To become reacquainted with each other as we explored the city, to see an undiscovered part of Istanbul each day, and an unknown side of Füsun-it was a pleasure that continually renewed itself. When we witnessed the poverty and chaos that reigned in the hospitals, the desperate old people who had to queue outside the entrances in the early hours of the morning to have any chance of seeing a doctor, or when we happened on black market butchers cutting up carcasses in the empty lots of the backstreets, far from the supervising eyes of the city council, it seemed to me that in life’s shadowy precincts we were drawn even closer. Though our own story had its own vexing shadows, they were as nothing to the fearsome darkness in the lives of the city and its dwellers that we glimpsed while walking these streets. The city was teaching us to see the ordinariness of our lives, teaching us, too, a humility that banished guilt. There was a consoling power I felt mixing with the city crowds in shared taxis and buses, and admiring Füsun as she conversed with a headscarfed auntie sitting in the next seat, her grandchild asleep in her lap.
With her, I was able to discover all the awkwardness and pleasure of a stroll through Istanbul in the company of a beautiful woman whose head was uncovered. If we entered a hospital reception area, or the office of a state bureaucracy, all heads would turn toward her. Old functionaries accustomed to peering down indifferently on the impoverished and the elderly would perk up, presenting themselves as diligently devoted to duty, and without first inquiring her age would address her as “young madam.” There were those who, habituated to the careless use of the familiar with other patients, pointedly adopted the formal “you,” and there were others who didn’t dare even to look at her face. Young doctors would approach like urbane gentlemen in European films, to ask, “Might I be of any assistance?” Crusty professors who seemed not even to notice me tried to charm her with quips and courtesies. All this disruption on account of a beautiful woman appearing without a headscarf in the office of a state bureaucracy, sowing momentary alarm, even panic. Some clerks could not bring themselves to discuss the business at hand in her presence, others would stammer, still others fall silent, obliged to seek out a man who could act as intermediary. When they finally saw me, and took me for her husband, they would relax, as would I, in much the same helplessness.
“Füsun Hanım needs a report from the ear, nose, and throat specialist to take to the office of drivers licensing,” I’d say. “We were sent here from Beşiktaş.”
“The doctor isn’t in yet,” the orderly in charge would say. Opening the file in our hands, he would glance quickly at the documents inside and say, “Please sign in and take a number.” When we noticed how long the line of patients was, he would add: “Everyone is waiting in line. There’s no one who doesn’t wait.”
Once I spied an opportunity to grease the orderly’s palm, but Füsun objected, saying, “No, we’re going to do this like everyone else.”
As we waited in line, chatting with patients and clerks, everyone assumed I was her husband, and this pleased me. I did not see the mistake as reflecting the assumption that a woman would never go to a hospital with a man who wasn’t her husband, but as proof that our growing intimacy was now clear to all. Once we went for a stroll in the backstreets of Cerrahpaşa, while waiting for our number to be called at the University’s Çapa Hospital, and at some moment I had lost Füsun, whereupon a window in a ramshackle wooden house opened, and a headscarf-wearing auntie informed me that “your wife” had stepped into the grocery story around the corner. We attracted some notice in these backstreet neighborhoods, but no alarm. A few children might follow us; some adults mistook us for tourists who’d lost their way. Sometimes a smitten youth might shadow us, just to admire Füsun from afar, but when a few streets farther on I would catch his gaze, he would politely retreat. Heads were often to be seen poking out of doors and windows, the women asking Füsun whom we were seeking or what address, and the men asking me. Once, seeing Füsun about to eat a plum she’d bought from a street vendor, an old woman reached out, crying, “Wait a minute, my girl. Let me wash that for you first!” The woman washed our plums in her stone-paved kitchen on the ground floor, made us coffee, and asked us what we were doing in the area; when I said that my wife and I were searching for a beautiful wooden house to live in, the old woman relayed this information to all the neighbors.
All the while, our laborious driving lessons in Yıldız Park continued, and we were also preparing for the written exam. If we were sitting in a tea garden with some time to kill, Füsun would sometimes take a booklet from her bag with a title like Driving Made Easy or Driving Exam Questions Complete with Answers, and, smiling mischievously, she would quiz me.
“What is a road?”
“I give up.”
“The lanes and zones open to traffic for public use,” Füsun would say, reciting half from memory and reading the rest. “All right then, what is traffic?”
“Traffic refers to the presence and movement of pedestrians and animals-”
“There is no ‘and,’” Füsun would say. “Traffic refers to the presence and movement of pedestrians, animals, vehicular machinery, and tractors with tires on roads.”
I enjoyed these question-and-answer exchanges, which caused us to reminisce about middle school, and the curriculum, which relied so heavily on memorization, and our report cards, which included marks for “comportment,” and soon I would find myself asking her a question.
“What is love?”
“I don’t know.”
“Love is the name given to the bond Kemal feels with Füsun whenever they travel along highways or sidewalks; visit houses, gardens, or rooms; or whenever he watches her sitting in tea gardens and restaurants, and at dinner tables.”
“Hmmm… that’s a lovely answer,” Füsun would say. “But isn’t love what you feel when you can’t see me?”
“Under those circumstances, it becomes a terrible obsession, an illness.”
“What has this got to do with the driving examination?” Füsun would say. Then she would behave as if this sort of dalliance could not be allowed to go on if a couple was unmarried, and I would take care not to make any more such jokes for the rest of the day.
The written exam took place in Beşiktaş, in a small palace where Numan Efendi, one of Abdülhamit’s crazy princes, had listened to harem girls play the ud as he whiled away the hours doing impressionist paintings of the Bosphorus. After the founding of the Republic the building had been converted by the state into offices that were never properly heated, and as I waited at the entrance, I regretfully remembered, as I had countless times, that I should have waited outside the Taşkışla Building, where she had taken her university entrance exam eight years earlier. Had I broken off the engagement to Sibel and sent my mother to ask for Füsun’s hand, we could have had three children by now. But there would still be time for three children, or even more, once we’d married. I was so sure of this that when Füsun came out of the exam looking elated, and announcing, “I answered all the questions!” I was on the verge of informing her how many children we would have, but I held back, mindful of how, in the evenings, we were still sitting, quite solemnly, at the family table, watching television as we ate.