“Might it be something simpler than that? The sex was so good that I became obsessed… That’s what love is like. Maybe you’re the one finding some deep meaning in all this, something projected from your own world. Actually, our love has nothing to do with you and yours!”
Those last words came out of my mouth of their own accord. Suddenly I felt as if Zaim was regarding me from a great distance; he had already given up on me a long time ago, and was only now accepting that he couldn’t be alone with me anymore. As he listened to me he was thinking not of me, but of what he would tell his friends. I could read his absence in his face now. And because Zaim was an intelligent man such signals as I had just given were not lost on him, and I could tell that he was angry at me in return. And so the distance was perceptible from either perspective: Suddenly I, too, was seeing Zaim, and my entire past, from a point very far away.
“You’re a man of real feeling,” said Zaim. “That is one of the things I cherish about you.”
“What does Mehmet say about all this?”
“You know how much he cares about you. But he’s happy with Nurcihan in a way beyond anyone else’s understanding. He’s walking on air, and he doesn’t want anything-any trouble-to bring him down.”
“I understand,” I said, resolving to drop the matter.
Zaim read my mind. “Don’t think with your heart-use your head!” he said.
“Fine, I’ll be rational,” I said, and for the rest of the meal we said nothing of any consequence.
Once or twice Zaim offered another serving of society gossip, and when Hilmi the Bastard and his wife stopped at our table on their way out, he tried to relieve the tension with a few jokes, but without success. Those fine clothes on Hilmi and his wife suddenly looked pretentious, even false. Yes, I’d cut myself off from my entire crowd, and all my friends, and perhaps this was cause for sadness, but there was also something more, I felt-a grudge, a rage.
I paid the bill. Saying our good-byes at the door, Zaim and I suddenly threw our arms around each other and kissed each other on the cheeks, like two old friends who knew that one was on the verge of a long journey that would part them for many years. Then we walked off in opposite directions.
Two weeks later Mehmet telephoned Satsat to apologize for having been unable to invite me to the wedding at the Hilton. He added that Zaim and Sibel had been a couple for some time now. He’d assumed I knew, considering everyone else did.
72 Life, Too, Is Just Like Love….
ONE EVENING at the beginning of 1983 I was about to sit down to supper at the Keskins’ when, sensing something strange, something missing, I carefully surveyed the room. The chairs were all in their usual places, and there was no new dog on top of the television, but the sense of something peculiar in the room persisted, as if the walls had been painted black. In those days I’d ceased to think of my life as something I lived in wakeful consciousness of what I was doing: I’d begun instead to think of it as something imagined, something-just like love-that issued from my dreams, and as I had no wish either to fight my growing pessimism about the world or to surrender myself to it unconditionally, I acted as if no such thoughts had entered my mind. It might be said that I had decided to leave everything as it was. I applied the same logic to the unease awakened in me by the dining room as I had to that stirred by the sitting room: I resolved not to dwell on it, to let it pass.
TRT 2, Turkey ’s arts and culture channel, was at the time showing a series of films starring Grace Kelly, who had just died. It was our old friend Ekrem the famous actor who presented the “Art Film” feature every Thursday evening, reading from the script in his hands, which the alcoholic Ekrem Bey hid behind a vase of roses, so as to hide his shaking hands. His comments were written by a young film critic, who had been an old friend of Feridun’s before they fell out over a scathing review of Broken Lives. And Ekrem Bey read the critic’s convoluted, intellectualized prose with little comprehension; finally he raised his eyes from the page, and just before saying, “and so here is tonight’s feature…” he announced that he had met “America’s elegant ‘princess star’ at a film festival many years ago,” adding, almost as if it were a secret, that she had a deep love for Turks, his dreamy expression implying that he might even have enjoyed a grand romance with the enchanting star. Füsun, who had heard a great deal about Grace Kelly from Feridun and his film critic friend during the early years of her marriage, would not miss a single one of these films, and since I would not miss a chance to watch Füsun watch the fragile, helpless, but still radiantly beautiful Grace Kelly, I would make sure to take my place at the Keskin table every Thursday.
That Thursday we watched Hitchcock’s Rear Window, but far from putting my troubled mind at ease, it heightened my anxiety. It was this film I’d gone to see eight years earlier, when, skipping out on my usual lunch with the Satsat employees, I took refuge in a cinema to contemplate Füsun’s kisses in solitude and peace. But now it was no consolation to see from the corner of my eye how engrossed Füsun was in the film, nor did it help to remark on something of Grace Kelly’s purity and refinement in her. Either in spite of the film or because of it, I had sunk into that stupor that afflicted me, if not often then at regular intervals, during suppers in Çukurcuma. It was like being caught in a suffocating dream, trapped in a room whose walls were advancing toward me. It was as if time itself was getting steadily narrower.
I struggled for a long time to convey for the Museum of Innocence this sensation of being caught in a dream. The condition has two aspects: (a) as a spiritual state, and (b) as an illusory view of the world.
The spiritual state is somewhat akin to what follows drinking alcohol or smoking marijuana, though it is different in certain ways. It is the sense of not really living in the present moment, this now. At Füsun’s house, as we were eating supper, I often felt as if I were living a moment in the past. Only a moment before we would have been watching a Grace Kelly film on television, or another like it; true, our conversations at the table were more or less alike, but it was not such sameness that invoked this mood; rather it was a sense of not abiding in those moments of my life as they were occurring, experiencing these moments as if I were not living them. While my body lived out the present on the screen, my mind was watching Füsun and me from a slight distance, and my soul watched from a greater one. So the effect of that moment I was living was of something I was remembering. Visitors to my Museum of Innocence must compel themselves, therefore, to view all objects displayed therein-the buttons, the glasses, the old photographs, and Füsun’s combs-not as real things in the present moment, but as my memories.
To experience this present moment as a memory is to experience a temporal illusion. But I also experienced a spatial illusion. Exhibited here are a pair of optical illusions. Try to detect the seven differences between these two pictures, or decide which one is smaller; this puzzle is of the type that induced a similar disquiet when I was a boy and came across them in magazines for children. When I was a child, games like “Help the king find his way out of the labyrinth!” or “What burrow should the rabbit take to get out of the forest?” amused me as much as they unnerved me. Likewise, during my seventh year of dining with the Keskins, the supper table slowly became less an amusing and more a stifling place. That evening, Füsun sensed my state of mind.
“What’s wrong, Kemal? Didn’t you like the film?”
“No, I liked it.”
“Maybe you didn’t like what it was about,” she said cautiously.
“On the contrary,” I said, and I fell silent.
It was so unusual for Füsun to show interest in my mood, or ask how I was when we were still at the table, in her parents’ earshot, that I was moved to say a few admiring things about the film and Grace Kelly.
“But I know you’re feeling low this evening, Kemal, don’t try to hide it,” Füsun said.