The Museum of Innocence (16 page)

We shared a whiskey in a glass that once belonged to Ethem Kemal—my grandfather, who was her great-grandmother’s second husband—and we began to kiss. As I write these words I feel I should take care not to cause undue upset to those concerned souls who have taken an interest in my story, for a novel need not be full of sorrow just because its heroes are suffering. As always, we fiddled with the things in the room—my mother’s discarded dresses, hats, and china figurines. As always, we kissed each other gracefully, having become so proficient in this art. Instead of pulling you into our melancholy, let me say that it felt as if Füsun’s mouth had melted into mine. As our kisses grew ever longer, a honeyed pool of warm saliva gathered in the great cave that was our mouths combined, sometimes leaking a little down our chins, while before our eyes the sort of dreamscape that is the preserve of childish hope began to take form—and we surveyed it as if through a kaleidoscope. From time to time, one of us would, like a ravenous bird taking a fig into its beak, suck upon the other’s upper or lower lip, as if about to swallow it, biting the imprisoned lip, as if to say, “Now you’re at my mercy!” and having enjoyed this adventure of lips, and the frisson of being at someone else’s mercy, and awakening, at that moment, to the thrilling prospect of complete surrender, not just of one’s lips but of one’s entire body to a lover’s mercy, we recognized that the gap between compassion and surrender is love’s darkest, deepest region.

After making love we both fell asleep. When a sweet breeze blew in through the balcony, lifting the tulle curtains and dropping them like a silk veil onto our faces, we both awoke with a start.

“I dreamt I was in a field of sunflowers,” said Füsun. “And the sunflowers were swaying strangely in the breeze. For some reason they scared me. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t.”

“Don’t be afraid,” I said. “I’m here.”

I won’t say how we left, how we dressed and reached the door. After telling her to stay calm during her exam, and warning her not to forget her registration card, and assuring her that everything would go well, that she was sure to attain the score she needed, I said the thing that I had been repeating in my mind for days, thousands of times over, trying to make it sound as natural as possible.

“Let’s meet at the same time tomorrow, okay?”

As she averted her eyes, Füsun said, “Fine.”

I watched with love as she took her leave, and I knew at once that the engagement party would be a great success.

24

The Engagement Party

THESE POSTCARDS of the Istanbul Hilton were acquired some twenty years after the events I describe; I picked up some of them while strolling through small museums and flea markets in this city and elsewhere in Europe, and others I purchased in transactions with Istanbul’s foremost collectors in the course of assembling the Museum of Innocence. When, after a lengthy bargaining session with the famously neurotic collector Halit Bey the Invalid, I was able to acquire one of these postcards depicting the hotel’s modernist international-style facade, and granted permission to touch it, I was reminded not just of the evening of my engagement party, but of my entire childhood. When I was ten, my parents attended the opening of the hotel, a very exciting occasion for them, along with all of Istanbul society, as well as the long-forgotten American film star Terry Moore. We could see the new building from our house, and though at first it looked foreign against Istanbul’s tired old silhouette, during the years that followed my parents grew accustomed to it, going there whenever they could. Representatives from the foreign firms to whom my father sold goods—they were to a man all interested in “Oriental” dancing—all stayed at the Hilton. On Sunday evenings, when we would go as a family to eat that amazing thing called a hamburger, a delicacy as yet offered by no other restaurant in Turkey, my brother and I would be mesmerized by the pomegranate-colored uniform with gold braids and flashy buttoned epaulettes of the doorman with the handlebar mustache. In those years so many Western innovations made their first appearance in this hotel that the leading newspapers even posted reporters there. If one of my mother’s favorite suits got stained, she would send it to the dry cleaner at the Hilton, and she liked to drink tea with her friends at the patisserie in the lobby. Quite a few of my friends and relatives had their weddings in the grand ballroom on the lower level. When it became clear that my future in-laws’ dilapidated house in Anadoluhisarı was not quite suitable for the engagement party, the Hilton was everyone’s first choice. And it enjoyed one other distinction: The Hilton had been, since the day it opened, one of the few civilized establishments in Turkey where a well-heeled gentleman and a courageous lady could obtain a room without being asked for a marriage certificate.

There was still plenty of time to spare when Çetin Efendi dropped my parents and me at the revolving doors, which were shaded by a canopy in the form of a flying carpet.

“We still have half an hour,” said my father, who always cheered up the moment he stepped into this hotel. “Let’s go and have something to drink.”

After we had chosen a corner of the lobby with a good view of the entrance, my father greeted the elderly waiter, who recognized him, and ordered “quick
rakıs”
for the men and tea for my mother. We enjoyed observing the evening crowds and—as the appointed time grew closer—watching our guests arrive, and reminiscing about the old days. Acquaintances, curious relations, and other party guests paraded just in front of us one by one in their chic outfits, but the thick leaves of a potted cyclamen shielded us from view.

“Aaah, look how much Rezzan’s daughter has grown; she’s so sweet,” my mother said. “They should ban miniskirts on anyone who doesn’t have the legs,” she said, frowning at another guest. Then: “It wasn’t us who seated the Pamuk family all the way at the back!” she said in answer to a question posed by my father, whereupon she pointed out some other guests: “Look at what’s become of Fazıla Hanım. She used to be such a beauty, but nothing remains of it. Oh, I wish they had left her at home, if only I hadn’t seen that poor woman like this…. Those headscarf people must be relations of Sibel’s mother…. I’ve had no use for Hicabi Bey since he left that lovely rose of a wife and his children to marry that coarse woman. I’m going to thrash Nevzat the hairdresser—that shameless man gave Zümrüt exactly the same style as me. Who are these people? Look at the noses on that couple—my God, don’t they look just like foxes? … Do you have any money on you, my son?”

“What for?” my father said.

“The way he came racing home, changing into his clothes as if he were just dashing off to the club, instead of going to his engagement party. Kemal darling, look at you, did you even remember your wallet?”

“I did.”

“Good. Stand up straight when you walk, all right? Everyone’s watching you…. Come on now, it’s time for us to get going.”

My father gestured to the waiter to bring him a single
raki
, and after looking me in the eye, and gathering my own need for one, he repeated the hand gesture, indicating me this time.

“Now, you’re not overdoing it, are you?” my mother said to my father. “I thought you’d picked yourself up and shaken off that gloom you’ve been wearing like an old coat.”

“Can’t I drink and enjoy myself at my son’s engagement party?”

“Oh, how beautiful she looks!” said my mother when she saw Sibel. “And her dress, it’s gorgeous; those pearls look perfect. But this girl is such a splendid creature that anything would look wonderful on her. What a charming sight, how elegant that dress looks on her, don’t you think? My son, do you have any idea how lucky you are?”

Sibel was embracing two friends who had walked past us just a few minutes earlier. The girls were taking scrupulous care with the long, thin filtered cigarettes they had just lit, making an exaggerated effort not to muss each other’s hair, makeup, or dress; their lovely bright red lips touched nothing as they exchanged kisses, giggling as they looked each other over and showed each other necklaces and bracelets not often removed from their boxes.

“Any intelligent person knows that life is a beautiful thing and that the purpose of life is to be happy,” said my father as he watched the three beauties. “But it seems only idiots are ever happy. How can we explain this?”

“Here it is, one of the best days in the boy’s life, so why are you spouting such thoughts, Mümtaz?” said my mother. She turned to me. “Go on, my son, what are you waiting for? Go to Sibel. Spend every moment at her side, share her joy!”

I put down my glass, and as I came out from behind the potted plant and walked toward Sibel I saw her face light up. “Where have you been?” I asked as I kissed her.

After Sibel had introduced me to her friends, we both turned around to watch the great revolving door.

“You look so beautiful, my darling,” I whispered in her ear. “No one else comes close.”

“And you’re very handsome…. But let’s not stand here.”

All the same we continued to stand there, and not at my insistence. As people came flowing into the hotel—friends and strangers, guests and a handful of well-dressed tourists—heads kept turning to look at us, and Sibel liked being the center of so much admiring attention.

It is only now, so many years later, as I recall each and every person who came through those revolving doors, that I realize how insular and intimate was this circle of rich, Westernized families, and how familiar we all were with everyone else’s business. There was the Halis boy, known to us since the days when my mother would take us to Maçka Park to play with our pails and shovels, and whose family fortune in olive oil and soap from Ayvalık did not prevent him from taking a wife with the same lantern jaw as everyone else in his clan (“inbreeding!” my mother charged)…. There was Kadri the Sieve, my father’s friend from the army, and mine from football matches, the former goalkeeper and now a car salesman, arriving with his daughters, each glittering with earrings, bracelets, necklaces, and rings…. The thick-necked son of a former president, who had gone into business and blackened his good name with corruption, arriving with his elegant wife…. And Doctor Barbut, who’d taken out the tonsils of every member of Istanbul society in the days when that operation was still fashionable—it wasn’t just me but hundreds of other children as well who went into a panic at the mere sight of his briefcase and camel-hair coat….

“Sibel’s still holding on to her tonsils,” I said, as the doctor gave me a warm embrace.

“Well, these days modern medicine has more modern ways of scaring beautiful girls into submission,” said the doctor, repeating one of his oldest jokes as he gave me a wink.

As Harun Bey, the handsome representative for Siemens in Turkey, passed by, I feared my mother would notice and get annoyed. She judged this serene, mature man to be “an oaf, a disgrace,” for undaunted by all the society cries of “Scandal! Calamity!” he had taken as a third wife the daughter of his second wife (in other words, his stepdaughter). With his cool manner and his sweet smile, he had eventually been accepted back into the fold, though he still had to bear the occasional glare. Then there was Cüneyt Bey with his wife, Feyzan. Cüneyt Bey had bought up for next to nothing the factories and other assets of the Greeks and Jews who were sent off to work camps when they were unable to pay the “wealth tax” imposed on minorities during the Second World War. Though his overnight transformation from loan shark to industrialist offended my father, it was more by reason of jealousy than righteousness, and he was still a treasured friend. Their eldest son, Alptekin, had been my classmate in primary school, and when we discovered that their younger daughter, Asena, had been Sibel’s, we were all so pleased as to agree the lot of us should get together very soon.

“Don’t you think it’s time to go downstairs now?” I said.

“You’re very handsome, but you must learn to stand up straight,” Sibel said, unknowingly parroting my mother.

Our cook, Bekri Efendi, Fatma Hanım, Saim Efendi the janitor, and his wife and children came through the revolving doors, one behind the other, looking very bashful in their best clothes, and each in turn shook Sibel’s hand. Fatma Hanım and Saim Efendi’s wife, Macide, had taken the chic scarves my mother had brought them from Paris and fashioned them to look like traditional headscarves. Their pimply sons were in suits and ties, and though they did not stare at her, they could not hide their admiration for Sibel. After that we saw my father’s friend Fasih Fahir and his wife, Zarife. My father didn’t like it that his dear friend was a Freemason, and at home he would rail against the clandestine network of “influence and privilege” that had infiltrated the world of business, clucking his tongue whenever he pored over the lists of Turkish Masons put out by anti-Semitic publishing houses; but whenever Fasih was expected at the house, my father would hide away all the books with names like
Inside the Masons
and
I Was a Mason
that had so fascinated him.

Just behind him was a woman known to everyone in society, whom at first glance I mistook for one of our guests: Deluxe Şermin, the only female pimp in all of Istanbul (and perhaps the entire Muslim world). Around her neck was the purple scarf that was her trademark (since it concealed a scar from a knife wound, and she could never take it off) and at her side, in impossibly high heels, was one of her beautiful “girls.” Walking into the hotel like guests, they headed straight for the patisserie. And here was the strange, bespectacled Faruk the Mouse (as children we used to go to each other’s birthdays, because our mothers were friends), and there, behind him, were the Maruf boys, onetime playmates of mine, as our nurses were friends. Their family, whom Sibel knew well from the club Cercle d’Orient, had made a fortune in tobacco.

The aged and rotund former foreign minister, Melikhan, who was to present our rings, came through the revolving doors with my future father-in-law, and because he had known Sibel as a child, he threw his arms around her and kissed her. He looked me over and turned back to her.