The Museum Of Innocence

79 Journey to Another World

MUCH LATER, when I awoke, Füsun had still not returned. Thinking she had gone to her mother’s side, I got out of bed and lit a cigarette at the window. The sun had not yet risen, but in the gloom I could make out just the hint of daylight and the fragrance of wet earth. The neon signs of the gas station up the road, and of the Grand Semiramis Hotel, were reflected in the puddles on the edge of the asphalt and in the polished chrome bumpers of the Chevrolet in the adjacent parking lot.

I saw that the restaurant where we’d had dinner and performed our engagement ceremony the night before had a small garden, its chairs and cushions now sopping wet. Just beyond, a naked lightbulb was strung to the branch of a fig tree, and in the light filtering through its leaves I could see Füsun sitting on a bench. She was half turned toward me, smoking as she awaited sunrise.

I threw on my clothes and went straight down. “Good morning, my beauty,” I whispered.

She said nothing, lost in thought and shaking her head like someone preoccupied with great troubles. On the chair right beside the bench I saw a glass of raki.

“While I was getting the water, I noticed there was an open bottle of this, too!” Her impish expression reminded me that she was Tarık Bey’s daughter.

“Assuming we aren’t going to spend the most beautiful morning the world has ever seen drinking, what are we going to do?” I said. “It will be hot on the road. We can sleep all day in the car… Is this seat taken, young lady?”

“I’m not a young lady anymore.”

I did not answer, but sat down beside her, and taking her hand just as I’d done in the Palace Cinema, I settled in to admire the view with her.

Sitting there in silence we watched the world around us slowly brighten. There were still purple lightning bolts in the distance, and orange clouds shedding their rain on some part of the Balkans. An intercity bus rumbled past. We gazed at its red taillights until they disappeared.

A dog with black ears approached us with care from the gas station, wagging its tail amicably. It was a dog of no distinction, an ordinary mutt. After sniffing me, and then Füsun, he rested his head on her lap.

“He’s taken a shine to you,” I said.

But Füsun didn’t answer.

“Yesterday as we were coming in, he barked at us three times,” I said. “Did you notice? There was once a china dog just like him on top of your television.”

“You stole that one, too.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘stole.’ Your mother, your father, all of you knew about it from the first year.”

“True.”

“What did they say about it?”

“Nothing. It upset my father. My mother would act as if it didn’t matter. And I wanted to become a film star.”

“You still can be.”

“Kemal, that’s a lie you’ve just told me. You don’t even believe it yourself,” she said in a serious voice. “That really makes me angry-how good you are at telling lies.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You know perfectly well that you have no intention of helping me become a film star. There’s no longer any need, after all.”

“What do you mean? If it’s what you really want, it’s perfectly possible.”

“It’s been what I really wanted for years, Kemal. And you know that.”

The dog nestled up to Füsun.

“It’s the spitting image of that china dog. Especially those ears, half black, half wheaten-they’re identical.”

“What did you do with all those dogs, and combs, and watches, and cigarettes, and everything else?”

“I took comfort from them,” I said, now a little resentful myself. “The whole collection resides in the Merhamet Apartments. I could feel no shame about it with you, my lovely. When we get back to Istanbul, I’d like you to see it.”

She looked at me and smiled. There was compassion in that smile, and, at least in my opinion, just as much mockery as my story, and my obsession, merited.

“So you want to take me back to that dusty garçonnière, is that it?” she said.

“There’s no longer any need for that,” I said in some pique, throwing her words back at her.

“That’s right. Last night you tricked me. You robbed me of my greatest treasure without benefit of marriage. You took possession of me. And people like you never marry what they’ve already had. That’s the kind of person you are.”

“You’re right,” I said, half angry, half playful. “This is the one and only thing I’ve been waiting for all these years. Why should I get married now?”

At least we were still holding hands. Hoping to smooth it over before the game turned serious, I kissed her passionately on the lips. Füsun submitted at first, but then she drew away.

“I could kill you,” she said, standing up.

“Because you know how much I love you.”

I wasn’t sure she’d heard me. My beauty, truly angry now, walked off in a drunken huff, her high heels clicking furiously.

She did not go back into the hotel. The dog was following her, and together they headed out to the highway, turning in the direction of Edirne, Füsun in the lead, and the dog trailing. I finished the raki left in Füsun’s glass (as I’d sometimes done at the house in Çukurcuma, when no one was looking). For a long while I watched them from behind. The Edirne road stretched out straight ahead of them to the horizon, almost into infinity, and with Füsun’s dress ever easier to spot as the sky brightened, there seemed no danger of her vanishing from sight.

But after a time I could no longer hear her footsteps across the fields. And when I could see no more the red speck that was Füsun, when she had vanished into infinity, like a heroine at the end of a Yeşilçam film, I became uneasy.

A few minutes later I saw the red speck again. She was still walking on, my angry beauty. A great tenderness was born in me as I considered it: We would spend the rest of our lives making love as we had done last night and having tiffs as we’d done this morning. Even so, I longed to make the arguments fewer, the rough patches smoother, and Füsun happy.

Traffic was building on the Edirne-Istanbul road. A pretty woman in a red dress with such beautiful legs was bound to be harassed. I got into the ’56 Chevrolet and set off down the road to find her.

A kilometer and a half on, I spotted the dog under a plane tree. He was sitting there waiting for Füsun. I felt a sharp pang inside me, and my heart knocked against my chest. I slowed down.

ALTAT TOMATOES, a large billboard proclaimed, amid gardens, fields of sunflowers, little farmhouses. The Os had been peppered with bullets, target practice for bored passengers driving past. The holes had had time to rust.

One minute later, seeing the red speck on the horizon again, I laughed giddily. I slowed, as I drew closer to her, still stalking angrily along the right side of the road. She didn’t stop when she saw me, or when I reached across to open the passenger-side window.

“Come on, darling, hop in and let’s go back. It’s getting late.”

But she didn’t answer.

“Füsun, please believe me, it’s going to be a very long drive today.”

“I’m not coming. The rest of you can go on without me,” she said, like a rebellious child, still not slowing.

I’d reduced speed to keep pace with her and was calling to her from the driver’s seat.

“Füsun, my darling, look at how beautiful the world is-open your eyes to this glory,” I said. “Why poison life with anger and arguments?”

“You don’t understand at all.”

“What don’t I understand?”

“Because of you, I haven’t had the chance to live my own life, Kemal,” she said. “I wanted to become an actress.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What do you mean, you’re sorry?” she said, furious.

Sometimes I wasn’t able to keep the car abreast of her, and we couldn’t hear each other.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, shouting this time, thinking she hadn’t heard me.

“You and Feridun, you deliberately kept me from having my chance in films. Is this what you’re sorry for?”

“Did you really want to become like Papatya and all those drunken women at the Pelür?”

“We’re all drunks now, anyway,” she said. “And I would never have been like them, I assure you. But you two were so jealous, so afraid I might find fame and leave you, that you had to keep me at home.”

“You were always a bit timid about going down that path alone, Füsun, without a powerful man at your side…”

“What?” she said, now palpably enraged.

“Come on now, darling, jump into the car. We can argue about it as much as you like over drinks tonight,” I said. “I love you with all my heart. We have a wonderful life ahead of us. Please just get in.”

“On one condition,” she said, in the same childish voice she had used so many years before, the time she asked me to return her childhood tricycle to the house.

“Yes?” I asked.

“I’m driving.”

“The Bulgarian traffic police are even more corrupt than ours. I hear there are lots of roadblocks, just so they can take bribes.”

“No, no,” she said. “I want to drive it now, back to the hotel.”

I stopped the car at once and opened the door. As I was changing places, I pinned Füsun to the hood of the car and kissed her with all my might. And wrapping her arms around my neck, squeezing with all her strength, and pressing her beautiful breasts against me, she set my head spinning.

She slid into the driver’s seat. Starting the engine as carefully as she had done during our first lessons in Yıldız Park and deftly releasing the handbrake, she crawled out into the road, propping her left arm on the open window, just like Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief.

We moved ahead slowly, searching for a place to make a U-turn. She tried to make a full U at the junction of the main road and a muddy country lane, but she couldn’t manage it, and the car came to a shuddering halt.

“Watch the clutch!” I said.

“You didn’t even notice the earring,” she said.

“What earring?”

She’d started the car up again, and we lurched forward.

“Not so fast!” I said. “What earring?”

“The one on my ear…,” she moaned, like someone just coming out of anesthesia.

Dangling from her right ear was her lost earring. Had she been wearing it while we were making love? Could I have missed such a thing?

The car was gathering speed.

“Easy does it!” I shouted, but she’d pressed the accelerator right down to the floor.

In the far distance, her friend the dog seemed to have recognized Füsun and was coming out into the middle of the road to meet the car. I was hoping he would take note of the speed and get out of the way, but he didn’t.

Now going even faster, ever faster, Füsun honked the horn to warn the dog.

We jerked to the right, and then to the left, the dog still far ahead of us. Suddenly the car began moving in a straight line, as a sailboat will cut straight through the waves without listing when the wind has died. But this line, though straight, deviated from the road. It was when I saw we were speeding not toward the hotel, but right for a plane tree on the side of the road, that I realized an accident was inevitable.

Truly I knew then, in the depths of my soul, that we had come to the end of our allotted portion of happiness, that our time had come to leave this beautiful realm, by way of racing toward the plane tree. Füsun had locked onto it, as onto a target. And so it was I felt, my future could not be parted from hers. Wherever we were going, I would be there with her, and we were never to enjoy the happiness one could find on this earth. It was a terrible shame, but it seemed inevitable.

All the same, I shouted, “Watch out!”-a pure reflex, as if Füsun could not see what was happening. In fact, it was the instinctual shout of someone trying to escape a nightmare and return to the beauty of ordinary life. If you ask me, Füsun was a little drunk, but driving at 105 kilometers an hour, headed for the 105-year-old plane tree, she seemed to know exactly what she was doing. And so I understood we had reached the end of our lives.

My father’s twenty-five-year-old Chevrolet went hurtling with impressive speed and power into the plane tree on the left-hand side of the road.

Beyond the tree amid a field of sunflowers was a house-a small factory, actually, that produced Batanay sunflower oil, the very brand the Keskins used for cooking, as we had both noted when speeding along the road, just before the accident.

Months later I found the wreck, and I remembered, as I touched the various parts of the ruined Chevrolet, what I had recalled in my dreams: that just after the crash, Füsun and I had looked into each other’s eyes.

Füsun knew she was about to die, and during those two or three seconds she told me with her pleading eyes that she didn’t really want to, that she would cling to life as long as she could, hoping for me to save her. But I could only smile at my beautiful fiancée, still so full of vitality, the love of my life to the last, and believing I was about to die as well, I felt glad of being under way to a different world.

All memory of what happened next eluded me during my months lying in a hospital and for years thereafter; so what follows is based on the report of others, and on what I was able to glean when I returned to the site of the accident many months thereafter.

Six or seven seconds after the crash, Füsun died of injuries sustained when the car crumpled like a tin can and the steering column pierced her chest. Her head smashed with full force against the windshield. (It would be another fifteen years before seatbelts became compulsory in Turkish cars.) According to the accident report displayed here, her skull was crushed, tearing the meninges of the brain whose wonders had always surprised me, and she’d suffered a severe laceration of the neck, as well as several broken ribs and glass splinters in her forehead. All the rest of her beautiful being-her sad eyes; her miraculous lips; her large pink tongue; her velvet cheeks; her shapely shoulders; the silky skin of her throat, chest, neck, and belly; her long legs; her delicate feet, the sight of which had always made me smile; her slender honey-hued arms, with their moles and downy brown hair; the curves of her buttocks; and her soul, which had always drawn me to her-remained intact.