The Museum of Innocence (14 page)

Abdullah Efendi’s restaurant had formerly been in Beyoğlu, on the main avenue next to Ağa Mosque. Back in those days it was where the rich and famous would stop for lunch if they were passing through the area or on their way to the cinema, but several years ago, after most of his customers had acquired cars, he had moved to the hills above Emirgân, to a little farm overlooking the Bosphorus. As we walked into the restaurant, my father assumed a jovial smile, shaking hands with the waiters he had known for years from the old Abdullah’s and other restaurants. Then he surveyed the large dining room, searching for anyone he knew among the customers. As the headwaiter was guiding us to our table, my father stopped to chat with one party, and waved in the direction of another, and flirted breezily with an elderly lady sitting at a third table with her daughter; this lady remarked how fast I’d grown up, how much I resembled my father, and how handsome I was. Once we had been seated by the headwaiter (who’d called me “little gentleman” throughout my childhood and, at some point, without anyone’s quite having noticed, began calling me “Kemal Bey”), my father ordered a few hors d’oeuvres for us to share—pastries, smoked fish, and suchlike—and also
raki
.

“You do want some, don’t you?” he asked me, adding, “You know you can smoke, too, if you like,” as if we had not come to a mutual understanding about my smoking in his presence after I’d returned from America.

“Bring an ashtray for Kemal Bey,” he told one of the waiters.

He picked up a few of the cherry tomatoes that came from the restaurant’s own greenhouse and sniffed them; as he knocked back his
rakı
, it seemed that there was something specific on his mind, though he had not yet decided how to broach the subject. For a moment we both looked out the window at Çetin Efendi in the distance, chatting with the other drivers waiting outside the entrance.

“Never forget Çetin Efendi’s worth,” my father said, sounding as if he were dictating his last testament.

“I do know his worth.”

“I’m not sure you do…. I know he is always telling religious stories, but you should never laugh at them. He’s an honest man, Çetin, and he’s a gentleman, a thoroughly decent human being. He’s been like that for twenty years. If anything should ever happen to me, don’t send him away. Don’t change cars every two minutes like those nouveau riche upstarts. The Chevrolet’s a good car…. This is Turkey, look… when the state banned the import of new foreign cars ten years ago, it turned Istanbul into a museum for old American cars, but what does it matter; we’ve ended up with the best repair shops in the world.”

“I grew up in that car, Father, so you don’t need to worry,” I said.

“I’m glad to hear it,” said my father, in a tone suggesting he had come to the real subject. “Sibel is very special, a very charming girl,” he said, but no, this wasn’t what he had brought me here to discuss. “You don’t find such a person every day, do you? A woman, a rare flower like her—you must make sure you never break her heart. You must care for her always, and treat her with the utmost tenderness.” Suddenly a strange, shameful expression appeared on his face. He began to speak impatiently, as if something had irritated him: “Do you remember that beautiful girl? … You know, the one you saw me with once in Beşiktaş. When you first saw her, what did you think?”

“Which girl?”

My father got even more annoyed. “Oh come on now, I’m talking about that very beautiful girl you saw me with in Beşiktaş, in Barbaros Park, you know, ten years ago.”

“No, Father, I don’t have any memory of this.”

“My son, how could you not remember? We came eye to eye. There was a very beautiful girl sitting next to me.”

“What happened next?”

“Not wishing to shame your father, you politely averted your eyes. Do you remember now?”

“No, I don’t.”

“No, you did see us!”

I truly had no such memory, but there was no convincing my father. After a long, awkward discussion, we agreed I must have wanted to forget and succeeded in doing so. Or perhaps he and the girl had merely panicked, thinking I’d seen them. This is how we came to the real subject.

“That girl was my lover for eleven years, and she was very beautiful,” said my father, proudly combining the two most important facts into a single sentence.

It was clear that my father had long dreamed of talking to me about this woman’s beauty, and the thought that I might not have seen it with my own eyes, or, even worse, that I might have seen her but forgotten how beautiful she was—this had dampened his spirits a little. He pulled a small black-and-white photograph from his pocket. It was of a dark, sorrowful girl—very young—standing on the back deck of a City Line ferry in Karaköy.

“That’s her,” he said. “It was taken the year we met. It’s a shame she’s so sad here; you can’t see how beautiful she was. She is beautiful, isn’t she? Do you remember now?”

I said nothing. It annoyed me to listen to my father talking about an affair, no matter that it was ancient history. Though at that moment, I could not understand what exactly it was that bothered me.

“Look, I don’t want you repeating any of what I say here to your brother,” my father said, slipping the photo back into his pocket. “He’s too stern, he wouldn’t understand. You’ve been to America, and I’m not going to be telling you anything that would shock you. All right?”

“Of course, Father dear.”

“So now listen,” said my father, and as he took tiny sips of
rakı
, he told his story.

It was “seventeen and a half years ago on a snowy day in January 1958” that he’d first met that girl and was instantly struck by her pure and innocent beauty. The girl was working at Satsat, which my father had only just started. At first it was just a working relationship, but despite the twenty-seven-year difference in their ages it became something more “serious and emotional.” One year after the girl had begun relations with her handsome boss (my father, by my instant calculation, would have been forty-seven years old at the time) he forced her to leave Satsat. Again at my father’s behest, she did not look for another job; instead she went quietly to live in an apartment in Beşiktaş that my father set up for her, dreaming that one day they would marry.

“She was very good-hearted, very sensitive, and clever—a very special person,” said my father. “She wasn’t like other women at all. I’ve had a few escapades in my life, but I never fell for anyone the way I fell for her. My son, I thought a lot about marrying her…. But what would have happened to your mother? What would have happened to you and your brother? …”

For a time we were silent.

“Don’t misunderstand me, my child, I’m not saying I made sacrifices so that you could be happy. In fact, of course, she was the one who really wanted marriage. I kept her dangling for years. I just couldn’t imagine life without her, and when I couldn’t see her I suffered enormously. But there was no one to share my pain with. Then one day she said, ‘Make up your mind!’ Either I left your mother and married her, or she was going to leave me. Pour yourself some
raki
.”

There was a silence. “When I refused to leave you boys and your mother, she left me,” said my father. To admit this exhausted him, but it also relaxed him. When he looked at my face and saw that he could go on confiding in me, he became more relaxed still.

“I was in pain, great pain. Your brother had married, and you were in America. But of course I tried to hide my anguish from your mother. To steal into a corner like a thief and suffer in secret—that was another agony. Your mother had sensed the existence of this mistress, just as she had with the others; understanding that something serious was going on, she said nothing. Your mother, and Bekri and Fatma Hanım—we lived together like a cast of characters imitating a happy family in a hotel room. I could see that I would find no relief, that if it carried on this way I would go mad, but I couldn’t bring myself to do what was necessary. At the same time,
she”
—my father never said her name—“was suffering just as much. She announced that an engineer had proposed marriage and that if I didn’t decide soon, she was going to accept. But I didn’t take her seriously…. I was the first man she had ever been with. I thought she could not possibly want anyone else, that she must be bluffing. Even when I doubted my reasoning and started to panic, I was still paralyzed. So I tried just not to think about it. You remember that summer when Çetin drove us all to Izmir, to the fair…. When we got back I heard that she had got married, but I couldn’t believe it. I was convinced she had just put the news out to get my attention, and make me suffer. She refused my every attempt to see her, even to speak with her; she wouldn’t answer the phone. She even sold the house I’d bought for her and moved somewhere I couldn’t find her. Had she really married? Who was this engineer husband? Had she had children? What was she doing? For four years I couldn’t ask anyone these questions. I feared the answers I might get, but to know nothing was agony, too. To imagine her living in another part of Istanbul, opening the papers to read the same news, watching the same TV programs, yet never to see her—it left me desolate. I began to feel as if life itself was futile. Please don’t misunderstand me, my son—I certainly felt proud of you, and the factories, and your mother. But this suffering was unimaginable.”

Because he’d been using the past tense, I sensed that the story had reached some sort of conclusion, and that my father had found some relief in his confession, but for some reason this displeased me.

“In the end, curiosity got the better of me, and one afternoon I rang her mother. The woman certainly knew all about me, but of course she didn’t recognize my voice. I lied to her, passing myself off as the husband of one of her girl’s lycée classmates. ‘My wife is ill and it would boost her spirits if your daughter could come to see her in the hospital,’ I said. Her mother said, ‘My daughter is dead,’ and began to cry. She’d died of cancer! I hung up at once so that I wouldn’t cry, too. I wasn’t expecting this, but I knew at once that it was true. She had never married an engineer…. How terrifying life can be, how empty it all is!”

When I saw the tears forming in my father’s eyes, for a moment I felt utterly helpless. I understood his pain even as I felt anger, and the more I reflected on the story he had told me, the more my mind became muddled and I behaved as if I were a member of a tribe an old-fashioned anthropologist might describe as “primitive” and unable to think about its own taboos.

“So anyway,” my father said, pulling himself together after a short silence, “I didn’t bring you here just to upset you with tales of all my woes. But you’re about to get engaged, so it’s fitting for you to know your father better. But there is something else I want you to know. Can you understand?”

“What is it?”

“What I feel now is only remorse,” said my father. “I never paid her enough compliments, and I would give anything to be able to tell her a thousand times over what a charming, precious person she was. She truly had a heart of gold, a lovely, modest, utterly enchanting girl…. She wasn’t like other beauties I’ve seen here. She never flaunted it, as if her loveliness were her own doing; she was never demanding, never expected gifts or flattery. You see, it’s not just that I lost her; it’s also that I know I didn’t treat her as she deserved—that’s why I still suffer. My son, you must know how important it is to treat women well—but now, not later, not when it is too late.”

There was something ceremonial about that last pronouncement, as he reached into his pocket to bring out a faded velvet-covered jewel box. “That time we all went to the Izmir Fair, I bought these for her, so that she wouldn’t be angry with me, so that she’d forgive me, but fate did not allow me to give them to her.” My father opened the box. “Earrings were very becoming on her. These are pearls, very fine ones. For years I hid them away. But when I’m gone, I don’t want your mother finding them. You take them. I’ve given it some thought; these will look very good on Sibel.”

“Father dear, Sibel is not my mistress; she’s going to be my wife,” I said, looking into the box he’d handed to me.

“Come on, now,” said my father. “You won’t tell Sibel the story behind the earrings; she will never be the wiser. But when you see her wearing them, you’ll remember me. You will never forget the wisdom I’ve imparted to you today. You’ll treat that girl perfectly…. Some men always treat women badly, and they’re proud of it. Don’t ever be one of them. Let my words remain on your ears as the earrings remain on Sibel’s.”

He closed the box, and with an old-fashioned gesture, pressed it into my hand with his own, as an Ottoman pasha might have pressed a tip into the hand of an inferior. “My boy,” he said to the waiter, “why don’t you bring us a bit more raki and some ice. What a beautiful day it is, don’t you think?” he said to me. “What a beautiful garden they have here. It smells of spring with all the linden trees.”

It took me another hour to convince him that I had a meeting I couldn’t cancel, and that, no, it wouldn’t do for the big boss to phone Satsat and call off his son’s appointment.

“So that’s what you learned in America,” he said. “I’m impressed.”

I didn’t want to refuse my father his happiness, so I drank another glass of
raki
, though all the while I kept glancing at my watch, not wanting to be late for my rendezvous with Füsun, on this of all afternoons.

“Don’t rush off, my son, let’s sit here a little longer. See how easy we are with each other, a lovely conversation between father and son. Give me a moment before you go off to get married and forget us!” my father said.

“Father dear,” I said, as we were leaving, “I can see how much you’ve suffered, and I will never forget this invaluable advice you’ve given me today.”

As he got older, whenever he was overcome by a great emotion my father’s lips would quiver at the edges. He took my hand and squeezed it with all his might. When I squeezed his in return, just as hard, it was as if I’d squeezed a sponge hidden in his cheeks, because suddenly his eyes welled.