When she was ten, she would ask her father if she could sit on his lap while he was playing cards, and when he said no (“Stop, my girl, I’m busy, can’t you see?”), one of his card-playing friends (Mr. Ugly) invited her onto his lap, saying, “Come over here and bring me luck,” and he went on to caress her in a way that she would later understand to be far from innocent.
Istanbul ’s streets, bridges, hills, cinemas, buses, crowded squares, and isolated corners were filled with these shadowy Uncles Sleaze, Shit-head, and Ugly, who, though they appeared like dark specters in her dreams, she could not bring herself to hate as individuals (“Perhaps it was because none of them ever really shook me to the core”). What Füsun found hard to reckon was that even though one of every two family visitors quickly turned into an Uncle Sleaze or a Mr. Shithead, her father never noticed them squeezing or touching her in the corridors or the kitchen. When she was thirteen, she was convinced that being a good girl obliged her not to complain about this pack of shifty, sleazy, loathsome men with their restless paws. During those same years, when a lycée “boy” who was in love with her (about which Füsun had no complaints) wrote “I love you” on the street, just in front of the house, her father pulled her to the window by her ear to point at the writing and gave her a smack.
Because so many Shameless Uncles had a penchant for exposing themselves in parks, empty lots, and backstreets, she, like all presentable Istanbul girls, learned to avoid such places. Yet there were inevitably exceptions. One reason that these violations had not strained her optimism was that, even as they all repeated the secret refrain of the same dark music, the malefactors were at the same time eager to reveal their vulnerabilities. There was an army of followers-men who had seen her in the street, caught sight of her at the school gate, in front of the cinema, or on the bus; some would follow her for months on end, and she would pretend she hadn’t noticed them, but she never took pity on any of them (I was the one who’d asked if she had). Some of her followers were not so besotted, or patient, or polite: After a certain interval, they would start pestering her (“You’re very beautiful. Can we walk together? There’s something I’d like to ask you. Excuse me, are you deaf?”), and before long they’d get angry, saying rude things to her and cursing her. Some would walk about in pairs; some would bring along friends to show them the girl they had been following in recent days and get a second opinion; some would laugh lewdly among themselves as they followed her; some would try to give her letters or presents; some would even cry. Ever since one of her followers had pushed her into a corner and tried to force a kiss on her, she had stopped challenging them the way she occasionally used to do. By the age of fourteen, she knew all the tricks that men played and could read their intentions so men could no longer catch her unawares and touch her, and perhaps she no longer fell into their traps so easily, though the streets were never short of men finding imaginative new ways to touch her, pinch her, squeeze her, or brush her from behind. The men who stretched their arms out through car windows to fondle girls walking down the street, the men who pretended to trip on the stairs in order to press themselves against girls, the men who abruptly started to kiss her in the elevator, the men who took with their change an illicit stroke of her fingers-it had been some time since any of them could surprise her.
Every man in a secret relationship with a beautiful woman is obliged to jealously hear various stories about the various men who were infatuated with, or putting the moves on, his beloved, reports to be greeted with smiles, an abundance of pity, and ultimately contempt. At the Outstanding Achievement Course there was a sweet, gentle, handsome boy her age who was always inviting her to go to the cinema or sit in the tea garden on the corner, and whenever he saw Füsun he was so excited that for the first few minutes he was speechless. One day when she mentioned that she didn’t have a pencil he gave her a ballpoint pen, and he was ecstatic to see her using it to take notes in class.
At the same college there was an “administrator”-in his thirties, his hair always slick with brilliantine, edgy, obnoxious, and taciturn. He was ever finding excuses to call Füsun to his office, as in “Your identity papers are not complete,” or “One of your answer sheets is missing,” and once she was there, he’d begin discussing the meaning of life, the beauty of Istanbul, and the poems he had published until, seeing that Füsun was giving him not a word of encouragement, he would turn his back on her, gazing out the window, and he would hiss, “You may leave.”
She would not even discuss the hordes-a woman in one instance-who came to the Şanzelize Boutique and fell in love with her on sight, and went on to buy loads of dresses, accessories, and trinkets from Şenay Hanım. Naturally, I pressed her for more details, and only to placate my curiosity, passing for concern, did she agree to talk about the most ridiculous one, a man in his fifties, short, fat as a jar, with a brush mustache, but stylish and rich. He would chat with Şenay Hanım, now and again pushing long French sentences out of his little mouth, and when he left the shop his cloud of perfume would linger for some time, upsetting Lemon the canary!
As for the suitors found by her mother through a matchmaker (supposedly without Füsun’s knowing) there was one man she’d liked, who had been more interested in her than in marriage; she’d gone out with him a few times, liked him, and kissed him. Last year, during a music competition among many schools at the Sports Arena, she’d met a Robert College boy who’d fallen head over heels in love with her. He’d meet her at the school gate, and every day they’d leave together, and they’d kissed two or three times. Hilmi the Bastard, however, despite a flurry of dates, she’d not even kissed, because his sole aim in life seemed to be getting girls into bed. She’d felt close to Hakan Serinkan, the beauty contest emcee, not because he was famous, but because, in this place where everyone was conspiring backstage and being openly unfair to her, he’d gone out of his way to be gentle and kind; and because when it came time for the culture and intelligence questions that made the other girls so nervous, he’d whispered them to her backstage in advance, along with the answers. But later, when this old-style crooner had made insistent phone calls to the house, she’d refused to answer, and, anyway, her mother didn’t approve. Rightfully inferring jealousy-though she thought it had to do with the singer’s fame-she told me tenderly (but with obvious pleasure) that she had not been in love with anyone since the age of sixteen, and then she made a pronouncement that shocks me still. Although she, like most girls, enjoyed the perpetual celebration of love in magazines and television and songs, she didn’t regard the subject fit for idle talk, and was convinced that people exaggerated their feelings just to appear superior. For her, love was something to which one devoted one’s entire being at the risk of everything. But this happened only once in a lifetime.
“Have you ever felt anything close to this?” I asked, as I lay down beside her on the bed.
“Not really,” she said, but then she thought a bit and with a reserve born of willful scrupulousness, she told me about someone.
There was a man so madly and obsessively in love with her that she had thought she could love him back-he was rich, handsome, a businessman, and “married, of course.” In the evenings when she left the shop he would pick her up in his Mustang at the corner of Akkavak Street. They would go to that place next to the Dolmabahçe Clock Tower where people parked and drank tea and looked at the Bosphorus or to that empty lot in front of the Sports Arena, and as they sat there in the dark, and sometimes in the rain, they would kiss for a long time, and then, forgetting his circumstances, this thirty-five-year-old man would ask her to marry him. I could smile over this man’s predicament, suppressing my jealousy, much as Füsun intended, even as she told me what kind of car he had, what sort of work he did, and how lovely his large green eyes were; but when Füsun told me his name, I was flooded by an envy that confounded me. This man whom she intimately called Turgay, who had made his fortune in textiles, was a “business associate” and family friend of my father, my brother, and me. I often saw this tall, handsome, ostentatiously hale and hearty man strolling around Nişantaşı with his wife and children, a contented family man. Could my regard for him-as a committed family man, and an honest and hardworking businessman-have somehow inspired this great jealous surge? Füsun recounted how this man had come to the Şanzelize for months on end to “catch” her, and because Şenay Hanım was wise to him, he’d been obliged almost to buy out the entire shop.