“Fine, then, I’ll talk… It’s just that it seems as if something has changed in this house, but I can’t figure out what it is.”
They all burst out laughing.
“We’ve moved Lemon to the back room, Kemal Bey,” said Aunt Nesibe. “We were wondering why you hadn’t mentioned it.”
“Is that so?” I said. “How could I not have noticed? I mean, I love Lemon…”
“We love him, too,” said Füsun proudly. “I’ve decided to paint his portrait, so I’ve moved the cage into the other room.”
“Have you started painting yet? Could I have a look, please?”
“Of course.”
It had been some time since Füsun had given up on her bird series, for which she could no longer summon up the enthusiasm. Entering the room, before looking at Lemon himself, I inspected Füsun’s painting of the bird, only just begun.
“Feridun doesn’t take bird photographs anymore,” said Füsun. “And so I’ve decided to paint from life instead.”
Füsun’s mood, her poise as she talked about Feridun as if he were someone from her past-it all set my head spinning. But I kept my calm. “You’ve made a good start on this, Füsun,” I said. “Lemon is going to be your best painting yet. After all, you know your subject so well, and it’s by drawing on the subjects one knows best that one makes the most successful art.”
“But I’m not aiming for realism.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not going to paint his cage. Lemon will be perched in front of the window like a wild bird who has alighted there of his own free will.”
That week I went three more times to the Keskins’ for supper. Each night, when the meal was over, we went into the back room to Lemon’s emerging portrait. He seemed happier and livelier outside his cage, and when we went into the back room, we were now more interested in the painting than the bird itself. After an oddly serious but perfectly sincere discussion of the challenges of this project, we would speak of going to see the museums of Paris.
On Tuesday evening, as we gazed at the painting of Lemon, I uttered the words I had prepared in advance, though I was as nervous as a lycée student: “Darling, the time has come for us to leave this house, this life, together,” I whispered. “Life is short, and in our stubbornness we have lost many days, many years. What we need is to go to another place to be happy.” Füsun acted as if she had not heard me, but Lemon answered with an abbreviated chk, chk, chk. “There’s nothing to fear anymore, nothing to hold us back. Let’s you and I, the two of us, leave this house together, for another place, another house, our own house, and let us live happily from then on. You are only twenty-five years old-we have half a century of life ahead of us, Füsun. We have suffered enough over these past six years to deserve those fifty years of happiness! Let’s leave together now. We’ve been stubborn with each other for long enough.”
“Have we been stubborn with each other, Kemal? That’s news to me. Don’t put your hand there, you’re scaring the bird.”
“I’m not scaring him. Look, he’s eating from my hand. We can give him the best place in the house.”
“My father will be wondering where we are,” she said, warmly, as if we were sharing a secret.
The next Thursday, we saw To Catch a Thief. Instead of watching Grace Kelly, I watched Füsun watching her, from start to finish. In everything-from the pulsing of the blue veins in my beauty’s throat to the way her hand fluttered across the table, straightened her hair, or held her Samsun-I saw her fascination for the screen princess.
When we went into the back room, Füsun said, “Do you know what, Kemal? Grace Kelly was bad at mathematics, too. And she got into acting by working as a model first. But the only thing I really envy her is that she could drive a car.”
In his introduction that week, as if he was giving inside information about a very close friend, Ekrem Bey informed Turkey ’s art film enthusiasts of the odd coincidence: that a year earlier the princess had died in a car accident on the same road she had driven down in this film.
“Why were you jealous?”
“I don’t know. Driving made her look so powerful, and free. Maybe that’s why.”
“I could teach you, if you like.”
“No, no, that would be impossible.”
“Füsun, I know that in two weeks I can teach you enough for you to get your license and drive comfortably around Istanbul. There’s nothing to it. Besides, Çetin taught me how to drive when I was your age [this wasn’t true]. All you need to do is to be calm, to have a little patience.”
“I’m patient,” Füsun said confidently.
73 Füsun’s Driving License
IN APRIL 1983 Füsun and I began to prepare for the drivers’ licensing examination, our first tentative plans having been followed by five weeks of indecision, feigned reluctance, and silence. We both knew there would be more at stake than a license since the intimacy between us was to be put to the test, once again in a tutelary setting. We had been given our second chance, and being quite sure that God would not give us a third, I was tense about it.
Still, I was jubilant at Füsun’s ultimate agreement and so I nurtured real hope of becoming steadily more relaxed, cheerful, and confident. The sun was emerging from behind the clouds after a long, dark winter.
It was on the afternoon of one such sunny, glistening spring day (April 15, to be exact, three days after we had celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday with a chocolate cake I’d bought at Divan) that I picked up Füsun in the Chevrolet in front of Firuzağa Mosque for her first driving lesson, and off we went, with me at the wheel and Füsun sitting beside me. She’d asked me not to pick her up in front of the house in Çukurcuma but on a corner higher up the hill, five minutes away from the curious eyes of the neighborhood.
It was the first time in eight years that we were going out alone together, though I was too tense and excited to notice my elation. I was meeting this girl after an agonizing eight-year wait-I had been put to so many tests, endured such pain-yet that is not how it felt. Rather it was as if I was meeting for the first time a splendid young girl who had been found for me by others, and who was, in their view, a perfect match.
Füsun was wearing a becoming print dress of orange roses and green leaves on a white background. It was the same elegant dress-with its V-shaped neckline and its skirt falling just below her knees-that she would wear to each driving lesson, as a sportswoman might wear the same tracksuit for every training session, and by the end of the lesson, her dress would be as dampened as any athlete’s suit. Three years after we had begun our lessons, when I spotted it in Füsun’s chest of drawers, I would pluck it out, instinctively sniffing its sleeves and its front for her unique scent, longing to remember the pleasure of those tense and dizzying lessons of ours, in Yıldız Park, just above Sultan Abdülhamit’s palace.
The underarms of Füsun’s dress would be the first to become moist, before the damp patches spread slowly and adorably over her breasts, her arms, and her abdomen. Sometimes the engine would stall in a bright spot in the park, and-just as eight years earlier, when we were making love-we would perspire lightly, feeling the sun on our skin. But it was not so much the sun that made Füsun and me perspire as the fact of being alone in that car, trapped in our own air, our own shame, tensions, and jangled nerves. When Füsun made a mistake, for example, rolling the right-hand front tire over the curb, grinding the gears, or causing the engine to stall, she would redden with anger and begin to perspire, never more profusely than when she bungled the clutch.
Füsun had made a careful study of all the traffic regulations, memorizing the books at home, and her steering wasn’t bad, but-as with so many new drivers-the clutch was her downfall. She’d drive carefully at a low speed down the learner’s lane, and slow down for the intersection, approaching the sidewalk as carefully as a captain landing at an island pier, and just as I said, “That’s wonderful, my lovely, you’re really catching on,” she’d take her foot off the clutch too fast and the car would lurch forward and strain for breath like a rasping old man. As the car stumbled on like a coughing invalid, I would cry, “The clutch, the clutch, the clutch!” But in her panic Füsun would hit the accelerator or the brakes instead. When it was the accelerator, the car would rock more menacingly before stalling. I’d observe the sweat pouring down Füsun’s red face, her forehead, the tip of her nose, and her temples.