At that moment I realized that my mother knew all about Füsun, but that she wanted to find some other way of explaining a painful occurrence-just as our ancestors had blamed djinns rather than them-selves. Seeing this, I was deeply touched.
“She was very ambitious, very haughty, very proud, that girl,” said my mother, looking straight into my eyes. She added, as if giving away a secret, “Anyway, from the time I heard she didn’t like cats, I had my doubts.”
I had no memory of Sibel’s hatred of cats, but this was the second time my mother had used this as a reason to rail against her. I changed the subject. We drank our coffees together on the balcony, watching a small funeral below. Though she still shed a few tears now and again, saying, “Oh, your poor, dear father,” my mother was in good health; she had pulled herself together and her faculties were sound. She told me that the person in the coffin set on the funeral stone was one of the owners of the famous Bereket Apartments. As she located it for me, two buildings down from the Atlas Cinema, I found myself daydreaming about a premiere at the Atlas Cinema of a film starring Füsun. After lunch I left for Satsat, where, convinced that I could recover the “normal” life I’d had before Füsun, before Sibel, I threw myself into my work.
Seeing Füsun had alleviated much of the pain I had suffered for so many months. As I worked in the office, part of me was thinking, in all sincerity, that I was lucky to have recovered from my lovesickness, and in this thought was a great serenity. As I carried on shuffling papers, I checked myself periodically, and I was glad to note that indeed I had no desire to see her. There was no longer any question of my returning to that dreadful house in Çukurcuma, that rat’s nest with its mud and its floods. My disdain was fueled less by love for Füsun than by resentment of her conniving family and that fatso they called their son-in-law. But I grew angry for feeling enmity for a mere boy, just as I cursed my stupidity in enduring a year of agony on account of this “love.” But was I really angry at myself? I wanted to believe that I had embarked on a new life, and that my heartache was over; these powerful new dark feelings were necessary proof my life had changed, and as such I needed them, genuine or not. So I resolved to see the old friends I had been shunning, to have fun, to go to parties, though for some time I kept my distance from Zaim and Mehmet, lest they bring back memories of Füsun and Sibel. Sometimes, after midnight, having had a lot to drink at a nightclub or a party, I would see my rage directed not at society’s idiocies, its tedious conventions, nor my own foolishness in succumbing to my obsession; my anger was directed at Füsun; in a walled-off corner of my mind, I would fretfully acknowledge that I was in perpetual argument with her, at times thinking secretly that she had chosen to reject the pleasant life I could have given her, in favor of this flooded rat’s nest in Çukurcuma, and so she was to blame for my natural inability to continue caring about someone who would bury herself alive in such a stupid marriage.
I had a friend from my army days, Abdülkerim, the son of a wealthy Kayseri landowner. After our military service had ended, he had kept in touch with holiday and New Year’s cards, which he signed in a careful floral script, and so I had made him the Kayseri distributor for Satsat. Because I’d thought Sibel would find him far too “à la Turca ” I had not spared him much time during his visits to Istanbul over the last few years, but four days after my visit to Füsun’s family, I took him to a new restaurant named Garaj that had found immediate favor with Istanbul society. As we reminisced, it was almost as if I were seeing my life through his eyes; to make myself feel better, I told him stories about the wealthy patrons entering and leaving the restaurant, sometimes even just before or after they had visited our table to offer us polite and affable handshakes. Before long it was clear that Abdülkerim was less interested in stories of ordinary human frailty, pain, and transgression than in the sex lives, scandals, and domestic peccadillos of rich Istanbullus whom he hardly knew; one by one he focused on each girl rumored to have had sex before marriage, or even before her engagement, and I did not like this. Perhaps this is why, by the end of the evening, having fallen into a contrarian frame of mind, I told Abdülkerim my own story, describing the love I’d felt for Füsun, but telling it as if it had all happened to some other rich idiot. As I told the story of the young rich man, much admired in society, who had fallen so madly in love with a “shopgirl,” only for her, in the end, to marry someone else, I was so anxious to keep Abdülkerim from suspecting that “he” was me that I pointed out a young man sitting at a distant table.
“Well, no harm done. This promiscuous girl has been married off, so the poor man is off the hook,” said Abdülkerim.
“Actually, when I think of what that man risked for love, I can’t help feeling a lot of respect for him,” I said. “He broke off his engagement for this girl…”
For a moment Abdülkerim’s face lit up with gentle understanding; but then he turned to look covetously at Hicri Bey, the tobacco magnate, with his wife and two swanlike daughters, making their way toward the exit. “Who are those people?” he asked without looking at me. The younger of Hicri Bey’s two dark-haired daughters-her name was Neslişah, I think-had bleached her hair. I did not like the way Abdülkerim looked at them, half mocking, and half admiring.
“It’s late. Shall we go?” I said.
I asked for the bill. We said nothing to each other until we had left the restaurant and were saying our good-byes.
I did not walk straight home to Nişantaşı; instead I headed for Taksim. I had returned Füsun’s orphaned earring to her, but not formally-in my stupor, I had merely left it in the bathroom. This was demeaning, both for them and for me. My pride demanded that I make it clear to them that this had been no mistake but something I’d done deliberately, intending she would find it. So I would have to apologize, and being secure in the knowledge that I would never see her again, I could smile at Füsun and say one last indifferent good-bye. As I walked through the door, Füsun would understand that this was to be her last glimpse of me, and perhaps she would panic, but I would elude her in a deep silence, as she had done to me for the past year. I would not even say that we would never see each other again, but I would wish her well in such a way that she could not conclude otherwise and would thus be undone.
As I slowly made my way toward Çukurcuma through the back-streets of Beyoğlu, it crossed my mind that there was a chance Füsun might not be undone at all; it was possible she was perfectly happy, living in that house with her husband. But if that was the case, if she loved that dullard so much that she would choose to live penuriously in that rickety house, then I would surely have no wish to see her again anyway. Along the narrow streets, uneven sidewalks, and stairs, I looked through the half-drawn curtains to see families turning off their television sets and preparing for bed, or poor, elderly couples sitting across from each other, smoking their last cigarettes of the day, and it struck me on this spring evening, in the pale lamplight, that the people living in these silent backstreets were happy.
I rang the doorbell. A bay window on the second floor swung open. “Who is it?” Füsun’s father called out into the darkness.
“It’s me.”
“Who?”
As I stood there, wondering if I should run away, her mother opened the door.
“Aunt Nesibe, I am sorry to disturb you at such a late hour.”
“Never mind, Kemal Bey. Do come in.”