The Museum of Innocence

by Orhan Pamuk

  It was on one such screen in a gigantic open-air cinema that I first saw Orhan Gencebay, who with his songs and his movies, his records and his posters, was becoming a fixture in the lives of the entire Turkish public at that time—the king, in fact, of music and domestic film. The cinema was on a hill behind the new shantytowns between Pendik and Kartal, overlooking the Sea of Marmara, the sparkling Princes’ Islands, the factories, large and small, whose walls were covered with leftist slogans. The smoke, which looked even whiter by night, rising like puffs of cotton from the chimneys of the Yunus Cement Factory in Kartal had covered the entire area in white ash, and together with the plaster dust falling onto the audience produced an effect like snow in a fairy tale.

  In this film Orhan Gencebay played a poor young fisherman named Orhan. There was a rich, evil man who was his patron, to whom he felt indebted. This patron’s spoiled son was even worse, and when the boy and his friends happened upon the girl played by Müjde Ar (who was just making her first films at the time) and raped her, mercilessly and at length, tearing off her clothes to give us a better view, the audience fell silent. Under pressure from his patron, to whom he felt so indebted, Orhan was then obliged to whitewash the whole affair by marrying Müjde. At this point, Gencebay cried out, “Down with the world, down with everything!” and once again he would sing the song he had made famous throughout Turkey.

  During the film’s most affecting scenes, we would hear nothing but a rustling noise coming from the hundreds of people seated around us, munching pumpkin seeds (the first time I heard this, I thought it was coming from some machine in a nearby factory). Whenever I heard this sound, I felt as if we had all been abandoned to sorrows gathering up within us for many years. But the film’s ambience, the jostling of people who had come out to have a bit of fun, the wisecrackers in the section for single men at the front, and, of course, the implausible plot elements all hindered my ability to let myself go and luxuriate in my suppressed fears. But when Orhan Gencebay cried out in anger, “All is darkness, where is humanity?” I was very happy to be sitting in that cinema, among the trees and under the stars, with Füsun at my side. While I kept one eye on the screen, with my other I watched how Füsun squirmed in her blue jeans, in her wooden chair, how her chest rose and fell with each breath, and how, as Orhan Gencebay cried, “My destiny be damned!” she crossed those legs. I watched her smoke, and wondered how much she shared in the passions on-screen. When Orhan was forced to marry Müjde, and his angry song took on rebellious tones, I turned to Füsun, smiling with a look both impassioned and arch. But, caught up in the film, she didn’t even turn to look at me.

  Because his wife had been raped, Orhan the fisherman did not make love with her—he kept his distance. When she understood that her pain would not be assuaged by this marriage, Müjde attempted suicide; Orhan took her to the hospital and saved her. The most emotional scene was on the way back from the hospital, when he told his wife to take his arm, and Müjde turned to him and asked, “Are you ashamed of me?” It was then that I finally felt an intimation of the shame that had remained buried inside me. The crowd had fallen into a deathly silence, aghast at the shame of marrying and walking arm in arm with a woman who had been raped, her virginity stolen.

  My own shame was compounded by anger. Was I embarrassed that virginity and chastity were being discussed so openly, or because I was watching this with Füsun? As these thoughts passed through my mind, I could feel Füsun fidgeting in her chair. The children sitting in their mothers’ laps had fallen asleep, and the angry youths in the front row had stopped making wisecracks at the heroes and had grown quiet, and Füsun, seated next to me, put her right arm behind her chair—how I longed to hold it!

  The second feature gave the shame inside me a new shape, casting it as the ailment that afflicted the entire country, and even the stars in the sky: the pain of love. This time Orhan Gencebay had dark, sweet Perihan Savaş at his side. In the face of unbearable pain, he showed no anger, rather availing himself of those other, greater weapons that we all possess—humility and forbearance—summarizing his feelings, and the film, in this song, which the museum visitor can have the pleasure of listening to:

  Once you were my sweetheart

  I yearned for you even when you were near

  Now you’ve found another love

  May happiness be yours

  And mine the trials and troubles

  Let life be yours, be yours.

  By now all the children were asleep on their parents’ laps, and the rowdy, soda-swilling, chickpea-throwing boys in the front rows had fallen silent—was it owing to the lateness of the hour or to the respect they felt for Orhan Gencebay in transforming the pain of fear with sacrifice? Could I do likewise and live without further misery or humiliation, just by wishing for Füsun’s happiness? If I did all that was necessary for her to star in a Turkish film, would I find peace?

  Füsun’s arm was no longer close to me. When Orhan Gencebay told his sweetheart, “May happiness be yours, and may the memories be mine!” someone at the front yelled “You fool!” but almost no one laughed approval. We were all silent. That was when it occurred to me that the lesson this country had learned or yearned to learn, above all others, the skill we most wanted to master and pass along, was that of gracefully accepting defeat. The film had been shot in a Bosphorus yalı, and perhaps because it awakened memories of last summer, and last autumn, for a brief time I felt a lump in my throat. Just off the coast of Dragos a white ship was slowly advancing across the Sea of Marmara toward the sparkling lights of the Princes’ Islands where happy people were summering. Lighting a cigarette, I crossed my legs and gazed at the stars, dazzled by the beauty of the universe. I had been drawn into this film, coarse as it was, by the audience’s hushed response. If I had been watching the film at home alone on television, it would not have affected me so, and had I been sitting with my mother, I would not have watched it to the end. It was only because I was sitting next to Füsun that I felt the bond of fellowship with the rest of the audience.

  When the lights went up we were as quiet as the mothers and fathers bearing sleeping children in their arms; not once did we break this silence on our return journey. As Füsun dozed in the backseat, her head resting on her husband’s chest, I smoked a cigarette and gazed through the window at the somber streets, the little factories, the shanty towns, the youths defacing walls with leftist slogans under cover of darkness, the trees that looked so much older at night, the aimless packs of dogs, and the tea gardens about to close, while Feridun whispered to me his good-natured analysis of the film’s key moments, which I never once turned my head to acknowledge.

  One warm evening we went to the Yeni İpek Cinema, located in a long and narrow garden squeezed between the shanties near İhlamur Palace and the backstreets of Nişantaşı, where we sat under the mulberry trees to watch The Agony of Love Ends with Death and a second melodrama, Listen to My Crying Heart, featuring the child star Papatya. As we sat holding our soft drinks during the intermission, Feridun mentioned that the tough guy with the thin mustache playing the crooked accountant in the first film was a friend of his, and was willing to play a similar role in our film. This was the point I realized it would be very difficult for me to enter the Yeşilçam film world purely for the sake of being close to Füsun.

  My evasive eyes lit on one of the balconies overlooking the cinema garden, and from the black curtains obscuring its door I realized that this old wooden house was one of Nişantaşı’s two most secret and exclusive backstreet brothels. The girls there loved to joke about how, on summer nights, as they lay with their rich gentleman clients, their cries of love would mingle with the music on the sound track, and the clashing of swords, and actors declaring, “I can see, I can see” in melodramas featuring a pair of sightless eyes suddenly opened. The house had once belonged to a famous Jewish merchant, and his former parlor now served as a waiting room, so whenever the high-spirited, mini-skirted girls got bored, they could go up to
one of the empty rooms in the back and watch the film from the balcony.

  At the little Yıldız Garden Cinema in Şehzadebaşı, overflowing balconies surrounded the garden on all three sides, in a way that recalled boxes at La Scala. Once, during a scene from My Love and My Pride, a father was castigating his son (“If you marry that good-for-nothing shopgirl I will cut you out of my will and disown you!”), while an argument broke out on one of the balconies, causing some of us to confuse the two disputes. In the Yaz Çiçek Cinema Garden, just next to the wintertime Çiçek Cinema in Karagümrük, we watched The Old Lady Who Sells Simits, whose screenplay was written by son-in-law Feridun, based, he told us, on a new adaptation of the novel The Bread Seller Woman by Xavier de Montépin. This time it was not Türkan Şoray in the leading role but Fatma Girik, and just above us there was a fatso father unhappy with this state of affairs, so as he sat there in his underwear on the balcony, surrounded by his family, drinking his rakı and eating his mezes, he kept saying, “Now would Türkan ever have deigned to play the part like this? Not on your life, brother, what a travesty!” To make matters worse, having seen the film the previous evening, he kept sarcastically announcing what was about to happen, in a voice loud enough for the entire audience to hear. When drawn into a shouting match with those below who pleaded, “Shhh, shut up so we can watch the film,” he scorned the film all the more, picking fights with the audience. Füsun, doubtless thinking that all this was upsetting her husband, nestled up to him, and I burned up inside.

  On the way back, as she joined the conversation or dozed off in the backseat, she would rest her head on her husband’s shoulder or his belly, or wrap her arms around him, which I had no wish to see. In the car, with Çetin driving slowly and carefully, I was directing my attention to the warm and humid night, our way lit by fireflies, listening to crickets, breathing in the fragrance of honeysuckle, rust, and dust blowing in the backstreets through the half-open windows, and gazing out into the darkness. But when we were watching a film and I sensed that they were nestling up against each other, as happened, for example, at the Incirli Cinema in Bakırköy, where we saw two thrillers inspired by American films and set in Istanbul’s backstreets, a black mood would instantly swamp me. And sometimes, like the fierce hero of Caught in the Crossfire who swallowed his grief, I would seal my lips tight. Sometimes it would seem to me that Füsun was leaning on her husband’s shoulder just to make me jealous, and in my mind she and I were dueling to see which of us could make the other feel worse. Then I would act as if I had not even noticed the newlyweds whispering to each other and giggling, and I would pretend I was immersed in the film, enjoying it tremendously; just to prove it, I would laugh at something only the most obtuse person in the audience would find funny. Or I would snigger as if, having noticed a bizarre inconsistency everyone else had missed, and, like so many intellectuals being uneasy at having come to see a Turkish film, I couldn’t help railing against such nonsense. But I didn’t like this cynical mood of mine. If at an emotionally charged moment her husband draped his arm around Füsun, something he did only rarely, I did not feel at all uncomfortable, but if Füsun took such a moment to rest her head lightly on Feridun’s shoulder, I felt utterly crushed and couldn’t prevent myself from feeling that Füsun was heartless and trying to hurt me, and I would get angry.

  At the end of August, when the first flocks of storks had flown over Istanbul, en route from the Balkans to the south, to Africa (it didn’t even cross my mind that Sibel and I had given an end-of-summer party at just this time the previous year), and the weather had turned cool and rainy, we went one evening to see a film at the large garden inside the Beşiktaş Market that was known as the Hunchback’s Place and served as the summer venue for the Yumurcak Cinema, and as we sat there, watching I Loved a Penniless Girl, I sensed that underneath the pullover that she had draped over her lap the two were holding hands. I took the same measures as I had at other times, in other cinemas, when I was overcome by this same jealousy, and just after I had convinced myself that I had put it out of my mind, I crossed my legs and lit a cigarette so that I could take another look and see if the happy couple were indeed holding hands beneath that pullover. Bearing in mind that they were married, and shared a bed, and had so many other opportunities to touch each other, I had to wonder why they were doing so now, in front of me.

  Whenever my mood plummeted, it would seem to me that the film on the screen (like all the others we had seen over the past few weeks) was perversely awful, preposterously shallow, and deplorably disconnected from the real world. I’d had my fill of half-witted lovers, continually bursting into song, of those headscarfed servant girls with painted lips who became chanteuses overnight. I didn’t care for those plots about bands of sergeants that were “rip-offs of a French adaptation” of The Three Musketeers, as Feridun would tell me with a smile, nor did I like watching other bands of ruffians who proved themselves men by taunting girls in the street. We saw The Kasımpaşa Trio and The Three Fearless Musketeers with its black-shirted heroes at the Desire Cinema in Feriköy, where competition had forced the managers to show three badly cut and therefore incomprehensible films every evening. All those lionhearted lovers (“Stop! Stop! Tanju is innocent; the one you want is me!” as Hülya Koçyiğit declares in Under the Acacias, which we were unable to see to the end because of a rainstorm); and those mothers who would sacrifice everything so that their blind children could have the operation (as in Broken Heart, shown in the Üsküdar People’s Garden Cinema, where a troupe of acrobats entertained us between features); those friends who said, “Keep running, my lion, while I distract them” (Erol Taş, who Feridun said had promised to appear in our film, was once to speak those immortal lines); I found them no less tiring than the honorable and selfless neighborhood boys who refused happiness saying: “But you are my friend’s sweetheart.” At a gloomy, hopeless moment like this, even the heroines who said, “I am a penniless shopgirl, while you are the son of a wealthy factory owner”—even the miserable wretch who went to see his beloved in a chauffeur-driven car on the pretext of visiting distant relatives couldn’t stir my sympathies.

  The pleasures of sitting beside Füsun, the fleeting happiness of being at one with the audience as I watched the film, if chilled by a wind of jealousy, could produce a darkness benighting everything under the sun. But on some transcendent occasions the whole world seemed illumined: When, for instance, amid the misery of heroes forever losing their sight, my arm would brush against the velvet skin of her arm, and, not wishing the wondrous sensation to end, I would hold my arm still, continuing to watch the film without following the action, until I could believe that she had actually let her arm brush against me, I would almost faint from happiness. At the end of the summer, in the Arnavutköy Çampark Cinema, while watching Little Lady, about a spoiled rich girl’s adventures with the chauffeur who brings her to her senses, our arms brushed against each other that way, and remained intensely in contact as the fire of her skin ignited mine, and until my body reacted with an entirely unexpected elation. So transported was I by the dizzying sensation that for a time I paid no attention to arresting my body’s impudence, and so when the lights came on, and the five-minute intermission began, I was obliged to hide my shame by draping my navy pullover over my lap.

  “Shall we get some soda?” said Füsun. At the interval she usually went with her husband to buy soda and pumpkin seeds.

  “Sure, but give me a moment, would you?” I said. “I just had a thought I’m trying to remember.”

  Just as I had done as a lycée student, whenever I needed to hide my body’s importune excitement from my classmates, I raced through memories of my grandmother’s death, the real and imaginary funeral rites of my childhood, the times when my father had scolded me, and then I imagined my own funeral, the grave terrifyingly dark, my eyes filled with earth. Half a minute later I was ready to stand up without betraying myself.

  Walking together toward the soda vendor, I noticed as if for t
he first time how tall she was and how fine her posture. How pleasant it was to walk among families, chairs, running children without worry of being seen…. I liked to observe the notice she attracted in the crowd, and it made me so happy to imagine that they saw us as a couple, husband and wife. That this short walk together was worth all the pain I had suffered, that I was living through a moment unlike any other, that this walk was one of the happiest moments in my life, seemed certain even as it was happening.

  As always, there was no queue for the soda vendor, only a crowd of children and adults all shouting at once. So we took our place behind them and began to wait.

  “So what was this serious thought you were trying to remember just now?” Füsun asked.

  “I liked the film,” I said. “I was wondering how it was I could now enjoy all these films that I used to laugh at in the old days, or just ignore. At that moment it seemed to me the answer was on the tip of my tongue if I could only concentrate.”

  “Do you really like these films? Or do you like coming with us to see them?”

  “Of course I like them. They make me so very happy. Most of the ones we’ve seen this summer, they speak to a sorrow inside me, and I find them consoling.”