Füsun passed the written exam with a perfect score, but she failed her first road test miserably. They flunked everyone on the first attempt, just to emphasize what a serious business it was to operate an automobile, but we were unprepared for how it turned out. Füsun got into the Chevrolet with the three-man examination committee, and though she had successfully started up the car and put it into motion, she had not gone far before a deep-voiced examiner in the backseat declared, “You didn’t look in the mirrors!” and when Füsun turned around to ask, “What did you say?” they instructed her to stop the car at once and get out. Drivers, the regulations clearly stated, were never to look behind them while they were driving. The examiners bolted from the Chevrolet, as if truly frightened to be in a car with such a reckless driver, a degrading show that Füsun found demoralizing.
They scheduled her for a retake four weeks later, at the end of July. Those familiar with the modus operandi of the drivers licensing agency could only laugh to see us so downcast and humiliated, and they lectured us amicably about bribes and how we might go about procuring a license at a particular shantytown teahouse (with four pictures of Atatürk and a clock on its walls) that was frequented by everyone in Istanbul who had a hand in the drivers licensing business. If we were to enroll in one of the pricey driving schools where retired traffic policemen taught (and attendance wasn’t compulsory), we were certain to pass, because the examination committee and many policemen were partners in that business.
Paying for this course also afforded one the privilege of taking the test in an old Ford specially modified for the purpose: This vehicle had a huge hole in the floor next to the driver’s seat, so that when the driving candidate was called upon to park in a tight space, he could see the colored markings on the road; and if he would but refer to the written guide hidden behind the sun visor, he would know which colored marking indicated that he should turn the wheel as far as it could go to the left, and exactly when he should go into reverse, so as to park the car flawlessly. It was also possible, for a larger sum, to avoid enrolling in a school altogether, a custom which I, as a businessman, knew only too well was sometimes unavoidable. But as Füsun was adamantly opposed to the smallest enrichment of the policemen who had callously failed her, we continued our lessons at Yıldız Park.
The examination guide contained hundreds of minor regulations of which a driver needed to show awareness on the road. It was not enough to operate the car properly in the presence of the examining committee; one also had to demonstrate, sometimes by exaggerated gestures, mastery of these regulations-for instance, looking into the rearview mirror as required counted for nothing unless you also showed consciousness of doing so by gripping the mirror. A fatherly policeman with long experience of the licensing process explained this to Füsun in a most affable way, saying, “My girl, it’s not enough to drive a car during your exam. You also have to look as if you’re driving. The first you do for your own benefit, and the second for the benefit of the state.”
After our driving lessons in the park, when the sun was low in the sky, we would go to Emirgân for coffee and soda on the edge of the Bosphorus, or to a coffeehouse in Rumelihisarı for tea from a samovar, and these pleasures never failed to neutralize the aggravations of the lessons. But let no reader infer from this that we carried on like giddy lovers.
“We’re making better progress at these lessons than we did with mathematics!” I said once.
“We shall see,” Füsun replied cautiously.
Sometimes we would sit at the table and drink our teas in silence, like some long-married couple who had run out of things to say to each other; as we admired the Russian tankers passing by, or the City Line ferries on their way to Heybeliada, or (as happened once) the Sam-sun heading out on its tour of the Black Sea ports, we seemed lost in misery, in dreams of other lives and other worlds.
Füsun didn’t pass her second test either. This time they set her the very difficult task of maneuvering into an imaginary parking space while driving up a hill in reverse. When she made the Chevrolet tremble and judder again, they ordered her out of the car in the same humiliating way.
I had been watching from a distance with a mixed crowd of retired policemen, applicants, letter writers, teaboys, and various gawkers; when one of them saw a bespectacled examiner once again take the wheel from Füsun, he said, “They flunked that chick,” and a couple of others laughed.
As we drove back toward the house, Füsun was too upset to speak. Without asking her first, I parked the car in Ortaköy and sat down in a little meyhane in the market, where I ordered us some rakı with ice.
“Life is short but very sweet, Füsun,” I said after a few swigs of rakı. “The time has come to stop letting these fiends get the better of you.”
“How can they be so vile?”
“They want money. So let’s pay them.”
“Do you believe women can never be good drivers?”
“It’s not what I think, but it is what they think.”
“It’s what everyone thinks.”
“Darling, I beg you, don’t be so stubborn about this as well,” I said, hoping almost at once that Füsun had not heard me say this.
“I’m not stubborn in anything, Kemal,” she said. “But when your pride or your honor is being trampled on, you can’t just bow your head. Now I’m going to ask something of you, and I would like you to listen, please, and take it seriously. I am going to get my license without paying a bribe, Kemal, and on no account are you to interfere. Don’t you dare pay a bribe behind my back, and don’t try to pull any strings, either, because I’ll know if you do, and I will be extremely upset.”
“All right,” I said, looking down.
We drank our rakıs saying little more to each other. It was almost evening, and this meyhane in the middle of the market was empty. Impatient flies were perched uncertainly on its trays of fried mussels and little meatballs with thyme and cumin. Years later I went back for another look at that ramshackle meyhane whose memory is so dear to me, but the entire building had been razed and in its place were now shops selling evil eyes, trinkets, and other tourist souvenirs.
That evening, after we’d left the restaurant and were getting back into the car, I took Füsun by the arm.
“Do you know what, sweetheart? That was the first time in eight years we have eaten in a restaurant, just the two of us.”
“Yes,” she said. The light that flickered for a moment in her eyes made me inordinately happy. “I have something else to say to you. Give me the keys, I’m going to drive the car.”
“Of course.”
The junctions and hills of Beşiktaş and Dolmabahçe made her perspire a little, but even though she’d had a bit to drink, she was able to steer the Chevrolet as far as Firuzağa Mosque without incident. When I picked her up three days later from the usual spot, she wanted to drive the car again, but the city was crawling with police and I talked her out of it. Despite the hot weather, our lesson went amazingly well.
As we were driving back I looked at the whitecaps on the windy Bosphorus and said, “If only we’d brought our swimsuits!”
The next time we went out, when Füsun left the house in the usual floral print dress, she was wearing underneath it the blue bikini displayed here. After our lesson, at Tarabya Beach, she did not take off her dress until just before she jumped off the seawall into the water. For one brief moment of embarrassment, I could see my beloved’s body, and then she swam away, so fast you might have thought she was fleeing me. The bubbles and the churning water in the wake of her plunge, the beautiful light, the midnight blue of the Bosphorus, her bikini-all this gathered in my mind to form an indelible image, a feeling. I spent years searching out that sentiment, and those wondrous colors, in the old photographs and postcards of Istanbul ’s troubled collectors.
I jumped into the sea right after her. A strange voice inside warned of monsters and evil creatures perhaps lurking underwater, waiting to attack her. I needed to reach her in time and protect her from the depths of the waves. I remember that I was giddy as I searched for her in the choppy sea, that I swam as fast as I could, panicked at the thought that happiness might escape my grasp, and that at one moment at the height of my panic I couldn’t breathe. Füsun had been carried away by the Bosphorus currents! At that moment I wanted to die with her; I wanted to die at once. Just then the capricious waves of the Bosphorus opened up and there was Füsun right in front of me. Both of us breathless, we faced each other with the smiles of happy lovers. But when I tried to get closer, so that I might touch her, kiss her, she pulled a long face, like some modest girl with scruples; without further dallying, she did a cool breaststroke away from me. I swam after her, doing the same stroke. As I swam I admired the movement of her beautiful legs, the sweet roundness of her buttocks. Only much later would I notice how far we were from shore.