“Kemal Bey,” said the neighbor, Efe the electrician. “Tarık Bey has passed away. Please accept our condolences.”
I ran upstairs, instinct taking me not to the master bedroom but to Füsun’s room-the little bedroom I had dreamed of for so many years.
My lovely was lying doubled up in bed and crying. When she saw me she straightened herself, and I sat down beside her. We instantly threw our arms around each other, embracing with all our strength. She rested her head between my neck and chest, weeping convulsively.
Dear God, what great happiness it was to hold her in my arms! I felt the world’s profundity, its unbounded beauty. With her head resting on my shoulder, her chest pressed against mine, I felt as if it were not just she but the entire world in my arms. Her shaking upset me, grieved me deeply, in fact, but what bliss it brought me, too! I stroked her hair with care and tenderness, combing it gently with my fingers. Every time my hand returned to her roots so my fingers could pass once more through her hair, her entire body quaked as she burst into tears once more.
I called to mind my own father’s death so that I might better share in her grief. But much as I’d loved my father, there’d always been a tension between us, a rivalry of sorts. Füsun, by contrast, had loved her father deeply, tirelessly, and without effort or reservation, just as one might love one’s home, and one’s street, and the sun that shone down on them. And it seemed to me that her tears were shed not just for her father but also for the state of the world, and the course of life.
“Don’t worry, my darling,” I whispered into her ear. “Everything will be fine from now on. From now on everything will work out. We are going to be very happy.”
“I don’t want anything anymore!” she said, wailing more fiercely. As I felt her shudder in my arms, I looked long and hard at the furniture, the drawers, the little nightstand, Feridun’s film books, and so much else. For eight years, how much I had longed to come into this room where Füsun kept all her dresses, and all her other belongings.
As her sobbing intensified, Aunt Nesibe came in. “Oh Kemal,” she said, “what are we going to do? How can I live without him?” Sitting down on the bed, she, too, began to cry.
I spent the night in Çukurcuma. Sometimes I would go downstairs to sit with the friends and acquaintances who had come to offer condolences, and then I would go back upstairs to comfort Füsun, still crying in her room; I would stroke her hair and give her a fresh handkerchief. As her father’s body lay in the next room, and the friends and acquaintances gathered together downstairs sat drinking tea and smoking cigarettes and watching television in silence, Füsun and I lay side by side, locked in an embrace, for the first time in nine years. I breathed in the scent of her neck, her hair, her skin perfumed with the scent that the exertions of crying had released. Then I would go back downstairs to serve the guests.
Feridun was unaware of what had happened, and that night he did not come to the house. It is only now, years later, that I can fully appreciate the thoughtfulness of the neighbors in acting as if it was entirely natural that I be there, indeed as if I were Füsun’s husband. I’d met them all in the course of my visits to Çukurcuma, sometimes in the street, and sometimes when they called at the house, and to offer them tea and coffee, to empty their ashtrays, to offer them pastries hurriedly acquired from the corner bakery was for me a welcome distraction, as it was for Füsun and Aunt Nesibe. At one point three men-the Laz carpenter whose shop was just up the hill, the eldest son of Rahmi Bey (whose artificial hand will be familiar to all museum visitors), and an old friend who often came to play cards with Tarık Bey in the afternoons-embraced me each in turn, repeating the traditional entreaty not to die with the dead. But as I grieved for Tarık Bey, there was also inside me a boundless will to live; as I considered the new life now awaiting me, I felt deeply happy, and on this account ashamed.
After the banker he’d invested with went bankrupt and fled the country, Tarık Bey began to spend time at an association set up by a number of other “banker victims” (as the newspapers liked to call them). The association had been established to find a legal means of recovering the money that the retirees and petty clerks had lost to the bankers, but in this it had been unsuccessful. As Tarık Bey would sometimes relate to us, barely containing his laughter, the members (whom he sometimes described as a “brainless rabble”) were so fractious that planning discussions would typically degenerate into argument, with victims kicking and punching one another. Sometimes, after a great deal of shouting, they would force through a petition, which they’d submit to the ministry or leave at the door of a bank or a newspaper with no professed interest in helping them. Some members would pelt banks with rocks, bellowing their grievances, sometimes assaulting bank clerks. After several unsavory incidents in which bankers’ doors had been kicked down and their homes and offices looted, Tarık Bey distanced himself from the association, but that summer, while Füsun and I were sweating for her driver’s license and swimming in the sea, he’d begun attending meetings once again. That afternoon some development at the association had particularly annoyed him, and he’d gone home complaining of chest pains; as the doctor who’d come hours too late was able to confirm with one look, he’d died of a heart attack.
Füsun was all the more distraught at not having been at home when her father died. Tarık Bey must have lain in bed for a long time, waiting for his wife and daughter. Aunt Nesibe had taken Füsun along that day to a house in Moda to finish a dress that was a rush order. In spite of all the assistance I had given the family, from time to time Aunt Nesibe still went off with that sewing box with the picture of Galata Bridge on it, to work at various houses at a daily rate. In no way was I insulted, as other men might have been, by Aunt Nesibe’s persistence; rather, I was impressed that she still sewed, even though she knew she could count on me for support. Still, I was troubled whenever I heard that Füsun had accompanied her, asking myself what my beauty, my one and only, could be doing in those strangers’ houses; but she went only rarely, and even more rarely spoke to me about those sewing day trips, though when she did she always described them as pleasant excursions, in terms reminiscent of her mother’s visits to Suadiye so many years ago, with such joy in her voice as she told me of drinking ajran on the Kadıköy ferry, and of throwing simits to the seagulls, that I hadn’t had the heart to tell her that when we were married and living among the rich, neither of us would enjoy meeting those people whose houses she’d visited as a seamstress.
Long after midnight, when everyone had left, I curled up on the divan in the back room downstairs. To sleep in the same house with Füsun, for the first time in my life… this was the greatest happiness. Before drifting off to blissful sleep, I listened first to Lemon rattling about in his cage, and then to the ships sounding their whistles.
I woke up with the morning call to prayer; by now the ships on the Bosphorus were more insistent, and in my dream Füsun’s ferry ride from Karaköy to Kadıköy had merged with Tarık Bey’s death.
From time to time, I heard foghorns, too, and the whole house was bathed in the pearly white that was particular to foggy days. Passing in silence through the white dreamscape, I made my way up the stairs. There, on the bed where she and Feridun had spent the first happy nights of their marriage, I found Füsun fast asleep, with her arms draped around her mother. I sensed that Aunt Nesibe had heard me. I gave the room one last careful peek: Füsun really was asleep, and Aunt Nesibe was pretending.
Going into the other room, I gently lifted the sheet they’d draped over him, and looked for the first time at Tarık Bey’s body. He was still wearing the jacket he’d put on to attend the meeting at the banker victims’ association. His face was ashen, the blood having gathered at the nape of his neck. It was as if the stains and moles and wrinkles on his face had grown larger in death. Was this because his soul had left him, or because his body had already begun to decay and change shape? Death’s terrifying presence was much stronger than the love I felt for Tarık Bey. Rather than feel for him, or put myself in his shoes, I wanted only to flee. But I did not leave the room.