I’d loved Tarık Bey because he was Füsun’s father, because we’d spent so many years at the same table, drinking raki and watching television. But as he’d never really opened himself up to me, I’d never felt truly close to him. In truth, we’d never been fully satisfied with each other, but in spite of that we still managed to get along.
As I thought all this over, I realized that Tarık Bey, like his wife, had known from the beginning that I was in love with his daughter. Or rather, I did not so much realize this as confess it to myself. He’d almost certainly known very early on that I’d been so irresponsible as to sleep with his daughter when she was but eighteen years old, and, inevitably, dismissed me as a heartless rich man, a boorish philanderer. As I was the one who had forced him to marry his precious girl off to a penniless boy with no prospects, he could not but have hated me! But he had never once shown his resentment; or perhaps I had never once wanted to see it. I might say he had both resented and forgiven me, as thieves and gangsters keep company by turning a blind eye on one another’s iniquities and disgraces. This was why, after the first few years, he’d ceased to be the man of the house, just as I had ceased to be the guest: We had become partners in crime.
As I looked at Tarık Bey’s frozen face, a long-suppressed memory surfaced: I was reminded of the fear and awe that had printed itself on my father’s face as he faced death. Tarık Bey’s heart attack had lasted longer: He’d met death and struggled with it, and so on his face there was no awe. He’d bitten his lips on one side, as if to fight the pain, and the other side of his mouth was open, as if grinning. At the table he’d always had a cigarette in that corner of his mouth, and a raki glass in front of him. But in the room there was no charge issuing from the objects that had surrounded him in life; there was only the fog of death and the void.
The white light flooding the room came mostly from the left-hand side of the bay window. Looking outside I saw the narrow street was empty. Because the bay window extended as far as the middle of the street, I could imagine myself suspended above it in midair, in fog so thick that I could only just see the corner where the street met Boğazkesen Avenue, the entire neighborhood asleep in the fog, a cat confidently slinking slowly down the street.
Just over his bed, Tarık Bey had hung a framed photograph from his days as a teacher at Kars Lycée: It showed him standing with his students at the end of a play they had performed in the famous theater that dated back to the time when the city had belonged to the Russians. The top of the bedside table and its half-open drawer also brought back strange memories of my father. It emanated a sweet fragrance, a mixture of dust, medicine, cough syrup, and yellowing paper. Above the drawer I saw a water glass containing his false teeth and a book by his beloved Reşat Ekrem Koçu. Inside the drawer there were old medicine bottles, cigarette holders, telegrams, folded doctors’ reports, newspaper articles about bankers, electric and gas bills, coins now gone out of circulation, and many other odds and ends.
Before any of the day’s visitors gathered at the Keskin house, I left for Nişantaşı. My mother was up and having breakfast in bed, eating from a tray Fatma Hanım had brought her and propped on a pillow: boiled eggs, marmalade, black olives, and toasted bread. She perked up when she saw me. When I told her about Tarık Bey, her face dropped, and she looked genuinely sorry. I could tell that she felt Nesibe’s grief. But beneath that I sensed something else.
“I’ll be going back there,” I said. “Çetin can bring you to the funeral.”
“I’m not going to the funeral, my son.”
“Why not?”
First she gave two ridiculous excuses. “There’s been no announcement in the papers. Why are they in such a big hurry?” and “Why aren’t they having the funeral at Teşvikiye Mosque? Everyone else started their funeral processions there.” I could see that she felt deeply for Nesibe, whom she’d liked so much, and with whom she’d had such good fun during the days when Nesibe had come to the house to sew. But underneath there was something else, something unyielding. When she saw how unsettled I was by her refusal, and how determined to know the true reasons for it, she lost her temper.
“Do you want to know why I’m not going to the funeral?” she said. “Because if I do, you’ll marry that girl.”
“Where did you get that idea? She’s married already.”
“I know. It will break Nesibe’s heart. But my son, I’ve known all about this for years. If you insist on marrying her, it won’t be a pretty picture to most people.”
“Does it really matter, Mother dear? People will always talk.”
“Please, I beg of you, don’t take offense.” Looking very serious, she set her toast on the tray, and next to it, her knife, smeared with butter; and she looked intently into my eyes. “At the end of the day, what other people say has no importance whatsoever. Of course, what’s important is the truth, the honesty of our feelings. I have no complaints about that, my son. You fell in love with a woman… And that’s wonderful, my son. I can’t complain about that. But has she ever loved you? What has she done over the past eight years? Why has she still not left her husband?”
“She’s going to leave him, I am certain of it,” I lied ashamedly.
“Look, your dear departed father was smitten with a poor woman young enough to be his daughter… He was obsessed with her. He even bought her a house. But he kept everything hidden; he didn’t make a fool of himself as you have done. Even his closest friend had no idea.” She turned toward Fatma Hanım, who had just entered the room, and said, “Fatma, we’re having a little talk.” When Fatma had withdrawn, shutting the door behind her, my mother continued. “Your dear departed father was a man of character and intelligence, and a gentleman, too, but even he had his weaknesses and desires. Years ago you asked me for the key to the Merhamet Apartments and I gave it to you, but knowing you to be your father’s son, I warned you. ‘For goodness’ sake, be careful,’ I said. Didn’t I? My son, you didn’t listen to me at all. All right, you say to me that if it’s your fault, where is Nesibe’s sin in all this? What I can never forgive is this torture she and her daughter have subjected you to, these ten long years.”
I did not say, It’s been eight, not ten, Mother. “All right, Mother,” I said. “I know what to say to them.”
“My son, you can’t find happiness with that girl. If you could, you’d have found it by now. I don’t think you should go to the funeral either.”
I did not infer from my mother’s words that I had ruined my life: Quite to the contrary, she’d reminded me, and I felt this all the time now, that I was soon to share a happy life with Füsun. And so I was not in the least angry with her; I even smiled as I listened to her lecture, my only wish being to return to Füsun’s side at once.
Seeing she’d made no impression on me, my mother was incensed. “In a country where men and women can’t be together socially, where they can’t see each other or even have a conversation, there’s no such thing as love,” she vehemently declared. “By any chance do you know why? I’ll tell you: because the moment men see a woman showing some interest, they don’t even bother themselves with whether she’s good or wicked, beautiful or ugly-they just pounce on her like starving animals. This is simply their conditioning. And then they think they’re in love. Can there be such a thing as love in a place like this? Take care! Don’t deceive yourself.”
Finally my mother had succeeded in angering me. “All right then, Mother,” I said. “I’m off.”
“When they hold funerals in neighborhood mosques, the women don’t even attend,” she called after me, as if this had been her real excuse all along.
Two hours later, as the crowd at Firuzağa Mosque dispersed after funeral prayers, I saw women among the mourners embracing Aunt Nesibe, though admittedly they were few. I remember seeing Ceyda and also Şenay Hanım, proprietor of the now defunct Şanzelize Boutique, as I was standing beside Feridun in his flashy sunglasses.