Füsun’s father was waiting on the landing. “Welcome, Kemal Bey.” I’d forgotten I’d seen him a year earlier at the engagement party, somehow imagining that we hadn’t embraced since the last of the old family meals at the Feast of the Sacrifice. Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible.
Then I thought I must be seeing Füsun’s sister, because there, standing behind her father in the doorway, I saw not Füsun, but a dark-haired beauty who resembled her. But even as I was thinking this, I realized that this was Füsun. It was a tremendous shock. Her hair was jet-black. “Her natural color, of course!” I told myself, as I tried to calm my nerves. I went inside. My plan had been to ignore her parents, hand her the flowers, and throw my arms around her, but I could tell from the look on her face, and her discomfort as she approached me, that she didn’t want me to embrace her.
We shook hands.
“Oh, what lovely roses!” she said, without taking them from my hands.
Yes, of course, she was very beautiful; she had matured. She could tell how distressed I was that our reunion was turning out so differently from what I’d imagined.
“Aren’t they lovely?” she said, now addressing someone else in the room.
I came eye to eye with the person she had indicated. The first thought to cross my mind was: “Couldn’t they have found another evening to invite over this sweet, fat adolescent neighbor?” But once again, even as the thought passed through my mind, I knew I was wrong.
“Cousin Kemal, let me introduce you, this is my husband, Feridun,” she said, trying to sound as if she’d just recalled a detail of minor significance.
I stared at this man called Feridun, not as a real person but as if he were an obscure memory I could not quite place.
“We married five months ago,” said Füsun, raising her eyebrows as if waiting for the penny to drop.
I could tell, from the way this fatso shook my hand, that he knew nothing. “Oh, I’m so pleased to meet you!” I said to him, and smiling at Füsun, now hiding behind her husband, I said, “You’re a very lucky man, too, Feridun Bey. Not only have you married a wonderful girl, but this girl is now in possession of a nifty tricycle.”
“Kemal Bey, we so wanted to invite you to the wedding,” said her mother. “But we’d heard your father was ill. My girl, instead of hiding behind your husband, why don’t you find a vase for those beautiful roses Kemal Bey is holding in his hands.”
My beloved, who had never once been absent from my dreams all year, took the roses from my hands with a small, elegant gesture, first bringing herself close enough for me to see the blush of her cheeks, her ever-inviting lips, her velvet skin, and her neck, and I would have done anything at that moment, just to know I could spend the rest of my life this close. I inhaled the fragrance of her exposed bosom before she drew back. I was dumbstruck, amazed at her reality, as one is amazed at the reality of the natural world.
“Put the roses in a vase,” said her mother.
“Kemal Bey, you’ll have a raki, won’t you?” said her father.
“Tweet tweet tweet,” said her canary.
“Oh, yes, I’d love one, yes, I’ll have a raki.”
They gave me two rakis on the rocks and I knocked them both back, on an empty stomach, hoping they would take immediate effect. I remember speaking for a time about the tricycle I’d brought with me, and a few childhood memories, before we sat down to eat. But alas, I was still sober enough to know that because she was married, I could show none of that lovely brotherly feeling that I’d hoped the tricycle would evoke.
Füsun sat across from me, as if by chance (she’d asked her mother where she should sit), but she would not look me in the eye. During these first minutes I was shocked enough to believe she had no interest in me. I, in turn, tried to look as if I had no interest in her, as if I were a well-meaning, wealthy cousin, here to give a wedding present to a poor relation, while many more important things weighed on my mind.
“Soooo, when can we expect children?” I asked, still playing this role, looking Feridun in the eye first, but failing then to address Füsun.
“We’re not thinking of having children right away,” said Feridun. “Perhaps after we’ve moved into our own house.”
“Feridun is very young, but he is one of the most sought-after screenwriters in Istanbul today,” said Aunt Nesibe. “He’s the one who wrote The Old Lady Who Sells Simits.”
All night I struggled to get it through my skull-as people say. At intervals all evening I conjured up the hopeful dream that this wedding story was a joke, that they’d gotten some neighbor’s fat son to masquerade as a childhood sweetheart, dressing him up as her husband, a final lesson to me that they would, at evening’s end, own up to. Eventually, as I learned more about the couple, I did accept that they were married, but then it was the various details of that reality that, as they were disclosed, I found unacceptable: Feridun Bey, this son-in-law who was living with his wife’s family, was twenty-two years old, and interested in film and literature; though he wasn’t making much money yet, in addition to screenplays for Yeşilçam, he wrote poetry. I discovered that as a distant relation on her father’s side, he’d played with Füsun as a child, and that, when he was a child, he had even ridden on the tricycle I’d brought back to the house. Hearing all this, I felt my very soul shriveling up inside me, irritated by the raki that Tarık Bey poured so solicitously into my glass. Whenever I entered a new house, I would always feel uncomfortable until I knew how many rooms it had, and which backstreet the balcony looked out on, and why a table had been positioned in a particular way, but now there were no such questions in my mind.
The only consolation was to sit across from her, to admire her, like a painting. Her hands were always moving, just as I remembered. Although married, she still didn’t smoke in front of her father, and that, alas, meant that I could not watch her light her cigarette in that lovely way of hers. But twice, she pulled back her hair the way she used to, and three times, when she was trying to join the conversation, she took a deep breath-like those she had always drawn when we quarreled-and raised her shoulders just slightly, as if waiting for her chance. Each time I saw her smile, hope and joy rose up inside me with the force of blooming sunflowers. I was reminded by her beauty, and by her gestures, which were so dear to me, and by her luminous skin, that the center of the world, the center to which I must travel, was at her side. All other people, places, and pastimes were nothing but “vulgar distractions.” It wasn’t just in my mind that I knew this, it was in my body; and so sitting across from her I longed to stand up and throw my arms around her. But when I tried to contemplate my situation, and what would happen next, I felt such an ache in my heart that I could think no more, and then it was not just for the benefit of the others that I played the part of the relative come to congratulate the young couple: It was also for my sake. Though our eyes hardly met during that meal, Füsun caught on at once, and as I carried on acting, she did everything one would expect from a happy young newlywed entertaining a wealthy distant relation come to call in his chauffeur-driven car, teasing her husband, feeding him spoonfuls of fava beans. All this made the eerie silence in my head echo.
The rain that had been pelting down ever faster on the way to the house showed no signs of abating. Tarık Bey had already told me, at the very beginning of the meal, that the neighborhood of Çukurcuma was, as the name implied, a topographical bowl, and that only after buying the house last summer did they learn it had flooded many times in the past, and so I went with him to the bay window to watch the torrent pouring down the hill. Many of their neighbors were out there, with their trousers rolled up and barefoot, using zinc buckets and plastic washtubs to bail out the water rushing over the curbs right into their houses, and arranging piles of stones and rags into makeshift levees. As two barefoot men struggled to clear a blocked grate with their hands, two women, one wearing a green and the other a purple headscarf, were pointing insistently at something in the torrent and shouting. At the table Tarık Bey had commented mysteriously that the sewers dating back to Ottoman times could no longer cope. Whenever the drumming of the rain increased, someone would say something like, “The heavens have opened up,” or “It’s the flood!” or “May God protect us,” and then rise from the table to gaze anxiously through the window at the floodwaters and the neighborhood, now transfigured in the pale lamplight. I, too, felt compelled to rise, in solidarity with their fears of flood, but I was so drunk I was afraid of being unable to stay on my feet, and knocking over tables and chairs.