For a while I danced with Nurcihan.
“You’ve broken Sibel’s heart. She’s very angry at you,” she said as we danced. “You shouldn’t leave her sitting alone in restaurants. She’s so in love with you. She’s also very sensitive.”
“Without thorns, the rose of love has no fragrance. When are you two getting married?”
“Mehmet wants us to marry right away,” said Nurcihan. “But I just want to get engaged first as you two did-and have a chance to enjoy love a bit before we settle into marriage.”
“You shouldn’t use us as your model, not to that extent, anyway…”
“Why-are there things I don’t know?” said Nurcihan, trying to hide her curiosity behind a fake smile.
But I paid her no mind. The raki was easing my obsession from a strong, steady ache into an intermittent specter. I remember that at a certain point in the evening, Sibel and I were dancing, and, like a teenage lover, I made her promise never to leave me, and she, impressed by the ardor of my pleas, tried sincerely to allay my fears. Many friends and acquaintances stopped by our table, inviting us to join them elsewhere when we had tired of Fuaye. Some wanted to play it safe and drive out to the Bosphorus for tea, others were saying we should go to the tripe restaurant in Kasımpaşa, there were even those proposing we all go to a nightclub to listen to Turkish classical music. There was a moment when Nurcihan and Mehmet wrapped their arms around each other with exaggerated abandon and amused everyone as an instantly recognizable impression of the romantic dance that Sibel and I were given to dancing. At daybreak, and in spite of pleas from a friend leaving Fuaye with us, I insisted on driving. Seeing how I was drifting back and forth across the road, Sibel began to scream, so we took a car ferry to the other side. At dawn, as the ferry approached Üsküdar, we both fell asleep in the car. A sailor woke us by pounding on the window, because we were blocking food trucks and buses. We made our way along the shore, under ghostly plane trees shedding their red leaves, reaching the yali without incident, and, as we always did following our all-night adventures, we wrapped our arms tightly around each other and drifted off to sleep.
43 Cold and Lonely November Days
IN THE days that followed, Sibel didn’t even ask where in Nişantaşı I’d spent the hour and a half that I’d gone missing, but there was little room for doubt. After that night we had both become resigned to the fact that I was never going to get over my obsession. It was clear that strict regimens and prohibitions had been useless, though we still enjoyed living together in this once grand, now crumbling yali. However hopeless our situation, there was something about this decrepit house that bound us together and made our pain bearable by endowing it with a strange beauty. The yali added gravity and historical depth to this doomed love of ours; our sorrow and defeat were so great that the vestigial presence of a vanished Ottoman culture could furnish what we had lost as old lovers, as a newly engaged couple. The world evoked protected us somehow from the pain we felt at being unable to make love.
If, of an evening, we set up our table beside the sea-and, resting our arms and our elbows against the iron balcony rail, drank Yeni Rakı together and found our spirits lifting-I would sense from the way Sibel looked at me that in the absence of sex the only thing that could bind us together was marriage. Weren’t there plenty of happy married couples-not just in our parents’ generation but in our own-who led chaste lives together, as if everything were normal? After our third or fourth glass, we would play guessing games about young and old couples we knew-sometimes from a distance, sometimes more intimately-asking each other, “Do you think they still do?” and giving the question half-serious consideration. Our mockery, which now seems so very painful to me, owed a great deal, no doubt, to a dubious supposition that we would soon be returning to a satisfying love life. In our strange complicity and in these conversations that walled us off from the outside world, there was the veiled aim of convincing ourselves that we could marry in this condition, and peacefully await the return of that sex life of which we had once been so proud. At least Sibel would come to believe this, even on her most pessimistic days; swayed by my teasing, my jokes, and my compassion, she would grow hopeful, and content, even sitting on my lap, as if to trigger a reaction. In my more hopeful moments I, too, would feel the thing I thought Sibel was feeling, and it would occur to me to say that we must marry at once, but I held back, fearing that she might decline my proposal quickly and definitively, and then abandon me. For it seemed to me that Sibel was waiting for an opportunity to end our relationship with a retaliatory blow that would also restore her self-respect. Unable to accept that she had lost the lifetime of marital bliss that had stretched out before us only four months ago-that enviable, unsullied existence, rich with children, friends, and diverse amusements-she could not bring herself to strike first. In this way, we both derived emotional utility from the strange love that still bound us and for the time being, whenever in the middle of the night despair awoke us from the slumber that only drink can induce, we would continue the custom of wrapping our arms around each other, ignoring the pain as best we could.
From mid-November onward, whenever we awoke on a windless night-raw from misery, or thirst, because we’d had so much to drink-we began to hear a fisherman splashing around in his rowboat, just beyond our closed shutters, moving through the still waters of the Bosphorus, casting his net. Sometimes the boat would drift beneath our bedroom. Accompanying this quiet, soft-spoken fisherman was a slim little boy whose voice was sweet and who did everything his father asked. As the lamp hanging from their boat filtered through our shutters, casting a lovely glow on the ceiling, we could hear the sounds of their oars cutting into the silent water, and the water cascading through their net as they lifted it from the sea, and at times only the boy’s coughing as the two went wordlessly about their work. We would wake up to their arrival and clinging to each other we listened to them rowing five or six meters from our bed, little knowing that we were in here listening; we heard them throw stones into the sea, to scare the fish into the net, and on rare occasions they spoke: “Hold it tight, my son,” the fisherman would say, or, “Pick up the basket,” or, “Now backwater.” Much later, in the midst of the deepest silence, the son would say in his sweet voice, “There’s another one over there!” and Sibel and I lying enfolded would wonder what the child was pointing at. Was it a fish, or a dangerous spike, or some sea creature we could only imagine from our bed? I do not remember ever talking about the fisherman and his son during the waking hours that followed. But at night we wafted between sleep and wakefulness, sometimes hearing the fishing boat drift away after its night’s work and sometimes missing it we would nevertheless enjoy without fail a precious interval of immense peace, as if there was nothing to fear as long as we’d been visited by the fisherman and his son.
With every passing day, Sibel would resent me a bit more, entertain a few more painful doubts about her beauty; each day her eyes would well up more frequently, as our altercations and little tiffs and skirmishes became more unpleasant. It typically happened that Sibel would give herself over to a gesture to make me happy, by baking a cake, perhaps, or finding at a great price some marvelous coffee table for the house, but when I, sitting there with a raki in my hand, dreaming of Füsun, would not respond in the way she had hoped, she would leave and slam the door in fury; though I would sit where she had left me, cursing myself for the shame that kept me from going after her to apologize-and when I finally did, I would see that she was too far lost to resentment.