The pleasure of imagining Füsun remorseful had, by the second day, overwhelmed my visceral pique. By the evening of that day, as I sat eating silently with my mother in Suadiye, I realized I had begun to miss Füsun. My viscera having healed, I knew that I could only maintain my pique for the sake of punishing her. As I ate my supper I tried to put myself in Füsun’s place and adopt a cruel pragmatism. I imagined the agony and remorse I’d be feeling if I were a beautiful young woman, on the verge of starring in a film directed by my husband, when with a thoughtless remark I had shattered the feelings of the wealthy producer, and with them, the hope of becoming a star. But for my mother’s continued interruptions (“Why didn’t you finish your meat? Are you going out this evening? Summer’s almost over. We don’t have to wait until the end of the month-we can go back to Nişantaşı tomorrow. How many glasses does that make for you tonight?”) I might have succeeded in putting myself in Füsun’s place.
In the course of my drunken struggle to guess what Füsun might be thinking, the possibility occurred to me that from the moment I’d heard the ugly words (“So you’re saying that you really are going to shell out the money…”) provoking my “diplomatic pique,” a vengefulness in me had been exposed. I wanted to take revenge on Füsun, but because it both frightened and shamed me to entertain such a wish, I instead convinced myself that I “never wanted to see her again.” This was the more honorable way, as it would allow me to take my revenge with a clear conscience, whereas exaggerating my visceral pique could only serve to excuse the sin by cloaking my desire to punish her in a victim’s innocence. Realizing this, I decided to forgive Füsun and go to see her, and having so decided, I began to see everything in a more positive light. Still, before I could go see them again, I would have to engage in more thinking, as well as self-deception.
After supper I went out to Baghdad Avenue, where, years ago, when I was young, I had so often “promenaded” with my friends, and as I walked down the wide sidewalks, I again tried as hard as I could to put myself in Füsun’s shoes, to figure out precisely how Füsun would interpret the situation were I to stop punishing her. In a blinding flash it came to me: A beautiful woman like her, a woman with brains who knew what she wanted, would have no trouble finding another producer to back her husband’s film. A scorching and jealous regret overtook me. The next day I sent Çetin off to find out what was playing in the open-air cinemas of Beşiktaş, which investigation led me to decide that there was “an important film not to be missed.” Sitting in my office at Satsat with the receiver pressed to my ear, listening to the phone ringing in Füsun’s house, my heart began to pound as I realized that, whoever answered, I would be unable to speak naturally.
As nothing natural could come of trying to satisfy the conflicting demands of visceral and diplomatic pique, I felt compelled at least to prolong the latter for as long as no apology was forthcoming. So it was that we passed our last summer evenings in Istanbul ’s cinema gardens, our dignity chastened, having little fun, speaking even less, feigning mutual indignation. My grimace was infectious-and of course Füsun responded in kind. I resented her obliging me to make this pretense, and now this in turn would make me genuinely indignant. Over time, the persona I assumed in her presence came to supplant my true self. It must have been then I first came to realize that for most people life was not a joy to be embraced with a full heart but a miserable charade to be endured with a false smile, a narrow path of lies, punishment, and repression.
While these Turkish films kept telling us that one could find “the truth” leaving behind this “world of lies,” by now I could no longer believe in the films we saw in the open-air cinemas, with ever dwindling audiences. I could no longer submit to that sentimental realm. By the end of summer, the Star Cinema in Beşiktaş was so empty that it would have looked strange for me to sit too close to Füsun, so I left a seat empty between us, and as the winds grew colder, my contrived sulking hardened into icy remorse. Four days later we went to the Club Cinema in Feriköy, but instead of a film, there were beds with penniless boys tended by headscarf-wearing aunties, and it amused us when we realized that the city council had organized a circumcision ceremony, complete with acrobats, magicians, and dancers, for families who couldn’t afford their own rite. But when the good-hearted mustached mayor saw how pleased we were and asked us to join them, Füsun and I, both so determined to present each other a cold shoulder, declined. It was infuriating to see her responding to my diplomatic pique with her own no less contained version while also keeping the pantomime subtle enough for her husband not to notice.
I managed not to call them for six days. It bothered me that neither Füsun nor her husband had ever once called me. If we were not going to make this film, what excuse could I have for calling them? If I wanted to carry on seeing them, I would have to give them some money, an unbearable truth, one I couldn’t accept.
The last film we went to was at the Majestic Garden Cinema in Pangaltı at the beginning of October. It was a warm night, and there were some others in attendance. I was hoping that on this beautiful evening, probably the last of the summer, our recriminations, the diplomatic standoff, might end. But before we took our seats, something happened: I ran into Cemile Hanım, the mother of a childhood friend. She had also been one of my mother’s bezique partners in those days, but it was as if she grew ever poorer with age. We exchanged looks, as if to say, What are you doing here? in the manner of people who come from old money and feel ashamed and guilty at the loss of their fortunes.
“I was curious to see Mükerrem Hanım’s house,” said Cemile Hanım, as if making a confession.
I did not understand what she meant. I assumed that some interesting person named Mükerrem Hanım lived in one of the old wooden houses whose interiors you could see from the cinema garden, and so I sat down next to Cemile Hanım, that we might look into this house together. Füsun and her husband went to sit six or seven rows in front of us. When the film began I realized that it was the house in the film she was referring to as Mükerrem Hanım’s. This was the princely abode in Erenköy of a prominent aristocratic family-I used to ride past it on my bicycle when I was a child. After falling on hard times, they (like so many old families of my mother’s acquaintance) had taken to renting out their villas to Yeşilçam Films as sets. Cemile Hanım was not here to cry her eyes out watching a film called More Bitter Than Love, but to see the wood-inlaid rooms of an old pasha’s house serving fictively as the home of an evil family who were evidently new money. I should have stood up and gone to sit next to Füsun. But I couldn’t, for a strange shame had immobilized me. I was like a teenager refusing to sit with his parents at the cinema, but also unwilling to acknowledge the source of his shame.
This shame, mingling with my affected pique, which I remain reluctant to acknowledge even so many years later, made it easier to sustain the pretense of being offended. When the film was over, I rejoined Füsun and her husband, whom Cemile Hanım gave a careful look up and down. Füsun was sulking even more than before, and I had no recourse but to respond in kind. On the way back, the silence in the car was hard to bear, and so I fantasized about throwing off this role in which I had cast myself with an unexpected joke, bursting into mad laughter, or getting drunk-but all in vain.
For five days I didn’t call them. I survived on elaborate and delicious fantasies of a contrite Füsun preparing to ask my forgiveness. In my dreams I answered her regretful pleas by blaming her, and when I had listed her faults one by one, I had so fully persuaded myself of her anguish that before long I was as genuinely angry as anyone who had been dealt a terrible injustice.