Şenay Hanım had pressured her, saying, “Don’t cause any heartbreak to my kind customer,” and so Füsun had accepted his presents, and then later, when she was sure of his affections, she had started to meet with him “out of curiosity,” and even felt “strangely close” to him. One snowy day, at Şenay Hanım’s insistence, she’d gone with this man to “help” a friend who’d opened up a boutique in Bebek; on the way back, they’d stopped in Ortaköy for a bite to eat, and after he’d drunk a few too many rakıs, “Turgay Bey the playboy factory-owner” began to press her to go with him to his garçonnière in a backstreet in Şişli, to “drink some coffee.” When Füsun turned him down, that “elegant, sensitive man,” losing all sense of proportion, said, “I’d buy you anything!” Thus rebuffed he then drove the Mustang to empty lots and backstreets trying to kiss her like before, until, with Füsun refusing his advances, he’d tried to “possess” her by force. “And all the while he was saying that he was going to give me money,” said Füsun. “The next evening, when the shop closed, I didn’t meet him. The day after that, he came to the shop, and either he’d forgotten what he’d done or he chose not to remember. He pleaded with me ardently, even leaving a Matchbox Mustang for me with Şenay Hanım. But I never got into that Mustang again. In retrospect, I should have been stern and told him never to come back again. But he was so in love with me, like a child, really; he was prepared to forget any rejection in the hope of having his love returned, and that moved me, so I couldn’t say it. He would come to the shop every day, buying so much and making Şenay Hanım very happy, and if he got me alone for a moment in some corner, his great green eyes almost wet, he would plead with me, saying, ‘Can’t we just go back to the way we were? I can pick you up every evening. We can drive around in the car. I don’t want anything else.’ After I met you, I started hiding in the back room every time he visited the shop. Now he doesn’t come round so often.”
“Those times last winter when you kissed him in the car, why didn’t you go further?”
“I wasn’t eighteen years old yet,” said Füsun, frowning gravely. “I turned eighteen two weeks before you and I met at the shop-on April twelfth.”
If the intrinsic evidence of love is to have one’s lover or the object of one’s affections in mind at all times, then I was truly on the verge of falling in love with Füsun. But inside me was a coolheaded rationalist saying my inability to stop thinking about Füsun was because of all those other men. When it occurred to me that jealousy might be an even more definitive sign of love, my reason (however frantic) concluded that this was merely a transitory manifestation. Indeed, after a day or two, I would assimilate Füsun’s catalog of the “other men” who had enjoyed her kisses, and even feel some contempt for those who had failed to compel her to go further. But when we made love that day, rather than tumbling into the usual childish bliss, in which playful curiosity mingled with exuberance, I found myself in the grip of what the newspapers call the urge to “master her,” and making my desires plain with ever harsher force, I was surprised by my own behavior.
15 A Few Unpalatable Anthropological Truths
HAVING RAISED the question of “mastery,” I would like to return to a matter at the very foundation of my story. Many readers and visitors will already understand it only too well, but in the expectation that much later generations-such as those who will visit our museum after 2100-might find the term opaque, let me now lay aside fears of repeating myself and set down a certain number of harsh-in times past, the preferred word would have been “unpalatable”-truths.
One thousand nine hundred and seventy-five solar years after the birth of Christ, in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the western and southern shores of the Mediterranean, as in Istanbul, the city that was the capital of this region, virginity was still regarded as a treasure that young girls should protect until the day they married. Following the drive to Westernize and modernize, and (even more significantly) the haste to urbanize, it became common practice for girls to defer marriage until they were older, and the practical value of this treasure began to decline in certain parts of Istanbul. Those in favor of Westernization hoped that as Turkey modernized (and in their view, became more civilized) the moral code attending virginity would be forgotten, along with the concept itself. But in those days, even in Istanbul ’s most affluent Westernized circles, a young girl who surrendered her chastity before marriage could still expect to be judged in certain ways and to face the following consequences:
a) The least severe consequences befell the young people who, as in my story, had already decided to marry. In wealthy Westernized circles, just as in the case of Sibel and me, there was a general tolerance of young unmarried people who were sleeping together if they had proven themselves “serious,” either by formal engagement or another demonstration that they were “destined for marriage.” Even so, well-born, well-educated girls who had slept with their prospective husbands before marriage were disinclined to say they had done so out of their trust in these men and their intentions, preferring to claim that they were free and modern enough to disregard tradition.
b) In cases where such trust had yet to be established, or coupledom yet to be socially recognized, should a girl fail to “hold herself back” and instead give away her virginity, perhaps to a man who had forced himself on her, or perhaps because she was passionately in love, or had succumbed to any number of other enemies of prudence-such as alcohol, temerity, or mere stupidity-the traditional code required that any man wishing to protect the girl’s honor should marry her. It was after one such accident that Ahmet, the brother of my childhood friend Mehmet, came to marry his wife, Sevda; and though he is now very happy, the union was made in fear of regret.
c) If the man tried to wriggle out of marrying the girl, and the girl in question was under eighteen years of age, an angry father might take the philanderer to court to force him to marry her. Some such cases would attract press attention, and in those days it was the custom for newspapers to run the photographs with black bands over the “violated” girls’ eyes, to spare their being identified in this shameful situation. Because the press used the same device in photographs of adulteresses, rape victims, and prostitutes, there were so many photographs of women with black bands over their eyes that to read a Turkish newspaper in those days was like wandering through a masquerade. All in all, Turkish newspapers ran very few photographs of Turkish women without bands over their eyes, unless they were singers, actresses, or beauty contestants (all occupations suggestive of easy virtue, anyway), while in advertisements there was a preference for women and faces that were evidently foreign and non-Muslim.
d) Because no one could conceive of a sensible young girl who gave her virginity under such circumstances to a man who had no intention of marrying her, it was widely believed that anyone who had done such a thing was not sane. The most popular Turkish films of the era included many exemplary tales, painful melodramas of girls at “innocent” dance parties where the lemonade had been spiked with sleeping potions, after which their honor was “soiled” and they were robbed of their “greatest treasure;” in these films the good-hearted girls always died, and the bad ones all became whores.