The Museum of Innocence

by Orhan Pamuk

  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 pu
blishing 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.

  “I’m very happy for you!” he said. “And he’s handsome! Congratulations, my boy,” he said, and he shook my hand.

  Sibel’s girlfriends, all smiles, came to join us. The former foreign minister took on the air of a playboy, heaping extravagant praise on them for their dresses, their jewelry, and their upswept hair, in that tongue-in-cheek way that is the preserve of indulged old men, and when he had kissed each one on the cheek he went downstairs, as if never more pleased with himself.

  “I’ve never liked that bastard,” said my father, heading down the stairs.

  “For God’s sake, let it go!” said my mother. “Watch the steps.”

  “I can see them,” said my father. “I’m not blind yet, thank God.” When he saw the view from the garden—Dolmabahçe Palace and beyond it the Bosphorus, Üsküdar, and Leander’s Tower—and the crowd of chattering guests, he cheered up. I took him by the arm, and as we walked among the waiters offering colorful canapés, we began the long process of greeting our guests, offering each kisses on the cheek and a suitable interval of small talk.

  “How proud you must be of your son, Mümtaz Bey. He’s the spitting image of you at that age…. I feel as if I’m looking at you when you were young.”

  “I’m still young, madam,” said my father. “But I’m afraid I don’t recognize you….” Then he turned to me. “Would you mind letting go of me?” he whispered sweetly. “You’re holding my arm too tight and I’m not lame.”

  I discreetly extracted myself. The garden sparkled with beautiful girls. Most were wearing stylish open-toed high heels, and I imagined the expectant and joyful care with which they must have painted their toenails fire engine red. Though they were in sleeveless or backless dresses with plunging necklines, it cheered me to see how much more at ease they were in this fashion than they were in their usual short skirts. Just like Sibel, they were clutching small shimmering handbags with metal clasps.

  Sometime later Sibel took me by the hand and introduced me to a large number of relatives, childhood friends, classmates, and other chums I’d never heard of.

  “Kemal, I’d like to introduce you to a very dear friend of mine,” she said each and every time, her face beaming, and she would go on to praise that person in a voice that, for all its joyous sincerity, still carried the weight of obligation. The joy was most certainly the effect of life having gone her way, exactly the way she planned. She had devoted such an effort to the perfect placement of every pearl on her dress, made sure every crimp and curl was in impeccable harmony with every curve on her body, and now with the evening proceeding so smoothly, she assumed that she could just as smoothly slip into a happy future. This was why Sibel treated each passing moment, each new face, each embrace, as a fresh cause for jubilation. From time to time she would nestle up to me, and with maternal attentiveness she would use her thumb and her forefinger to pick off an imaginary hair or piece of lint from my shoulders.

  Whenever there was a pause in the greeting and joking, I raised my head to survey the guests and the waiters carrying trays of canapés among them and I could tell from the level of laughter and chatter that the drinks were beginning to relax them. All the women were lavishly made up and extravagantly dressed. In their filmy, tight-waisted, sleeveless dresses, they looked as if they would soon be feeling the chill, while the men seemed trussed up in their stylish white suits, buttoned up as tightly as boys in their outgrown holiday best—and ties that were colorful by Turkish standards, aping the wide, loud, patterned “hippie” ties so fashionable three or four years earlier. It was clear that many rich, middle-aged men had either not heard or refused to believe that the rage for big sideburns, Cuban heels, and long hair had finally run its course. The effect of these overlong and now outdated sideburns, kept in deference to fashion, together with the more traditional black mustaches, was to make the men’s faces look very dark. As the smells of aftershave and brilliantine (applied with particular liberality on the thinning hair of men over forty), the ladies’ heavy perfumes, the clouds of cigarette smoke to which everyone contributed, more out of habit than for pleasure, the odor of cooking oil from the kitchens—as the confluence of odors swirled into the spring breeze, I was reminded of being a child at my parents’ parties. Even the elevator music that the orchestra (the Silver Leaves) was playing, half ironically, to set the mood for the evening, whispered to me that I was happy.

  By now the guests, especially the elderly, had tired of standing, and hungry people were already looking for their tables, with little children forging ahead (“Granny! I found our place!” “Where? Stop, don’t run, you’ll fall”). Just then, the former foreign minister came up from behind to take me by the arm. With consummate diplomatic skill he drew me to one side to remind me that he had known Sibel since she was a child, and to impress on me, at great length, how elegant and refined she was, and what charming, cultured people her parents were, illustrating these points with examples from his own fond memories.

  “Old, sophisticated families like theirs are in short supply these days, Kemal Bey,” he said. “You are in the world of business, so you know better than I do that we’re being swamped by ill-mannered nouveaux riches, and provincials with their headscarf-wearing wives and daughters. Just the other day I saw a man with two wives trailing him, draped in black from head to toe, like Arabs. He’d taken them out for ice cream to Beyoğlu…. So tell me, are you ready to marry this girl and do everything to make her happy for the rest of your life?”

  “Yes, sir, I am,” I said. I could not help noticing that the former minister was disappointed by the lack of jolliness in my reply.

  “Engagements are not to be broken. It means that this girl’s name will be linked with yours until the end of your lives. Have you given this serious thought?”

  The guests were already pouring in and forming a circle around us.

  “I have.”

  “Well then, let’s get you engaged so that we can eat. If you would take your place …”

  I could tell he hadn’t warmed to me, but that did not dampen my mood. The former foreign minister began by telling the assembled guests a story from his army days. He, like Turkey itself, had been very poor forty years ago, and he recounted, with genuine feeling, how he and his dear departed wife had become engaged without fanfare or ceremony. He declared his high regard for Sibel and her family. There wasn’t much wit in what he said, but even the waiters who had retired to the side holding their trays smiled as if listening to an entertaining story. When Hülya, the sweet, bucktoothed ten-year-old whom Sibel loved dearly (and who was utterly fascinated by her), came forward with the silver tray bearing the rings I display here, the crowd fell silent. Sibel and I were so excited, and the former foreign minister so distracted, that we got into a hopeless muddle about which ring we
nt where. But by now the guests were ready for a laugh, and so when a few people cried out, “Not that finger, it goes on the other hand,” a general titter circulated through the crowd, until the rings finally found their proper places, and then the former foreign minister cut the ribbon binding them, to a spontaneous round of applause sounding like a flock of pigeons taking flight. Even though I had prepared myself for this, the sight of so many people I had known all my life clapping for us and warmly smiling made me as giddy as a child. But this was not what set my heart racing.