As Çetin was filling the tank at the Çatalca exit, Füsun got out of the car with her mother. After buying a packet of the local fol cheese from an old lady selling her wares beside the road, they went into the teahouse next door, ordered tea and simits to accompany the cheese, and tucked into their makeshift feast. As I sat down with them, it occurred to me that if we continued at this pace, our European tour would last months, not weeks. Did I complain? No! As I sat across from Füsun, silently watching her, I felt the same sweet ache spreading through my chest and my stomach as I’d felt in early adolescence at a dance party, or upon meeting a beautiful girl at the start of summer. It was not the deep and corrosive agony of thwarted love that had once been so familiar, but a requited lover’s sweet impatience.
At 7:40 the sun shone into our eyes before sinking below the line of the sunflower fields. Not long after Çetin Efendi had turned on the headlights, Aunt Nesibe said, “For the grace of God, everyone, let’s not drive in this darkness!”
On the two-lane road the trucks bearing down on us from the opposite direction did not even bother to dim their lights. Just past Babaeski, my eyes were drawn to the blinking purple neon sign of the Grand Semiramis Hotel; it seemed a good place to stop for the night. I asked Çetin to slow down; making a turn in front of Türk Petrol, we heard the dog’s woof, woof, woof warning us off. Çetin stopped in front of the hotel, where my heart began to beat wildly, bursting with feeling, and the awareness that at this place, after nine years of longing, my dreams would come true.
The three-story hotel was quite clean and, except for its name, a modest establishment; the retired army officer at the desk (a cheerful picture of him armed and in uniform hanging above reception) accommodated my request for three rooms, one for Füsun and Aunt Nesibe, one for Çetin Efendi, and one for me. When I found mine, I lay down on the bed and, gazing at the ceiling, it occurred to me that enduring this entire journey while sleeping alone in the room next to Füsun’s might be even worse than having waited nine years.
Later, as she entered the small dining room downstairs, I noticed that Füsun’s manner perfectly befitted the surprise I had prepared for her. It was the sort of entrance one might have made into the sumptuous salon hung with velvet curtains of a grand hotel in some glittering European seaside resort of the nineteenth century: She was beautifully made up and wearing a perfume that I had given her years earlier-Le Soleil Noir (I display the bottle here)-and her lipstick shade matched the red of her dress (also in this exhibit), which brought out the lustrous undertones of her black hair. Sitting at the other tables were tired families-workers returning from Germany; from time to time curious children and lustful fathers would turn around to look at us.
“That red looks lovely on you tonight,” said Aunt Nesibe. “It will look even better in the hotel in Paris, and when we go out. But, darling, don’t wear it every night we’re on the road.”
Aunt Nesibe shot me a look requesting that I second her advice, but no words came from my mouth. It wasn’t merely that, in fact, I wanted her to wear this dress every night, for in it she was so extraordinarily beautiful; it was also that I was as tense as a young lover who, sensing that his happiness is very close at hand, still fears what might go wrong; and so I was struck dumb. I sensed that Füsun, sitting just across from me, felt something of the same anxiety, as she avoided my gaze, and smoked awkwardly as a schoolgirl novice, turning away to exhale.
As we looked over the hotel’s rather plain menu, which had been approved by Babaeski Council, there was a long, strange silence, as if this were the moment to review the last nine years of our lives.
When a waiter finally appeared, I ordered a large bottle of Yeni Rakı.
“Why don’t you have a drink tonight, too, Çetin Efendi, so that we can make a toast,” I said. “You won’t be driving me home after supper.”
“God bless you, Çetin Bey, you’ve spent enough time waiting,” said Aunt Nesibe, full of appreciation. And then, still holding his attention, she looked at me and said, “If you have patience, and put yourself in God’s hands, there is no heart you cannot win, no fortress you cannot capture-isn’t that so?”
When the raki arrived, I poured out a generous amount for Füsun-as I’d done for the others-adoring the way she smoked when she was nervous, staring at the tip of her cigarette. We’d all, Aunt Nesibe included, taken our raki on the rocks, and as the liquid clouded, we drank it in like some potion. After a while I relaxed.
The world was a beautiful place, in truth. It was as if I were noticing this for the first time, though I had already known that I would be caressing Füsun’s fine body, her long arms, and her beautiful breasts for the rest of my life, that resting my head against her neck and breathing in her scent I would sleep in peace for years to come.
I did as I’d done as a child, first concentrating to put out of my mind whatever the cause of my happiness, so that I might then look around me with fresh eyes and see the beauty of everything anew: on the wall a fetchingly elegant photograph of Atatürk in a frock coat, beside it a panorama of the Swiss Alps, a prospect of the Bosphorus Bridge, and-a souvenir of nine years ago-an image of Inge posing sweetly with a bottle of Meltem. I saw a clock showing the time to be twenty past nine, and a sign on the wall behind the reception desk warning that “couples will be asked to present a marriage certificate.”
“Withering Slopes is on tonight. Should we tell them to find the channel?”
“There’s still time, Mother,” said Füsun.
A foreign couple in their thirties came into the dining room. Everyone turned around to look at them, and they greeted us politely. They were French. In those days very few tourists from the West came to Turkey, but those who did came mostly by car.
When the time came, the hotel owner sat down in front of the television with his wife, who was wearing a headscarf, and his two grown daughters-one of whom I’d seen earlier in the kitchen-whose heads were not covered; with their backs to their guests, they settled in to watch the latest episode in silence.
“Kemal Bey, you won’t be able to see from there,” said Aunt Nesibe. “Why don’t you come sit next to us?” whereupon I wedged my chair into the narrow space between Füsun and her.
Withering Slopes was set in the Istanbul hills, but I cannot say that I took much of it in, with Füsun pressing against me with her bare arm! My left arm, especially my forearm, pressed against her, was aflame. My eyes were on the screen, but it was as if my soul had entered Füsun’s.
A third eye, an inner one, feasted on Füsun’s neck, and her beautiful breasts, and the strawberry nipples at the tips of those breasts, and the whiteness of her stomach. Füsun kept pressing against me, and she slowly increased the pressure, so that the Batanay Sunflower Oil ashtray into which she stubbed out her cigarette, even the lipstick-stained cigarette ends, escaped my notice.
When the episode had ended, the television was switched off for the night. The hotel owner’s elder daughter turned on the radio and found some sweet, light music that the French couple appreciated. Returning my chair to its rightful place, I very nearly tripped, having drunk so much. Füsun had had three glasses, by the report of my third eye, which kept count.
“We forgot to make a toast,” said Çetin Efendi.
“Yes, let’s make a toast,” I said. “In fact, the time has come for us to have a small ceremony. Çetin Efendi, you are now going to officiate.”
With a flourish, I produced the engagement rings I had bought a week earlier at the Covered Bazaar, and took them out of their boxes.