“I don’t,” said Sibel, and then she fell silent, with a look as if to ask, So what’s going to happen now?
Changing the subject, I told her that my father seemed to be withdrawing from the world a little more every day. Sibel told me about her mother’s new habit of hiding away her old clothes and other belongings. I told her how my mother was even more radical about banishing all her discarded things to another apartment. But this was a dangerous subject, so we fell silent again. Sibel’s expression told me she inferred no malice in my having brought it up just to keep the conversation going, but she also understood that my avoiding the real subject meant I had nothing new to say to her.
So she got to the point herself, saying, “I see you’ve come to accept your condition.”
“What do you mean?”
“For months now we’ve been waiting for your illness to pass. But after all this waiting, there are no signs of recovery-and instead you seem to greet your illness with open arms. It’s very painful to see, Kemal. In Paris I prayed for your recovery.”
“I’m not ill,” I said. I looked at the jolly crowd of diners around us. “These people might see it that way. But you shouldn’t.”
“When we were at the yali,” Sibel said, “didn’t we both agree it was an illness?”
“We did.”
“So what has changed now? Is it normal to leave your fiancée in the lurch like this?”
“What?”
“For a shopgirl…”
“Why are you mixing things up like that? This has nothing to do with shops, or wealth, or poverty.”
“It has everything to do with it,” said Sibel, with the determination that attends having given something a great deal of thought and reached a painful conclusion. “It’s because she was a poor, ambitious girl that you were able to start something with her so easily. If she hadn’t been a shopgirl, maybe you could have married her without causing yourself embarrassment. So that’s what made you ill, in the end. You couldn’t marry her. You couldn’t find the courage.”
Believing that Sibel was saying these things to me to make me angry, I got angry. But this is not to say that the fury owed nothing to my partial awareness that she was right.
“It isn’t normal, darling, for someone like you to do all these bizarre things for the sake of a shopgirl, to go to live in a hotel in Fatih… If you want to get better, you have to concede that I have a point.”
“First of all, I’m not in love with that girl the way you think I am,” I said. “But just for the sake of argument, don’t people ever fall in love with people who are poorer than they are? Don’t rich and poor ever fall in love?”
“The art of love is in finding a balance of equals,” Sibel said. “As there is with you and me. Have you ever seen a rich girl fall in love with Ahmet Efendi the janitor, or Hasan Usta, the construction worker, just for his good looks? Outside Turkish films, I mean.”
Sadi, the headwaiter, was walking toward us, his face beaming at the sight of us, but when he saw how intently we were talking, he broke off the approach. I indicated with my head that he had been right to do so and turned back to Sibel.
“I believe in Turkish films,” I said.
“Kemal, in all these years I have never seen you go to a Turkish film, not even once. You don’t even go with your friends to the summer cinemas, just for a laugh.”
“Life at the Fatih Hotel is just like a Turkish film, believe me,” I said. “At night, before I go to sleep, I walk around those desolate and impoverished streets. It does me good.”
“In the beginning I thought this whole business with the shopgirl was Zaim’s fault,” she said pointedly. “I thought you were aping La Dolce Vita. I thought you wanted to have some fun with dancers, and bar girls, and German models before you got married. I discussed this with Zaim. But now I’ve decided you’re suffering from some sort of complex”-this word had just come into fashion-“some sort of complex about being rich in a poor country. Of course, this is a lot deeper than some little fling with a shopgirl.”
“You may be right,” I said.
“In Europe the rich are refined enough to act as if they’re not wealthy. That is how civilized people behave. If you ask me, being cultured and civilized is not about everyone being free and equal; it’s about everyone being refined enough to act as if they were. Then no one has to feel guilty.”
“Hmmmmm. I see your time at the Sorbonne was not a waste,” I said. “Shall we order our fish now?”
Sadi now came to our table, and after we’d asked him how he was (“Extremely well, praise be to God!”) and how business was going (“We’re a family, Kemal Bey. It’s the same people every night!”), we talked about the general state of affairs (“Ah, with all this terrorism between leftists and rightists, it’s almost impossible for a decent citizen to go out into the street!”) and the comings and goings of the regulars (“Everyone’s back from Uludağ now!”). I’d known Sadi since childhood. Before Fuaye opened, he’d worked at Abdullah Efendi’s in Beyoğlu, where my father had eaten all the time. He’d come to Istanbul thirty years earlier, at the age of nineteen, never having seen the sea before, and quickly learned the intricacies of picking and preparing fish from the old Greek tavern owners and the city’s most famous Greek waiters. He brought us a tray of red mullet, large, oily bluefish, and sea bass that he’d bought with his own hands at the fish market that morning. We smelled the fish, looked at the brightness of the eyes, and the redness of the gills, and confirmed that it was fresh. Then we complained about how polluted the Sea of Marmara was getting. Sadi told us that Fuaye had a private company deliver a tanker full of water every day because of the cuts in the water supply. They had not yet ordered a generator to cope with the power cuts, but the guests seemed to like the atmosphere on those evenings when they had to depend on candles and gas lamps. After topping off our wineglasses, Sadi went on his way.
“There was that fisherman with his son,” I said. “We used to listen to them in the yali. Not long after you left for Paris, they disappeared, too. After that the yali got even colder and lonelier, until I couldn’t bear it anymore.”
Sibel heard the note of apology in my voice as I spoke of this development, hoping to redirect the conversation. (My father’s pearl earrings crossed my mind.) “This father and his son were probably going after the schools of bonito or bluefish.” There had been plenty of both this year, I told her; even in the backstreets of Fatih, I’d seen them sold from horse-drawn carts, followed everywhere by cats. As we ate our fish, Sadi told us that the price of turbot had gone up dramatically, because they’d arrested those Turkish fishermen who’d gone into Russian and Bulgarian waters to fish turbot. As we were discussing this story, I saw that Sibel was looking more distressed than ever. She knew I was talking about all these things so as not to speak of our predicament, about which I had nothing new to say and no hope to offer. I did want to find an easy way to talk about it, but I couldn’t think of any. Now, seeing her sad face, I knew I couldn’t lie to her, and that made me frantic.
“Look, Hilmi and his wife are getting up to leave,” I said. “Shall we invite them to join us?” Before Sibel could say anything, I waved at them, but they didn’t see me.
“Don’t ask them to join us,” said Sibel.
“Why? Hilmi’s a very nice boy. And I thought you liked his wife, what’s her name?”
“What’s going to happen to us?”
“I don’t know.”
“When I was in Paris, I talked to Leclerq.” This was Sibel’s economics professor, whom she admired greatly. “He thinks I should do a dissertation.”
“So you’re going to Paris?”
“I’m not happy here.”
“Shall I come, too?” I asked. “Though I have a lot of work here.”