That I’d not been able to put Füsun out of mind all this while; that throughout my conversation with Berrin I’d felt her presence behind me, at her table in the back; that I kept wondering how she was doing and what she must be thinking-I’d been trying to hide this from myself just as I’ve been keeping it from my readers, but enough! You already know that I failed. So from now on I’ll be straight with you.
I found an excuse to leave the table. I can’t remember what pretext I came up with. I cast my eyes over the back of the garden, but I couldn’t see Füsun. The place was very crowded, and as always, with everyone talking at once, shouting to be heard, and children shrieking as they played hide-and-seek among the tables, and the clink of knives and forks going on over their heads-a cacophony the orchestra only exacerbated-it added up to quite a roar. I walked through this infernal din toward the back, hoping to catch sight of Füsun.
“Many congratulations, my dear Kemal,” I heard someone say. “How much longer till the belly dance?”
This was Selim the Snob, who was sitting at Zaim’s table. I laughed, as if he’d said something hilarious.
“You’ve made an excellent choice, Kemal Bey,” a nice matron told me. “You probably don’t remember me. I’m your mother’s…”
But before she could make the connection, a waiter with a tray pushed me aside to make his way between us. By the time I had gathered my bearings, the well-wishing woman had been carried away in the flow of the crowd.
“Let me see your ring!” said a child, roughly twisting my hand.
“Stop, don’t be rude!” said the child’s fat mother, seizing the child roughly by the arm. She lunged, as if to slap him, but the brat was wise to her ways and wriggled out just in time. “Come here and sit down!” cried his mother. “I’m so sorry… and congratulations.”
A middle-aged woman I’d never seen before was laughing herself red in the face, but when our eyes met she suddenly became serious. Her husband introduced himself-he was a relation of Sibel’s, but apparently we’d both done our military service at the same time in Amasya-and he invited me to sit down with them. I surveyed the tables at the back of the garden, hoping to catch sight of Füsun, but she seemed to have vanished into thin air. Misery spread through my body.
“Are you looking for someone?”
“My fiancée is waiting for me, but of course I’d love to sit down and have a drink with you…”
They were very pleased, and at once they pushed together their chairs to make room for one more. No, I didn’t need a place setting, just a little more raki.
“Kemal, my friend, have you ever been introduced to Admiral Erçetin?” the man asked, pointing at the gentleman across the table.
“Yes, of course,” I said. In fact I had no memory of him.
“Young man, I am Sibel’s father’s aunt’s sister’s husband!” the admiral told me humbly. “I congratulate you.”
“Please excuse me, Admiral. I didn’t recognize you out of uniform. Sibel speaks highly of you.”
In fact, Sibel had told me how a distant cousin of hers had years ago spent the summer in Heybeliada and fallen in love with a handsome naval officer; thinking that this admiral must be one of those grandees that rich families treat so well so as to have someone to pull strings whenever they have dealings with the state, or when they need to arrange the deferment of some son’s military service, I hadn’t paid particular attention to her tale. I now had a strange urge to ingratiate myself by saying, “When is the army going to step in, sir? How much longer can we be pushed to the brink by communists on the one side and reactionaries on the other?” but I was composed enough to know that if I said these things in my present addled state, I would be judged drunk and disrespectful. Suddenly something prompted me to stand up, and there, in the distance, I saw Füsun.
“I’m afraid I’m neglecting our other guests. I think I’d better get up, gentlemen!”
As always after drinking too much, I felt like my own ghost trying to take its first solo walk outside the body.
Füsun had returned to her table in the back. In a dress with spaghetti straps, her bare shoulders had a healthy glow. She’d had her hair done, too. She was so very beautiful that even from that distance it filled my heart with joy and excitement to catch a glimpse of her.
She acted as if she hadn’t seen me. Four tables closer was the fidgety Pamuk family, and so, to close the distance between me and Füsun, I went over to greet Aydın and Gündüz Pamuk, who at some point had done some business with my father. All the while I kept my antennae tuned to Füsun’s table, whose proximity to the Satsat table had created the opportunity for my young and ambitious employee Kenan, who could not take his eyes off Füsun, to strike up a conversation with her.
Like so many formerly rich families that had squandered their fortunes, the Pamuks had turned in on themselves and found it upsetting to come face-to-face with new money. Sitting with his beautiful mother, his father, his elder brother, his uncle, and his cousins was the chain-smoking twenty-three-year-old Orhan, nothing special about him beyond his propensity to act nervous and impatient, affecting a mocking smile.
Rising from the tedious Pamuk table, I walked straight over to Füsun. How to describe the expression on her face when she realized that she couldn’t ignore me-that I had been so bold as to approach her with love in my eyes? At once she blushed, her deep pink skin glowing with life. From the looks Aunt Nesibe was giving me, I guessed that Füsun had told her everything. First I shook her hand, which was dry, and then I shook hands with her father, who had long fingers and slender wrists like his daughter’s, and he gave no sign of knowing anything. When it was my beloved’s turn, I took her hand, and with tenderness and propriety, I kissed her on both cheeks, furtively inhaling the tender spots on her neck and below her ears that had brought me such pleasure only hours ago. The question I couldn’t get out of my head-“Why did you come?”-now took the form of “How good of you to come!” She had put on just a bit of eyeliner and some pink lipstick. With her perfume, the makeup gave her an exotic womanly air. But her eyes were red and puffy like a child’s, so I knew that after we had parted that afternoon she had gone home and spent the early evening crying; but no sooner had I worked this out than she assumed the demeanor of a confident, well-bred woman who knew her own mind.
“Kemal Bey, I know Sibel Hanım. You’ve made a very wise choice,” she said bravely. “Congratulations.”
“Oh, thank you.”
“Kemal Bey,” her mother said at the same time. “I can only imagine how busy you are. God bless you for giving so much of your time to helping our daughter with her mathematics.”
“Her exam is tomorrow, isn’t it?” I asked. “She should be heading home early to get plenty of rest.”
“I understand you have every right to be concerned,” said her mother. “But while she was working with you she got very upset. Give her your permission to have a little fun for an evening.”
I gave Füsun a compassionate, teacherly smile. With all the noise from the crowd and the music, it seemed that no one could hear us. I saw in the looks Füsun was giving her mother the same flashes of anger I’d seen during our trysts in the Merhamet Apartments; I took one last look at her beautiful, half-exposed breasts, her wondrous shoulders, and her childish arms. As I turned away I felt happiness overwhelm me like a giant wave crashing.
The Silver Leaves were playing “An Evening on the Bosphorus,” their version of “It’s Now or Never.” If I didn’t believe with all my heart that absolute happiness in this world can only happen while living in the present and in the arms of another, I would have chosen this instant as “the happiest moment of my life.” For I had concluded from Füsun’s mother’s words and her own hurt and angry looks that she could not bring herself to end our relationship, and that even her mother seemed to have resigned herself to this state of affairs, though with certain expectations. If I proceeded with great care and let her know how much I loved her, Füsun, I now understood, would be unable to break off relations with me for as long as I lived! The manly pleasures outside the realm of morality that God granted just a few favored slaves-the happiness that my father and my uncles had had only a taste of, and rarely before their fifties, not before they had suffered terrible torment-it seemed to me now that I was going to be able to enjoy the same good fortune-partaking of all the pleasures of a happy home life with a beautiful, sensible, well-educated woman, and at the same time enjoying the pleasures of an alluring and wild young girl-all this while I was still in my thirties, having scarcely suffered for it, or paid a price. Though not at all religious, I have engraved in my memory what I still regard as a postcard of bliss, sent by God: the image of merry guests, now dispersed to the outer reaches of the garden, and beyond them among the plane trees and the colored lamps, the landscape, the lights of the Bosphorus and the deep blue sky.