After the banker he’d invested with went bankrupt and fled the country, Tarık Bey began to spend time at an association set up by a number of other “banker victims” (as the newspapers liked to call them). The association had been established to find a legal means of recovering the money that the retirees and petty clerks had lost to the bankers, but in this it had been unsuccessful. As Tarık Bey would sometimes relate to us, barely containing his laughter, the members (whom he sometimes described as a “brainless rabble”) were so fractious that planning discussions would typically degenerate into argument, with victims kicking and punching one another. Sometimes, after a great deal of shouting, they would force through a petition, which they’d submit to the ministry or leave at the door of a bank or a newspaper with no professed interest in helping them. Some members would pelt banks with rocks, bellowing their grievances, sometimes assaulting bank clerks. After several unsavory incidents in which bankers’ doors had been kicked down and their homes and offices looted, Tarık Bey distanced himself from the association, but that summer, while Füsun and I were sweating for her driver’s license and swimming in the sea, he’d begun attending meetings once again. That afternoon some development at the association had particularly annoyed him, and he’d gone home complaining of chest pains; as the doctor who’d come hours too late was able to confirm with one look, he’d died of a heart attack.
Füsun was all the more distraught at not having been at home when her father died. Tarık Bey must have lain in bed for a long time, waiting for his wife and daughter. Aunt Nesibe had taken Füsun along that day to a house in Moda to finish a dress that was a rush order. In spite of all the assistance I had given the family, from time to time Aunt Nesibe still went off with that sewing box with the picture of Galata Bridge on it, to work at various houses at a daily rate. In no way was I insulted, as other men might have been, by Aunt Nesibe’s persistence; rather, I was impressed that she still sewed, even though she knew she could count on me for support. Still, I was troubled whenever I heard that Füsun had accompanied her, asking myself what my beauty, my one and only, could be doing in those strangers’ houses; but she went only rarely, and even more rarely spoke to me about those sewing day trips, though when she did she always described them as pleasant excursions, in terms reminiscent of her mother’s visits to Suadiye so many years ago, with such joy in her voice as she told me of drinking ajran on the Kadıköy ferry, and of throwing simits to the seagulls, that I hadn’t had the heart to tell her that when we were married and living among the rich, neither of us would enjoy meeting those people whose houses she’d visited as a seamstress.
Long after midnight, when everyone had left, I curled up on the divan in the back room downstairs. To sleep in the same house with Füsun, for the first time in my life… this was the greatest happiness. Before drifting off to blissful sleep, I listened first to Lemon rattling about in his cage, and then to the ships sounding their whistles.
I woke up with the morning call to prayer; by now the ships on the Bosphorus were more insistent, and in my dream Füsun’s ferry ride from Karaköy to Kadıköy had merged with Tarık Bey’s death.
From time to time, I heard foghorns, too, and the whole house was bathed in the pearly white that was particular to foggy days. Passing in silence through the white dreamscape, I made my way up the stairs. There, on the bed where she and Feridun had spent the first happy nights of their marriage, I found Füsun fast asleep, with her arms draped around her mother. I sensed that Aunt Nesibe had heard me. I gave the room one last careful peek: Füsun really was asleep, and Aunt Nesibe was pretending.
Going into the other room, I gently lifted the sheet they’d draped over him, and looked for the first time at Tarık Bey’s body. He was still wearing the jacket he’d put on to attend the meeting at the banker victims’ association. His face was ashen, the blood having gathered at the nape of his neck. It was as if the stains and moles and wrinkles on his face had grown larger in death. Was this because his soul had left him, or because his body had already begun to decay and change shape? Death’s terrifying presence was much stronger than the love I felt for Tarık Bey. Rather than feel for him, or put myself in his shoes, I wanted only to flee. But I did not leave the room.
I’d loved Tarık Bey because he was Füsun’s father, because we’d spent so many years at the same table, drinking raki and watching television. But as he’d never really opened himself up to me, I’d never felt truly close to him. In truth, we’d never been fully satisfied with each other, but in spite of that we still managed to get along.
As I thought all this over, I realized that Tarık Bey, like his wife, had known from the beginning that I was in love with his daughter. Or rather, I did not so much realize this as confess it to myself. He’d almost certainly known very early on that I’d been so irresponsible as to sleep with his daughter when she was but eighteen years old, and, inevitably, dismissed me as a heartless rich man, a boorish philanderer. As I was the one who had forced him to marry his precious girl off to a penniless boy with no prospects, he could not but have hated me! But he had never once shown his resentment; or perhaps I had never once wanted to see it. I might say he had both resented and forgiven me, as thieves and gangsters keep company by turning a blind eye on one another’s iniquities and disgraces. This was why, after the first few years, he’d ceased to be the man of the house, just as I had ceased to be the guest: We had become partners in crime.
As I looked at Tarık Bey’s frozen face, a long-suppressed memory surfaced: I was reminded of the fear and awe that had printed itself on my father’s face as he faced death. Tarık Bey’s heart attack had lasted longer: He’d met death and struggled with it, and so on his face there was no awe. He’d bitten his lips on one side, as if to fight the pain, and the other side of his mouth was open, as if grinning. At the table he’d always had a cigarette in that corner of his mouth, and a raki glass in front of him. But in the room there was no charge issuing from the objects that had surrounded him in life; there was only the fog of death and the void.
The white light flooding the room came mostly from the left-hand side of the bay window. Looking outside I saw the narrow street was empty. Because the bay window extended as far as the middle of the street, I could imagine myself suspended above it in midair, in fog so thick that I could only just see the corner where the street met Boğazkesen Avenue, the entire neighborhood asleep in the fog, a cat confidently slinking slowly down the street.
Just over his bed, Tarık Bey had hung a framed photograph from his days as a teacher at Kars Lycée: It showed him standing with his students at the end of a play they had performed in the famous theater that dated back to the time when the city had belonged to the Russians. The top of the bedside table and its half-open drawer also brought back strange memories of my father. It emanated a sweet fragrance, a mixture of dust, medicine, cough syrup, and yellowing paper. Above the drawer I saw a water glass containing his false teeth and a book by his beloved Reşat Ekrem Koçu. Inside the drawer there were old medicine bottles, cigarette holders, telegrams, folded doctors’ reports, newspaper articles about bankers, electric and gas bills, coins now gone out of circulation, and many other odds and ends.
Before any of the day’s visitors gathered at the Keskin house, I left for Nişantaşı. My mother was up and having breakfast in bed, eating from a tray Fatma Hanım had brought her and propped on a pillow: boiled eggs, marmalade, black olives, and toasted bread. She perked up when she saw me. When I told her about Tarık Bey, her face dropped, and she looked genuinely sorry. I could tell that she felt Nesibe’s grief. But beneath that I sensed something else.