by Orhan Pamuk
AYLA: I was starting to get used to the city again, twelve years after I’d left. It felt like I was discovering it afresh, finding backstreets and distant neighbourhoods which hadn’t changed at all or at least felt no different, and those pavements and ancient streets where only shadows moved at night.
INTERVIEW, ORHAN PAMUK: I love the idea of a person wandering the city, looking for signs. My novels are partly influenced by the noir genre, and so-called B-movies. You have someone telling a story. The story may be crude and far-fetched, but what matters, in my view, is the crumbling city, its vistas and hidden details – its tumultuous essence. My Istanbul is not a place you can display in a museum. It is a neglected city, where everything is mixed up with everything else. Everything there is old. Everything is worn out. There is a fixed idea, an image in my mind of a lone figure searching for something in these dilapidated surroundings. That’s another reason why I love walking in the city in the middle of the night.
AYLA: Istanbul at night. A population of men and dogs. The city connected all night, every night, by thousands of yellow taxis in mysterious orbits, each an indivisible atom, but together seeming to trace a single secret meaning on the city.
TAXI DRIVER: I’ve been a taxi driver for twenty-eight years. Istanbul is prettier at night, when all the day’s filth is covered up. There is a beauty in the city then that hides everything that happens during the day. You know, Istanbul during the day is harder to live in than anywhere else in this country. I’ve seen about three quarters of Turkey. There’s hardly a city, town, or village I haven’t seen. Three quarters, I’ve seen, though I guess not all of it. But this I know: you will have no trouble during the daytime anywhere else. Here in Istanbul you don’t find that tranquillity. It’s very different here, during the day.
AYLA: There is no daylight in the Museum of Innocence. It feels like night and dreaming. Perhaps this is why it was so easy for me to feel at home there. Once, I found myself staring with a powerful sense of déjà vu at a photograph of a salep vendor on the Galata Bridge at night. It took me a while to realise that, like many of the other photographs in the museum, it is by Ara Güler. Like all Istanbullus of my generation, I have seen some of his photographs so many times that I confuse them with my own memories of the city.
ARA GÜLER: I am Ara Güler. I was born in 1928 in this city called Istanbul. So, if you count from 1928, I must be around eighty-five now. All these years, I’ve been watching Istanbul. If you look at my photographs today, you’ll find my memories in them. Whatever we do, we can never get away from our memories. I must have taken two million photographs, maybe more … I have no idea, I don’t remember, I never counted. See this building? It belonged to my father. It’s been there since before I was born. I can’t say when exactly, but one day, this building is going to be a museum. It will be the museum of my foundation. My archives will be in proper order then. But I don’t know when it will be. Perhaps I’ll die before it happens. But I don’t mind, you know?
AYLA: And now, I can’t tell whether I like Ara Güler’s photographs because they remind me of what Istanbul was like when I was a child, or because they’re simply beautiful. But maybe beauty and memory are not separate things. Love is familiar. In the Museum of Innocence I read that while Kemal was not yet using the word ‘love’ to describe his feelings for Füsun, he had begun to suffer its first symptoms. He was already worried that he was becoming besotted, and he already felt intense jealousy when he realised that the sexual pleasure that Füsun had discovered with him could now also be experienced with other men. And on the day that was to contain the happiest moment of his life, Kemal, wracked with jealousy when Füsun was just ten minutes late for their rendezvous, ran out into the streets of Nişantaşı and found her as she was approaching the apartments.
KEMAL: As we walked without speaking up the street where the police station was, straight to the Merhamet Apartments, we were fast approaching the ‘happiest moment of my life’ mentioned at the beginning of my book.
With our heads on the pillow, our view was of the radiator pipe, the lidded hole for the stovepipe, the window cornice, the curtains, the lines and corners where the walls met the ceiling, the cracks in the wall, the peeling paint, and the layer of dust.
AYLA: Sometimes it was difficult for me to read the novel, in particular to read about the intimate details of Füsun and Kemal’s lovemaking. We never talked about such things. But now I, and anybody who reads even just the first page of the novel, knows that the happiest moment of Kemal’s life occurred just as he ‘gently entered Füsun’ and that this was also the precise moment that her earring came loose and fell. Sometimes, reading the novel felt like reading a diary that I shouldn’t have seen, and somehow, discovering these secrets from Füsun’s past changes my past, too.
KEMAL: Afterwards, Füsun looked into my eyes. ‘My whole life depends on you now,’ she said in a low voice. This both pleased and alarmed me.
AYLA: I read that Kemal and Füsun continued to meet and make love every day, right up to the day of Kemal and Sibel’s engagement party. Even on the actual day of Kemal and Sibel’s engagement party. And I read that as he watched Füsun leave the Merhamet Apartments that day, just a few hours before it was due to begin, Kemal knew that his engagement party would be a great success. In the Museum of Innocence, Füsun’s socks, sneakers, and underwear are displayed alongside the invitation to Kemal and Sibel’s party on the Bosphorus Terrace of the Hilton Hotel.
INTERVIEW, ORHAN PAMUK: I was a child when the Hilton first opened its doors. Every visit there was an event. The people of Nişantaşı loved going to the Hilton; it made them feel more American, more European. I would go with them. All parties, including the engagement party in The Museum of Innocence, were thrown at the Hilton. The first time I ever ate a hamburger was at the Hilton. There were some dances I learned, some films I watched for the first time at the Hilton. The Hilton, where the West made its first inroads into Turkey, where Turkish people first encountered the concept of westernisation, and westerners first encountered Istanbul, was such an important place that all the major national newspapers used to have Hilton correspondents.
AYLA: Füsun made a big mistake in going to Kemal and Sibel’s expensive engagement party at the Hilton. She told me herself over and over again that she’d made a mistake. She was meant to take her university entrance exams the next day. She was trying to pretend everything was normal. Going to that party, having to stand among that gathering of happy, wealthy guests and watch Kemal get engaged to another girl made her heartbreak harder to bear, and she fell ill. I wasn’t invited to Kemal’s engagement party, of course. All I know about it is what Orhan Pamuk wrote in his book. Füsun never liked to talk about the Hilton Hotel. Orhan Pamuk danced with her at the party, and maybe that’s where he got the emotional motivation needed to write this long novel and set up a museum with Kemal.
INTERVIEW, ORHAN PAMUK: Füsun was exactly like Ayla describes her. When I saw her for the first time at the engagement party at the Hilton, I had no idea she would become the protagonist of my novel … I was an awkward, restless young man back then. I danced with her because she was beautiful, but she wasn’t all that interested in me. I wasn’t particularly handsome, anyway. Later, I found out more about Füsun through Kemal’s story. After Kemal died, I sought out Ayla and others who knew Füsun in order to write my novel. I always research all my books. I did everything I could to bring Füsun to life, to make her real.
AYLA: Curiosity took me back to the Hilton, and I found that everything around it had changed. And while the staircases, the function halls, and the rooms may have stayed the same, the atmosphere they evoked had changed completely. Those places which had once had such an effect on Füsun, Kemal, and Orhan had now become unremarkable city spaces. The only thing that remained the same was the view of the Bosphorus, and the Cityline ferries as they made their nightly journeys back to dock …
FERRY WORKER: I prefer working nights, when everything is calm
er. When there’s no traffic on the Bosphorus … When there are no fishermen, no motor boats, our job is simpler and safer. And people, people at night, tend to be more reasonable. Most of them are tired after a day at work, maybe they’re on their way home. So that’s why it’s always easier at night. There are so many kinds of currents from one end of the Bosphorus to the other. There are lots of turns, too; it isn’t a straight passage. That also has an effect. There is a current that goes from the Black Sea to the Marmara Sea, and one in the opposite direction, towards the Black Sea. When the lodos wind blows, the currents flow a certain way; when the north-easterly poyraz blows, they change direction and strength. I’ve seen with my own eyes how certain boats, the kind we call ‘sinkers’, get swept back before they can sail past the Maiden’s Tower. There’s a powerful current by the Sarayburnu promontory that takes you all the way to the Marmara Sea. Cross over to the other side, to Kabataş, and the current will take you back towards Beşiktaş. There are currents and counter-currents everywhere. Back in the day, sailboats used to follow the coastline on the European side up to a point and then cross over to the Asian side to avoid the currents.
AYLA: I read that, in the weeks following his engagement party, Kemal would still go to the Merhamet Apartments to wait for Füsun to come. Every day, at ten minutes to two, he would take out the key with trembling hands and let himself in, joyfully believing that in ten or fifteen minutes, Füsun would arrive and they would be making love.
KEMAL: Every day I went to the Merhamet Apartments at the customary hour, to begin my wait. Having realised that getting there early only aggravated my pain, I resolved not to arrive before five minutes to two. I would go into the apartment trembling with impatience, and during the first ten or fifteen minutes hopeful anticipation would ease the pain, an excitement wreathing my head down to the tip of my nose even as my heart ached and my stomach cramped.
This depiction of the internal organs of the human body is taken from an advertisement for Paradison, a painkiller on display in the window of every pharmacy in Istanbul at the time, and I use it here to illustrate to the museum visitor where the agony of love first appeared, where it became most pronounced, and how far it spread.
One: where the deepest pain is initially felt.
Two: as the pain increases, it will radiate to the cavity between the lungs and the stomach. At that point its abdominal presence will no longer be confined to the left side, as it will have spread to the right.
Three: you will feel as if a hot poker or a screwdriver were twisting into you.
Four: it is as if the stomach and then the entire abdomen were filling up with acid.
Five: it is as if sticky, red-hot little starfish were attaching themselves to your organs.
Six: the pain of jealousy is initially felt in the mind and soon triggers a pain in the stomach, bringing the lover to devastation.
AYLA: Listening to the anatomy of Kemal’s melancholy was like discovering the science of hüzün, Turkish melancholy, in the streets of Istanbul. Looking at the city now, it’s sometimes difficult to remember that when we were growing up, we felt that we were living in a black-and-white world, the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.
INTERVIEW, ORHAN PAMUK: The beautiful city views that Istanbul gifts us, the feel of the streets at midnight when the dogs take over, the city’s dilapidated backstreets, its cemeteries, its moss-covered walls, its old wooden homes with crooked bay windows, its new concrete buildings with their plaster already crumbling, its muddy, wood-coloured, unadorned streets, its cobbled pavements, all of these things together inject a feeling of hüzün into the inhabitants of Istanbul. This, I have determined, is the fundamental feeling the city conveys. But this idea of ‘Turkish melancholy’, hüzün, also comes with a philosophical aspect: it is a warning against success and wealth. The philosophy of hüzün seems to tell us, ‘Don’t you dare be successful in life. Don’t you dare try to marry the girl you love. You will fail.’ It is about favouring humility over success. The philosophy of hüzün tells us, ‘Retreat into your shell and find from there a way to live with dignity, to be and look like everyone else.’ Don’t try to be special or different.
AYLA: I read that after his engagement party, while she still occupied Kemal’s every thought, Füsun never came to the Merhamet Apartments again. And though he grew adept at distracting himself with the happiness he found in the objects she had touched, the light had gone out of Kemal’s life.
KEMAL: Forty-five minutes later, Füsun still had not come, and I was lying on the bed like a corpse, though in pain and intensely aware of it, like an animal listening helplessly to its last breath.
Beside my head was the side table on which she had left her watch so carefully the first few times we made love. For a week, I had been aware that in the ashtray now resting there was the butt of a cigarette Füsun had stubbed out. I picked it up and rubbed the end that had once touched her lips against my cheeks, my forehead, my neck, and the recesses under my eyes, as gently and kindly as a nurse salving a wound. Distant continents appeared before my eyes, sparkling with the promise of happiness, and scenes from heaven; I remembered the tenderness my mother had shown me as a child, and the times I had gone to Teşvikiye Mosque in Fatma Hanım’s arms, before pain would rush in again, inundating me.
AYLA: And Kemal began to behave like a man whose job it was to gather the refuse of his affair with Füsun. Things that had been thrown away, things that had been lost, things that were looked down on, things that had been crushed underfoot, Kemal began to collect. He felt deeply alienated from his class, and sometimes felt an affinity for the legions of Istanbul’s ragpickers.
RAGPICKER: I’m quite emotional, easily hurt, so sensitive I can cry at the smallest thing. I suppose that life at night is better for people like me. I sleep during the day, no-one bothers me then, and I go out to work at night. Most people look down on me when they see me. I’ve noticed it, I notice it all the time. When I say they look down on you, what I mean is they look at you like you’re something dirty. That’s why I never go out ragpicking during the day. Night-time is the best. I always go to the same places anyway. Usually it’s corporate buildings. They know me by now, so they let me in and I can roam around inside for as long as I want. No questions asked. Since people know me, I have enough work to last me through the night. I never go out during the day. I don’t want to look at people during the day, I don’t even want to see their faces.
AYLA: By now there was hardly a moment when Kemal wasn’t thinking of Füsun. Even just walking through the streets of the neighbourhood where he had lived for most of his life caused him to suffer. For now, more than anything else, those streets reminded him of her.
KEMAL: I knew by now that if I didn’t make a plan to forget her, there would be no continuing my normal daily life.
The streets or locations marked in red represent regions from which I was absolutely banned. The Şanzelize Boutique, near where Teşvikiye Avenue crosses with Valikonağı Avenue; the Merhamet Apartments, on Teşvikiye Avenue; the police station and the corner where Alaaddin had his shop – on my mental map, they were all restricted areas, marked in red.
INTERVIEW, ORHAN PAMUK: The city for me is the place where the protagonist of the novel I have in my mind can walk and walk. The city bears the marks of our memories, so when we walk through its streets, we feel as if we were walking simultaneously in the past, the present, and the future. The hero of the novel I am writing now is also always walking and selling boza at night. There is a quotation from Rousseau I particularly like: ‘I can only meditate when I’m walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.’
INTERVIEW, EMRE AYVAZ: You’ve had a bodyguard for the past few years; you go on walks together. How has this made you feel?
INTERVIEW, ORHAN PAMUK: Five months after I was awarded the Nobel Prize, and shortly after the assassination of Hrant Dink, the Turkish government began assigning bodyguards to people like me who were deemed to be in dang
er. Early on, when things were at their worst, I had to go around with three bodyguards. It got a little better as time went on. There is now, in 2013, greater freedom of thought in Turkey than there was in, say, 2003. I use myself as an example: I’ve gone down from three bodyguards to one. We’re doing just fine! Having a bodyguard meant that after all those years when I had been free to wander around the city alone, there would now always be a policeman with me. As you’d expect, this rather upset me. But in time, my bodyguard and I became friends. We started going on long walks together.
KEMAL: In spite of banishing myself from the streets where I’d lived all my life and keeping far from all objects reminiscent of her, I was unable to forget Füsun. For now I’d begun to see her ghost in crowded streets and at parties.
There she was, standing before the Dolmabahçe Clock Tower, or walking through the Beşiktaş Market carrying a macramé bag like a housewife, or most surprising and unsettling, gazing down at the street from the window of a third-floor apartment in Gümüşsuyu. When she saw me in the street looking up at her, Füsun’s ghost stared back at me. When I waved, she waved back. But her manner of waving sufficed to tell me that she wasn’t Füsun, so I walked off in shame.
Discounting the second or two of consolation that the first sightings of these ghosts brought me, I never for long forgot that they were not Füsun but figments of my unhappy imagination. Still, I could not live without the occasional sweet feeling, and so I began to frequent those crowded places where I might see her ghost; and eventually I would mark these places, too, on my mental map of Istanbul. Those places where her ghosts had appeared most often were the ones where I was most regularly to be found. Istanbul was now a galaxy of signs that reminded me of her.
