“It’s a shame neither of us made it through, Orhan Bey, but to the end we behaved like the good lycée girls we were, though we laughed ourselves to tears that night,” said Ceyda. In a flash, the pale photograph appeared on the wooden coffee table; the moment he saw it, Kemal Bey’s face went as white as ash, and he fell into a long silence.
Because Ceyda’s husband had no taste for the beauty contest story, we would not be looking much longer at Füsun’s old photograph. But at the end of the evening Ceyda, understanding as ever, offered it to Kemal Bey as a present.
After leaving Ceyda’s house in Maçka, I walked toward Nişantaşı with Kemal Bey, through the silence of the night. “I’ll walk you as far as the Pamuk Apartments,” he told me. “Tonight I won’t be staying at the museum, but with my mother in Teşvikiye.”
But five buildings before we reached the Pamuk Apartments, just in front of the Merhamet Apartments, he stopped and smiled.
“Orhan Bey, I read your novel Snow all the way to the end,” he said. “I don’t like politics. So please don’t be offended if I say I found it a bit of a struggle. But I liked the ending. And at the end of our novel I would like to do the same as that character in Snow and address the reader directly. Do I have this right? When will your book be finished?”
“After your museum,” I said. By now this had become a standard joke between us. “What are your last words for the reader?”
“I’m not going to say, as your character did, that readers cannot possibly understand us from afar. On the contrary, visitors to the museum and people who read your book will most certainly understand us. But there is something else I want to say.”
He took Füsun’s photograph from his pocket and in the pale light of the streetlamp in front of the Merhamet Apartments he looked lovingly at her. I drew up beside him.
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” he said to me, just as his father had said to him thirty-odd years ago.
There we stood, two men, gazing with love, admiration, and respect at the photograph of Füsun in a black swimsuit embroidered with the number nine-at her honey-hued arms, and her face (betraying no joy, only sadness), and her splendid body, both of us struck by the depth of her humanity, the radiance of her soul, despite the thirty-four years that had elapsed since the photograph had been developed.
“Please put this photograph in your museum, Kemal Bey,” I said.
“My last words in the book are these, Orhan Bey, please don’t forget them…”
“I won’t.”
He kissed Füsun’s photograph lovingly, and placed it with care into the breast pocket of his jacket. Then he smiled at me, victorious.
“Let everyone know, I lived a very happy life.”
2001 – 2002, 2003 – 2008
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Orhan Pamuk is the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2006. His novel My Name Is Red won the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages. He lives in Istanbul.
