The Museum Of Innocence

72 Life, Too, Is Just Like Love….

ONE EVENING at the beginning of 1983 I was about to sit down to supper at the Keskins’ when, sensing something strange, something missing, I carefully surveyed the room. The chairs were all in their usual places, and there was no new dog on top of the television, but the sense of something peculiar in the room persisted, as if the walls had been painted black. In those days I’d ceased to think of my life as something I lived in wakeful consciousness of what I was doing: I’d begun instead to think of it as something imagined, something-just like love-that issued from my dreams, and as I had no wish either to fight my growing pessimism about the world or to surrender myself to it unconditionally, I acted as if no such thoughts had entered my mind. It might be said that I had decided to leave everything as it was. I applied the same logic to the unease awakened in me by the dining room as I had to that stirred by the sitting room: I resolved not to dwell on it, to let it pass.

TRT 2, Turkey ’s arts and culture channel, was at the time showing a series of films starring Grace Kelly, who had just died. It was our old friend Ekrem the famous actor who presented the “Art Film” feature every Thursday evening, reading from the script in his hands, which the alcoholic Ekrem Bey hid behind a vase of roses, so as to hide his shaking hands. His comments were written by a young film critic, who had been an old friend of Feridun’s before they fell out over a scathing review of Broken Lives. And Ekrem Bey read the critic’s convoluted, intellectualized prose with little comprehension; finally he raised his eyes from the page, and just before saying, “and so here is tonight’s feature…” he announced that he had met “America’s elegant ‘princess star’ at a film festival many years ago,” adding, almost as if it were a secret, that she had a deep love for Turks, his dreamy expression implying that he might even have enjoyed a grand romance with the enchanting star. Füsun, who had heard a great deal about Grace Kelly from Feridun and his film critic friend during the early years of her marriage, would not miss a single one of these films, and since I would not miss a chance to watch Füsun watch the fragile, helpless, but still radiantly beautiful Grace Kelly, I would make sure to take my place at the Keskin table every Thursday.

That Thursday we watched Hitchcock’s Rear Window, but far from putting my troubled mind at ease, it heightened my anxiety. It was this film I’d gone to see eight years earlier, when, skipping out on my usual lunch with the Satsat employees, I took refuge in a cinema to contemplate Füsun’s kisses in solitude and peace. But now it was no consolation to see from the corner of my eye how engrossed Füsun was in the film, nor did it help to remark on something of Grace Kelly’s purity and refinement in her. Either in spite of the film or because of it, I had sunk into that stupor that afflicted me, if not often then at regular intervals, during suppers in Çukurcuma. It was like being caught in a suffocating dream, trapped in a room whose walls were advancing toward me. It was as if time itself was getting steadily narrower.

I struggled for a long time to convey for the Museum of Innocence this sensation of being caught in a dream. The condition has two aspects: (a) as a spiritual state, and (b) as an illusory view of the world.

The spiritual state is somewhat akin to what follows drinking alcohol or smoking marijuana, though it is different in certain ways. It is the sense of not really living in the present moment, this now. At Füsun’s house, as we were eating supper, I often felt as if I were living a moment in the past. Only a moment before we would have been watching a Grace Kelly film on television, or another like it; true, our conversations at the table were more or less alike, but it was not such sameness that invoked this mood; rather it was a sense of not abiding in those moments of my life as they were occurring, experiencing these moments as if I were not living them. While my body lived out the present on the screen, my mind was watching Füsun and me from a slight distance, and my soul watched from a greater one. So the effect of that moment I was living was of something I was remembering. Visitors to my Museum of Innocence must compel themselves, therefore, to view all objects displayed therein-the buttons, the glasses, the old photographs, and Füsun’s combs-not as real things in the present moment, but as my memories.

To experience this present moment as a memory is to experience a temporal illusion. But I also experienced a spatial illusion. Exhibited here are a pair of optical illusions. Try to detect the seven differences between these two pictures, or decide which one is smaller; this puzzle is of the type that induced a similar disquiet when I was a boy and came across them in magazines for children. When I was a child, games like “Help the king find his way out of the labyrinth!” or “What burrow should the rabbit take to get out of the forest?” amused me as much as they unnerved me. Likewise, during my seventh year of dining with the Keskins, the supper table slowly became less an amusing and more a stifling place. That evening, Füsun sensed my state of mind.

“What’s wrong, Kemal? Didn’t you like the film?”

“No, I liked it.”

“Maybe you didn’t like what it was about,” she said cautiously.

“On the contrary,” I said, and I fell silent.

It was so unusual for Füsun to show interest in my mood, or ask how I was when we were still at the table, in her parents’ earshot, that I was moved to say a few admiring things about the film and Grace Kelly.

“But I know you’re feeling low this evening, Kemal, don’t try to hide it,” Füsun said.

“Fine, then, I’ll talk… It’s just that it seems as if something has changed in this house, but I can’t figure out what it is.”

They all burst out laughing.

“We’ve moved Lemon to the back room, Kemal Bey,” said Aunt Nesibe. “We were wondering why you hadn’t mentioned it.”

“Is that so?” I said. “How could I not have noticed? I mean, I love Lemon…”

“We love him, too,” said Füsun proudly. “I’ve decided to paint his portrait, so I’ve moved the cage into the other room.”

“Have you started painting yet? Could I have a look, please?”

“Of course.”

It had been some time since Füsun had given up on her bird series, for which she could no longer summon up the enthusiasm. Entering the room, before looking at Lemon himself, I inspected Füsun’s painting of the bird, only just begun.

“Feridun doesn’t take bird photographs anymore,” said Füsun. “And so I’ve decided to paint from life instead.”

Füsun’s mood, her poise as she talked about Feridun as if he were someone from her past-it all set my head spinning. But I kept my calm. “You’ve made a good start on this, Füsun,” I said. “Lemon is going to be your best painting yet. After all, you know your subject so well, and it’s by drawing on the subjects one knows best that one makes the most successful art.”

“But I’m not aiming for realism.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not going to paint his cage. Lemon will be perched in front of the window like a wild bird who has alighted there of his own free will.”

That week I went three more times to the Keskins’ for supper. Each night, when the meal was over, we went into the back room to Lemon’s emerging portrait. He seemed happier and livelier outside his cage, and when we went into the back room, we were now more interested in the painting than the bird itself. After an oddly serious but perfectly sincere discussion of the challenges of this project, we would speak of going to see the museums of Paris.

On Tuesday evening, as we gazed at the painting of Lemon, I uttered the words I had prepared in advance, though I was as nervous as a lycée student: “Darling, the time has come for us to leave this house, this life, together,” I whispered. “Life is short, and in our stubbornness we have lost many days, many years. What we need is to go to another place to be happy.” Füsun acted as if she had not heard me, but Lemon answered with an abbreviated chk, chk, chk. “There’s nothing to fear anymore, nothing to hold us back. Let’s you and I, the two of us, leave this house together, for another place, another house, our own house, and let us live happily from then on. You are only twenty-five years old-we have half a century of life ahead of us, Füsun. We have suffered enough over these past six years to deserve those fifty years of happiness! Let’s leave together now. We’ve been stubborn with each other for long enough.”

“Have we been stubborn with each other, Kemal? That’s news to me. Don’t put your hand there, you’re scaring the bird.”

“I’m not scaring him. Look, he’s eating from my hand. We can give him the best place in the house.”

“My father will be wondering where we are,” she said, warmly, as if we were sharing a secret.

The next Thursday, we saw To Catch a Thief. Instead of watching Grace Kelly, I watched Füsun watching her, from start to finish. In everything-from the pulsing of the blue veins in my beauty’s throat to the way her hand fluttered across the table, straightened her hair, or held her Samsun-I saw her fascination for the screen princess.

When we went into the back room, Füsun said, “Do you know what, Kemal? Grace Kelly was bad at mathematics, too. And she got into acting by working as a model first. But the only thing I really envy her is that she could drive a car.”

In his introduction that week, as if he was giving inside information about a very close friend, Ekrem Bey informed Turkey ’s art film enthusiasts of the odd coincidence: that a year earlier the princess had died in a car accident on the same road she had driven down in this film.

“Why were you jealous?”

“I don’t know. Driving made her look so powerful, and free. Maybe that’s why.”

“I could teach you, if you like.”

“No, no, that would be impossible.”

“Füsun, I know that in two weeks I can teach you enough for you to get your license and drive comfortably around Istanbul. There’s nothing to it. Besides, Çetin taught me how to drive when I was your age [this wasn’t true]. All you need to do is to be calm, to have a little patience.”

“I’m patient,” Füsun said confidently.