The Museum of Innocence

by Orhan Pamuk

  “What a coincidence,” I said. “I’m just coming back from your house.”

  “Is that so?”

  Once again I was shocked to see how young this husband was—how childish, in fact.

  “Ever since my last visit, I’ve been thinking about this film business,” I said. “You’re right. We have to make art films in Turkey, too, just as they do in Europe…. But since you weren’t there, I didn’t have a chance to talk about all this. Shall we get together some evening?”

  I could sense an immediate confusion in his evidently tipsy mind (by the whiff of him, he’d had at least as much to drink that evening as I had).

  “Why don’t I come and pick you up on Tuesday evening at seven?” I said.

  “Füsun can come too, right?”

  “Of course, if we are to make a European-style art film, we must have Füsun play the lead!”

  For a moment we smiled at each other like two old friends who, having shared the long, trying years of school and military service, had at last seen their ship come in. In the lamplight I looked probingly into Feridun Bey’s eyes, each of us imagining he’d gotten the better of the other, and we parted in silence.

  51

  Happiness Means Being Close to the One You Love, That’s All

  I REMEMBER that when I reached Beyoğlu, its shop windows were glittering and I was glad to walk among the crowds streaming out of the cinemas. My happiness—the joy I could take in life—was impossible to deny. That Füsun and her husband had invited me to their house so that I would invest in their preposterous film dreams should perhaps have caused me only shame and humiliation, but so great was the happiness in my heart that I felt no embarrassment whatsoever. That night my mind was fixed on one fantasy: the film premiere, and Füsun holding the microphone, speaking to the admiring audience at the Palace Cinema—or was the New Angel Cinema a better choice?—thanking me first and foremost. When I came on stage, those attuned to the latest gossip would whisper that during the filming the young star had fallen in love with the producer and left her husband. The photograph of Füsun kissing me on the cheek would appear in all the newspapers.

  There is no need to dwell on the dreams my imagination was churning out, much as the rare safsa flowers that secrete their own opiated elixir and fall off to sleep. Like most Turkish men of my world who entered into this predicament, I never paused to wonder what might be going on in the mind of the woman with whom I was madly in love, and what her dreams might be; I only fantasized about her. Two days later, when I went to collect her and Feridun in the Chevrolet, with Çetin Efendi at the wheel, I saw, as soon as my eyes met hers, that our evening would in no way resemble the conjurings of my imagination, but being happy just to see her, I lost none of my enthusiasm.

  I invited the newlyweds to sit in the backseat, while I sat in the front beside Çetin, and as we passed through streets darkened by the city’s shadows, and through dusty, disorderly squares, I tried to lighten the mood by turning my head around continually to make jokes. Füsun was wearing a dress the color of blood oranges and fire. To expose her skin to the exquisite fragrance of the Bosphorus breeze, she had left the top three buttons undone. I remember that as the car bumped over the cobblestones on the Bosphorus roads, every time I turned around to address them, happiness flamed up in me. That first night we went to Andon’s Restaurant in Büyükdere, and—as would become the rule whenever we met to discuss our film project—I soon realized that I was the one who was the most animated of our party.

  We had just selected our mezes from the tray that the old Greek waiters brought to us, when Feridun, whose self-confidence I almost envied, said, “For me, Kemal Bey, cinema is the only thing in life that matters. I say this so that my age does not undermine your confidence in me. For three years now I’ve been working in the heart of Yeşilçam, our own Hollywood. I’m very lucky, I’ve met everyone. I’ve worked as a set hand, carrying lights and props, and I’ve worked as an assistant director. I’ve also written eleven screenplays.”

  “And all of them were shot, and they did very well,” said Füsun.

  “I’d really like to see those films, Feridun Bey.”

  “Of course, Kemal Bey, we could go and see them. Most of them are still playing at summer cinemas, and some are still showing in Beyoğlu. But I’m not happy with those films. If I were content to produce work of that caliber, the people at Konak Films say that I’d be ready to start directing. But I don’t want to make that sort of film.”

  “What sort of film would that be?”

  “Commercial, melodramatic, mass audience stuff. Don’t you ever go to Turkish films?”

  “Very rarely.”

  “The rich of our country who have been to Europe only go to Turkish films to laugh at them. When I was twenty I thought that way, too. But I don’t look down on Turkish films the way I used to. Füsun now likes Turkish films very much.”

  “Teach me, too, for God’s sake, so I, too, may love them as much,” I said.

  “I’d be happy to teach you,” said Mr. Son-in-law, smiling sincerely. “But the film we make with your help won’t be at all like those, have no fear. For example, we won’t make a film in which Füsun leaves the village for the city, and three days later, thanks to her French nanny, becomes a lady.”

  “Anyway, I’d be fighting with that nanny from the very beginning,” said Füsun.

  “And you won’t see her playing Cinderella, despised by her rich relatives because she’s poor,” Feridun continued.

  “Actually, I wouldn’t mind playing a despised poor relation,” said Füsun.

  Although I didn’t believe she was mocking me, I felt in her words a buoyancy, a lightheartedness, that pained me all the same. It was in the same blithe spirit that we shared family memories; after recalling how we’d long ago toured Istanbul in the Chevrolet, with Çetin at the wheel, we discussed recent and imminent deaths of distant relations living in the narrow streets of distant neighborhoods, and much else. Our discussion of how to make stuffed mussels ended with the extremely pale Greek chef coming all the way from the kitchen to tell us, with a smile, that a dash of cinnamon was required. The son-in-law, whose innocence and optimism were beginning to win me over, was not overbearing as he promoted his screenplay and his film ambitions. When I dropped them off at the house, we agreed to meet again four days later.

  During the summer of 1976 we dined together at many Bosphorus restaurants. Even years later, every time I looked out at the Bosphorus through the windows of those restaurants, I would remember being caught between my elation at sitting across from Füsun and the cool I needed to maintain to win her back, and would feel the same confusion that had beset me. At these meals I would listen respectfully to her husband holding forth on his dreams, on Yeşilçam films and Turkish audiences, keeping my doubts to myself; it was, after all, not my aim to offer the Turkish filmgoer “the gift of an art film in the Western sense of the term,” and so I would discreetly create difficulties; for example, asking to see the finished screenplay, only to express my excitement about another story before the first script came to hand.

  Once, after Feridun (whom I had discovered to be cleverer and more adroit than many Satsat employees) had engaged me in a conversation about the cost of a “good and proper” Turkish film, I worked out that the cost of making Füsun a star would be roughly half that of a small apartment in the backstreets of Nişantaşı, but if we were unable to accomplish this purpose, it was not because this figure was unacceptable; it was because I had realized that seeing Füsun twice a week on the pretense of making a film was enough to assuage my pain, at least for now. After suffering so much I was content with what I now had. Even to wish for more was too daunting. It was as if, having endured such agony, I needed to give myself a little rest.

  If, after our meal, Çetin drove us to İstinye for chicken breast pudding with lots of cinnamon on top, or he took us to Emirgân for a stroll, to laugh and talk as we ate paper helva and ice cream sandwiches and gaz
ed into the dark waters of the Bosphorus, it would seem to me that there could be no deeper happiness in all the world. One evening, when I had placated the djinns of love and found peace in Yani’s Place, just by sitting across from Füsun, I recall being struck by the simple, ineluctable formula: Happiness means being close to the one you love, that’s all. (Taking immediate possession is not necessary.) Just before acknowledging this enigmatic mantra, I had looked out the restaurant window at the opposite shore; seeing the twinkling lights of the yali where Sibel and I had spent the previous summer together, I realized that love was no longer lacerating my stomach.

  It was not just that the searing pains of love would disappear the moment I sat down at the same table with Füsun; I would immediately forget that until just now, this same pain had brought me to thoughts of suicide. So, at Füsun’s side, with the agony having subsided, I would forget my wretched undoing; convincing myself that I had been restored to “normal,” I returned to my old self; I would succumb to the illusion that I was strong, decisive, even free. But after our first three outings I came to notice that such ecstasy was inevitably followed by the familiar despair, and so, as I sat across from her, thinking how soon I would miss her, foreseeing the pain of the days to come, I would discreetly pilfer various objects from the table as reminders of the happiness I’d felt there and then—and to fortify myself later when I was alone. This little tin spoon, for example: One evening, at Aleko’s Place in Yeniköy, I had a short conversation with her husband about football—it was fortunate we were both Fenerbahçe supporters, which spared us shallow arguments—when Füsun, getting bored, put this spoon into her mouth, toying with it for some time. This saltshaker: Just as she picked it up a rusty Soviet tanker rumbled past the window, the violence of its propeller shaking the bottles and glasses on our table, and she held it for a good long time. On our fourth meeting, we went to Zeynel in İstinye, and as we all strolled, I was just behind her, Füsun cast off this half-eaten cone, which I retrieved from the ground and pocketed in a flash. Returning home, I would gaze drunkenly at these objects; a day or two later, not wishing my mother to see them, I would take them over to the Merhamet Apartments to arrange them among similarly precious artifacts, and as the agonies of love set in, I would conjure my relief with them.

  During that spring and summer my mother and I grew closer—our camaraderie now resembled nothing we had known before. The reason, no doubt, was that she had lost my father, just as I had lost Füsun. Loss had brought us both greater maturity, and made us more indulgent. But how much did my mother know of my grief? Were she to find the spoons and ice cream cones I brought home with me, what would she think? If she had interrogated Çetin, how much would she have learned of my movements? Sometimes, in moments of misery, I would worry about such things; on no account did I want my mother to grieve for me; I did not want her thinking of me in the grip of an intolerable obsession driving me to mistakes I might “regret for a lifetime.”

  Sometimes I would feign being in higher spirits than she was; I could never tell her, even in jest, that her attempts to arrange a marriage for me were pointless, and so I would still listen intently to her detailed reports on the girls she had investigated on my behalf. One of these was the Dağdelens’ youngest daughter, Billur; according to my mother, the spate of bankruptcies that had now come to pass had not arrested their “life of dissipation,” complete with cooks and servants; though she conceded that the girl had a pretty face, she added that she was very short, and when I said I was not prepared to marry a dwarf, she closed the case file. (From our earliest youth, our mother had been telling us, “Don’t you take any girl under 1 meter 65 centimeters, please; I don’t want you marrying a dwarf.”) As for the Mengerlis’ middle daughter, whom I had met with Sibel and Zaim at the Cercle d’Orient in Büyükada early the previous summer, my mother decided that she wasn’t suitable either: The girl had been very recently left in the lurch by the eldest Avunduk son, with whom she had been madly in love, and whom she hoped to marry—a state of affairs that, as my mother had only lately discovered, had been scrutinized by all Istanbul society. My mother continued her search all summer long, and always with my blessing, sometimes because I actually hoped that her efforts might somehow produce a joyous outcome, and sometimes because I hoped this project would bring her out of the reclusiveness she had entered after my father’s death. On any given afternoon, my mother might call the office from her house in Suadiye to tell me of a girl she really wanted me to see: She had been coming in the Işıkçıs’ motorboat to spend her evenings on our neighbor Esat Bey’s wharf, and if I came over to the other side before it got dark and went down to the shore, I could have a look and if I wished, I could meet her—this intelligence all relayed as dutifully as a peasant might do when leading hunters to the place where the partridges had gathered.

  At least twice a day my mother would find an excuse to ring me at the office, and after telling me how long she had cried after coming across some possession of my father’s at the back of a wardrobe—his black-and-white summer spectator shoes, for example, one of which I respectfully display here—she would say, “Don’t leave me alone, please!” and would go on to remind me that I shouldn’t stay in Nişantaşı, that it wasn’t good for me to be alone either, and that she was definitely expecting me for supper in Suadiye.

  Sometimes my brother would come with his wife and his children. After supper—while my mother and Berrin discussed children, relatives, old habits, new shops and fashions, the ever-spiraling prices, and the latest gossip—Osman and I would sit under the palm tree, where my father had once sat alone in his chaise longue, gazing at the islands and the stars and dreaming of his secret lovers. Here we would discuss the business and the settlement of my father’s affairs. My brother would do as he always did in those days, urging me to come in on this business with Turgay Bey, but never insisting too much; and then he would tell me, again, what a good thing it had been promoting Kenan to the managerial ranks; he would go on to denounce the difficulties I’d made with Kenan, and my refusal to be part of this new venture; after warning me that this was my last chance to change my mind, and muttering that I would live to regret losing this opportunity, he would complain that I seemed to be avoiding him, and all our mutual friends, indeed, running away from success and happiness, both in private life and at work. “What’s eating you?” he would ask with a frown.

  My answer would be that I was worn out after the loss of our father and the awkward ending of my engagement to Sibel—and left feeling a bit introverted. It was a very hot July evening when I told him that I wished to be alone with my grief, and I could see from Osman’s face that he saw this as a form of madness. It seemed to me that, for now at least, my brother was willing to tolerate this as a species of severe depression; but if my affliction got any worse, he would find himself caught between embarrassment and the agreeable prospect of seizing permanent control of our business dealings through the pretext of my incapacity. But I was only afflicted by such anxieties if I’d seen Füsun very recently; if a longer time had elapsed since I’d last seen her, and I was racked with the pain of her absence, my thoughts would be only of her. My mother could sense my obsession, and the darkness inside me, but although it worried her, she did not truly want to know the details. After every meeting with Füsun I was overcome by the innocent wish to convince myself that the love I felt was of no great importance; in much the same way, I tried to persuade my mother, without quite putting it into words, that the obsession more and more evidently ruining my life was nothing to worry about. To prove to my mother that I didn’t have a “complex,” I told her that I had taken Füsun, the daughter of Aunt Nesibe the seamstress, along with her husband, out to eat on the Bosphorus, also mentioning that, at the young husband’s insistence, we had all gone to see one of the films of which he was the screenwriter—such diversions as an obsessive could hardly afford to entertain!

  “Goodness,” said my mother. “I’m glad they’re doing well.
I’d heard how the child was spending time with film people, Yeşilçam people, and it made me very sorry. What can you expect for a girl who enters beauty contests! But if you say they’re all right …”

  “He seems to be a reasonable boy.”

  “You are going to the movies with them? You should still be careful. Nesibe has a very good heart, and she’s very good company, but she’s a conniver.” Then, changing course, she said, “There’s going to be a party on Esat Bey’s wharf this evening; they sent a man over with an invitation. Why don’t you go—I can have them put my chair under the fig tree, and I can watch you from here.”

  52

  A Film About Life and Agony Should Be Sincere

  FROM THE middle of June 1976 to the beginning of October, we went to see more than fifty films at the summer cinemas, whose ticket stubs I display here, along with the lobby photographs and advertisements I was able to acquire in subsequent years from Istanbul’s collectors. Toward nightfall I would go with Çetin to the house in Çukurcuma to collect Füsun and her husband in the Chevrolet, just as I had done on evenings when we went out to eat along the Bosphorus. In the morning Feridun would have discovered from managers and distributors he knew where the film we wished to see was showing, noting the neighborhood and the district on a piece of paper, and under his direction, we would try to find our way. Istanbul had grown wildly over the previous ten years while fires and new buildings had changed its face, and the narrow streets were so packed with fresh arrivals that we often lost our way. Only by frequently stopping to ask directions did we eventually find the cinema, and even then we were obliged to run, often arriving to find the garden already in darkness, and so we would have no idea what sort of place it was until the lights came on during the five-minute intermission.

  In later years these cinema gardens would disappear—the mulberry and plane trees would be chopped down, replaced with apartment buildings or turned into parking lots, or mini football fields covered with AstroTurf; but in those days, each time I set eyes on these mournful places—surrounded by whitewashed walls, little factories, teetering old wooden houses, and two-or three-story apartments with too many balconies and windows to count—I was shocked by how crowded they were. Intermingled in my mind with the drama on the screen was the lively humanity I sensed in all those big families, the mothers in their headscarves, the chain-smoking fathers, the soda-sipping children, the single men, the barely suppressed fidgetiness of these people munching disconsolately on their pumpkin seeds as we watched the film, almost always a melodrama.