“We certainly can,” I said.
“You’re very clever, little lady,” said Çetin Efendi. “Actually the prophet Abraham didn’t want to kill his son at all. But the command was from God. If we don’t submit to God’s every command, then the world will turn upside down, the Judgment Day will be upon us… The foundation of the world is love. The foundation of love is the love we feel for God.”
“But how could a child whose father wants to kill him understand this?” I asked.
For a moment I met Çetin Efendi’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
“Kemal Bey, I know you are just saying these things to tease me and have a good laugh, just like your father,” he said. “Your father loves us very much and we respect him greatly, so we never get upset at his jokes. Your jokes don’t upset me either. I’ll answer your question with an example. Have you seen the film called The Prophet Abraham?”
“No.”
“No, of course not-you’d never go to a film like that. But you should see this film and take this little lady with you. You won’t be bored… Ekrem Güçlü plays Abraham. We took the whole family-my wife, my mother-in-law, and all our children-and we all cried to our hearts’ content. When Abraham took out his knife and looked at his son, we all cried then, too… And when Ismail said, ‘Dear Father, do whatever God commands!’ just like he does in the Glorious Kuran… we cried again. Then, when the sacrificial lamb appeared in the place of the son who was to have been slaughtered, we wept with joy, together with everyone else in the cinema. If we give what we treasure most to a Being we love with all our hearts, if we can do that without expecting anything in return, then the world becomes a beautiful place, and that, little lady, is why we were crying.”
I remember going from Fatih to Edirnekapı, and from there we turned right to follow the city walls all the way to the Golden Horn. As we passed the poor neighborhoods, as we advanced along the crumbling city walls, the three of us fell silent, and we remained so for a very long time. As we gazed upon the orchards between the old castle walls, and the empty lots strewn with rubbish, discarded barrels, and debris, and the run-down factories and workshops, we saw the occasional slaughtered lamb, and skins that had been tossed to one side, with their innards and horns, but in the poor neighborhoods, with their unpainted wooden houses, there was less sacrifice, and more festivity. I remember how delighted Füsun and I were to look out over the lots where carousels and swings had been set up for the celebrations, and at the children buying gum with their holiday money, and the Turkish flags set like little horns on the tops of buses, and all the scenes that I would later find in photographs and postcards, and collect so ardently.
As we drove up Şişhane Hill a crowd was milling in the middle of the road and the traffic had come to a standstill. At first I thought it was another holiday gathering, but when the crowd parted before us we found ourselves right beside two vehicles that had crashed only moments ago, and the dying victims. The truck’s brakes had failed, and the driver had swerved into the oncoming lane, then mercilessly plowed into a private car.
“God is great!” said Çetin Efendi. “Please, little lady, make sure you do not look.”
We caught a glimpse of someone still trapped inside the car, whose front was completely crushed, her head bobbing as she fought for her life. I shall never forget the crunch of shattered glass under our tires as we drove on or the quiet that followed. We hurried on up the hill, and as we sped through the deserted streets from Taksim to Nişantaşı, it was as if in flight from death itself.
“Where have you been all this time?” my father asked. “We were getting worried. Did you get the liqueur?”
“It’s in the kitchen!” I said. The sitting room smelled of perfume, cologne, and carpet. As I joined the crowd of relations, I forgot all about little Füsun.
12 Kissing on the Lips
THE FOLLOWING afternoon, Füsun and I reminisced again about our drive around the city on that holiday morning six years earlier, before giving ourselves over to kisses and lovemaking. As the linden-scented breeze rustled through the tulle curtains to lap against her honey-colored skin, I was driven to distraction by the way she clung to me with all her strength, as to a life raft, eyes tightly shut, and I could neither see nor reflect on the deeper meaning of what I was experiencing. Still I concluded that if I was to avoid sinking into the dangerous depths where guilt and suspicion serve only to induce the helplessness of love, I should seek out the company of other men.
On Saturday morning, after I’d been with Füsun three more times, my brother rang to invite me to the match that Fenerbahçe was to play that afternoon against Giresunspor; if Fenerbahçe won-as the odds-makers expected-it would take the championship. So off we went to the İnönü Stadium, formerly known as the Dolmabahçe Stadium. Apart from its name, it pleased me to note, it was just the same as it had been twenty years ago. The only real difference was that, adopting European convention, they had tried to grow grass on the playing field. But as the seed had taken root only in the corners, the playing field resembled the head of a balding man with just a scattering of hair on the temples and the back. The more affluent spectators in the numbered stands did the same as they had done in the mid-1950s: Whenever the exhausted players approached the sidelines, especially the less glorious defensemen, they would shower them with abuse, rather as the Roman masters cursed gladiators from the tribunes (“Run, you gutless faggots!”); while from the open stands, the poor, the unemployed, and students echoed the angry curses in unison, hoping to make their voices heard, too. As the sports pages would confirm the next day, it was something of a rout, and when Fenerbahçe scored a goal, I jumped to my feet with the rest of the crowd. In this festive atmosphere, with men on the field and in the stands conjoined in ritual embrace and congratulation, in this sudden community I felt my guilt recede, my fear transform into pride. But during the quiet moments of the match, when all thirty thousand of us could hear a player kick the ball, I turned to look at Dolmabahçe Palace, and the Bosphorus glimmering behind the open stands, and as I watched a Soviet ship moving behind the palace, I thought of Füsun. I was profoundly moved that she, hardly knowing me, had yet chosen me, had so deliberately elected to give herself to me. Her long neck, the dip in her abdomen that was like no other, the blending of sincerity and suspicion in her eyes at the same instant, their melancholic honesty when they looked right into mine as we lay in bed, and our kisses, all played on my mind.
“You seem preoccupied. It’s the engagement, I guess,” said my brother.
“Yes.”
“Are you very much in love?”
“Of course.”
With a smile both compassionate and worldly-wise, my brother turned back to watch the ball in midfield. In his hand was a Turkish Marmara cigar-he had taken up this habit two years earlier, “just to be original,” he said. The light wind blowing in from Leander’s Tower ruffling the teams’ great banners as well as the little red corner flags carried the stinging smoke right into my eyes, making them water just as the smoke from my father’s cigarettes had done when I was a child.
“Marriage will do you good,” said my brother, his eyes still on the ball. “You can have children right away. Don’t wait too long and they can be friends with ours. Sibel is a woman with a lot of sense; she has her feet on the ground. While you sometimes get carried away with your ideas, she’ll provide a good balance. I hope you don’t wear out Sibel’s patience the way you did with all those other girls? Hey, what’s wrong with this ref? That was a foul!”
When Fenerbahçe scored its second goal, we all leapt up-“Goooal!”-and threw our arms around one another and kissed. When the match was over, we were joined by Kadri the Sieve, an army buddy of my father’s, and a number of football-loving lawyers and businessmen. We walked up the hill with the shouting, chanting crowd and went into the Divan Hotel, where we talked football and politics over glasses of raki. And my thoughts turned again to Füsun.