What with the filming and the curfew, Feridun was seldom home, and he gave Füsun none of the money I’d put into Lemon Films. It was around this time (about a month earlier I’d taken away an old deck of cards belonging to Tarık Bey, scarcely concealing my action) that I stopped replacing the things I took and instead began to leave money.
I knew that Füsun read her fortune with those cards to pass the time. When Tarık Bey played bezique with Aunt Nesibe, he used a different deck, as did Aunt Nesibe when, once in a blue moon, she played cards with a guest (poker with peas, or even seven jacks). A number of cards in the deck I “stole” were dog-eared, and their backs were stained; some of the cards were even bent and broken. Füsun was amused to admit that because she could recognize some of these cards by their marks and stains, she could make her fortune come up according to her wishes. I’d sniffed the deck, breathing in the mixture of perfume, mildew, and dust particular to old cards, picking up the scent of Füsun’s hand. The deck and its scent made my head spin, and as Aunt Nesibe had noticed my interest, I slipped it into my pocket in plain view.
“My mother tries to read her fortune, but it never works out,” I said. “This deck seems to offer more favorable results. Once she gets to know the stains and creases, perhaps my mother will have better luck. She’s been very low lately.”
“Please send my best regards to Sister Vecihe,” said Aunt Nesibe.
After I’d promised to buy a new deck from Alaaddin’s shop in Nişantaşı, she spent a good while insisting that I “should not go to all that trouble.” When I insisted, she did allow that a certain new set had caught her eye in Beyoğlu.
Füsun was in the back room. Feeling very ashamed, I took a roll of cash from my pocket and hid it on the sideboard.
“Aunt Nesibe, would you please buy two of those sets, one for yourself and one for my mother? She will be happy to receive a deck of cards if they come from this house.”
“Of course,” said Aunt Nesibe.
Ten days later, and again feeling strangely ashamed, I left another wad of bills in the place from which I’d taken a new bottle of Pe-Re-Ja cologne.
During the first few months I was sure that Füsun had no idea that I was replacing objects with money. In fact, I’d been taking cologne bottles from the Keskin household for years and storing them at the Merhamet Apartments. But these were either empty or almost empty bottles, and so bound to be discarded soon anyway. No one but the children who played with them in the street had any interest in empty bottles.
Whenever I was offered cologne after supper, I would eagerly, even hopefully, rub it into my hands, my forehead, and my cheeks, as if anointing myself with some unction. When Füsun or her parents were offered cologne, I would watch enchanted as they each performed their own rituals. Never taking his eyes off the television, Tarık Bey would slowly and noisily unscrew the heavy bottle’s cap, and we all knew that soon, at the next commercial break, he would hand the bottle to Füsun saying, “See if anyone would like some.” First Füsun would pour cologne into her father’s hands, and Tarık Bey would rub it into his wrists with therapeutic purposefulness, inhaling the fragrance deeply, like someone recovering from shortness of breath, a relief renewed for the rest of the evening by sniffing now and again the tips of his long fingers. Aunt Nesibe would take only a few drops, and with dainty gestures reminiscent of my mother’s, she would make as if she were lathering an imaginary bar of soap between her palms. If he was at home, it would be Feridun who took the most cologne when his wife offered it, cupping his hands like a man dying of thirst, slapping it on his face as if intending to gulp it down. This range of gestures led me to feel that cologne had a meaning beyond its pleasant smell and cooling effect (especially since the same rituals were performed on cold winter evenings).
Like the cologne the driver’s assistant offered each and every traveler at the beginning of a bus journey, our cologne reminded us that as we gathered around the television we belonged to one another, that we shared the same fate (a sentiment also suggested by the evening news), that even though we were meeting together in the same house to watch television every evening, life was an adventure, and there was a beauty in doing things together.
I sat impatiently when my turn came, waiting for Füsun to pour cologne into my hands, and for our eyes to meet. We would look deeply into each other’s eyes, like two who had fallen in love at first sight. As I smelled the cologne in my hands, I would never look at them, but continue to look deep into her eyes. Sometimes the intensity, determination, and love visible in mine would make her smile, a hint of a smile that would not soon leave the corners of her lips. In that smile I saw a tenderness as well as a derision inspired by my ardor, my evening visits, and life itself, but it didn’t break my heart. Rather I would feel more love for her than ever, and so I’d want to take the cologne, this bottle of Altın Damla, Golden Drops, home with me, and a few visits later, when the bottle was almost empty, I would walk over to my coat, hanging near the door, and without stealth slip the bottle into my pocket.
During the filming of Broken Lives, as I walked from the Peri Cinema to Çukurcuma at around seven in the evening, just before nightfall, I sometimes felt as if I were reliving a little piece of a former life. In the first life that I was now repeating exactly, there had been no great sorrow, nor any great happiness, and a heavy melancholy was blackening my soul. Perhaps this was because I’d seen the end of the story and knew that no great victory or extraordinary bliss awaited me. Six years after falling in love with Füsun, I was no longer someone who thought of life as a pleasurable adventure, indeterminately full of possibility: I was on the verge of becoming a sad and dejected man. I was slowly being overtaken by the fear of having no future.
“Füsun, shall we look at the stork?” I asked during those spring evenings.
“No, I haven’t touched it since last time,” said Füsun listlessly.
Once Aunt Nesibe interrupted us to say, “Oh, how can you say such a thing? Why, when last I saw it that stork took off from our chimney and flew so high into the air-Kemal Bey, from where it is now you could see all of Istanbul.”
“I’d love to take a look.”
“I’m just not in the mood tonight,” Füsun would say sometimes, in all honesty.
Then I would sense Tarık Bey’s beating heart, and in his longing to protect his daughter, his sadness. It grieved me to think that when she uttered these words, Füsun was talking about not just that night, but about the dead end that was her whole life, and it was then that I decided to stop going to watch the filming of Broken Lives. Füsun’s answer had also served as a reminder of the war she had been waging against me for many years; in Aunt Nesibe’s looks, I could see that she was concerned for me as well as Füsun. The woes and worries of life had blackened our hearts, no less than the dark rain clouds gathering over Tophane had blackened the sky; feeling this, we would sink into a silence we had only three ways to remedy:
1. We’d watch television.
2. We’d pour more raki into our glasses.
3. We’d light another cigarette.
68 4,213 Cigarette Stubs
DURING MY eight years of going to the Keskins’ for supper, I was able to squirrel away 4,213 of Füsun’s cigarette butts. Each one of these had touched her rosy lips and entered her mouth, some even touching her tongue and becoming moist, as I would discover when I put my finger on the filter soon after she had stubbed the cigarette out; the stubs, reddened by her lovely lipstick, bore the unique impress of her lips at some moment whose memory was laden with anguish or bliss, making these stubs artifacts of singular intimacy. For nine years Füsun smoked Samsuns, for which brand I gave up Marlboros soon after beginning to dine at the Keskins’. I used to buy Marlboro Lights from tombala men and the black market vendors in the backstreets, and I can recall a conversation with Füsun one night about how both Marlboro Lights and Samsuns were full-flavor cigarettes of a similar taste. Füsun claimed that Samsuns made one cough more, but I said that as we had no way of knowing how many poisons and other chemicals the Americans put into their tobacco, it was possible that Marlboros were even more harmful. Tarık Bey had not yet sat down at the table when, looking deeply into each other’s eyes, we each produced a pack to offer the other a cigarette. For eight years I followed Füsun, chain-smoking Samsuns, but as I have no wish to set a poor example for future generations, let me not dwell lovingly on those seductive details that feature so prominently in old novels and films.