The Museum of Innocence

by Orhan Pamuk

  On one particularly hot July day, my brother rang to tell me, with righteous anger, that Turgay Bey, our partner in so many successful ventures, felt injured at not having been invited to the engagement party, and now wished to withdraw from a big bedsheet contract that we’d jointly bid for and won, a mess for which Osman held me personally responsible (Osman having heard from my mother that it was I who had scratched his name off the guest list). I calmed him down by promising to put matters right with Turgay Bey tomorrow.

  As I sat in the car the next day in the withering heat, on my way to his giant factory in Bahçelievler, I looked out at the hideous neighborhoods of ever uglier new apartment blocks, depots, little factories, and dumping grounds, and the pain of love no longer felt unbearable. This abatement could only be on account of my impending meeting with someone who might give me news of Füsun, someone with whom I might be able to talk about her. But in similar circumstances (when I spoke with Kenan or ran into Şenay Hanım in Taksim) I could not admit the reason for my welcome joy, trying to convince myself that simply pursuing “business” was having a beneficial effect. Indeed, if I hadn’t gone to such lengths of self-deception, this visit I had made “only for business” might have gone better.

  That I had come all the way from Istanbul to apologize to Turgay Bey had assuaged his pride, and this was quite enough for him to treat me well. He gave me a tour of his weaving operation, through halls where hundreds of girls were working on giant looms and when, behind one of them, I saw Füsun’s ghost with her back turned, my real purpose in coming announced itself to me. And so, as I admired the modern new offices and “hygienic” cafeterias, I abandoned my aloof manner, amicably suggesting what a shame it would be if we could not do business with him. Turgay Bey wanted us to eat lunch with the workers, according to his custom, but I, convinced that this would not allow me to apologize properly, told him that a bit of drink not to be found on the premises might help me broach certain “important matters.” I looked at him closely—so ordinary looking, with his mustache—and there was nothing in his expression to suggest an awareness that I was alluding to Füsun. Finally I mentioned the engagement party, and he, by now mollified, said proudly, “It was just an oversight, I’m sure. Let’s put it behind us.” But I continued to insist, forcing this honest and industrious man whose mind scarcely strayed from his work to invite me out to a Bakırköy fish restaurant. In his Mustang I remembered Füsun telling me how many times they had kissed while sitting in those same seats, how their thrashing was reflected in the gauges and the rearview mirror, and I remembered how he had groped her, felt her up, before she’d even turned eighteen. I wondered again whether Füsun had gone back to him, and, haunted still by all her ghosts, unable to convince myself that this man in all likelihood had no news of her, I remained tightly coiled in readiness.

  At the restaurant, as Turgay Bey and I sat across from each other like two old ruffians, as I saw him put the napkin on his lap with his hairy hands, and looked at his great pockmarked nose and his impudent mouth from up close, I had a strong intuition that this would not go well. When he wasn’t shouting for the waiter, he was wiping the corners of his mouth with his napkin, an elegant gesture stolen from a Hollywood film. Still I managed to rein myself in, and until the middle of the meal, I remained in control. But soon the raki I drank to escape the evil within me flushed it to the surface. In the most polite way, Turgay Bey allowed that any misunderstanding about the bedsheet contract could be easily settled and that there should be no ill will between us as partners. “We’re both going to do very well,” he said soothingly, when I blurted, “What matters most is not that our business goes well, but that we be good people.”

  “Kemal Bey,” he said, glancing at the raki glass in my hand, “I have the greatest respect for you, and your father, and your family. We’ve all had our bad days. Living as we do in this beautiful but impoverished country, we enjoy a good fortune that God bestows only on his most beloved subjects; and let us give thanks for that. Let us not be too proud, and let us remember Him in our prayers—that is the only way to be good.”

  “I had no idea you were so religious,” I said mockingly.

  “My dear Kemal Bey, what did I do wrong?”

  “Turgay Bey, you broke the heart of a young girl who happens to be a member of my family. You treated her badly. You even offered her money. I’m talking about Füsun of the Şanzelize Boutique—she’s a very, very close relation on my mother’s side.”

  His face turned ashen, and he looked down. That was when I realized that I was jealous of Turgay Bey not because he had been Füsun’s lover before me, but because, once the affair was over, he’d managed to get over her and return to his normal bourgeois life.

  “I had no idea she was related to you,” he said with shocking sincerity. “I feel deeply shamed. If your family could not bear to see me, you had every right not to invite me to the engagement party. Do your father and your older brother feel equally offended? What can we honorably do about this—should we end our partnership?”

  “Let’s end it,” I said, regretting my words even as I uttered them.

  “In that case, let us say it is you who have canceled the contract,” he said, lighting a Marlboro.

  The pain of love was now exacerbated by my shame at having misplayed my hand. Though I was very drunk by now, I drove myself back to the city. Since I’d turned eighteen, driving in Istanbul and especially on the shore road, along the city walls, had brought me huge pleasure, but now, with my sense of impending doom, the ride had become a form of torture. It was as if the city had lost its beauty, as if I could do nothing but put my foot on the accelerator in order to escape this place. Driving through Eminönü, under the pedestrian overpasses in front of the New Mosque, I very nearly ran someone over.

  Reaching the office, I decided that the best thing to do was to convince Osman that ending the partnership with Turgay Bey was not such a bad idea. I summoned Kenan, who was well informed about this particular contract, and he listened, very intently, to what I had to say. I summarized the situation thus: “For personal reasons, Turgay Bey is behaving badly and has asked if we might fill this contract on our own,” adding that we had no option other than to part ways with Turgay Bey.

  “Kemal Bey, if at all possible, let’s try and avoid this,” said Kenan. He explained that we could not possibly manage alone, and if we failed to fulfill the order in time, it would harm not just Satsat but the prospects of the other firms involved, and subject us to heavy penalties in the New York courts. “Is your brother aware of all this?” he asked. I must have been spouting raki fumes like a chimney, else he wouldn’t have questioned his boss so insolently. “The arrow has already left the bow,” I said. “We’ll have to carry on without Turgay Bey.” I knew this was impossible, even if Kenan hadn’t said so. But my reason had now shut down altogether, yielding to a troublemaking devil. Kenan remained in front of me, insisting that I needed to speak to Osman.

  It goes without saying that I did not then hurl the stapler displayed here, or the accompanying ashtray bearing the Satsat logo, at Kenan’s head, however much I longed to do so. I do remember noting that, however laughable his tie was, it resembled the company ashtray in both ungainly size and coloring. “Kenan Bey,” I roared, “you are not working in my brother’s firm. You are working for me!”

  “Kemal Bey, please don’t take offense. Of course I’m aware of this,” he said slyly. “But you introduced me to your brother at the engagement party, and since then we’ve been in touch. If you don’t ring him right away to talk about a matter this important, he’s going to be very upset. Your brother is aware that you’ve not been having the easiest time recently, and like everyone else, he only wants to help you.”

  The words “everyone else” almost detonated my anger. I was tempted to fire him then and there, but I feared his audacity. Suffering like a trapped animal, I became aware that I would only feel better if I could just see Füsun once. To the world I was i
ndifferent, because by now everything was so futile, so very vulgar.

  34

  Like a Dog in Outer Space

  BUT INSTEAD of Füsun I saw Sibel. My pain was now so great, so all-consuming that when the office emptied out, I knew at once that if I remained by myself for too long I would feel as lonely as this dog after the Soviets sent him off in his little spaceship into the dark infinity of outer space. By calling Sibel to the office after hours, I gave her the legitimate expectation that we would be resuming our pre-engagement sex life. My well-intentioned fiancée was wearing Sylvie, a perfume I’d always liked, and these imitation net stockings that, as she knew very well, aroused me, with high-heeled shoes. She arrived elated, thinking that my “sickness” was retreating, and I could not bring myself to tell her that, quite to the contrary, I had called her here to rescue me from the scourge, however briefly; that I longed to embrace her as I had embraced my mother when I was a child. So Sibel did as she had done with such relish in the past: She walked me backward and sat me down on the divan, and proceeded to do her dumb secretary impression, cheerily peeling off her clothes, layer by layer, until, smiling sweetly, she sat on my lap. Let me not describe how the scent of her hair and her neck made me feel utterly at home, or how relaxed, even restored, I was by that familiar intimacy, because the reasonable reader, like the attentive museum visitor, will then assume that we went on to make love. He would be disappointed, as Sibel was, too. But it felt so good to embrace her that I had soon drifted off into a peaceful, happy sleep, and my dream was of Füsun.

  When I woke up, in a sweat, we were still lying there in each other’s arms. The room was dark and we dressed in silence, Sibel lost in her own thoughts, and I wallowing in guilt. The headlights of the cars in the avenue and the purple sparks from the trolleybus rods illuminated the office just as they had in the days when we had made careless love.

  Without discussion, we repaired to Fuaye, and when we sat down at our sparkling table in the crowded, bustling dining room, I thought once again how charming, beautiful, and understanding Sibel was. I remember that after we had talked about this and that for an hour, and laughed with various tipsy friends who had stopped by our table, we discovered from the waiter that Nurcihan and Mehmet had been in for supper earlier. But there was no avoiding the real issue indefinitely, as our evening was punctuated by longer and longer silences. I ordered a second bottle of Çankaya wine. By now Sibel was drinking a lot, too.

  At last she said, “What’s going on with you? It’s time—”

  “If I only knew,” I said. “There seems to be a part of my mind that doesn’t want to acknowledge the problem, or understand it.”

  “So you don’t understand it either, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you ask me, you know a lot more than I do,” said Sibel with a smile.

  “What do you think I know so much more about than you do?”

  “Do you ever worry what I might be thinking about your troubles?” she asked.

  “I worry that if I don’t snap out of this, I’ll lose you.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” she said, stroking my hand. “I’m patient and I love you dearly. If you don’t want to talk about it, then you don’t have to. And don’t worry, I don’t have any wild theories about all this. We have plenty of time.”

  “What wild theories?”

  “Well, for example, I’m not worried that you might be a homosexual or something,” she said, smiling at once, to show that she wanted to reassure me, too.

  “Oh, thanks. What else?”

  “I don’t think it’s a sexual illness or some deep childhood trauma, or anything like that. But I still think that it might help to see a psychologist. There’s nothing wrong with that. In Europe and America, everyone goes to them…. Of course, you’d have to tell this person what you can’t tell me…. Come on, darling, tell me, don’t be afraid. I’ll forgive you.”

  “I am afraid,” I said with a smile. “Shall we dance?” “Then you admit there is something you know and I don’t.” “Mademoiselle, please don’t decline my invitation to dance.” “Oh, monsieur! I am engaged to a troubled man!” she said, and we rose to our feet.

  I have recorded these details, and displayed these menus and glasses, to evoke the uncanny intimacy, the private language, and—if that’s the right word for it—the deep love that existed between us during those hot July nights when, seeking relief, we’d go to clubs and parties and restaurants and drink with abandon. It was a love fed not by sexual appetite but by a fierce compassion, and on nights when, having both had a lot to drink, we rose to dance, it wasn’t so far from physical attraction. As the orchestra in the background played “Lips and Roses,” or as the disc jockey (a new fixture in Turkey at that time) spun his 45s, the songs would filter through the leaves of the still and silent trees on humid summer nights and I would take my beloved fiancée in my arms, embracing her no less passionately than on the divan in the office, and however motivated to protect myself, I treasured our camaraderie and common bonds; breathing in the scent of her neck and her hair, I found peace, and I would see how senseless it was to feel as lonely as a canine cosmonaut in space; and assuming that Sibel would always be at my side, I would woozily draw her closer. As we danced under the gaze of other romantic couples, we would sometimes lurch, as if to take a drunken spill onto the floor. Sibel enjoyed these alcoholic trances we fell into, as they transported us from the everyday world. Outside in the streets of Istanbul, communists and nationalists were gunning each other down, robbing banks, throwing bombs, and spraying coffeehouses with bullets, but we had occasion, and license, to forget the entire world, all because of my mysterious ailment, which in Sibel’s mind gave life a certain depth.

  Later, when we sat down at our table, Sibel would again drunkenly broach the subject, now not as something she understood but something she accepted without fully understanding. Thus, thanks to Sibel’s efforts, my mysterious moods, my melancholy, and my inability to make love to her amounted to no more than a premarital test of my fiancée’s compassion and commitment, a limited tragedy soon to be forgotten. It was as if our pain gave us the distinction of standing apart from our coarse, superficial, rich friends, even as we boarded their speedboats. We no longer needed to join the careless drunks who jumped from the pier into the Bosphorus at the end of a party. My pain, and my strangeness, had graced us with a degree of difference. It pleased me to see Sibel embrace my pain with such dignity, and this, too, drew us closer together. But even amid all this drunken earnestness, if I heard a City Line ferry blowing its sad whistle in the distance, or if I glanced into the crowd and in the least likely of places spotted someone I thought was Füsun, Sibel would notice the strange expression on my face and intuit painfully that the danger lurking in the shadows was far more fearsome than she’d thought.

  And so it was that by the end of July, Sibel’s loving suggestion that I see a psychiatrist turned into a requirement, and unwilling to lose her wonderful compassion and companionship I agreed. The famous Turkish psychoanalyst who the careful reader will recall offering an analysis of love was at that time recently returned from America and working hard, with his bow tie and his pipe, to convince a narrow segment of Istanbul society that they could no longer do without his profession. Years later, when I was trying to establish my museum, and I paid him a visit to ask what he remembered of that era (and also to solicit his donation of that same pipe and bow tie), I discovered that he had no memory of the troubles I was suffering at the time; what’s more, he’d heard nothing of my painful story, which was by then common knowledge in Istanbul society. He remembered me as being like so many of his other patients at that time—perfectly healthy individuals who rang his bell only out of curiosity. I shall never forget how Sibel insisted on coming with me, like a mother taking her ailing child to the doctor, and how she said, “I’ll just sit in the waiting room, darling.” But I hadn’t wanted her to come at all. Sibel, with the felicit
ous intuition so prevalent in the bourgeoisies of non-Western countries, and most particularly Muslim countries, saw psychoanalysis as a “scientific sharing of confidences” invented for Westerners unaccustomed to the curative traditions of family solidarity and shared secrets. When, after talking about this and that and neatly filling out the necessary forms, I was asked what my “problem” was, I felt compelled to disclose that I had lost the woman I loved and now felt as lonely as a dog sent into outer space. But instead I said that I had been unable to make love to my beautiful and cherished fiancée since our engagement. And he asked me what was the cause of my loss of desire—a surprise since I thought he would be the one to answer this question. Today, so many years later, when I remember the words that came to my mind with God’s help, I still smile, but I also see some truth in them: “Perhaps I’m afraid of life, Doctor!”

  This would be my last visit to the psychoanalyst, who could do no more than send me off with the words: “Don’t be afraid of life, Kemal Bey!”

  35

  The First Seeds of My Collection

  HAVING EVADED the snare of the psychoanalyst, I tricked myself into thinking that I was on the road to recovery, convinced that I was strong enough to return, just for a while, to the streets I had marked in red. It felt so good for the first few minutes, to be walking past Alaaddin’s shop, down streets where my mother had taken me shopping as a child, and to breathe in the air in those shops, so good that I came to believe I was not afraid of life and that my illness was abating. These hopeful thoughts emboldened me to think I could walk past the Şanzelize Boutique without pain—but this was a mistake. Just seeing the shop from a distance was enough to unnerve me.