“What for?” my father said.
“The way he came racing home, changing into his clothes as if he were just dashing off to the club, instead of going to his engagement party. Kemal darling, look at you, did you even remember your wallet?”
“I did.”
“Good. Stand up straight when you walk, all right? Everyone’s watching you… Come on now, it’s time for us to get going.”
My father gestured to the waiter to bring him a single raki, and after looking me in the eye, and gathering my own need for one, he repeated the hand gesture, indicating me this time.
“Now, you’re not overdoing it, are you?” my mother said to my father. “I thought you’d picked yourself up and shaken off that gloom you’ve been wearing like an old coat.”
“Can’t I drink and enjoy myself at my son’s engagement party?”
“Oh, how beautiful she looks!” said my mother when she saw Sibel. “And her dress, it’s gorgeous; those pearls look perfect. But this girl is such a splendid creature that anything would look wonderful on her. What a charming sight, how elegant that dress looks on her, don’t you think? My son, do you have any idea how lucky you are?”
Sibel was embracing two friends who had walked past us just a few minutes earlier. The girls were taking scrupulous care with the long, thin filtered cigarettes they had just lit, making an exaggerated effort not to muss each other’s hair, makeup, or dress; their lovely bright red lips touched nothing as they exchanged kisses, giggling as they looked each other over and showed each other necklaces and bracelets not often removed from their boxes.
“Any intelligent person knows that life is a beautiful thing and that the purpose of life is to be happy,” said my father as he watched the three beauties. “But it seems only idiots are ever happy. How can we explain this?”
“Here it is, one of the best days in the boy’s life, so why are you spouting such thoughts, Mümtaz?” said my mother. She turned to me. “Go on, my son, what are you waiting for? Go to Sibel. Spend every moment at her side, share her joy!”
I put down my glass, and as I came out from behind the potted plant and walked toward Sibel I saw her face light up. “Where have you been?” I asked as I kissed her.
After Sibel had introduced me to her friends, we both turned around to watch the great revolving door.
“You look so beautiful, my darling,” I whispered in her ear. “No one else comes close.”
“And you’re very handsome… But let’s not stand here.”
All the same we continued to stand there, and not at my insistence. As people came flowing into the hotel-friends and strangers, guests and a handful of well-dressed tourists-heads kept turning to look at us, and Sibel liked being the center of so much admiring attention.
It is only now, so many years later, as I recall each and every person who came through those revolving doors, that I realize how insular and intimate was this circle of rich, Westernized families, and how familiar we all were with everyone else’s business. There was the Halis boy, known to us since the days when my mother would take us to Maçka Park to play with our pails and shovels, and whose family fortune in olive oil and soap from Ayvalık did not prevent him from taking a wife with the same lantern jaw as everyone else in his clan (“inbreeding!” my mother charged)… There was Kadri the Sieve, my father’s friend from the army, and mine from football matches, the former goalkeeper and now a car salesman, arriving with his daughters, each glittering with earrings, bracelets, necklaces, and rings… The thick-necked son of a former president, who had gone into business and blackened his good name with corruption, arriving with his elegant wife… And Doctor Barbut, who’d taken out the tonsils of every member of Istanbul society in the days when that operation was still fashionable-it wasn’t just me but hundreds of other children as well who went into a panic at the mere sight of his briefcase and camel-hair coat…
“Sibel’s still holding on to her tonsils,” I said, as the doctor gave me a warm embrace.
“Well, these days modern medicine has more modern ways of scaring beautiful girls into submission,” said the doctor, repeating one of his oldest jokes as he gave me a wink.
As Harun Bey, the handsome representative for Siemens in Turkey, passed by, I feared my mother would notice and get annoyed. She judged this serene, mature man to be “an oaf, a disgrace,” for undaunted by all the society cries of “Scandal! Calamity!” he had taken as a third wife the daughter of his second wife (in other words, his stepdaughter). With his cool manner and his sweet smile, he had eventually been accepted back into the fold, though he still had to bear the occasional glare. Then there was Cüneyt Bey with his wife, Feyzan. Cüneyt Bey had bought up for next to nothing the factories and other assets of the Greeks and Jews who were sent off to work camps when they were unable to pay the “wealth tax” imposed on minorities during the Second World War. Though his overnight transformation from loan shark to industrialist offended my father, it was more by reason of jealousy than righteousness, and he was still a treasured friend. Their eldest son, Alptekin, had been my classmate in primary school, and when we discovered that their younger daughter, Asena, had been Sibel’s, we were all so pleased as to agree the lot of us should get together very soon.
“Don’t you think it’s time to go downstairs now?” I said.
“You’re very handsome, but you must learn to stand up straight,” Sibel said, unknowingly parroting my mother.
Our cook, Bekri Efendi, Fatma Hanım, Saim Efendi the janitor, and his wife and children came through the revolving doors, one behind the other, looking very bashful in their best clothes, and each in turn shook Sibel’s hand. Fatma Hanım and Saim Efendi’s wife, Macide, had taken the chic scarves my mother had brought them from Paris and fashioned them to look like traditional headscarves. Their pimply sons were in suits and ties, and though they did not stare at her, they could not hide their admiration for Sibel. After that we saw my father’s friend Fasih Fahir and his wife, Zarife. My father didn’t like it that his dear friend was a Freemason, and at home he would rail against the clandestine network of “influence and privilege” that had infiltrated the world of business, clucking his tongue whenever he pored over the lists of Turkish Masons put out by anti-Semitic publishing houses; but whenever Fasih was expected at the house, my father would hide away all the books with names like Inside the Masons and I Was a Mason that had so fascinated him.
Just behind him was a woman known to everyone in society, whom at first glance I mistook for one of our guests: Deluxe Şermin, the only female pimp in all of Istanbul (and perhaps the entire Muslim world). Around her neck was the purple scarf that was her trademark (since it concealed a scar from a knife wound, and she could never take it off) and at her side, in impossibly high heels, was one of her beautiful “girls.” Walking into the hotel like guests, they headed straight for the patisserie. And here was the strange, bespectacled Faruk the Mouse (as children we used to go to each other’s birthdays, because our mothers were friends), and there, behind him, were the Maruf boys, onetime playmates of mine, as our nurses were friends. Their family, whom Sibel knew well from the club Cercle d’Orient, had made a fortune in tobacco.