The Museum Of Innocence

75 The İnci Patisserie

ON A RAINY day at the beginning of April, after chatting with my mother for most of the morning, I went to Satsat at around noon. As I was drinking my coffee and reading the paper at my desk, Aunt Nesibe phoned. She asked me not to come to visit for a while, saying that there’d been some unpleasant gossip going around the neighborhood, and that though she couldn’t go into detail over the phone, she had good news for me. With my secretary, Zeynep Hanım, listening in the next room, I did not inquire how things were going, not wishing to make my concern for Aunt Nesibe too obvious.

For two days I waited, eaten alive by curiosity, until-once more, just before noon-Aunt Nesibe came to see me at Satsat. Despite all the time we’d spent together over the past eight years, it was so strange seeing her at the office that I stared at her blankly as if at some visitor from the provinces or the outskirts of the city, who, having come to exchange a defective Satsat product or to collect her complimentary calendar or ashtray, had found her way upstairs by mistake.

By then Zeynep had figured out that the stranger was someone very important to me; perhaps she could tell from my awkwardness or Aunt Nesibe’s ease, or perhaps she’d already heard a few things. When she asked us how we’d like our Nescafés, Aunt Nesibe said, “I’ll have Turkish coffee, my girl-if that’s possible.”

I closed the connecting door. Aunt Nesibe sat down across from me at my desk and looked me straight in the eyes.

“Everything’s settled,” she said, her manner suggesting not so much a happy outcome as life’s tendency to put things aright in the simplest way. “Füsun and Feridun are separating. If you let Feridun have Lemon Films he’ll be very accommodating. This is what Füsun wants, too. But first the two of you will have to talk.”

“Do you mean me and Feridun?”

“No, I mean you and Füsun.”

After watching the first glow of happiness spread across my face, she lit herself a cigarette, crossed her legs, and told me the story, not in a needlessly dilatory way, but enjoying every bit just the same. Two days earlier, Feridun had come to the house having drunk a good deal; telling Füsun that he and Papatya had split, he said he wanted to come back to the house, and to Füsun. But, of course, Füsun wouldn’t have him back, and a terrible row ensued, and what a pity, what a shame it was that the neighbors, the entire neighborhood, had heard them shouting (this was why Aunt Nesibe had asked that I not visit for a while). Later on Feridun telephoned, and after he and Aunt Nesibe arranged to meet in Beyoğlu, both husband and wife agreed to a separation.

There was a silence. “I’ve changed the locks on the front door,” said Aunt Nesibe. “Our house is no longer Feridun’s house.”

For a moment it was as if all the traffic clattering past Satsat had fallen silent, along with the wider world. Seeing me transfixed by what she’d said, my cigarette burning down unnoticed in my hand, Aunt Nesibe retold her story from the beginning, this time lavishing more detail. “To tell the truth, I could never feel any anger toward that boy,” she said, in a worldly-wise tone of voice that implied she had known from the start how all this would turn out. “Yes, he has a good heart, but he’s also very weak. What mother would want a bridegroom like that?” she said, and then fell silent. I was expecting her next to say something like, Of course, we had no choice, but she said something utterly different.

“I’ve experienced a bit of this in my own life. It’s very difficult, being a beautiful woman in this country especially a divorcée-more difficult, even, than being a beautiful girl… When men can’t get what they want from a beautiful woman, they do evil things to her-you know this, too, Kemal; and Feridun protected Füsun from all those evils.”

For a moment I wondered whether I was one of the evils Feridun had protected her from.

“Of course, it shouldn’t have taken this long to sort things out,” she continued.

Calm but amazed, I said nothing: It was as if I had never noticed before what a strange shape my life had taken.

“Of course, Feridun has a right to Lemon Films,” I said after some time. “I’ll speak to him. Is he at all angry with me?”

“No,” said Aunt Nesibe, frowning. “But Füsun wants to have a serious talk with you. There is so much inside her that has gone unsaid. You’ll talk.”

We decided that Füsun and I should meet at two in the afternoon three days hence, at the İnci Patisserie in Beyoğlu. Aunt Nesibe did not prolong the conversation; she pretended to be uncomfortable speaking in such strange surroundings, but, good woman that she was, she did not try to hide her contentment when she left.

On the afternoon of Monday, April 9, 1984, I went to Beyoğlu as happy and excited as a teenager going to see the lycée girl he had been dreaming about for months. At first I was too restless to sleep and then too impatient to get through the morning. So I’d asked Çetin to drop me off at Taksim early. It was sunny there, while İstiklal Avenue was as always in shadow, and I sought the refuge of its cool shade, its shop windows, its cinema entrances; even the smell of damp and dust in the passages I had visited with my mother as a child was inviting. I was dizzy with blissful memories and the promise of a happy future, the contagious optimism of the crowds swirling past me in search of a nice meal, a diverting film, a few things to buy.

I went into Vakko, Beymen, and a couple of other stores in search of a present for Füsun, but I couldn’t decide on anything. To work off nervous energy, I walked all the way to Tünel, and exactly half an hour before the appointed time, in front of the Mısırlı Apartments, I saw Füsun. She was clad in a lovely spring dress, large, bright polka dots on a white background with a pair of provocatively glamorous sunglasses and was looking at a shop window. She hadn’t noticed me, but I noticed her, and in particular that she was wearing my father’s earrings.

“What a coincidence” were my first clumsy words.

“Oh… hello, Kemal! How are you?”

“It’s such a beautiful day, I had to get out of the office,” I said, as if we’d had no plan to meet in half an hour, and had run into each other by chance. “Shall we walk?”

“First I have to find a particular type of button for my mother,” said Füsun. “She is under a lot of pressure completing an urgent dress order, and so after you and I have spoken, I’m going back to the house to help her. Shall we go to the Passage of Mirrors to find her a wooden button?”

We went not just to the Passage of Mirrors but to several other passages, too. How lovely it was to watch Füsun talk to the shop assistants, looking over samples of all colors, rummaging through trays of old buttons, chatting away as she searched for a set.

“What do you say to these?” she said, having found some buttons.

“They’re beautiful.”

“All right, then.”

She paid for the buttons that I would find nine months later, in her chest of drawers, still in their wrapping paper.

“Come on now, let’s walk a little,” I said. “I spent eight years dreaming about meeting one day in Beyoğlu and walking along together.”

“Really?”

“Truly.”

We walked for a while without speaking. From time to time I, too, would look into a shop window, though it wasn’t the merchandise that drew my eye, but her beautiful reflection in the glass. Men were not the only ones noticing her in the Beyoğlu crowds; it was the women, too, and Füsun liked that.

“Let’s sit down somewhere and have a piece of cake,” I said.

Before Füsun could answer, a woman broke through the crowd and crying with delight threw her arms around her. It was Ceyda, and her two children: a boy of eight or nine and his younger brother, both in short pants and white socks, both healthy-looking and vivacious; as their mother spoke to Füsun, they eyed me curiously: They had Ceyda’s huge eyes.

“How lovely to see you two together!” said Ceyda.

“We ran into each other just a few minutes ago,” said Füsun.

“You look so nice together,” said Ceyda. They lowered their voices to continue their conversation inaudibly.

“Mother, I’m bored, can we please go?” said the older child.

I remembered sitting with Ceyda in Taşlık Park eight years ago, when this child was in her belly; as we’d gazed down at Dolmabahçe, we’d talked about the pain I was in. But recalling that time I was neither sad nor overcome by emotion.

After Ceyda had left us, we slowed down in front of the Palace Cinema where they were showing That Troublesome Song, starring Papatya. During the past twelve months, Papatya had (if the papers were to be believed) broken some world record by playing the lead in no fewer than seventeen films and photoromans. The magazines were peddling a lie about her being offered starring roles in Hollywood, and Papatya had kept the story line bubbling by posing with Longman’s textbooks and telling lies about taking English lessons, and her willingness to do whatever she could to represent Turkey abroad. As Füsun examined the film stills in the lobby, she noticed me paying close attention to her expression.

“Come on, darling, let’s go,” I said.

“Don’t worry, I’m not jealous of Papatya,” she said sagely.

We continued along in silence, gazing into shop windows.

“Sunglasses are very becoming on you,” I said. “Shall we step inside for a profiterole?”

We’d arrived at the İnci Patisserie at the exact time her mother and I had arranged for the rendezvous. Without hesitation we went inside: An empty table beckoned at the back, just as in my dreams of the past three days. We ordered the profiteroles, for which the patisserie was famous.

“I’m not wearing sunglasses to look good,” said Füsun. “Whenever I think of my father, it brings me to tears. You do understand that I am not jealous of Papatya, I hope?”

“I understand.”

“Still, I’m impressed by what she’s done,” she continued. “She put her mind to something, and she refused to give up, and she succeeded, just like a character in an American film. If I regret anything, it’s not having failed to become a successful actress like Papatya; it’s having failed to fight for what I wanted in life, and for that I have only myself to blame.”

“I’ve been pressing my case for nine years, but that is not always the best way to get what you want in life.”

“That may be true,” she said coldly. “You spoke to my mother. Now it’s time for you and me to speak.”

Exuding self-assurance, she took out a cigarette. As I leaned forward with my lighter, I looked into her eyes and-in a whisper, so that no one in this tiny patisserie could hear me-I told her once again how much I loved her, how our bad days were over, and how, despite all the time we’d lost, a great happiness awaited us.

“I feel the same way,” she said in a measured, cautious voice. Her gestures were tense, her expression anything but natural, from which I concluded there was a tempest raging inside her that required all her strength to suppress. Seeing how forcefully she was exerting herself to do the right thing, I loved her more than ever, but I also feared the intensity of what was brewing inside her.

“After I’m officially divorced from Feridun I want to meet all your family, your friends, everyone,” she said, sounding like the pupil at the head of the class, laying out her future. “I’m not in any hurry. We can take our time… After I’ve divorced Feridun, of course your mother has to come to us to seek permission. She and my mother will get along fine. But first she has to telephone my mother and apologize for not coming to my father’s funeral.”

“She was very unwell.”

“Of course. I know.”

We fell silent, and for a time picked at our profiteroles. As I watched her mouth, now filled with sweet chocolate and cream, it was not desire I felt, but love.

“There is something you must believe, and I expect you to behave accordingly. At no point during my marriage with Feridun did we have marital relations. You absolutely must believe this! In this sense I am a virgin. I shall be with only one man in my life, and that man is you. We can draw a veil over those two months that preceded the past nine years.” (Actually, dear reader, it was a month and a half, less two days.) “It will be as if we’ve just met. So it will be just as in those films-I married someone, but I remained a virgin.”

She smiled slightly as she uttered the last two sentences, but having grasped the seriousness of her demands, I only frowned soberly and said, “I understand.”

“We’ll be happier if we do it this way,” she said as one would utter any judicious pronouncement. “There’s one more thing I want. Actually, this was not my idea-it was yours. I want us all to tour Europe together in your car. My mother will come to Paris with me. We can go to the museums, look at all the pictures. Before we marry, I also want to buy things there that I can take to our house, as my trousseau.”

Hearing her speak of “our house” I broke into a smile. Even as she issued her commands she smiled slightly as she spoke, as a chivalric commander emerging victorious might declare his righteous terms at the end of a long war. Later, when she said, “We’ll have a big, beautiful wedding at the Hilton, like everyone else,” she frowned gravely. “Everything will be as it should be, down to the last detail,” she said, without affect, as if having no memories, good or bad, of my engagement party there nine years earlier, and simply wanting all to be correct.

“That’s how I want it, too,” I said.

For a time we were silent.

The İnci Patisserie had been an important landmark of my childhood excursions to Beyoğlu with my mother, and in thirty years it hadn’t changed a bit, though it was more crowded than I remembered, and that made it harder to speak.

When, for a moment, a mysterious silence fell over the whole patisserie, I whispered that I loved her very much and would obey her every wish, desiring nothing else in the world than to spend the rest of my life with her.

“Really?” she said, in the same childish manner as when doing her math homework.

She was confident and determined enough to laugh at her own words. Carefully lighting another cigarette, she enumerated her other demands: I was never to hide anything from her, I would share all my secrets, and whatever question she asked about my past, I was to answer it truthfully.

As I listened, everything I saw engraved itself upon my memory: Füsun’s stern, willful expression, the patisserie’s ancient ice cream machine, and the framed photograph of Atatürk, whose frown so closely resembled Füsun’s. We decided that the engagement should happen before we went to Paris, and that it should be a small family affair. We spoke of Feridun with respect.

Returning to the subject of sexual relations, she expressed her clear wish to wait until after marriage in the following terms: “Don’t try to force me, okay? It won’t work anyway.”

“I know,” I said. “Actually, I’d prefer this to be an arranged marriage.”

“It can almost count as one!” she said, sounding so very certain.

She went on to say that without a man in the house anymore, the neighbors might jump to conclusions if I continued coming to supper every night. (Every night?) “Of course, I don’t really care about the neighbors; they won’t be my neighbors for long,” she said later. “I just can’t have those same sweet conversations without my father there. It’s so painful.”

For a moment I thought she was going to cry, but she held herself together. The patisserie had swinging doors, but now a great influx was holding them open. A crowd of lycée students in navy jackets, their thin ties askew, were pushing their way in, laughing boisterously and jostling one another. Before long we rose to leave. Taking no end of pleasure from escorting Füsun through the Beyoğlu crowds, I walked silently by her side as far as Çukurcuma Hill.