Still crying, she said, “What do you mean-that beautiful girls never fall in love? If you know so much about everything, then tell me this…”
“What?”
“What’s going to happen now?”
This was the real question, and she now fixed me with a look as if to say she was not going to be distracted by sweet generalities about love and beauty, and that it was of the utmost importance that I give her the right answer.
I had no answer to give her. But this is how it seems now, so many years later. Sensing that such a question might come between us, I felt an unease for which I secretly blamed her and I began to kiss her.
Driven by desire and helplessness, our kisses grew more passionate. She asked if this was the answer to her question. “Yes,” I said. Content with this, she asked, “Weren’t we going to do some mathematics?” When I had bestowed another kiss, by way of an answer, she acknowledged it by kissing me back. To embrace, to kiss-it felt so much more genuine than any contemplation of the impasse to which we had come, so full of the irresistible power of the present moment. As she peeled off her clothes, Füsun changed from a fearful girl made sad by helpless passion into a healthy and exuberant woman ready to give herself over to love and sexual bliss. Thus did we enter what I have called the happiest moment of my life.
In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant “now,” even having lived such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happier moment to come. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse: If a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happiest moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so.
But when we reach the point when our lives take on their final shape, as in a novel, we can identify our happiest moment, selecting it in retrospect, as I am doing now. To explain why we have chosen this moment over all others, it is also natural, and necessary, to retell our stories from the beginning, just as in a novel. But to designate this as my happiest moment is to acknowledge that it is far in the past, that it will never return, and that awareness, therefore, of that very moment is painful. We can bear the pain only by possessing something that belongs to that instant. These mementos preserve the colors, textures, images, and delights as they were more faithfully, in fact, than can those who accompanied us through those moments.
We made love for the longest time, somewhere in the middle reaching the point when we were both out of breath; I had just kissed Füsun’s moist shoulders and entered her from behind, biting first her neck and then her left ear, and it was at this, the happiest moment of my life, that the earring whose shape I’d failed to notice fell from Füsun’s lovely ear onto the blue sheet.
Anyone remotely interested in the politics of civilization will be aware that museums are the repositories of those things from which Western Civilization derives its wealth of knowledge, allowing it to rule the world, and likewise when the true collector, on whose efforts these museums depend, gathers together his first objects, he almost never asks himself what will be the ultimate fate of his hoard. When their first pieces passed into their hands, the first true collectors-who would later exhibit, categorize, and catalog their great collections (in the first catalogs, which were the first encyclopedias)-initially never recognized these objects for what they were.
After what I call the happiest moment of my life had passed, and the time had come for us to part, and the fallen earring unbeknownst to us still nestled between the folds of the sheet, Füsun looked into my eyes.
“My whole life depends on you now,” she said in a low voice.
This both pleased and alarmed me.
The next day it was much warmer. When we met at the Merhamet Apartments, I saw as much hope as fear in Füsun’s eyes.
“I lost one of those earrings I was wearing,” she told me after we had kissed.
So now I said, “I have it here, darling,” as I reached into the right-hand pocket of my jacket hanging on the back of a chair. “Oh, it’s gone!” For a moment I glimpsed a bad omen, a hint of malign fate, but then I remembered that I’d put on a different jacket that morning, because of the warm weather. “It must be in the pocket of my other jacket.”
“Please bring it tomorrow. Don’t forget,” Füsun said, her eyes widening. “It is very dear to me.”
18 Belkıs’s Story
THE ACCIDENT featured prominently in all the papers. Füsun hadn’t read them, but Şenay Hanım had talked about the dead woman all morning-until it seemed to Füsun as if people were coming into the shop just to talk about the accident. “Şenay Hanım is going to close the shop tomorrow at lunchtime, so that I can go to the funeral, too,” said Füsun. “She’s acting as if we all adored that woman. But that was not the case…”
“What was the case?”
“It’s true that this woman came to the shop a lot. But she’d take the most expensive dresses-the ones just in from Italy and Paris-and she’d say, ‘Let me try out this one and see how it goes,’ and after wearing it at some big party she’d bring it back, saying, ‘It doesn’t fit.’ Şenay Hanım would get angry-after everyone had seen the woman wearing that dress at that party, it would be hard to sell. Also this woman drove a hard bargain, so Şenay Hanım was always talking behind her back, but she didn’t dare cross her, because she was too well connected. Did you know her?”
“No. But for a while she was the sweetheart of a friend of mine,” I said, stopping there because I reckoned I would better enjoy recounting the sordid background details to Sibel, yet I was amazed that this calculation left me feeling deceitful, since less than a week ago it would have caused me no discomfort to hide something from Füsun or even to tell her a lie-lies, it had seemed to me, were an inevitable and rather enjoyable consequence of the playboy life. I considered whether I could cut the story here and there, adapting it for her consumption, when I realized that this would be impossible. Seeing she had guessed that I was hiding something, I said this: “It’s a very sad story. Because this woman had slept with quite a few men, people spoke ill of her.”
This wasn’t my true impression. That’s how recklessly I answered. There was a silence.
“Don’t worry,” said Füsun, almost in a whisper. “I won’t ever sleep with anyone else for the rest of my life.”
Returning to my office at Satsat, I felt at peace with myself, and for the first time in ages turning myself over to work, I took pleasure from making money. Together with Kenan, a new clerk who was a bit younger and bolder than I was, I went down the list of our hundred or so debtors, pausing now and again for a bit of levity.
“So what are we going to do with Cömert Eliaçık, Kemal Bey?” he asked, with a smile and his eyebrows raised, seeing as the man’s name meant “Generous Open-Hand.”
“We’ll just have to open his hand a little wider. We can’t help it if his name condemns him to loss.”
In the evening, on the way home, I walked past the gardens of the old pasha’s mansion, which had not yet burned down, and I breathed in the fragrance of lindens, seeking the shadows of the plane trees of Nişantaşı, now in full blossom. As I considered men angrily blowing their horns in the traffic jam I felt content, the love storm had passed, I was no longer racked with jealousy, and everything was back on track. At home I took a shower. As I took a clean ironed shirt out of the wardrobe, I remembered the earring; not finding it in the pocket of the jacket where I thought I’d left it, I searched my wardrobe and every drawer, checked the bowl where Fatma Hanım put stray buttons, collar bands, and any spare change or lighters she found in my pockets, but it wasn’t there either.