Seeing her eyes slip away to examine the lower regions of her body with a doctor’s scrutiny, I understood that she wanted to experience this alone, and I wanted to finish what I was doing, to concentrate on my own satisfaction so that I could emerge from this arduous challenge feeling some relief. By now we both intuitively knew that to savor fully the pleasures that would bind us together meant to savor them in solitude as well; in that merciless embrace, greedy and unsparing, we were using each other for our own pleasure. There was something about the way Füsun pressed her fingers into my back; it made me think of that innocent, nearsighted girl learning how to swim in the sea, so fearful as she clung to her father who rushed out to save her when she feared she might drown. Ten days later, as she was embracing me with her eyes closed, I asked her what film she might be watching in her mind. “I was watching a field of sunflowers,” she told me.
The boys whose joyful shouts and curses and screeches would accompany our lovemaking in the days that followed were there too that first day, playing football in the old garden of Hayrettin Pasha ’s derelict mansion, cursing and screeching while in the house we made love. When they stopped their chatter for a while, a marvelous silence fell over the room, broken only by a few shy gasps from Füsun, and one or two happy moans that escaped me. In the distance we could hear the policeman’s whistle in Nişantaşı Square, and car horns, and a hammer hitting a naiclass="underline" A child kicked a can, a seagull mewed, a cup broke, the leaves of the plane trees rustled in the breeze.
We were lying in the silent room with our arms around each other, trying to banish thoughts of the bloody sheet, the discarded clothes, our still unaccustomed nakedness-all those primitive social rituals and embarrassing details that anthropologists so like to analyze and classify. Füsun for a while had cried silently. She had paid little attention to my words of consolation, only saying that she would remember this day till the end of her life, before beginning to cry again, and then falling silent once more.
Having become-with the passage of time-the anthropologist of my own experience, I have no wish to disparage those obsessive souls who bring back crockery, artifacts, and utensils from distant lands and put them on display for us, the better to understand the lives of others and our own. Nevertheless, I would caution against paying too much attention to the objects and relics of “first love,” for these might distract the viewer from the depth of compassion and gratitude that now arose between us. So it is precisely to illustrate the solicitude in the caresses that my eighteen-year-old lover bestowed upon my thirty-year-old skin as we lay quietly in this room in each other’s arms, that I have chosen to exhibit this floral batiste handkerchief, which she had folded so carefully and put in her bag that day but never removed. Let this crystal inkwell and pen set belonging to my mother that Füsun toyed with that afternoon, noticing it on the table while she was smoking a cigarette, be a relic of the refinement and the fragile tenderness we felt for each other. Let this belt whose oversize buckles that I had seized and fastened with a masculine arrogance that I felt so guilty for afterwards bear witness to our melancholy as we covered our nakedness and cast our eyes about the filth of the world once again.
Before leaving, I told Füsun that if she wanted to win a university place, she was going to have to work very hard during this final month and a half.
“Are you worried I’ll be a shopgirl forever?” she said with a smile.
“Of course not… But I’d like to tutor you for the exam… We could work here. Which books are you using? Are you studying classical mathematics or modern?”
“At lycée we did classical. But we’re doing both in my course. Because the answers are matched in the answer sheet. The whole thing makes my head spin.”
We agreed to meet the next day in the same place to work on mathematics. As soon as she was gone I bought the books they used in the lycée and the course from a bookstore in Nişantaşı; once back in the office I leafed through them as I smoked a cigarette, and I saw that I would actually be able to help her. The thought that I might be able to tutor Füsun in mathematics lightened the emotional burden and left me with a feeling of joy and a strange sort of pride. My neck, my nose, my skin, all ached with happiness, an exultation that I could not hide from myself. In one corner of my mind I kept thinking that Füsun and I would be meeting many more times in the Merhamet Apartments to make love. But I understood that the only way I could carry this off would be to act as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.
10 City Lights and Happiness
THAT EVENING Sibel’s old classmate Yeşim was getting engaged at the Pera Palas; everyone was going to be there, so I went. In her shiny silver dress, over which she had thrown a knitted shawl, Sibel seemed delighted, as if this party were a rehearsal for our own engagement, and she took an interest in every detail, mingling with all the guests, smiling constantly.
By the time Uncle Süreyya’s son (whose name I always forget) introduced me to Inge, the German model who’d done the Meltem commercials, I had downed two glasses of raki and felt relaxed.
“How are you finding Turkey?” I asked her in English.
“I’ve only been in Istanbul,” said Inge. “I’m so surprised. I never imagined anything like this.”
“What sort of thing did you imagine?”
For an awkward moment we stared at each other in silence. This was a wise woman. Having evidently learned how easily she could break a Turk’s heart by saying the wrong thing, she smiled, and in broken Turkish, she repeated the Meltem slogan that had captivated the whole country: “You deserve it all!”
“All of Turkey has come to know you in the space of a week. How does that feel?”
“The police recognize me, and so do the taxi drivers, and everyone in the street, too,” she said, as gleeful as a child. “There was even a balloon seller who stopped me, gave me a balloon, and said, ‘You deserve it all.’ It’s easy to become famous in a country that has only one television channel.”
Did she know how rude she was being even as she struggled to be humble? “So how many channels do you have in Germany?” I asked. Realizing that she had said something wrong, she blushed. I thought there had been no need for me to say that after all. “Every morning on my way to work, I see your picture blown up so large it covers the side of an entire apartment building, and it’s lovely,” I said, by way of recovery.
“Oh, yes, you Turks are way ahead of Europe as far as advertising is concerned.”
These words made me so pleased that for a moment I forgot she was just trying to be polite. I searched the merry, chirping crowd for Zaim. He was across the room, chatting with Sibel. It pleased me to think they might yet become friends. Even all these years later, I can remember the haze of euphoria that enveloped me. Sibel had coined a private nickname for him: “You-Deserve-It-All Zaim;” she found Meltem’s promotional slogan to be selfish and insensitive. In a poor and troubled country like Turkey with young leftists and rightists busy killing each other, it was, she felt, ugly.
A lovely spring breeze was wafting through the balcony’s grand doors, carrying the scent of linden trees. The lights of the city shone on the Golden Horn below. Even the slums and shantytowns of Kasımpaşa looked beautiful. I thought how happy I was, even feeling as if this was a prelude to yet greater happiness. The gravity of what had transpired with Füsun confused me, but I told myself that everyone has his secrets, fears, and moments of worry. No one could guess how many of these elegant guests felt similarly uneasy or carried secret spiritual wounds, but it was when we were in crowds like this, surrounded by friends-and having downed a glass of raki or two-that we persuaded ourselves how trivial and transitory those sentiments were.