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.