“Mümtaz, may he rest in peace, he always used to say that Osman and Kemal were more intelligent than he was, but I was never sure he believed it. Who says the younger generation must have more brains than we do?” my mother said.
“The girls are certainly smarter,” said Aunt Nesibe. “Did you know, Vecihe”-for some reason, she was unable to, or wouldn’t, address her as “Sister Vecihe” in her old reverential way-“what I regret most in life?” She went on to tell how for a long time she’d dreamed of opening a shop and making a name for herself, but could never find the courage, only to live to see “people who don’t even know how to hold a pair of scissors or sew a stitch now own the finest fashion houses.”
Together we went to the window to watch the rain and the runoff pouring down the hill.
“Tarık Bey, may he rest in peace, was very fond of Kemal,” said Aunt Nesibe as she sat down at the table. “Every evening he’d say, ‘Let’s wait a little longer. Kemal Bey might be coming.’”
I could tell that my mother did not care for these words at all.
“Kemal knows his mind,” said my mother.
“Füsun knows what she wants, too,” said Aunt Nesibe.
“They’ve already made their decision,” said my mother.
But that was as close as my mother got to asking Aunt Nesibe for her daughter’s hand.
Aunt Nesibe and Füsun and I each drank our usual glass of raki; my mother drank only rarely, but she asked for a glass, too, and after two sips turned cheerful-not so much because of the effect of ingesting the raki itself, but because of the fragrance, as my father used to say. She recalled the days when she and Nesibe had stayed up until dawn to complete an evening gown. They both enjoyed reminiscing about the weddings and dresses of that era.
“Vecihe’s pleated dress was so celebrated that afterward other women in Nişantaşı asked to have an identical one made for them. Some of them even bought the same material in Paris, placing it right on my lap, for me to sew, but I refused,” said Aunt Nesibe.
When Füsun rose ceremoniously from the table and went over to Lemon’s cage, I got up, too.
“For God’s sake, don’t bother with that bird while we’re still eating!” my mother cried. “Don’t worry, you have plenty of time left to spend together… Stop, stop right there, I’m not letting either of you back at the table until you’ve washed your hands.”
I went upstairs to wash, and Füsun, who could have washed her hands downstairs in the kitchen, followed me up. At the top of the stairs I took her by the arms and kissed her passionately. It was a deep and mature kiss, lasting ten or twelve seconds. Nine years ago we had kissed like children. But there was nothing childish about this kiss, with its slow, powerful soulfulness. Then Füsun went downstairs ahead of me, at a run.
We got through supper with little further merriment, and keeping a close watch on what we said; as soon as the rain had let up, we left.
“Mother dear, you forgot to ask for the girl’s hand,” I said, as we were driving home in the car.
“How often did you go over there, all these years?” my mother asked. When she saw me at a loss for words, she snapped, “Whatever is done, is done… But Nesibe said one thing that really hurt. Maybe it’s because you hardly ever stayed in to eat supper with your mother that it broke my heart to hear it.” She stroked my arm. “But don’t worry, my son, I didn’t mind. Even so, I just couldn’t bring myself to ask for her hand, as if she were still a lycée girl. She’s been married and divorced; she’s a full-grown woman. She has a head on her shoulders, and she knows what she’s doing. You two have talked everything over and agreed on everything. So why the need for all the pomp and ceremony? If you ask me, even an engagement is unnecessary… Stop prolonging things and creating fodder for gossips-just get married… Don’t bother going to Europe, either; these days you can find everything you want in the shops in Nişantaşı, so what’s the point of trudging over to Paris?”
Seeing my determined silence, she closed the subject.
When we got home, before going to bed, my mother said, “You were right, though. She’s a beautiful woman, and intelligent. She’ll be a good wife for you. But be careful, she looks as if she’s suffered a great deal. I may not know the half of it, but take care not to let the anger, the grudge, whatever it is she’s harboring inside her, poison your life.”
“It won’t!”
Quite to the contrary, with every day, the bond between us grew stronger, and with it our attachment to life, to Istanbul, its streets, its people, and all else. Sometimes while holding hands in a cinema, I would feel a light shiver passing through her. Sometimes she would lean into me, or even rest her head gently on my shoulder. She would sink into her seat to get closer, and I would take her hands between mine, sometimes stroking her leg, like a feather’s touch. During the first weeks Füsun had not liked sitting in a box, but now she didn’t object. Holding her hand allowed me to measure her reflexive responses to the film, just as a doctor might with the tips of his fingers probe a patient’s innermost parts, and I drew enormous pleasure from taking the pulse of her emotional responses to the film.
During intermission, there was cautious talk about the preparations for our trip to Europe, and about beginning to appear together in public, but I never mentioned my mother’s thoughts on an engagement party. I, too, had slowly come to see that an engagement party would bring only trouble, encouraging a lot of gossip, and causing disquiet even inside the family: If we invited a great many the gossip would be of how many we’d invited; if we invited fewer the gossip would be of how few. It seemed to me that Füsun was slowly coming to the same awareness, or at least I thought this was why she, too, avoided talk of the engagement. So it was without discussion that we somehow agreed to skip the engagement and marry at once after our return from Europe. As we smoked our cigarettes during the intervals between films, and at the Beyoğlu patisseries we’d gotten into the habit of visiting afterward, our greatest pleasure was dreaming up things we’d do on our trip. Füsun had bought a book written for Turks called Europeby Car and always took it along to the cinema, and as we turned the pages we would plan our itinerary. We would spend our first night in Edirne, then drive straight through Yugoslavia and Austria. I bought my own guidebooks, as well, and Füsun especially liked to look at the photographs of Paris in them. “Let’s go to Vienna, too,” she would say. Sometimes staring at the pictures of Europe in a book, she would fall into a strange, mournful silence as she drifted off into a daydream.
“What’s wrong, darling? What are you thinking?” I would ask her.
“I don’t know,” Füsun would say.
Because Aunt Nesibe, Füsun, and Çetin had never been outside Turkey before, they were applying for their first passports. To save them from the torture of visiting the various state bureaucracies and the torment of waiting in all those long lines, I brought in Selami, the police chief who took care of such matters for Satsat. (Careful readers will remember that it was this same retired constable whom I had asked to track down Füsun and her family eight years before.) Anchored by love, I had not been outside Turkey for nine years, and so it was I came to discover that I no longer felt the need for travel, where before, if I’d been cooped up in this country for more than three or four months, I’d be out of sorts.
It was a hot summer day when we went to sign papers at the Security Services Passport Office at the Governor’s Headquarters in Babıali. This old building, once home to prime ministers, pashas, and grand viziers, had since been the scene of numerous raids and political murders described in lycée history books, but as with many great Ottoman buildings that had survived into the Republican era, its former gilded splendor had worn away, as thousands of weary souls entered it daily to spend hours standing in line, first to acquire documents, then to have them stamped, and then signed, an eternity that inevitably led to arguments and scuffles, the whole scene suggesting Judgment Day. In the heat and humidity, the documents in our hands quickly turned soggy.