In the coolness of the Merhamet Apartments stairwell, I took her in my arms and kissed her. I kissed her again when we went into the apartment, but there was a certain shyness in her playful lips, a certain reserve in her manner.
“I have something to say to you.”
“Then say it.”
“I’m afraid you might not take it seriously enough, or that you might react exactly the wrong way.”
“Trust me.”
“Well, I’m not sure I can, but I’m still going to tell you,” she said. She looked as if she’d made up her mind, as if the arrow had already left the bow and there was no longer any point in holding it back. “If you take it the wrong way, I’ll die.”
“Forget the accident, darling, and please, just tell me.”
She began to cry silently, just as she had done that afternoon in the Şanzelize Boutique, when she’d been unable to give me a refund. Her sobs were almost sullen, as those of a child who was furious at being wronged.
“I’ve fallen in love with you. I’m head over heels in love with you!”
Her voice was both accusatory and unexpectedly gentle. “I think about you all day long. I think about you from morning until night.”
She covered her face with her hands and cried.
Let me confess that my first impulse was to grin stupidly. But I didn’t. Instead I frowned, assuming a tender expression of concern, until finally I had overcome the force of my own feelings. Here, at one of the deepest, most profound moments of my life, there was something contrived in my demeanor.
“I love you very much, too.”
Though I was being utterly sincere, my words were neither as forceful nor as truthful as hers. She’d said it first. Because I’d said it after Füsun, my own truthful declaration of love had taken on a consoling, tactful, echoing tone. Now it didn’t matter if my feelings might in fact be stronger than hers, since Füsun had gone first in confessing the fearful dimensions of her sentiments, and so had lost the game. The “sage of love” within me (acquired from who knew what egregious experience) was crowing about Füsun’s misstep: By speaking too sincerely, she had lost. From this reaction I deduced that my jealous worries and obsessions would soon subside.
When she began to cry again, she took out of her pocket a crumpled, childish hankie. I embraced her, and while caressing the lovely velvety skin on her neck and shoulders, I said there could be nothing more ridiculous than the idea of a beautiful girl like her, whom everyone adored, in tears just for having admitted to falling in love.
Still crying, she said, “What do you mean-that beautiful girls never fall in love? If you know so much about everything, then tell me this…”
“What?”
“What’s going to happen now?”
This was the real question, and she now fixed me with a look as if to say she was not going to be distracted by sweet generalities about love and beauty, and that it was of the utmost importance that I give her the right answer.
I had no answer to give her. But this is how it seems now, so many years later. Sensing that such a question might come between us, I felt an unease for which I secretly blamed her and I began to kiss her.
Driven by desire and helplessness, our kisses grew more passionate. She asked if this was the answer to her question. “Yes,” I said. Content with this, she asked, “Weren’t we going to do some mathematics?” When I had bestowed another kiss, by way of an answer, she acknowledged it by kissing me back. To embrace, to kiss-it felt so much more genuine than any contemplation of the impasse to which we had come, so full of the irresistible power of the present moment. As she peeled off her clothes, Füsun changed from a fearful girl made sad by helpless passion into a healthy and exuberant woman ready to give herself over to love and sexual bliss. Thus did we enter what I have called the happiest moment of my life.
In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant “now,” even having lived such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happier moment to come. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse: If a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happiest moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so.
But when we reach the point when our lives take on their final shape, as in a novel, we can identify our happiest moment, selecting it in retrospect, as I am doing now. To explain why we have chosen this moment over all others, it is also natural, and necessary, to retell our stories from the beginning, just as in a novel. But to designate this as my happiest moment is to acknowledge that it is far in the past, that it will never return, and that awareness, therefore, of that very moment is painful. We can bear the pain only by possessing something that belongs to that instant. These mementos preserve the colors, textures, images, and delights as they were more faithfully, in fact, than can those who accompanied us through those moments.
We made love for the longest time, somewhere in the middle reaching the point when we were both out of breath; I had just kissed Füsun’s moist shoulders and entered her from behind, biting first her neck and then her left ear, and it was at this, the happiest moment of my life, that the earring whose shape I’d failed to notice fell from Füsun’s lovely ear onto the blue sheet.
Anyone remotely interested in the politics of civilization will be aware that museums are the repositories of those things from which Western Civilization derives its wealth of knowledge, allowing it to rule the world, and likewise when the true collector, on whose efforts these museums depend, gathers together his first objects, he almost never asks himself what will be the ultimate fate of his hoard. When their first pieces passed into their hands, the first true collectors-who would later exhibit, categorize, and catalog their great collections (in the first catalogs, which were the first encyclopedias)-initially never recognized these objects for what they were.
After what I call the happiest moment of my life had passed, and the time had come for us to part, and the fallen earring unbeknownst to us still nestled between the folds of the sheet, Füsun looked into my eyes.
“My whole life depends on you now,” she said in a low voice.
This both pleased and alarmed me.
The next day it was much warmer. When we met at the Merhamet Apartments, I saw as much hope as fear in Füsun’s eyes.
“I lost one of those earrings I was wearing,” she told me after we had kissed.
So now I said, “I have it here, darling,” as I reached into the right-hand pocket of my jacket hanging on the back of a chair. “Oh, it’s gone!” For a moment I glimpsed a bad omen, a hint of malign fate, but then I remembered that I’d put on a different jacket that morning, because of the warm weather. “It must be in the pocket of my other jacket.”
“Please bring it tomorrow. Don’t forget,” Füsun said, her eyes widening. “It is very dear to me.”
18 Belkıs’s Story
THE ACCIDENT featured prominently in all the papers. Füsun hadn’t read them, but Şenay Hanım had talked about the dead woman all morning-until it seemed to Füsun as if people were coming into the shop just to talk about the accident. “Şenay Hanım is going to close the shop tomorrow at lunchtime, so that I can go to the funeral, too,” said Füsun. “She’s acting as if we all adored that woman. But that was not the case…”
“What was the case?”
“It’s true that this woman came to the shop a lot. But she’d take the most expensive dresses-the ones just in from Italy and Paris-and she’d say, ‘Let me try out this one and see how it goes,’ and after wearing it at some big party she’d bring it back, saying, ‘It doesn’t fit.’ Şenay Hanım would get angry-after everyone had seen the woman wearing that dress at that party, it would be hard to sell. Also this woman drove a hard bargain, so Şenay Hanım was always talking behind her back, but she didn’t dare cross her, because she was too well connected. Did you know her?”