“I feel so bad about that woman,” she said, with genuine sorrow. “She suffered so much, and so many people were jealous of her. In fact she was a very good person. Very.”
Without once referring to Belkıs by name, my mother recounted how years ago, when the Demirbağs’ eldest son, Demir, had been her lover, my parents had spent time with them in Uludağ; and whenever my father and Demir went off to play poker, my mother and Belkıs would stay up long after midnight, drinking tea and knitting and chatting in the hotel’s “rustic bar.”
“She suffered so much, the poor woman, first on account of being so poor and then on account of men. Such suffering,” my mother said, before turning to Fatma Hanım to say, “Bring my coffee out to the balcony. We’re going to watch the funeral.”
Except for my years in America, I had spent my whole life in this big apartment whose sitting room and wide balcony overlooked Teşvikiye Mosque, where one or two funerals took place every day, and when I was a child, these spectacles initiated us into the fearful mystery of death. Not just Istanbul’s rich but also famous politicians, generals, journalists, singers, and artists had their funeral prayers said at the mosque, considered a prestigious point of departure for the “final journey,” whereby the coffin was carried slowly on shoulders to Nişantaşı Square—the procession accompanied, depending on the rank of the deceased, by a military band or the city council ensemble playing Chopin’s Funeral March. When my brother and I were little we would put long, heavy bolsters from the divan on our shoulders and Bekri Efendi, Fatma Hanım, Çetin the chauffeur, and others would follow us as we hummed the funeral dirge, swaying slightly, just as the bearers of the dead did, on our way down the corridor. Just before a funeral of broad public interest—if the deceased was a prime minister, a famous tycoon, or a singer—the doorbell would ring and unexpected guests would appear, saying, “I was just passing by, and I thought I’d drop in,” and though my mother never let her manners lapse, later on she would say, “They didn’t come to see us but to see the funeral.” And so we began to think of the ceremony not as a comfort against the sting of death or a chance to pay one’s last respects to the deceased, but as an amusing diversion.
“Come over to this side, you’ll have a better view,” my mother said as I joined her at the small table on the balcony. But when she saw me suddenly go pale, with no evident enjoyment at watching the crowd of mourners, she drew the wrong conclusion: “You know, it’s not that father of yours napping inside who is keeping me from attending the funeral of this woman I loved dearly. It’s the men down there like Rıfkı, like Samim, who are wearing their dark glasses not to hide their tearful eyes, but to hide that they shed no tears. Well, anyway, you can see it much better from here. What
is
wrong with you?”
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
Below the gate to the Teşvikiye Mosque courtyard, in the shaded area where women gathered as if by instinct, I’d seen Füsun among the covered women and the society women who, for the occasion, had draped chic, fashionable scarves over their heads, and at that moment, my heart had begun to race. She was wearing an orange scarf. As the crow flies there were seventy, perhaps eighty meters between us. She was breathing, she was frowning, her soft skin was perspiring slightly in the midday heat; annoyed by the crowd of covered women pressing against her, she was biting her lower lip, shifting the weight of her slender body from one foot to the other—of course, I did not just see all these things, I felt them inside me. I longed to cry out to her from the balcony and wave, but as in a dream I had no voice, and my heart continued to pound.
“Mother, I have to go.”
“Ah! What’s come over you? Your face is deathly white.”
On the street I watched her from afar. Şenay Hanım was next to her. As she listened in to her employer’s conversation with a potential if not actual customer, a stocky but stylish woman, she ran her fingers over the ends of the scarf she had tied so awkwardly under her chin. The scarf had endowed her with a proud and sacred beauty. The Friday sermon was blaring on loudspeakers in the courtyard, but the sound was so bad that no one could make out what the preacher was saying, except for a few words about death being the last station and his boorish and insistent repetition of the word “Allah,” a calculated bit of intimidation, I thought. From time to time, someone would rush into the crowd, as if arriving late to a party, and as all heads turned, a little black-and-white photograph of Belkıs would be pinned onto the latecomer’s collar. Füsun carefully eyed everyone around her, as they greeted one another with a wave across the crowd, arms open for embrace, a hug of consolation, and mutual concern.
Like everyone else Füsun was wearing the photograph of Belkıs on her collar. It had become commonplace at funerals following political assassinations (so frequent in those days), and the custom had quickly gained currency among the Istanbul bourgeoisie. Many years later I was able to assemble a small collection of these tokens, and I display them here. When crowds of sighing (but inwardly content) socialites sporting sunglasses took to such displays, like so many right-and left-wing militants, these photographs would give an ordinary lighthearted society funeral intimations of an ideal that might be worth dying for, a hint of common purpose, and a certain gravitas. In imitation of the Western conceit, the photograph was framed in black, by which formerly happy images appropriated for death notices assumed the cast of mourning, and the most frivolous images could attain in death the somber dignity usually reserved for victims of political assassination.
I left without coming eye to eye with anyone, rushing off to the Merhamet Apartments, where I impatiently awaited Füsun. Every now and then I glanced at my watch. Much later, and without giving it much thought, I found myself parting the dusty curtains to look through the always closed window that gave onto Teşvikiye Avenue, and I saw Belkıs’s coffin pass below slowly in the funeral car.
Some people spend their entire lives in pain, owing to the misfortune of being poor, stupid, or outcast from society—this thought passed through me, gliding by with the measured pace of the coffin, then disappeared. Since the age of twenty I had felt myself protected by an invisible armor from all variety of trouble and misery. And so it followed that to spend too much time thinking about other people’s misery might make me unhappy, too, and in so doing, pierce my armor.
20
Füsun’s Two Conditions
FüSUN ARRIVED late. This upset me, but she was even more upset than I was. She explained that she had run into her friend Ceyda, but it sounded less like an apology than an accusation. Some of Ceyda’s perfume had brushed off on her. Füsun had met Ceyda during the beauty contest. She’d been unfairly treated, too, coming in third. But now Ceyda was very happy because she was going out with the Sedircis’ son, and this boy was serious; they were thinking about marriage. “That’s wonderful, isn’t it?” said Füsun, and as she gazed into my eyes her sincerity was arresting.
I was about to nod when she said there was a problem. Because the Sedircis’ son was so “serious,” he didn’t want Ceyda working as a model.
“For example, now that it’s summer, she’s booked to do an ad for a swing set. But her boyfriend is very strict, very conservative. So he is forbidding her to appear in a commercial for a covered swing set built for two—forget about wearing a miniskirt, he won’t even let her do it if she wears a dress that shows nothing. And Ceyda has completed a professional modeling course. Her picture is already in the papers. The manufacturer of the canopies for the swing sets is willing to use Turkish models, but the boy just won’t have it.”
“You should warn her that this man could have her under lock and key in no time.”
“Ceyda has been ready to marry and become a housewife for ages,” said Füsun, annoyed that I had failed to understand what she was talking about. “But her fear is that this serious man might not be so serious about her. I promised to get together and talk about it. What do you think, how can you tell if a man is serious?”
“How would I know?”
“You know exactly how men like this are….”
“I know nothing about rich conservative types from the provinces,” I said. “Come on, let’s look at your homework.”
“I didn’t do any homework. Okay?” she said. “Did you find my earring?”
My first impulse was to go through the motions like some sly drunk driver stopped for a police search who knows full well that he has left his license at home, yet searches his pockets, his glove compartment, his bags, in a parody of good faith. But I caught myself in time.
“No, dear, I looked for your earring but couldn’t find it,” I said. “But don’t worry—it will turn up sooner or later.”
“I’ve had enough! I’m leaving and I’m never coming back!”
I understood from the misery on her face as she looked around to gather her things, even as she fumbled, unsure where to put her arms, that this outburst was not just theater. I planted myself in front of the door like a bouncer and begged her not to go, pelting her with professions of how deeply in love with her I was (all true), until I could see, from the hint of a happy smile in the corners of her mouth, and the effort she made to hide her pity—slightly raising her eyebrows—that she was beginning to relent.
“All right, I won’t go,” she said. “But I have two conditions. First, tell me who you love most in the world.”
She saw at once that she had confused me, and that I could not answer with Sibel’s name or her own. “Give me the name of a man….” she said.
“My father.”
“Fine. My first condition is this. Swear on your father’s head that you’ll never ever lie to me.”
“I swear.”
“Not like that. Say the whole sentence.”
“I swear on my father’s head that I’ll never ever lie to you.”
“That was too easy for you.”
“What’s your second condition?”
But before she could announce her second condition, we were kissing and soon gaily making love. We put so much into it this time and our love so intoxicated us that we felt ourselves transported to an imaginary place, a new planet. In my own mind’s eye it was an alien surface, a silent, rocky desert island, the first photographs from the moon. Later Füsun would tell me her vision: a dark garden thick with trees, a window overlooking it, and in the distance the sea and a bright yellow hillside where sunflowers waved in the wind. Such scenes came to us at moments like this when our lovemaking surprised us—for example when I had taken into my mouth Füsun’s breast and her ripe nipple, or when Füsun had buried her nose in the place where my neck joined my shoulders and was locking me in her arms with all her might, or when we read in each other’s eyes a startling intimacy that neither of us had ever felt before.
“Okay, so now, my second condition,” said Füsun, after our love-making, her voice full of elation.
“One day you’re going to come to my house for supper with my mother and father, and you’ll bring my earring and the tricycle I rode when I was little.”
“Of course I will,” I said, with the lightness that comes after love-making “Except—what are we going to tell them?”
“If you ran into a relative on the street, wouldn’t you ask after her mother and father? Wouldn’t she invite you over? Or that day you walked into the shop and saw me—might you not have said you wanted to see my mother and father? Is it so unlikely that a relative would offer a girl a little help with her mathematics before the university entrance exam?”
“I certainly will come for a visit one evening, and I’ll bring the earring, I promise. But let’s not tell anyone about these math lessons.”
“Why not?”
“You’re very beautiful. They’ll know at once that we’re lovers.”
“In other words, are you saying that this isn’t Europe, so men can’t be shut up in a room to do math with a girl without it leading to something else?”
“On the contrary, they can. I’m saying that because this is Turkey, everyone will assume they aren’t there to do math, but something else. And knowing that everyone is thinking this, they start thinking about it, too. Worried about staining her honor, the girl will begin to say things like, ‘Let’s keep the door open.’ Nevertheless, if a girl remains in that room with him for long, the man will think she’s making a pass at him, and even if he hasn’t done anything to her yet, he will eventually have to, because otherwise his manhood would be called into question. Before long their minds will be defiled with thoughts of the things everyone thinks they are already doing, and those thoughts will be irresistible. Even if they don’t make love, they will begin to feel guilty and lose all confidence that they can stay in that room for long without succumbing to temptation.”
There was a silence. With our heads on the pillow, our view was of the radiator pipe, the lidded hole for the stovepipe, the window cornice, the curtain, the lines and corners where the walls met the ceiling, the cracks in the wall, the peeling paint, and the layer of dust. It is to evoke that abiding silence for the museum visitor that, years later, we have re-created this view in such minute detail.
21
My Father’s Story: Pearl Earrings
ON A SUNNY Thursday at the beginning of June—nine days before the engagement party—my father and I had a long lunch together at Abdullah Efendi’s restaurant in Emirgân, and I knew even then that I would never forget it. My father, whose recent gloom was so troubling to my mother, had invited me, saying, “Before the engagement, let’s go out, just the two of us, so that I can give you some advice.” As we sat in the ’56 Chevrolet, with Çetin Efendi at the wheel, where he had been since I was a child, I listened respectfully to my father’s counsel (for instance, that I shouldn’t confuse my business associates with my friends), for I assumed this was yet another pre-engagement ritual; and as I listened I opened my mind to the Bosphorus views slipping past the windows, the beauty of the City Line ferries as they rode the currents, and the shadows of the wooded gardens of the
yalı
s on the shores of the Bosphorus: Even at midday they were almost dark as night. Instead of repeating the lectures he’d perhaps heard as a child—instead, that is, of warning against laziness, frivolity, and daydreams, instead of compelling me to shoulder my duties and responsibilities—he reminded me, as the fragrance of the sea and pine trees blew through the open windows, that I needed to make the most of life, because God’s gift is fleeting. Here I display the plaster bust by Somtaş Yontunç (it was Atatürk himself who had given him his name, which means “Solid-Stone Sculptor”) created ten years earlier, when, thanks to booming textile exports, and our soaring fortunes, my father had, on the advice of a friend, agreed to pose for this sculptor, who was connected to the Academy. I added the plastic mustache out of contempt for the academician, who rendered my father’s whiskers far thinner than they really were, so that he would look more Western. When I was small and he scolded me for idleness, I would watch my father’s mustache quiver as he spoke. When he warned me that working too hard might cause me to miss life’s great beauties, I took it to mean that my father was satisfied with the innovations I had implemented at Satsat and the other firms. When he asked that in the future I also involve myself with some of the business dealings in which my older brother had recently expressed an interest, and I eagerly agreed, adding that we had all paid dearly for my brother’s deeply conservative half measures in every family concern he touched, it wasn’t just my father who smiled appreciatively—Çetin the chauffeur smiled, too.