I locked the bedroom door and sat down, preparing to take the opportunity to cry over Füsun for a very long time while thinking about my father, but the tears wouldn’t come. Instead I gazed with new eyes at the bedroom where my father had spent so many years with my mother, this intimate chamber of my childhood still entirely redolent of cologne, carpet dust, floor polish, old wood, curtains, my mother’s perfume, and the oil from our hands that clung to the barometer that my father would take me on his lap to show me. It was as if the center of my life had dissolved, as if the earth had swallowed up my past. Opening up his cupboard, I took out the outmoded ties and belts, and one of the pairs of shoes that were still occasionally shined, though he hadn’t worn them in years. When I heard footsteps in the corridor, I felt the same tinge of guilt I’d felt when rummaging through this wardrobe as a boy, and I quickly shut its creaking door. On my father’s bedside table were medicines, crossword puzzles, folded newspapers, a much loved photograph from his army days, taken when he’d been drinking raki with the officers, his reading glasses, and also his false teeth, in a glass. The false teeth I took from the glass, wrapping them in my handkerchief, and put them in my pocket; then I went to be with my mother in the front room, taking my father’s chair.
“Mother dear, don’t worry-I took Father’s false teeth,” I said.
She nodded, as if to say, Fine, you know best. By noon the house had filled with relatives, friends, acquaintances, and neighbors. They all kissed my mother’s hand and embraced her. The front door was open and the lift in constant use. Before long there were so many people that I could not help but remember the holiday feasts we’d had here. I felt that I loved this crowd of people, these sounds of family life, and the warmth; surrounded by all these relatives, all these cousins with the same potato noses and wide foreheads, I felt happy. For a while I sat with Berrin on the divan, gossiping amiably about the cousins. It pleased me that Berrin followed them all so closely, that she knew the family news better than I did. Like everyone else, I whispered the occasional little joke, I talked about the latest football match, which I’d watched in the lobby of the Fatih Hotel (Fenerbahçe 2-Boluspor 0), and I sat down at the table set by Bekri, who, despite his pain, was frying up more cheese pastries; and I went often to the bedroom in the back to look in on my father’s pajama-clad body. Yes, he was perfectly still. From time to time I opened up his drawers, to touch the things that carried so many of my early memories. My father’s death had turned these familiar props of childhood into objects of immeasurable value, each one the vessel of a lost past. I opened the bedside table drawer, and as I breathed in the fumes of cedar and my father’s sugary cough syrup, I gazed for a long time at the old phone bills, the telegrams, my father’s aspirins and medicines, as if I were looking at a complicated picture. I remember, too, that before leaving with Çetin to make the funeral arrangements, I stood on the balcony at length, gazing down at Teşvikiye Avenue. With the death of my father, it wasn’t just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole. Because coming home now meant a return to the center of that world, there was a happiness I could not hide from myself, and my guilt was even deeper than that of a man whose father has just died. In the refrigerator I found the little bottle of Yeni Rakı that my father had half finished the last night of his life; after all the guests had left and I was sitting with my mother and older brother, I drank what was left.
“Did you see what your father did to me?” said my mother. “Even when he was dying, he didn’t let me know.”
That afternoon, my father’s corpse had been taken to the morgue at Sinan Pasha Mosque in Beşiktaş. My mother, wishing to fall asleep immersed in my father’s scent, had not wanted the sheets or pillowcases to be changed. It was late when my brother and I gave our mother a sleeping pill and put her to bed. My mother smelled the pillowcases and the sheets for a time, and cried a little, and fell asleep. When Osman, too, had left, I went to my own bed, thinking that in the end-as I had so often longed would happen, and dreamed of happening, when I was a child-I had been left alone in this house with my mother.
But it was not this that filled me with excitement; it was (as I in my heart could not deny) the possibility that Füsun might come to the funeral. For this express reason I had included all the names of that distant branch of the family in the death announcements in the papers. I kept thinking that Füsun and her parents would read one of these announcements, somewhere in Istanbul, and come to the funeral. Which newspaper might they read? Of course, they might also hear the news from other relatives mentioned in the death notices. My mother read through all the newspaper death notices over breakfast. From time to time she would grumble: “Sıdıka and Saffet are related both to me and to your dear departed father, so their names should have come just after Perran and her husband. Şükrü Pasha’s daughters, Nigân, Türkan, and Şükran, have also been put in the wrong order. There was no need to include Uncle Zekeriya’s first wife, Melike the Arab. After all, she couldn’t have been married to your uncle for more than three months. That poor little baby of your great-aunt Nesime, who died when she was two months, her name wasn’t Gül, it was Ayşegül. Who did you go to for your information when you were writing these up?”
“They’re just typographical errors, Mother dear. You know what our newspapers are like,” said Osman. Every other minute, my mother was glancing out the window down at the courtyard of Teşvikiye Mosque, fretting about what she was going to wear, and we realized that on an icy, snowy day like this, she should not go outside at all. “You can’t wear that fur as if you were off to a party at the Hilton, and even in that you won’t be warm enough.”
“I am not going to stay at home on the day of your father’s funeral, even if it kills me.”
But as she watched the bearers carry my father’s coffin from the mosque morgue to the funeral stone, my mother began crying so hard that we immediately knew she would not make it down the stairs and across the street to join the funeral. In spite of all the tranquilizers we’d given her, when she went out to the balcony in her Astrakhan fur, propped up by Bekri on one side and Fatma Hanım on the other, to watch the crowd lift the coffin into the funeral hearse, she fainted. There was a harsh north wind blowing; there were swirls of snowflakes small enough to get into your eyes. Almost no one in the crowd noticed my mother. After Bekri and Fatma had taken her back inside, I too gave my attention to the crowd. These were the same people who had come to our engagement party at the Hilton. As it seemed so often on the streets of Istanbul in winter, the pretty girls I’d noticed during the summer had disappeared; the women had grown uglier, the men, too, darker and more threatening. Just as I had done at the engagement party, I shook hundreds of people’s hands, embracing many well-wishers, and every time I met a new shadow in the crowd I felt a pang, because we were burying my father, and because that shadow was not Füsun. When I was sure that neither she nor her parents had come to the funeral or the interment, and that they were not going to come, I felt as if I was being buried under the cold earth along with my father.
The cold seemed to bring the family closer, and after the ceremony was over they wanted to remain together, but I fled them, taking a taxi straight to the Merhamet Apartments. Even the smell of the apartment brought me peace as I inhaled it from the threshold; I knew from experience that Füsun’s lead pencil had the greatest consolatory power of all the things in the apartment, with her teacup, which I had not washed since her disappearance, coming in a close second; I took these things into bed with me. After touching them and stroking my skin with them for a short time, I was able at last to relax.