by Orhan Pamuk
But as she watched the bearers carry my father’s coffin from the mosque morgue to the funeral stone, my mother began crying so hard that we immediately knew she would not make it down the stairs and across the street to join the funeral. In spite of all the tranquilizers we’d given her, when she went out to the balcony in her Astrakhan fur, propped up by Bekri on one side and Fatma Hanım on the other, to watch the crowd lift the coffin into the funeral hearse, she fainted. There was a harsh north wind blowing; there were swirls of snowflakes small enough to get into your eyes. Almost no one in the crowd noticed my mother. After Bekri and Fatma had taken her back inside, I too gave my attention to the crowd. These were the same people who had come to our engagement party at the Hilton. As it seemed so often on the streets of Istanbul in winter, the pretty girls I’d noticed during the summer had disappeared; the women had grown uglier, the men, too, darker and more threatening. Just as I had done at the engagement party, I shook hundreds of people’s hands, embracing many well-wishers, and every time I met a new shadow in the crowd I felt a pang, because we were burying my father, and because that shadow was not Füsun. When I was sure that neither she nor her parents had come to the funeral or the interment, and that they were not going to come, I felt as if I was being buried under the cold earth along with my father.
The cold seemed to bring the family closer, and after the ceremony was over they wanted to remain together, but I fled them, taking a taxi straight to the Merhamet Apartments. Even the smell of the apartment brought me peace as I inhaled it from the threshold; I knew from experience that Füsun’s lead pencil had the greatest consolatory power of all the things in the apartment, with her teacup, which I had not washed since her disappearance, coming in a close second; I took these things into bed with me. After touching them and stroking my skin with them for a short time, I was able at last to relax.
To readers and museum visitors who are curious to know whether the pain I endured that day was owing to the death of my father or to Füsun’s absence, I would like to say that the pain of love is indivisible. The pains of true love reside at the heart of our existence; they catch hold of our most vulnerable point, rooting themselves deeper than the root of any other pain, and branching to every part of our bodies and our lives. For the hopelessly in love, the pain can be triggered by anything, whether as profound as the death of a father or as mundane as a piece of bad luck, like losing a key; such elemental pain can be flamed by any sort of spark. People whose lives have, like mine, been turned upside down by love can become convinced that all other problems will be resolved once the pain of love is gone, but in ignoring these problems they only allow them to fester.
Sitting in the taxi on the day we buried my father, I was able to think these thoughts clearly, but to my regret I could not act accordingly. The anguish of love had disciplined me—brought me to maturity—but in ruling my mind, it gave me scant latitude to use the reason that maturity had brought me. A man like me, too long captive to a destructive passion, will continue on the course his reason tells him is wrong, even if he knows it will bring him to sorrow; in time, he’ll see only more and more clearly how wrong was his path. In such situations there is an interesting phenomenon rarely remarked upon: Even on our worst days, our reason does not stop speaking to us; even if unequal to the power of our passion, it continues to whisper with merciless candor that our actions will serve no purpose but to heighten our love, and therefore our pain. During the first nine months after I lost Füsun, my reason continued to whisper to me, ever more urgently, giving me the hope that one day it would usurp control of my mind and rescue me. But love mingled with such hope (even the simpler hope that I would one day live without pain) gave me the strength to carry on in the face of my agony, while at the same time prolonging it.
As I lay in the Merhamet Apartments, soothing myself with Füsun’s things (the loss of my father having now merged with the loss of my love in an amalgam of being alone and unloved), I began to understand why Füsun and her family had not come to the funeral. Still I struggled to accept that Aunt Nesibe and her husband, who had always attached such importance to their relations with my mother and the family, had stayed away because of me. For this conclusion meant inexorably that Füsun and her family were determined to escape me forever. The prospect that I might never see her again for the rest of my life was so unbearable that I could not entertain it for long; I needed to find some way to have hope of seeing Füsun in the near future.
48
The Most Important Thing in Life Is to Be Happy
“I HEAR you’re blaming Kenan for Satsat’s going off the rails,” Osman whispered into my ear one evening. He came often to visit our mother in the evenings, sometimes with Berrin and the children, but mostly he came by himself to make a threesome at supper.
“Where did you hear that?”
“I hear things,” said Osman. My mother was in the other room; he gestured in her direction. “You’ve disgraced yourself in society, but at least don’t embarrass yourself at the firm,” he said mercilessly. (This despite the fact that he hated the word “society” as much as I did.) “It’s your fault you lost out on the sheet business,” he added.
“What’s going on, what are you talking about?” said my mother. “Please don’t have another argument!”
“We’re not,” said Osman. “I was just saying how good it is that Kemal’s returned. Don’t you agree, Mother?”
“Oh, yes, my son, it’s wonderful. Whatever anybody says, the most important thing in life is to be happy. This city is full of beautiful girls; we’ll find one who is even kinder and more beautiful, and more understanding. After all, a woman who doesn’t love cats is never going to make a man happy. None of us should waste any more time dwelling on what happened. Just promise me you’ll never go back to living in a hotel.”
“On one condition!” I said, childishly repeating Füsun’s ploy of nine months earlier. “I want to take over my father’s car, and Çetin with it.”
“Fine,” said Osman. “If Çetin is happy with that, then I am, too. But you have to stop messing with Kenan and the new business. I don’t want any more mudslinging.”
“I don’t want you two arguing in front of everyone, ever!” my mother said.
After separating from Sibel, I grew more distant from Nurcihan; and once I distanced myself from her, I began to see much less of Mehmet, who was as ever madly in love with her. Zaim, meanwhile, was spending more time with them, so when he and I met it would be just the two of us, and slowly I removed myself from the group. For a brief time I took to going out with Hilmi the Bastard and Tayfun and a few others who, despite being married, engaged, or as good as engaged, still had a taste for the naughtier side of nightlife, and liked to visit the city’s priciest brothels, or I’d go out with friends who knew which hotel lobbies were favored by the slightly more educated and refined girls that we mockingly called the “coeds;” I was not really looking for fun; what I was hoping for was a cure for my illness, but my love for Füsun had emerged from the shadows to claim my entire body. Although it was amusing to be among friends, I was not able to lose myself and forget my troubles. And so most evenings I stayed at home, sitting next to my mother, a glass of raki in my hand, watching whatever was on the single state-controlled channel.
My mother did just as she’d done when my father was alive: a merciless critique of whatever was on the screen; at least once a night, she would tell me not to drink so much, just as she used to tell my father, and then she would fall asleep in her chair. Fatma Hanım, the maid, and I would then be obliged to whisper about whatever was on television. Unlike the maids who worked for the rich families we saw in Western films, Fatma Hanım did not have a television in her room. For four years now, ever since the broadcasting service had begun and we’d bought our first television set, Fatma Hanım would come into the sitting room every evening to perch tentatively on the bar stool at the far end of the room—by now we had come to think of it as “her chair�
�—and from this distance she would watch along with us, fiddling with the knot in her scarf at moments of high drama, and sometimes venturing into the conversation. After my father’s death, it fell to her to respond to my mother’s endless monologues, and so lately we’d been hearing more from her. One night, after my mother had dozed off, there was a live broadcast of a skating competition; as we watched the long-legged Soviets and Norwegians, just as ignorant of the competition rules as the rest of Turkey, Fatma Hanım and I chatted about the warm weather, the political street killings, my mother’s health, the futility of politics, and about her son, who, after working with my father, had immigrated to Duisburg, Germany, to open a döner restaurant—in other words, we were talking about the sweetness of life, when she brought the subject round to me.
“Clawnails, you’re not poking holes in your socks anymore, and this is a good thing I noticed that you’re cutting your nails now, and very nicely, too. So I’m going to give you a present.”
“A pair of nail clippers?”
“No, there are already two pairs of nail clippers in the house. Three, counting your father’s. This is something else.”
“What is it?”
“Come inside,” said Fatma Hanım.
From her manner I guessed it was something special, so I followed. Stepping into her room, she picked something up; then she led me into my room and turned on the light; she opened her palm like someone doing a magic trick for a child.
“What’s this?” I said, before my heart began to pound.
“It’s an earring. What is this—a butterfly with a letter? Isn’t it strange?”
“It’s mine.”
“I know it’s yours. Months and months ago I found it in the pocket of your jacket. I set it aside, to give it to you. But your mother saw it and took it. She must have thought your dear departed father had bought it for someone else, and she would spoil his fun, or something like that. Anyway, she had a secret velvet pouch where she hid things from your father”—she smiled—“stole from your father and then hid from him. After your father died, she emptied it out and laid all the contents on top of his bureau, and when I saw this, I recognized it right away, so I grabbed it for you. There is also a photograph I found in one of your father’s jackets. Take that, too, before your mother sees it. Did I do well?”
“You did very well, Fatma Hanım,” I said. “You are very clever, very wise, and truly wonderful.”
With a happy smile, she handed me her gifts. The photograph was the one my father had shown me at Abdullah’s Restaurant: a picture of his deceased sweetheart. Looking at this sad girl now, and the ships and the sea in the background, I suddenly saw shades of Füsun.
The next day I called Ceyda. Two days later, we met again in Maçka and walked to Taşlık Park. Her hair was in a bun, and she was radiating with the happiness one sees uniquely in new mothers, and I soon saw she had acquired the confidence that comes of having to grow up quickly. During the past two days, and without much strain, I had written four or five letters to Füsun, finally putting the most moderate and coolheaded of these into a yellow Satsat envelope. As I had planned in advance, I frowned as I handed Ceyda the letter, telling her there had been a very important development, and that she had to make sure Füsun received this letter. My plan was to tell Ceyda nothing of the letter’s contents, creating an air of a mystery of such importance that she could not take responsibility for failing to deliver it. Ceyda’s sane, mature, accepting manner disarmed me, and it was with great excitement that I confessed to Ceyda that the letter pertained to a matter that had made Füsun very angry at me, and that when Füsun received the news I was sending her, she would be very glad, as I was, and that apart from lost time, our troubles were over. As I said my good-byes to Ceyda, who was rushing home to nurse her baby, I told her that as soon as Füsun and I married, we would have a child who would be friends with her boy, and that we would laugh one day at these troubles and the contortions it had taken to find true love. I asked her what she had named her child.
“Ömer,” said Ceyda. “But life never turns out the way we want, Kemal Bey.”
When weeks had passed without an answer from Füsun, Ceyda’s parting words came back to me often, but I never doubted that Füsun would answer my letter, for Ceyda had confirmed that Füsun was aware I had broken off the engagement. In my letter I had said that her earring had turned up in a box of my father’s, and that I wanted to bring it back to her, along with the other earrings of my father’s that I had tried to give her, and the tricycle. The time had come for the evening we had planned so long ago, when I would come for a meal with her parents.
In the middle of May, on a busy day, I was at the office reading correspondence from our distributorships in the provinces, along with other letters, personal and professional, offering friendship, thanks, complaint, apologies, and threats. Most had been written by hand, and I was struggling with some of them, because I couldn’t read the script—and then I came upon a very short letter, which I devoured with my heart pounding:
Cousin Kemal,
We too would very much like to see you. We await your company at supper on May 19.
Our phone line has not yet been connected. If you are unable to join us, send Çetin Efendi to let us know.
With our love and respects,
Füsun
Address: Dalgıç Street, No. 24, Çukurcuma
There was no date on the letter, but from the postmark I could tell it had been sent from Galatasaray Post Office on May 10. The nineteenth was more than two days hence, and though I longed to bolt straight to that Çukurcuma address, I restrained myself. If my aim was to marry Füsun in the end, and to bind her to me ever after, I should take care not to seem too anxious, I told myself.
49
I Was Going to Ask Her to Marry Me
ON WEDNESDAY, May 19, 1976, at half past seven, I set out for Füsun’s family’s house in Çukurcuma, telling Çetin Efendi only that we were going over to return a child’s tricycle to Aunt Nesibe. I gave him the address and I sat back in my seat, watching rain pour down on the streets, as if someone had upended a giant glass. Not once during my thousands of dreams of our reunion had I imagined such a deluge, or even a light drizzle.
Stopping at the Merhamet Apartments to pick up the tricycle and the pearl earrings that my father had given me in a box, I got completely soaked. Still entirely contrary to my expectations, I felt the deepest peace in my heart. It was as if I had forgotten all the pain I had endured since last seeing her at the Hilton Hotel 339 days earlier. I remember even feeling thankful for every minute I had spent writhing in agony, because it had brought me to this happy ending. I blamed nothing and no one.
I saw stretching out before me the same wondrous life I’d seen at the beginning of my story. Stopping off at a florist on Sıraselviler Avenue, I had them make me a huge bouquet of red roses that was as beautiful as that prospect. To calm myself, I’d had a half glass of rakı before leaving home. Should I have stopped off for one more at a meyhane—one of the taverns in the side streets leading up to Beyoğlu? Impatience, like the pain, had taken hold of me. “Be careful!” warned a voice inside. “This time you can make no mistakes!” As we passed the Çukurcuma Hamam shrouded in rain, I suddenly realized what a good lesson Füsun had taught me with these 339 days of agony: She had won. I was ready to do whatever she wanted, to avoid the punishment of never being able to see her again. Once I had recovered from the initial excitement, once I was sure that Füsun was at my side, I was going to ask her to marry me.
As Çetin Efendi peered through the rain, trying to read the house numbers, I conjured up the proposal scene, which I had already imagined somewhere in my mind, hiding it from my consciousness: After entering the house, handing over the tricycle, making a few jokes, taking a seat and settling in—was I up to doing all this?—I would sip the coffee Füsun brought me, and then, summoning my courage, I would look straight into her father’s eyes and say point-blank that I had come
to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage. The tricycle was just an excuse. We would laugh about it, like so many jokes we would use to keep from ever talking about the agonies, or the sorrows that had caused them. As I drank the Yeni Rakı her father would naturally serve me at the table, I would look into Füsun’s eyes and feast on the happiness that my decision had brought me. We could discuss the details of the engagement and the marriage at another time.
The car stopped in front of an old building; the rain made it impossible to see what sort of structure it was. My heart racing, I knocked on the door. Almost at once Aunt Nesibe answered. As I carried the tricycle inside, I remember how impressed she was by the sight of Çetin Efendi, who stood behind me holding an umbrella, and how delighted she was by the roses. I sensed unease in her expression, but I was not the least deterred, because I was climbing the stairs, and with every step, I was drawing closer to Füsun.
Füsun’s father was waiting on the landing. “Welcome, Kemal Bey.” I’d forgotten I’d seen him a year earlier at the engagement party, somehow imagining that we hadn’t embraced since the last of the old family meals at the Feast of the Sacrifice. Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible.
Then I thought I must be seeing Füsun’s sister, because there, standing behind her father in the doorway, I saw not Füsun, but a dark-haired beauty who resembled her. But even as I was thinking this, I realized that this was Füsun. It was a tremendous shock. Her hair was jet-black. “Her natural color, of course!” I told myself, as I tried to calm my nerves. I went inside. My plan had been to ignore her parents, hand her the flowers, and throw my arms around her, but I could tell from the look on her face, and her discomfort as she approached me, that she didn’t want me to embrace her.
We shook hands.
“Oh, what lovely roses!” she said, without taking them from my hands.
