17 My Whole Life Depends on You Now
BUT WHEN Füsun was ten minutes late for our next rendezvous at the Merhamet Apartments, I immediately forgot my resolutions. I kept glancing at my watch, a present from Sibel, and at the Nacar brand alarm clock Füsun so loved to shake until it jangled, and I peeked continually through the curtains at Teşvikiye Avenue, pacing up and down the creaky parquet floor, unable to take my mind off Turgay Bey. Soon I bolted the apartment and went outside.
I kept a careful eye on both sides of the street, to make sure I didn’t miss Füsun walking toward me, and I proceeded as far as the Şanzelize Boutique. But Füsun wasn’t in the shop either.
“Kemal Bey! How can I help you?” said Şenay Hanım.
“We’ve decided I should buy that Jenny Colon handbag for Sibel Hanım after all.”
“So you’ve changed your mind,” said Şenay Hanım. I could see a hint of mockery on her curled lips, but not for long. If I was embarrassed because of Füsun, she must have felt some shame for knowingly selling me a fake. We both fell silent. With torturous slowness, she retrieved the bag that had been restored to the arm of the mannequin in the window, dusting it off with the ritualized care of a seasoned shopkeeper. I directed my attention to Lemon the canary, who was having a dreary day.
After I had paid and was on my way out with my purchase, Şenay Hanım said, “Now that you trust us, perhaps you can grace our shop more often.” She took obvious pleasure in her double meaning.
“Of course.” If I didn’t buy enough from Şenay Hanım, might she plant the seed of suspicion in Sibel, who came into this shop from time to time? It grieved me less to imagine myself falling slowly into this woman’s trap than to catch myself making such petty calculations. I imagined that Füsun had gone to the Merhamet Apartments while I was out, and not finding me, had left. In the bright spring day the sidewalks were swarming with housewives out shopping, young girls clomping around in the latest platform shoes paired with ill-fitting short skirts, and pupils swarming out of the schools from which they had just been dismissed. Still searching for Füsun, I cast my eyes over the gypsy flower seller, and the vendor of black market American cigarettes (who everyone said was a plainclothes policeman), and the other denizens of Nişantaşı.
A water tanker with the words LIFE-CLEAN WATER on its side sped by, and Füsun emerged from behind it.
“Where have you been?” we said in unison, joyous smiles coming to our lips.
“The witch stayed in during lunchtime, and she sent me off to a friend’s shop. So I got to the apartment late, and you weren’t there.”
“I got worried, so I went to the shop. Look, I bought the bag as a memento.”
Füsun was wearing the earrings of which one is displayed at the entrance to our museum. We walked down the street together. We turned off Valikonağı Avenue into Emlak Avenue, which was not so crowded. We had just passed the apartment that housed the dentist to whom my mother brought me when I was a child (as well as the doctor in whose office I had first felt the unforgettable hardness of the cold tongue depressor shoved into my mouth) when we saw that a crowd had gathered at the foot of the hill; a few others were running down to join it, while others still were coming toward us, their faces contorted by what they had seen.
There had been an accident; the road was closed. Only a few minutes earlier the “Life-Clean Water” tanker had swerved into the left lane while heading down the hill and had crushed a dolmuş. The driver of the shared taxi was cowering in a corner, his hands trembling as he smoked a cigarette. The weight of the water tanker had crushed the long nose of a 1940s Plymouth that did the Taksim-Teşvikiye route. All that survived was the taxi meter. Beyond the ever-growing crowd of onlookers, amid the shards of glass and broken car parts, I saw the body of a woman trapped in the front seat, and recognized her as the dark-haired woman I’d passed on my way out of the Şanzelize Boutique. The street was now covered with debris. Taking Füsun by the arm, I said, “Let’s go.” But she paid me no mind. She stood there silently, staring at the woman pinned inside the wreck, until she had had her fill.
By now the crowd had grown considerably, and I was beginning to feel uneasy, less on account of the dead woman inside the car (yes, she must have been dead by then) than out of fear that I might run into someone I knew, when at last a police car came into view; wordlessly we moved away from the accident. As we walked without speaking up the street where the police station was, straight to the Merhamet Apartments, we were fast approaching the “happiest moment of my life” mentioned at the beginning of this book.
In the coolness of the Merhamet Apartments stairwell, I took her in my arms and kissed her. I kissed her again when we went into the apartment, but there was a certain shyness in her playful lips, a certain reserve in her manner.
“I have something to say to you.”
“Then say it.”
“I’m afraid you might not take it seriously enough, or that you might react exactly the wrong way.”
“Trust me.”
“Well, I’m not sure I can, but I’m still going to tell you,” she said. She looked as if she’d made up her mind, as if the arrow had already left the bow and there was no longer any point in holding it back. “If you take it the wrong way, I’ll die.”
“Forget the accident, darling, and please, just tell me.”
She began to cry silently, just as she had done that afternoon in the Şanzelize Boutique, when she’d been unable to give me a refund. Her sobs were almost sullen, as those of a child who was furious at being wronged.
“I’ve fallen in love with you. I’m head over heels in love with you!”
Her voice was both accusatory and unexpectedly gentle. “I think about you all day long. I think about you from morning until night.”
She covered her face with her hands and cried.
Let me confess that my first impulse was to grin stupidly. But I didn’t. Instead I frowned, assuming a tender expression of concern, until finally I had overcome the force of my own feelings. Here, at one of the deepest, most profound moments of my life, there was something contrived in my demeanor.
“I love you very much, too.”
Though I was being utterly sincere, my words were neither as forceful nor as truthful as hers. She’d said it first. Because I’d said it after Füsun, my own truthful declaration of love had taken on a consoling, tactful, echoing tone. Now it didn’t matter if my feelings might in fact be stronger than hers, since Füsun had gone first in confessing the fearful dimensions of her sentiments, and so had lost the game. The “sage of love” within me (acquired from who knew what egregious experience) was crowing about Füsun’s misstep: By speaking too sincerely, she had lost. From this reaction I deduced that my jealous worries and obsessions would soon subside.
When she began to cry again, she took out of her pocket a crumpled, childish hankie. I embraced her, and while caressing the lovely velvety skin on her neck and shoulders, I said there could be nothing more ridiculous than the idea of a beautiful girl like her, whom everyone adored, in tears just for having admitted to falling in love.