their news. Zaim and I would meet at Fuaye or Garaj or some other society restaurant that had just opened, and there we’d sit having long, pleasant conversations about life and what everyone was up to as intensely as two men discussing business.

Zaim had lost interest in his young girlfriend, Ayşe, who was the same age as Füsun. He told me she was too much of a child, and he couldn’t relate to her troubles or anxieties, nor had she managed to fit in with our group; when I pressed him, he insisted that he had no other girlfriend, or even anyone he was interested in. From what he said, it was clear that Zaim and Ayşe had done no more than kiss, and that the girl would continue to be cautious and prudent so long as her uncertainty about Zaim persisted.

“Why are you smiling?” said Zaim.

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are,” said Zaim. “But I don’t mind. Let me tell you something you will enjoy even more. Nurcihan and Mehmet meet every day of the week without fail and go from restaurant to restaurant, club to club. Mehmet even takes Nurcihan to gazinos and makes her listen to Ottoman music, all the old songs. They’ve made friends in these places with singers who used to sing on the radio and are now in their seventies and eighties.”

“Are you serious?… I never saw Nurcihan as someone who would go for that sort of thing.”

“All because she fell in love with Mehmet. Actually, Mehmet doesn’t know much about these old singers either. He’s trying to learn it all, just to impress Nurcihan. They go to the Sahaflar Market together to buy old books, and then they trot off to the flea market looking for old records. In the evenings they go to Maksim and the Bebek Gazino to listen to Müzeyyen Senar. But they never get around to listening to the records together.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, every evening they’re out at the gazinos,” Zaim said carefully. “But they never go anywhere to be alone and make love.”

“How do you know that?”

“Where could they possibly go? Mehmet still lives with his parents.”

“He used to have a place where he took women, in the backstreets of Maçka.”

“He had me over there, for a whiskey,” said Zaim. “It’s a typical garçonnière. Nurcihan is too clever to go near that hideous place; she knows that if she did Mehmet would immediately see it as reason not to marry her. Even I felt strange there: The neighbors were peering through the peephole, to see if this guy had brought back another prostitute.”

“So what should Mehmet do? Do you think it’s easy for a single man to rent an apartment in this city?”

“They could go to the Hilton,” said Zaim. “Or he could buy himself an apartment in a decent neighborhood.”

“Mehmet loves living with his family.”

“You do, too,” said Zaim. “May I say something to you as a friend? But promise me you won’t get angry.”

“I won’t get angry.”

“Instead of meeting secretly at the office, as if you were doing something wrong, you should have taken Sibel to the Merhamet Apartments, where you took Füsun; then you two would still be together.”

“Did Sibel say that?”

“No, my friend. Sibel doesn’t talk about such things with just anyone,” said Zaim. “Don’t worry.”

For a time we were silent. We’d been having so much fun gossiping, but then suddenly it upset me to have my life discussed as if I’d suffered some sort of catastrophe. Zaim noticed that my spirits had fallen, so he told me about how he’d run into Mehmet, Nurcihan, Tayfun, and Faruk the Mouse all sitting together at a soup shop in Beyoğlu late one night.

Zaim may have been recounting this in the hope of luring me back into my old life, but he also enjoyed reporting all the fun he was having; I listened to him go on in detail, often exaggerating, but I didn’t pay it much mind until later in the evening, when I was at the Keskins’ and I caught myself reflecting fondly on such outings. But let no one imagine that I was grieving my lost friends or my days of prowling the city. It was just that sometimes at the Keskins’ dinner table it would suddenly seem to me that nothing was happening in the world, or if something was happening we were far away-that’s all.

On the night we ushered in 1977 I must have succumbed to such a feeling, because I remember a point when I wondered what Zaim, Sibel, Mehmet, Tayfun, Faruk the Mouse, and all the rest were doing. (Zaim had installed electric heaters in his summer house and had dispatched the caretaker to light a fire for a big party to which he had invited “everyone.”)

“Look, Kemal, twenty-seven’s come up, and you have one on your card!” said Füsun. When she saw I wasn’t paying attention, she put a dried bean on the 27 on my tombala card, and smiled. “Stop messing around and play the game!” she said, for a moment looking into my eyes with concern, anxiety, and even tenderness.

It was for just this sort of attention from Füsun that I was going to the Keskin house. I felt an extraordinary happiness, but it hadn’t been easy to achieve. Not wanting to upset my mother and my brother, I hid my plans for spending New Year’s Eve at the Keskins’ by eating supper at home with them. Afterward Osman’s sons-my nephews-had cried, “Come on, Grandmother, let’s play tombala!” so I was obliged to play a round with them. While we were all playing, I came eye to eye with Berrin, and perhaps she, too, was struck by the pretense of this happy family tableau, because I remember that she raised her eyebrows, as if to say, “Nothing wrong, I hope?”

“Nothing,” I whispered. “We’re having fun, can’t you see?”

Later, rushing toward the door on the pretext of going to Zaim’s party, I caught another look from Berrin, who was not fooled. But I didn’t respond.

As Çetin rushed me over to the Keskin house, I was anxious but happy. The first thing I did after running up the stairs and entering-and, of course, savoring the joy of meeting Füsun’s eyes-was to take out from the plastic bag some of the presents my mother had prepared for the tombala winners at our house, and to set them out at the end of the table, crying, “For the tombala winners!” Aunt Nesibe, too, had prepared her own little presents for tombala, just as my mother had done every New Year’s since I was a child, and we mingled her presents with my mother’s. The fun we had playing tombala that night would be repeated every New Year’s for the next eight years, and Aunt Nesibe’s presents would be thrown together with the ones I had brought with me.

Here I display the tombala set that we used for eight consecutive New Years at Füsun’s house. For forty years, from the late 1950s to the late 1990s, my mother used a similar set to amuse first my brother, my cousins and me, and later, her grandchildren. When the New Year’s Eve party had come to an end, the game was over, the presents distributed, and the children and the neighbors had begun to yawn and doze off, Aunt Nesibe, like my mother, would carefully gather up the pieces, fill the velvet pouch bag, and count the numbered wooden tiles (there were ninety in all). After also making a deck of all the numbered cards, and tying it with a ribbon, she would collect the dried beans we’d used to mark the numbers and put them into a plastic bag for the next New Year’s Eve.

Now, all these years later, as I undertake to explain my love as sincerely as I can, explicating each object in turn, it seems to me that tombala captures the strange and mysterious spirit of those days. Invented in Naples, and still played by Italian families at Christmas, the game passed, like so many other New Year’s rituals and customs, from the Italian and Levantine families of Istanbul into the general population after Atatürk’s calendar reform, in no time becoming a New Year’s ritual.

Every year Aunt Nesibe would include among her presents a child’s handkerchief. Was this to remind us of the old wisdom that “To play tombala on New Year’s makes children happy, and so grown-ups should be mindful of being as happy as children on that evening”? When I was a child and an elderly guest won a present intended for a child, they would say without fail, “Oh, this is just the sort of handkerchief I needed!” My father and his friends would then wink at one another, suggesting there was a second meaning beyond our childish reach. Seeing them do this I would feel as if the grown-ups were not taking the game seriously with their sarcasm. In 1982, on a rainy New Year’s Eve, when I managed to complete the top line of my tombala card first and cry “Chinko!” like a child, Aunt Nesibe said, “Congratulations, Kemal Bey,” and handed me this handkerchief. And, yes, I said, “This is just the sort of handkerchief I needed!”

“It’s one of Füsun’s childhood handkerchiefs,” said Aunt Nesibe, perfectly earnest.

My mother would include a few pairs of children’s socks among the presents, as if to imply no lavish indulgence, only the furnishing of a few household essentials. Making the presents feel less like presents did allow us to see our socks, our handkerchiefs, the mortar we used for pounding walnuts in the kitchen, or a cheap comb from Alaaddin’s as objects of greater value, if only for a short time. Over at the Keskin household, everyone, even the children, would rejoice not on account of winning socks, but because they had won the game. Now, years later, it seems to me that this was so because none of the Keskins’ possessions belonged strictly to a particular family member, but, like this sock, to the entire household and the whole family, while I had always imagined a room upstairs that Füsun shared with her husband, and in it a wardrobe, with her own belongings; I had many tormented dreams about this room and her clothes and the other things in it.

It was on New Year’s Eve 1980 that I brought a surprise tombala present-a memento of my grandfather, Ethem Kemal: the antique glass from which Füsun and I had drunk whiskey at our last rendezvous, on the day of my engagement. Beginning in 1979 the Keskins had detected my habit of pocketing various belongings of theirs and replacing them with more valuable and expensive things, but like my love for Füsun, it was never discussed; so there was nothing remotely strange to them about a fancy glass such as one saw in Rafi Portakal’s antique shop turning up among the pencils, socks, and bars of soap. What broke my heart was that when Tarık Bey won, and Aunt Nesibe produced the presents, Füsun did not even begin to recognize it as the crystal glass from the saddest day of our affair.

Every time Tarık Bey used it as his raki glass over the three and a half years that followed, I would want to recall the happiness of the last time Füsun and I had made love, but like a child conditioned by some taboo to drive a certain thought from mind, I could not entertain this memory properly while sitting at the table with Tarık Bey.

The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also in the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory-of this there is no doubt. At some other time I would have had no interest in the bars of Edirne soap in this basket, and might even have found them tawdry, but having served as tombala presents on New Year’s Eve, these soaps formed in the shape of apricots, quinces, grapes, and strawberries remind me of the slow and humble rhythm of the routines that ruled our lives. It is my devout, and uncalculating, belief that such sentiments belong not just to me, and that, seeing these objects, visitors to my museum many years later will know them, too.

With the same conviction, I display here a number of New Year’s lottery tickets from the period. Like my mother, Aunt Nesibe would buy a ticket for the grand drawing on December 31, to serve as one of the tombala presents. To whomever won the ticket, the others at the Keskin table, as at our home, would say almost in unison: “Oh, look at that, you’re lucky tonight… You’re sure to win the ticket for the grand drawing, too.”

By some strange coincidence, Füsun won the lottery ticket every year between 1977 and 1984. But when the winning ticket was announced on the radio and television a short while later, by an equally strange coincidence, she never won a prize, not even a refund.

At our house as at the Keskin table, the old saw about poker, love, and life was oft repeated, especially when Tarık Bey was playing cards with guests.

“Unlucky at cards, lucky at love.”

Everybody said it compulsively, and so in 1981, on New Year’s Eve, after we had watched the live broadcast of the grand drawing, supervised by the First Notary Public of Ankara, after it was clear that Füsun had won nothing, I drunkenly, thoughtlessly, uttered it too.

“Seeing as you’ve lost the lottery, Miss Füsun,” I said, imitating the English gentleman hero we watched on television, “you are bound to be a winner at love!”

“I have no doubt about that, Kemal Bey!” said Füsun, without missing a beat, just like the clever, elegant heroines of the same films.

Conservative newspapers like Milli Gazete, Tercüman, and Hergün were forever fulminating against New Year’s Eve, which, thanks to tombala, the National Lottery, all this card playing, and the ubiquitous promotions for restaurants and nightclubs, was slowly turning into an orgy of drinking and gambling. When some rich Muslim families in Şişli and Nişantaşı began buying pine trees to decorate and display in windows the way Christians did in films, I remember that even my mother felt uneasy, but because these were people she knew, she refrained from calling them “degenerates” or “infidels” as the religious press would, dismissing them rather as “harebrained.”

In the run-up to New Year’s there would be thousands of vendors selling tickets for the National Lottery in the streets of Istanbul, and some would go dressed as Santa Claus into the wealthy neighborhoods. One evening in December 1980, when I was choosing what tombala presents to take to Füsun’s house, I saw a small mixed group of lycée students deriding one such Santa Claus, pulling his beard of cotton wool and laughing. When I drew closer I saw that this man was the janitor of the apartment house across the street; as the teenagers tugged at his cotton wool mustache, Haydar Efendi stood there silently, holding his tickets, his eyes downcast. A few years later the conservatives’ anger at the drinking and gambling during the celebration overflowed when Islamists set off a bomb in the Marmara Hotel on Taksim Square, in the patisserie that had been decorated for New Year’s with an enormous pine tree. At the Keskin dinner table, I recall, the bombing was, of course, an urgent topic, but it was nothing compared to what happened to the belly dancer who was expected to appear on a New Year’s Eve telecast. When Sertap, the most famous belly dancer of the day, appeared on television in 1981 despite the angry diatribes in the conservative press, we were dumbfounded, along with almost everyone else in the country. The TRT management had draped the beautiful and curvaceous Sertap in so many layers that not only were her “world-famous” belly and breasts covered, but even her legs.

“They might as well have veiled her, the disgraceful buffoons!” said Tarık Bey. Actually he hardly ever got angry at the television, and no matter how much he’d had to drink, he never shouted at the screen the way the rest of us did when sufficiently annoyed.

For some years, I’d been buying a Saath Maarif Takvimi, the calendar indicating the prayer times, from Alaaddin’s shop to take to Aunt Nesibe’s as a tombala present. On New Year’s Eve, 1981, it was Füsun who won it, and at my insistence she tacked it on the wall between the television and the kitchen, but no one would pay attention to the pages on days when I wasn’t there, despite there being a poem of the day, a daily note about the historical events whose anniversary it was, and a picture of a clock face, so that those who could not read and write might know the prayer times, as well as recommended recipes, historical anecdotes, and a bit of wisdom.

“Aunt Nesibe, you’ve forgotten to pull the page off the calendar again,” I would say at the end of the evening, when the soldiers would be saluting the flag as they goose-stepped across the screen, and we would have polished off a lot of raki.

“Another day is over,” Tarık Bey would say. “Thank God we are not hungry or without shelter, that our stomachs are full, that we are sitting in a warm house-what more could a person want in life?”

For some reason it lifted my heart to hear Tarık Bey say these homely words as the evening wound down, and so-even though I’d noticed on my arrival that they’d forgotten to pull the page off the calendar-I would omit to mention it until the moment I was about to leave, when I was ready to hear this thanksgiving.

“The most important thing is that we’re here all together, with our loved ones,” Aunt Nesibe would add. As she said this, she would lean over to kiss Füsun, and if Füsun was not at her side, she would call out, “Come here, my little storm cloud, so that I can give you a kiss.”

Sometimes Füsun would assume a little girl’s expression and sit on her mother’s lap, allowing Aunt Nesibe to spend a long time caressing her, kissing her arms, her neck, her cheeks. No matter how mother and daughter were getting along, they kept up this ritual through the eight years. As they laughed and kissed and hugged, Füsun knew full well that I was watching her, but she never looked back at me directly.

There were times, too, when, after Aunt Nesibe pronounced her wisdom about “loved ones,” Füsun would not go to her mother’s lap, but instead would take a neighbor’s child, a fast-growing boy called Ali, onto her lap, and after caressing him and showering him with kisses, she would say, “Time for you to go home now, or else your parents will get angry at us for keeping you.” Finally, there were the occasions when Füsun was in a bad mood, because she and her mother had argued that morning, and at Aunt Nesibe’s plea, “Come over here, my girl,” she would say, “Oh, Mother, please!” leaving Aunt Nesibe to say, “Then at least pull the page off the calendar, so we don’t get our days confused.”

This would leave Füsun all smiles suddenly, and after getting up to pull the page off the Saath Maarif Takvimi, she would read out the day’s poem and the recipe in a loud semitheatrical voice and laugh. Aunt Nesibe would comment, “Oh, what a good idea, let’s make quince and raisin compote, it’s been ages,” or, “Yes, they’re suggesting artichokes, but you can’t pick artichokes when they’re still small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.” Sometimes she would ask a question that unsettled me: “If I made a spinach pastry, would you eat it?”

If Tarık Bey didn’t hear her or was too gloomy to answer, then Füsun would turn to scrutinize me in silence, with a sadistic curiosity based on the expectation that I would not dare presume the prerogative of a full member of the family by telling Aunt Nesibe what to cook.

I knew how to rescue myself from this difficult bind, saying, “Füsun loves savory pastries, Aunt Nesibe, so you should definitely make it!”

Sometimes Tarık Bey would ask his daughter about the important historical dates on the page she’d torn off the Saath Maarif Takvimi, and she’d read aloud: “On September 3, 1658, the Ottoman army began its siege of Doppio Castle.” Or “On August 26, 1071, after the Battle of Malazgirt, Anatolia opened its doors to the Turks.”

“Hmmmm, let’s have a look at that,” Tarık Bey would say. “They’ve misspelled ‘Doppio.’ Here, take it back, and read us the saying of the day.”

“Home is where the heart is, and where we fill our stomachs,” Füsun said, reading in a mocking voice until our eyes met and she turned serious.

Suddenly we all fell silent, as if each was pondering the deeper meaning of those words. After Füsun had finished reading and had put the leaf from the calendar to one side, I picked it up, pretending I wanted to read it for myself, and when no one was looking, I put it into my pocket.

Of course, the pilfering wasn’t always so easy, but I have no wish to make myself more risible by going into the full details of my difficulties in acquiring so many objects of such varying size and preciousness from the Keskin household. Let an example from the end of New Year’s Eve 1982 suffice: Before I left the house with the little handkerchief I’d won at tombala, little Ali, the neighbor’s boy, who grew more in awe of Füsun with every day, came up to me and in a manner quite unlike his usual naughty self he said, “Kemal Bey, you know that handkerchief you won…”

“Yes?”

“That’s Füsun’s hankie from when she was a child. May I see it again?”

“Oh, I have no idea where I put it, Ali, my boy.”

“But I know,” the brat replied. “You put it in this pocket, so it must be there.”

He almost managed to invade my pocket with his hand, but I took a step backward. The rain was pelting down outside, and everyone had gathered at the window, so no one else heard what the child said.

“Ali, my boy, it’s getting very late, and you’re still here,” I said. “Your parents will blame us.”

“I’m going, Kemal Bey. But are you going to give me Füsun’s hankie?”

“No,” I whispered with a frown. “I need it.”