Füsun arrived at the usual time. A few days earlier, I had muttered that we’d better not meet on Saturday, as her exam was on the next day, but after working so hard, she’d wanted to rest her mind. After all, she’d skipped work at the Şanzelize Boutique for two days on the pretext of studying for her exam. The first thing she did when she walked in was to sit down at the table and light a cigarette.
“I think about you so much that there’s no room in my mind for mathematics,” she said, laughing self-mockingly, as if what she’d said meant nothing, as if it were a stock phrase taken from a film, but then she turned deep red.
Had she not blushed so deeply, and betrayed such sorrow, I would have gone along with the joke. We would have acted as if it hadn’t occurred to either of us that this was the day of my engagement party. It wasn’t that way, though. An overwhelming and unbearable sorrow weighed down on both of us that no amount of joking and no amount of distracting talk could assuage; we understood that even sharing the misery would not make it lighter, that the only escape from it was making love. But the melancholy inhibited our lovemaking and finally tainted it. At one point Füsun lay stretched out on the bed, as if she were a patient listening to her pain, and watching mournful clouds pass overhead. I stretched out beside her and joined her in looking at the ceiling. The children playing football outside had gone quiet, and all we could hear was the ball being kicked around. Then the birds stopped singing, until there was nothing to hear. Then, in the distance, a ship blew its horn, and then another.
We shared a whiskey in a glass that once belonged to Ethem Kemal-my grandfather, who was her great-grandmother’s second husband-and we began to kiss. As I write these words I feel I should take care not to cause undue upset to those concerned souls who have taken an interest in my story, for a novel need not be full of sorrow just because its heroes are suffering. As always, we fiddled with the things in the room-my mother’s discarded dresses, hats, and china figurines. As always, we kissed each other gracefully, having become so proficient in this art. Instead of pulling you into our melancholy, let me say that it felt as if Füsun’s mouth had melted into mine. As our kisses grew ever longer, a honeyed pool of warm saliva gathered in the great cave that was our mouths combined, sometimes leaking a little down our chins, while before our eyes the sort of dreamscape that is the preserve of childish hope began to take form-and we surveyed it as if through a kaleidoscope. From time to time, one of us would, like a ravenous bird taking a fig into its beak, suck upon the other’s upper or lower lip, as if about to swallow it, biting the imprisoned lip, as if to say, “Now you’re at my mercy!” and having enjoyed this adventure of lips, and the frisson of being at someone else’s mercy, and awakening, at that moment, to the thrilling prospect of complete surrender, not just of one’s lips but of one’s entire body to a lover’s mercy, we recognized that the gap between compassion and surrender is love’s darkest, deepest region.
After making love we both fell asleep. When a sweet breeze blew in through the balcony, lifting the tulle curtains and dropping them like a silk veil onto our faces, we both awoke with a start.
“I dreamt I was in a field of sunflowers,” said Füsun. “And the sunflowers were swaying strangely in the breeze. For some reason they scared me. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t.”
“Don’t be afraid,” I said. “I’m here.”
I won’t say how we left, how we dressed and reached the door. After telling her to stay calm during her exam, and warning her not to forget her registration card, and assuring her that everything would go well, that she was sure to attain the score she needed, I said the thing that I had been repeating in my mind for days, thousands of times over, trying to make it sound as natural as possible.
“Let’s meet at the same time tomorrow, okay?”
As she averted her eyes, Füsun said, “Fine.”
I watched with love as she took her leave, and I knew at once that the engagement party would be a great success.
24 The Engagement Party
THESE POSTCARDS of the Istanbul Hilton were acquired some twenty years after the events I describe; I picked up some of them while strolling through small museums and flea markets in this city and elsewhere in Europe, and others I purchased in transactions with Istanbul’s foremost collectors in the course of assembling the Museum of Innocence. When, after a lengthy bargaining session with the famously neurotic collector Halit Bey the Invalid, I was able to acquire one of these postcards depicting the hotel’s modernist international-style facade, and granted permission to touch it, I was reminded not just of the evening of my engagement party, but of my entire childhood. When I was ten, my parents attended the opening of the hotel, a very exciting occasion for them, along with all of Istanbul society, as well as the long-forgotten American film star Terry Moore. We could see the new building from our house, and though at first it looked foreign against Istanbul ’s tired old silhouette, during the years that followed my parents grew accustomed to it, going there whenever they could. Representatives from the foreign firms to whom my father sold goods-they were to a man all interested in “Oriental” dancing-all stayed at the Hilton. On Sunday evenings, when we would go as a family to eat that amazing thing called a hamburger, a delicacy as yet offered by no other restaurant in Turkey, my brother and I would be mesmerized by the pomegranate-colored uniform with gold braids and flashy buttoned epaulettes of the doorman with the handlebar mustache. In those years so many Western innovations made their first appearance in this hotel that the leading newspapers even posted reporters there. If one of my mother’s favorite suits got stained, she would send it to the dry cleaner at the Hilton, and she liked to drink tea with her friends at the patisserie in the lobby. Quite a few of my friends and relatives had their weddings in the grand ballroom on the lower level. When it became clear that my future in-laws’ dilapidated house in Anadoluhisarı was not quite suitable for the engagement party, the Hilton was everyone’s first choice. And it enjoyed one other distinction: The Hilton had been, since the day it opened, one of the few civilized establishments in Turkey where a well-heeled gentleman and a courageous lady could obtain a room without being asked for a marriage certificate.
There was still plenty of time to spare when Çetin Efendi dropped my parents and me at the revolving doors, which were shaded by a canopy in the form of a flying carpet.
“We still have half an hour,” said my father, who always cheered up the moment he stepped into this hotel. “Let’s go and have something to drink.”
After we had chosen a corner of the lobby with a good view of the entrance, my father greeted the elderly waiter, who recognized him, and ordered “quick rakıs” for the men and tea for my mother. We enjoyed observing the evening crowds and-as the appointed time grew closer-watching our guests arrive, and reminiscing about the old days. Acquaintances, curious relations, and other party guests paraded just in front of us one by one in their chic outfits, but the thick leaves of a potted cyclamen shielded us from view.
“Aaah, look how much Rezzan’s daughter has grown; she’s so sweet,” my mother said. “They should ban miniskirts on anyone who doesn’t have the legs,” she said, frowning at another guest. Then: “It wasn’t us who seated the Pamuk family all the way at the back!” she said in answer to a question posed by my father, whereupon she pointed out some other guests: “Look at what’s become of Fazıla Hanım. She used to be such a beauty, but nothing remains of it. Oh, I wish they had left her at home, if only I hadn’t seen that poor woman like this… Those headscarf people must be relations of Sibel’s mother… I’ve had no use for Hicabi Bey since he left that lovely rose of a wife and his children to marry that coarse woman. I’m going to thrash Nevzat the hairdresser-that shameless man gave Zümrüt exactly the same style as me. Who are these people? Look at the noses on that couple-my God, don’t they look just like foxes?… Do you have any money on you, my son?”