I would gaze straight into her eyes and study her carefully, as if there were all the time in the world. Of course, at the dinner table these looks of mine could never last longer than ten or twelve seconds, with my boldest attempt persisting for half a minute. Modern generations may well consider what I was doing as a form of harassment. Because by my insistent looks I was laying out on her family’s dinner table the intimacy, the love we had formerly shared, and which Füsun now wished to hide, or perhaps even forget. I cannot excuse myself by saying that we would all have had something to drink, or that I myself had overindulged. In my defense I can say only that had I denied myself even this joy of staring, I might have gone mad, even lost the will to visit the Keskins.
Most nights Füsun could tell after the first few glances whether I was in that angry, obsessive mood, wherein I would resort to deep looks that evening, and ruthless prosecution of my claim, but she would never panic; rather, like all Turkish women schooled in this art, she would pretend not even to have noticed that a man was sitting across from her with menace in his eyes, and she would give me not so much as a glance in response. This maddening rejoinder would make me even angrier, and I would stare at her all the more fiercely. In his column in Milliyet, the famous columnist Celâl Salik had issued many stern warnings to the angry men who prowl our streets: “When you see a beautiful woman,” he’d said, “please don’t bore into her with your eyes as if intent on murder.” And the thought that Füsun might take my intense staring as proof that I was one of those Celâl had addressed made me burn with further fury.
Sibel had talked to me at length about the way men recently arrived from the provinces harassed women; if they saw a beautiful woman wearing lipstick and without a scarf on her head, they would just stand and stare in vicious amazement. Often after a good, long stare, some of these men would stalk their quarry, while others would make their presence known in some more subtly menacing way, from a distance for hours, sometimes even days.
One evening in October 1977, Tarık Bey went upstairs to bed early, saying he was feeling “indisposed.” Füsun and Aunt Nesibe were conversing tenderly, and I was watching them somewhat absentmindedly, I think, when suddenly Füsun looked me straight in the eye. I stared back in that careful way I had recently mastered.
“Don’t do that!” Füsun said.
That threw me for a moment. Füsun had done a very good impression of my stare. At first I was too ashamed to answer.
“What are you trying to tell me?” I murmured.
“I am trying to tell you to stop doing it,” Füsun said, and then she mimicked me again, this time exaggerating. Her imitation of me made me see my distasteful resemblance to the heroes in photoromans.
Even Aunt Nesibe smiled at this. Then she took fright. “Stop imitating everybody and everything like a child, my girl!” she said. “You’re not a child anymore.”
“Don’t worry, Aunt Nesibe,” I said, gathering all my strength. “I understand Füsun very well.”
Did I really? It’s important, no doubt, to understand the person we love. If we cannot manage this, it’s necessary, at least, to believe we understand them. I must confess that over the entire eight years I only rarely enjoyed the contentment of the second possibility, let alone the first.
It was threatening to become one of those evenings when I could not rise from my chair. Deploying my willpower, I finally did, and murmuring that it had gotten very late, I removed myself. At home, drinking myself into oblivion, I resolved never to visit the Keskins again. In the next room my mother was snoring-a painful-sounding moan, but it was perfectly healthy.
The reader will already have guessed that I then sank into deep indignation. But it didn’t last long. Ten days later I rang the Keskins’ doorbell, as if nothing had happened. Stepping inside, I could see, from the moment our eyes met, that Füsun’s were shining, saying she was glad to see me. At that moment I was the happiest man on earth. We sat down at the table, where we continued to exchange looks.
As the months and years went by, and I was still sitting and talking at the Keskin table, watching television with Tarık Bey and Aunt Nesibe, aimlessly gabbing about this and that-with Füsun joining in at the odd tangent-I tasted pleasures I’d never known before. You could say I was creating a new family for myself. Those nights sitting across from Füsun, taking part in the Keskin family’s conversations lifted my spirits and made the world look so bright to me, I almost forgot the sorrow that brought me here.
So it was when in such a mood, late in the evening, at some unexpected moment, I would meet her eye by chance and suddenly I would remember my undying love, and I would bolt upright in excitement, as if having awakened, as if suddenly resurrected. I’d want Füsun to share my elation. For if she could for only a moment awaken as I had from this innocent dream, she would remember the deeper, truer world we’d once inhabited, and in no time she would leave her husband and marry me. But when I saw no such “recollection,” no such “awakening” in Füsun’s eyes, I would be far too dejected to rise from my chair.
For the whole while our film plans were in limbo, she somehow managed almost never to look at me in a way to suggest any memory of how happy we once were. She looked blandly, pretended to be fascinated by whatever was on television or by the gossip she’d just heard about a neighbor, acting as if her life had found its fulfillment sitting at her parents’ dinner table, as if her quest for meaning ended there; it was in effect the abrupt halt of my quest, too-this impression of desolation, betokening no shared future, no hope that Füsun would ever leave her husband.
Years after these events I saw how much Füsun’s indignant glances and the rest of her coded pantomime owed to the expressions of Turkish films. But it was no mere mimicry, for Füsun, like those heroines, was unable to explain her troubles to her mother, her father, or any man, so she channeled all her anger, her desire, and other emotions into those looks of hers, laden with meaning.
62 To Help Pass the Time
SEEING FüSUN on a regular basis allowed me to impose some order on the rest of my life as well. Because I was getting enough sleep, I’d get to the office early in the morning. (Inge was still drinking Meltem soda and smiling down mysteriously from the wall of that apartment in Harbiye, but according to Zaim, her effect on sales had abated.) Freed of the need to think obsessively at all times of Füsun, I was even working productively: I could spot people’s tricks and make sound decisions.
As expected, it wasn’t long before Tekyay, the company to which Osman had appointed Kenan manager, became Satsat’s competitor. But its success was not owing to the way Kenan and my brother ran it. Rather it was that the textile mogul Turgay Bey (my spirits plunged whenever I thought of his Mustang, his factory, and his infatuation with Füsun, though for some reason, I no longer felt jealous of him) had signed over the distribution rights of some of his key products to Tekyay. Being a man of fine feelings, Turgay Bey had forgotten all about the snub of the engagement party; he and his family were now on sound terms with Osman and his family. Subscribing to the same travel magazines, they’d go skiing together on Uludağ in the winter, and on shopping trips to Paris and London in the spring.