“Gül looks so much like I did in my twenties, and that day she just happened to be wearing an old knitted stole I’d worn in those years,” said Sibel Hanım, beaming with pride. “But poor Kemal, he looked so tired, so disheveled, broken down, and deeply unhappy. Orhan Bey, I felt so bad to see him that way. I wasn’t the only one-Zaim was heartsick, too. The man to whom I’d become engaged at the Hilton, who so loved life, who was always so charming, and so full of fun-he’d vanished, and in his place was an old man cut off from the world and life itself, with a long face, and a cigarette hanging from his mouth. If he hadn’t recognized Gül, we would never have known him. He hadn’t just aged; he’d fallen apart. I felt so sorry for him. Especially since this was the first time I’d seen him in who knows how many years.”
“It would have been thirty-one years after your last meal together at Fuaye,” I said.
There was an eerie silence.
“So he told you everything!” Sibel said a short while later, her voice full of pain.
As the silence continued, I realized what it was that they really wanted to tell me: They wanted readers to know how much happier their life together was compared to the story I was telling, and what a beautiful and normal life it was.
But after the girls had gone to their rooms, when we were drinking our cognacs, I realized that there was another thing that the couple was struggling to express. On her second glass, Sibel explained herself in a forthright way that I appreciated, without beating around the bush as Zaim had: “At the end of the summer of 1975, after Kemal had confessed to me that he was badly smitten by the late Füsun Hanım, I pitied my fiancé and wanted to help him. With the best of intentions, we moved together to our yali in Anadoluhisarı so that I could nurse him back to health, Orhan Bey, and we stayed there for a month.” (In fact, they stayed for three.) “Actually, this is no longer important… Today’s young people don’t worry about things like virginity.” (This wasn’t true, either.) “But even so, I am going to ask you especially to make no mention of those days in your book, because they are humiliating for me… This might not seem so important, but it was expressly because she’d gossiped about this matter that I fell out with my best friend, Nurcihan. The children wouldn’t care, but their friends, and all those gossips… Please don’t let us down…”
Zaim told me how much he’d loved Kemal-such a sincere person he was, whose friendship he’d always sought-and how much he missed him. “Is it true that Kemal collected all of Füsun Hanım’s possessions? Is there really going to be a museum?” he asked, half in awe, half in fear.
“Yes,” I said. “And with this book, I shall be the museum’s chief promoter.”
When I took my leave of their house, rather late though still laughing and carrying on with them, for a moment I put myself in Kemal’s shoes. If he were still alive, if he had taken up again with Sibel and Zaim (this was indeed possible, contrary to what he imagined), Kemal would have left their house that night feeling as I felt-both content and guilty about his solitary life.
“Orhan Bey,” said Zaim at the door. “Please don’t forget Sibel’s request. We at Meltem Enterprises, of course, wish to make a donation to the museum.”
That night I also realized it was pointless speaking to other people: I did not want to tell Kemal’s story as others saw it; I wanted to write it the way he had told it to me.
It was out of simple doggedness that I went to Milan, where I discovered what had upset Kemal so on the day he had run into Sibel, Zaim, and their daughters: Just before that chance encounter he had gone to the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum, finding that it was in terrible disrepair, and that in an effort to raise funds, a part of it had been rented out as a boutique of the famous designer Jenny Colon. The women who worked as guards in the museum, in black uniforms, were in tears on receiving my report of his death, and the directors, who confirmed that a Turkish gentleman came to visit them without fail every few years, had also been distraught.
This alone convinced me that I had no need to hear any more gossip to finish my book. I would only have wished to see Füsun, and to hear her. But before I could visit the ones who knew her best, there were the invitations from those who feared my book and insisted on receiving me in their houses preemptively, which invitations I accepted just for the pleasure of some company and sharing a meal.
And so it was that in the course of a very quick supper I was advised by Osman not to write this story at all. Yes, it might be true that it was his late brother’s negligence that had plunged Satsat into bankruptcy, but all his late father’s other firms were now engines of Turkey ’s export boom. They had many vicious competitors, and a book like this, beyond causing heartbreak and endless gossip as well, would only make Basmacı Holding a laughingstock and by association give Europeans just another excuse to laugh at us and put us down. Even so, I was able to leave the house with a lovely souvenir, a marble from Kemal’s childhood that Berrin Hanım handed to me in the kitchen, out of her husband’s view.
As for Aunt Nesibe, to whom Kemal had introduced me, she told me nothing new when I went to see her in her apartment on Kuyulu Bostan Street. Now she wasn’t crying just for Füsun, but also for Kemal, whom she described as her “only son-in-law.” She mentioned the museum but once: She used to have an old quince grater, and having got it into her head to make quince jelly, she wondered whether the grater she could find nowhere had perhaps wound up in the museum. I would surely know. If it was there could I bring it with me on my next visit? As I said good-bye at the door, she said, “Orhan Bey, you remind me of Kemal,” and she burst into tears.
Six months before his death, Kemal had introduced me to Ceyda, Füsun’s closest confidante, who in my view not only knew all Füsun’s secrets but understood Kemal best, too. This introduction had come about partly because Ceyda Hanım liked novels and had wanted to meet me. Her sons, now in their thirties and engineers both, were married, and their lovely brides, whose pictures she showed me, had already given her seven grandchildren. Her rich husband (he was the Sedircis’ son!), who was much older than Ceyda, looking slightly drunk and slightly senile, showed no interest in us or our story, even when Kemal and I admitted our overindulgence with raki.
Ceyda told me with a sweet smile how Füsun had discovered the earring Kemal had left in the Keskins’ bathroom on the evening of his first visit, and how though she’d told Ceyda about it right away, they’d decided together that Füsun should feign ignorance, just to punish Kemal. Like so many of Füsun’s secrets, that story Kemal Bey had already extracted from Ceyda years earlier. He had smiled painfully when he told it to me, pouring us each another glass of raki.
“Ceyda,” said Kemal later, “when I came to you for news of Füsun, you and I would always meet in Maçka, Taşlık. As you were telling me about Füsun, I would admire the view of Dolmabahçe from Maçka. When I checked recently, I discovered that I have accumulated many pictures of that view.”
As we’d been talking about photographs, and perhaps also to honor her visitors, Ceyda Hanım allowed as how just the other day she’d happened on a photograph that Kemal Bey had never seen. “This had us all excited,” she said. The photograph, taken during the finals of the 1973 Milliyet Beauty Contest, was of Hakan Serinkan whispering to Füsun the cultural questions that she would be asked to come on stage. The famous crooner, now a deputy for an Islamist party, had been very much taken with Füsun.