by Orhan Pamuk
She looked at me and smiled. There was compassion in that smile, and, at least in my opinion, just as much mockery as my story, and my obsession, merited.
“So you want to take me back to that dusty garçonnière, is that it?” she said.
“There’s no longer any need for that,” I said in some pique, throwing her words back at her.
“That’s right. Last night you tricked me. You robbed me of my greatest treasure without benefit of marriage. You took possession of me. And people like you never marry what they’ve already had. That’s the kind of person you are.”
“You’re right,” I said, half angry, half playful. “This is the one and only thing I’ve been waiting for all these years. Why should I get married now?”
At least we were still holding hands. Hoping to smooth it over before the game turned serious, I kissed her passionately on the lips. Füsun submitted at first, but then she drew away.
“I could kill you,” she said, standing up.
“Because you know how much I love you.”
I wasn’t sure she’d heard me. My beauty, truly angry now, walked off in a drunken huff, her high heels clicking furiously.
She did not go back into the hotel. The dog was following her, and together they headed out to the highway, turning in the direction of Edirne, Füsun in the lead, and the dog trailing. I finished the raki left in Füsun’s glass (as I’d sometimes done at the house in Çukurcuma, when no one was looking). For a long while I watched them from behind. The Edirne road stretched out straight ahead of them to the horizon, almost into infinity, and with Füsun’s dress ever easier to spot as the sky brightened, there seemed no danger of her vanishing from sight.
But after a time I could no longer hear her footsteps across the fields. And when I could see no more the red speck that was Füsun, when she had vanished into infinity, like a heroine at the end of a Yeşilçam film, I became uneasy.
A few minutes later I saw the red speck again. She was still walking on, my angry beauty. A great tenderness was born in me as I considered it: We would spend the rest of our lives making love as we had done last night and having tiffs as we’d done this morning. Even so, I longed to make the arguments fewer, the rough patches smoother, and Füsun happy.
Traffic was building on the Edirne–Istanbul road. A pretty woman in a red dress with such beautiful legs was bound to be harassed. I got into the ’56 Chevrolet and set off down the road to find her.
A kilometer and a half on, I spotted the dog under a plane tree. He was sitting there waiting for Füsun. I felt a sharp pang inside me, and my heart knocked against my chest. I slowed down.
ALTAT TOMATOES, a large billboard proclaimed, amid gardens, fields of sunflowers, little farmhouses. The Os had been peppered with bullets, target practice for bored passengers driving past. The holes had had time to rust.
One minute later, seeing the red speck on the horizon again, I laughed giddily. I slowed, as I drew closer to her, still stalking angrily along the right side of the road. She didn’t stop when she saw me, or when I reached across to open the passenger-side window.
“Come on, darling, hop in and let’s go back. It’s getting late.”
But she didn’t answer.
“Füsun, please believe me, it’s going to be a very long drive today.”
“I’m not coming. The rest of you can go on without me,” she said, like a rebellious child, still not slowing.
I’d reduced speed to keep pace with her and was calling to her from the driver’s seat.
“Füsun, my darling, look at how beautiful the world is—open your eyes to this glory,” I said. “Why poison life with anger and arguments?”
“You don’t understand at all.”
“What don’t I understand?”
“Because of you, I haven’t had the chance to live my own life, Kemal,” she said. “I wanted to become an actress.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What do you mean, you’re sorry?” she said, furious.
Sometimes I wasn’t able to keep the car abreast of her, and we couldn’t hear each other.
“I’m sorry,” I said again, shouting this time, thinking she hadn’t heard me.
“You and Feridun, you deliberately kept me from having my chance in films. Is this what you’re sorry for?”
“Did you really want to become like Papatya and all those drunken women at the Pelür?”
“We’re all drunks now, anyway,” she said. “And I would never have been like them, I assure you. But you two were so jealous, so afraid I might find fame and leave you, that you had to keep me at home.”
“You were always a bit timid about going down that path alone, Füsun, without a powerful man at your side….”
“What?” she said, now palpably enraged.
“Come on now, darling, jump into the car. We can argue about it as much as you like over drinks tonight,” I said. “I love you with all my heart. We have a wonderful life ahead of us. Please just get in.”
“On one condition,” she said, in the same childish voice she had used so many years before, the time she asked me to return her childhood tricycle to the house.
“Yes?” I asked.
“I’m driving.”
“The Bulgarian traffic police are even more corrupt than ours. I hear there are lots of roadblocks, just so they can take bribes.”
“No, no,” she said. “I want to drive it now, back to the hotel.”
I stopped the car at once and opened the door. As I was changing places, I pinned Füsun to the hood of the car and kissed her with all my might. And wrapping her arms around my neck, squeezing with all her strength, and pressing her beautiful breasts against me, she set my head spinning.
She slid into the driver’s seat. Starting the engine as carefully as she had done during our first lessons in Yıldız Park and deftly releasing the handbrake, she crawled out into the road, propping her left arm on the open window, just like Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief.
We moved ahead slowly, searching for a place to make a U-turn. She tried to make a full U at the junction of the main road and a muddy country lane, but she couldn’t manage it, and the car came to a shuddering halt.
“Watch the clutch!” I said.
“You didn’t even notice the earring,” she said.
“What earring?”
She’d started the car up again, and we lurched forward.
“Not so fast!” I said. “What earring?”
“The one on my ear …,” she moaned, like someone just coming out of anesthesia.
Dangling from her right ear was her lost earring. Had she been wearing it while we were making love? Could I have missed such a thing?
The car was gathering speed.
“Easy does it!” I shouted, but she’d pressed the accelerator right down to the floor.
In the far distance, her friend the dog seemed to have recognized Füsun and was coming out into the middle of the road to meet the car. I was hoping he would take note of the speed and get out of the way, but he didn’t.
Now going even faster, ever faster, Füsun honked the horn to warn the dog.
We jerked to the right, and then to the left, the dog still far ahead of us. Suddenly the car began moving in a straight line, as a sailboat will cut straight through the waves without listing when the wind has died. But this line, though straight, deviated from the road. It was when I saw we were speeding not toward the hotel, but right for a plane tree on the side of the road, that I realized an accident was inevitable.
Truly I knew then, in the depths of my soul, that we had come to the end of our allotted portion of happiness, that our time had come to leave this beautiful realm, by way of racing toward the plane tree. Füsun had locked onto it, as onto a target. And so it was I felt, my future could not be parted from hers. Wherever we were going, I would be there with her, and we were never to enjoy the happiness one could find on this earth. It was a terrible shame, but it seemed inevitable.
All the same, I shouted, “Watch out!”—a pure reflex, as if Füsun could not see what was happening. In fact, it was the instinctual shout of someone trying to escape a nightmare and return to the beauty of ordinary life. If you ask me, Füsun was a little drunk, but driving at 105 kilometers an hour, headed for the 105-year-old plane tree, she seemed to know exactly what she was doing. And so I understood we had reached the end of our lives.
My father’s twenty-five-year-old Chevrolet went hurtling with impressive speed and power into the plane tree on the left-hand side of the road.
Beyond the tree amid a field of sunflowers was a house—a small factory, actually, that produced Batanay sunflower oil, the very brand the Keskins used for cooking, as we had both noted when speeding along the road, just before the accident.
Months later I found the wreck, and I remembered, as I touched the various parts of the ruined Chevrolet, what I had recalled in my dreams: that just after the crash, Füsun and I had looked into each other’s eyes.
Füsun knew she was about to die, and during those two or three seconds she told me with her pleading eyes that she didn’t really want to, that she would cling to life as long as she could, hoping for me to save her. But I could only smile at my beautiful fiancée, still so full of vitality, the love of my life to the last, and believing I was about to die as well, I felt glad of being under way to a different world.
All memory of what happened next eluded me during my months lying in a hospital and for years thereafter; so what follows is based on the report of others, and on what I was able to glean when I returned to the site of the accident many months thereafter.
Six or seven seconds after the crash, Füsun died of injuries sustained when the car crumpled like a tin can and the steering column pierced her chest. Her head smashed with full force against the windshield. (It would be another fifteen years before seatbelts became compulsory in Turkish cars.) According to the accident report displayed here, her skull was crushed, tearing the meninges of the brain whose wonders had always surprised me, and she’d suffered a severe laceration of the neck, as well as several broken ribs and glass splinters in her forehead. All the rest of her beautiful being—her sad eyes; her miraculous lips; her large pink tongue; her velvet cheeks; her shapely shoulders; the silky skin of her throat, chest, neck, and belly; her long legs; her delicate feet, the sight of which had always made me smile; her slender honey-hued arms, with their moles and downy brown hair; the curves of her buttocks; and her soul, which had always drawn me to her—remained intact.
80
After the Accident
I WOULD now like to offer a brief account of the twenty-odd years that followed, bringing my story to a close without undue delay. Eventually I would be told that my surviving the accident was the fortuitous result of having opened the passenger-side window, so that I could converse easily with Füsun while driving beside her, and of my having instinctively shot my arm out just before the crash. The impact had caused a few small hemorrhages in my brain, and the swelling that resulted left me in a coma. In that state I was transported by ambulance to Istanbul University’s Çapa Hospital, where I was placed on a respirator.
For a month I lay in intensive care, unable to speak. Words did not enter my head; the world had frozen over. I will never forget when Berrin and my mother came to visit, tears in their eyes at the sight of the tube in my mouth. Even Osman showed an unaccustomed compassion, though from time to time there was something in his expression that said “I told you so.”
If Zaim, Tayfun, Mehmet, and various other friends eyed me with similar expressions—half reproach and half sorrow—it was because the police report attributed the accident to driving under the influence of alcohol (the role of the dog having gone unnoticed) and because the press had embellished the story with a dose of scandal. The Satsat employees were as respectful as ever, and touchingly empathetic.
After six weeks they got me started on physical therapy. Learning to walk again felt like starting life over, and as I embarked on my new existence, I thought about Füsun constantly. But thinking about her now had no connection to the future, or to the desire I’d once felt; slowly Füsun became a dream of the past, the stuff of memories. This was unbearably painful, now that suffering for her no longer took the form of desiring her, but of pitying myself. I was at this point—hovering between fact and remembrance, between the pain of loss and its meaning—when the idea of a museum first occurred to me.
I sought consolation in Proust and Montaigne. I would sit across the table from my mother at supper, the yellow pitcher resting between us, and as we ate I would pay little mind to the television. My mother felt that Füsun’s death was something akin to my father’s, and that since we’d each lost our most beloved, we had unlimited license to sigh and brood to our hearts’ content and apportion blame together. Vaporous raki glasses had figured prominently in both deaths, and so, too, had the secret world that each of the departed harbored within, until the pressure grew so great that there was no choice but to tell the secret. My mother didn’t care for this second similarity, but I wanted to lay everything out for consideration.
During the first few months after my release from the hospital, whenever I went to the Merhamet Apartments to sit down on the bed and smoke a cigarette and view the surrounding objects, a feeling awoke in me that if I could tell my story I could ease my pain. But to do so I would have to bring my entire collection out into the open.
I longed to patch things up with Zaim and have him again as my confidant. But in January 1985 I heard from Hilmi the Bastard that he and Sibel were very happy together and expecting a child. Hilmi the Bastard also told me that Nurcihan and Sibel had fallen out over something trivial. There was no reconnecting with them. Nor could I go to the new clubs and restaurants frequented by the old clientele of the Pelür and Garaj; my story was important to me and I did not wish to see it reflected in other people’s eyes, or to be seen as a broken wretch. For this reason, during a first and last visit to Şamdan, I laughed and joked and teased Tayyar, the aging waiter, whom I knew from the Pelür, making sure everyone noticed my high spirits, thus leaving the gossips to conclude that “in the end” I had “saved” myself from “that girl.”
One day I ran into Mehmet on a corner in Nişantaşı, and we agreed to meet for a meal on the Bosphorus, “just us men.” The Bosphorus restaurants had ceased to be places people saved for special occasions; now one went any day of the week. Sensing my curiosity, Mehmet began by telling me what all my old friends were up to. He said that he and Nurcihan had gone to Uludağ with Tayfun and his wife, Figen; that Faruk (the same Faruk whom Füsun and I had run into at Sariyer Beach) had been effectively bankrupted by high inflation, on account of dollar loans, but had fended off ruin by taking out more bank loans; and that though there was no ill feeling between Mehmet and Zaim following Nurcihan and Sibel’s falling-out, he no longer saw Zaim. Before I could ask why, Mehmet explained that Sibel had been needling Nurcihan for becoming too “à la Turca,” going to gazinos to hear classical singers like Müzeyyen Senar and Zeki Müren, and fasting during Ramadan (“Is Nurcihan really fasting?” I asked with a smile). But I recognized at once that this was not the real reason for the rift between these two old friends. Mehmet, imagining I wished to return to my old world, wanted to pull me back to his side. But he’d misread my intentions. Six months after Füsun’s death, I knew categorically that I could never return to that world.
After drinking a little raki, Mehmet confessed that while he loved Nurcihan dearly and had the utmost respect for her (this second feeling having assumed recently elevated importance), he did not find her as attractive as he had before she’d given birth. After enjoying a long and romantic courtship, getting married, and starting a family, they had quickly reverted to their former selves, with Mehmet resuming old habits. Sometimes leaving the children with his mother, he and Nurcihan would go out together, but more typically he would go out to new clubs and bars alone, the sort of places
favored by advertisers and the rich, to which in his determination to lift my spirits and regain my camaraderie he was now introducing me, as he would the city’s up-and-coming neighborhoods.
Another evening, Nurcihan came out with us. We went to a big new part of town just beyond Etiler that had sprung up in the space of a year, to eat a strange menu of dishes presented as American cuisine. Nurcihan did not mention Sibel, nor did she inquire about my feelings in the wake of Füsun’s death. One thing she said I took to heart, however; in the middle of the meal, apropos of nothing, she said she knew “deep in her bones” that I would one day be very happy. I had never more keenly felt that the chance for happiness in this life was forever lost to me. Perhaps this is why, although Mehmet seemed very much the old Mehmet, with Nurcihan I felt as if I were meeting a new person, as if all those memories in common no longer existed. It also occurred to me that the restaurant’s atmosphere, and these new city streets, which didn’t agree with me at all, may have also contributed to my feeling.
There were more of these new streets, these strange new concrete neighborhoods with each passing day, and they served only to reinforce my impression since getting out of the hospital that with Füsun’s death, Istanbul had become a very different city. Let me say now that this feeling was my most important preparation for the many years of wandering that lay ahead.
It was only when calling on Aunt Nesibe that I could feel the old Istanbul, the city I had so loved. One evening, after the first tearful visits, she, dispensing with formalities, told me I could go upstairs to look at Füsun’s room whenever I wished, and take away with me as much as I wanted.
Before going upstairs I performed what had been our ritual: I went over to Lemon’s cage to check his food and water. This, like any recollection of our suppers together, of our conversations while watching television, of everything else we had shared sitting at the table, was enough to bring tears to Aunt Nesibe’s eyes.
Tears … Silences … Because memories of Füsun were too painful for either of us to bear, I would be quick about the requisite preliminaries before going up to her room. Once a fortnight I would walk down to Çukurcuma from Beyoğlu, and as Aunt Nesibe ate supper we would watch television in silence, and after paying some attention to Lemon, who was slowly growing older and more quiescent, I would go look through Füsun’s bird pictures, one by one, after which review, announcing the need to wash my hands, I would head upstairs, my heart beating ever faster as I entered Füsun’s room and opened up her drawers and cupboards to go through her things.