In the days that followed, I went to Çukurcuma early every evening. But I sensed a great uneasiness in the house, and at the table. It was as if the gravity and contrivance of the situation had now been uncloaked. It had always been Tarık Bey who was best at pretending not to see what was going on between us: It was he who’d excelled at acting “as if.” Now that he was gone, there was no acting naturally, nor could we fall back into the comfortable, half-rehearsed routines of the past eight years.
75 The İnci Patisserie
ON A RAINY day at the beginning of April, after chatting with my mother for most of the morning, I went to Satsat at around noon. As I was drinking my coffee and reading the paper at my desk, Aunt Nesibe phoned. She asked me not to come to visit for a while, saying that there’d been some unpleasant gossip going around the neighborhood, and that though she couldn’t go into detail over the phone, she had good news for me. With my secretary, Zeynep Hanım, listening in the next room, I did not inquire how things were going, not wishing to make my concern for Aunt Nesibe too obvious.
For two days I waited, eaten alive by curiosity, until-once more, just before noon-Aunt Nesibe came to see me at Satsat. Despite all the time we’d spent together over the past eight years, it was so strange seeing her at the office that I stared at her blankly as if at some visitor from the provinces or the outskirts of the city, who, having come to exchange a defective Satsat product or to collect her complimentary calendar or ashtray, had found her way upstairs by mistake.
By then Zeynep had figured out that the stranger was someone very important to me; perhaps she could tell from my awkwardness or Aunt Nesibe’s ease, or perhaps she’d already heard a few things. When she asked us how we’d like our Nescafés, Aunt Nesibe said, “I’ll have Turkish coffee, my girl-if that’s possible.”
I closed the connecting door. Aunt Nesibe sat down across from me at my desk and looked me straight in the eyes.
“Everything’s settled,” she said, her manner suggesting not so much a happy outcome as life’s tendency to put things aright in the simplest way. “Füsun and Feridun are separating. If you let Feridun have Lemon Films he’ll be very accommodating. This is what Füsun wants, too. But first the two of you will have to talk.”
“Do you mean me and Feridun?”
“No, I mean you and Füsun.”
After watching the first glow of happiness spread across my face, she lit herself a cigarette, crossed her legs, and told me the story, not in a needlessly dilatory way, but enjoying every bit just the same. Two days earlier, Feridun had come to the house having drunk a good deal; telling Füsun that he and Papatya had split, he said he wanted to come back to the house, and to Füsun. But, of course, Füsun wouldn’t have him back, and a terrible row ensued, and what a pity, what a shame it was that the neighbors, the entire neighborhood, had heard them shouting (this was why Aunt Nesibe had asked that I not visit for a while). Later on Feridun telephoned, and after he and Aunt Nesibe arranged to meet in Beyoğlu, both husband and wife agreed to a separation.
There was a silence. “I’ve changed the locks on the front door,” said Aunt Nesibe. “Our house is no longer Feridun’s house.”
For a moment it was as if all the traffic clattering past Satsat had fallen silent, along with the wider world. Seeing me transfixed by what she’d said, my cigarette burning down unnoticed in my hand, Aunt Nesibe retold her story from the beginning, this time lavishing more detail. “To tell the truth, I could never feel any anger toward that boy,” she said, in a worldly-wise tone of voice that implied she had known from the start how all this would turn out. “Yes, he has a good heart, but he’s also very weak. What mother would want a bridegroom like that?” she said, and then fell silent. I was expecting her next to say something like, Of course, we had no choice, but she said something utterly different.
“I’ve experienced a bit of this in my own life. It’s very difficult, being a beautiful woman in this country especially a divorcée-more difficult, even, than being a beautiful girl… When men can’t get what they want from a beautiful woman, they do evil things to her-you know this, too, Kemal; and Feridun protected Füsun from all those evils.”
For a moment I wondered whether I was one of the evils Feridun had protected her from.
“Of course, it shouldn’t have taken this long to sort things out,” she continued.
Calm but amazed, I said nothing: It was as if I had never noticed before what a strange shape my life had taken.
“Of course, Feridun has a right to Lemon Films,” I said after some time. “I’ll speak to him. Is he at all angry with me?”
“No,” said Aunt Nesibe, frowning. “But Füsun wants to have a serious talk with you. There is so much inside her that has gone unsaid. You’ll talk.”
We decided that Füsun and I should meet at two in the afternoon three days hence, at the İnci Patisserie in Beyoğlu. Aunt Nesibe did not prolong the conversation; she pretended to be uncomfortable speaking in such strange surroundings, but, good woman that she was, she did not try to hide her contentment when she left.
On the afternoon of Monday, April 9, 1984, I went to Beyoğlu as happy and excited as a teenager going to see the lycée girl he had been dreaming about for months. At first I was too restless to sleep and then too impatient to get through the morning. So I’d asked Çetin to drop me off at Taksim early. It was sunny there, while İstiklal Avenue was as always in shadow, and I sought the refuge of its cool shade, its shop windows, its cinema entrances; even the smell of damp and dust in the passages I had visited with my mother as a child was inviting. I was dizzy with blissful memories and the promise of a happy future, the contagious optimism of the crowds swirling past me in search of a nice meal, a diverting film, a few things to buy.
I went into Vakko, Beymen, and a couple of other stores in search of a present for Füsun, but I couldn’t decide on anything. To work off nervous energy, I walked all the way to Tünel, and exactly half an hour before the appointed time, in front of the Mısırlı Apartments, I saw Füsun. She was clad in a lovely spring dress, large, bright polka dots on a white background with a pair of provocatively glamorous sunglasses and was looking at a shop window. She hadn’t noticed me, but I noticed her, and in particular that she was wearing my father’s earrings.
“What a coincidence” were my first clumsy words.
“Oh… hello, Kemal! How are you?”
“It’s such a beautiful day, I had to get out of the office,” I said, as if we’d had no plan to meet in half an hour, and had run into each other by chance. “Shall we walk?”
“First I have to find a particular type of button for my mother,” said Füsun. “She is under a lot of pressure completing an urgent dress order, and so after you and I have spoken, I’m going back to the house to help her. Shall we go to the Passage of Mirrors to find her a wooden button?”
We went not just to the Passage of Mirrors but to several other passages, too. How lovely it was to watch Füsun talk to the shop assistants, looking over samples of all colors, rummaging through trays of old buttons, chatting away as she searched for a set.
“What do you say to these?” she said, having found some buttons.
“They’re beautiful.”
“All right, then.”
She paid for the buttons that I would find nine months later, in her chest of drawers, still in their wrapping paper.
“Come on now, let’s walk a little,” I said. “I spent eight years dreaming about meeting one day in Beyoğlu and walking along together.”
“Really?”
“Truly.”
We walked for a while without speaking. From time to time I, too, would look into a shop window, though it wasn’t the merchandise that drew my eye, but her beautiful reflection in the glass. Men were not the only ones noticing her in the Beyoğlu crowds; it was the women, too, and Füsun liked that.