The Museum of Innocence

by Orhan Pamuk

  “But I do…. Füsun Hanım, why are you so afraid? Can’t you just say you want a role in this film?”

  Füsun looked away. She was smoking calmly and taking her time. I stood up. Feridun did likewise. We both stepped into the space between the man and the table. At the tables surrounding ours, heads began to turn in our direction. We must have assumed the fighting cock stance that Turkish men assume before a fight. No one wanted to miss the drama; all around us, curious, bored drunks settled in for a good show. Tahir’s friend rose from their table to approach us.

  An elderly waiter who’d seen many years of bar brawls intervened. “Come on now, gentlemen, let’s not all crowd in here. Please move back.” He added, “We’ve all had a lot to drink, and tempers will flare. Kemal Bey, we’re bringing out your fried mussels and salted fish.”

  Lest they misunderstand, let me inform visitors who come to our museum centuries hence—those happy generations of the future—that in those days Turkish men seized even the tiniest excuse to come to blows wheresoever they found themselves—be it a coffeehouse, a hospital queue, a traffic jam, or a football match, and that huge dishonor attached even to the appearance of shrinking away from a confrontation. Avoiding a fight or cowering was regarded as dishonor without degree.

  Tahir’s friend came from behind and put his hand on Tahir’s shoulder; he took him away, making as if he wanted them to “be the ones who kept their dignity.” And Feridun took me by the shoulder, as if to say, “What’s the use, anyway?” and he sat me down. I was very grateful to him for doing this.

  As the north wind blew, and a ship’s searchlight swept through the night, lighting up the choppy waves, Füsun carried on smoking, as if nothing had happened. I looked into her eyes for the longest time, and not once did she look away. There was something challenging, almost haughty, about the way she looked at me; I was suddenly aware that the change she had undergone over the past two years was far bigger and more dangerous than this little trouble we’d had with some drunken actor—and so were her expectations.

  Tarık Bey added his voice to the song floating over from the Mücevher Gazino, slowly swaying his head and his raki glass as he intoned Selahattin Pınar’s “Why Did I Ever Love That Cruel Woman.” We all joined in, knowing that to share the sorrow of the song would do us all some good. Much later, around midnight, while driving home, singing all together in the car, singing still, it seemed as if we’d utterly forgotten the unpleasant incident.

  61

  To Look

  BUT I had not forgotten Füsun’s treachery. It was clear that having noticed her at the Pelür, Tahir Tan was besotted with her and had persuaded Hayal Hayati and Muzaffer Bey to offer her film roles. Or, even likelier, having noticed Tahir Tan’s interest in Füsun, Hayal Hayati and Muzaffer Bey had offered her roles. After Tahir Tan had backed off, Füsun, acting like a cat that had just tipped over a bowl of milk, confessed that she had, at the very least, encouraged them.

  After that night at the Huzur Restaurant in Tarabya in the summer of 1977, Füsun was banned from all the film world’s Beyoğlu haunts, and most particularly the Pelür; and her resentment of this regime, whether imposed by her husband, her father, or both, precipitated a sullen fury when I next visited.

  Afterward, at the Lemon Films offices, Feridun clarified that Aunt Nesibe and Tarık Bey both had been frightened by the episode. And so not only was the Pelür off limits; for a time they’d even restricted her contacts with her neighborhood friends. She could not go out without asking her mother’s permission, as if still unmarried. Feridun tried to soften Füsun’s anger over this draconian but short-lived imprisonment by promising that he, too, would stay away from the Pelür. But it was clear to us that getting the art film under way was our only hope of restoring her spirits.

  The film, however, was still in no fit state to pass the board of censors, and neither did it seem to me that Feridun could remedy the situation any time soon. In the back room, where she had now begun a painting of a seagull, Füsun revealed to me that she was perfectly and painfully aware of this fact, and I was sad for her, and yet the spectacle of her willfulness moved me to ask only rarely how her painting was going. It was only if I happened to spy her in a good mood, and thus felt certain our conversation would be of painting seagulls, that I followed her into the back.

  Most of the time I would arrive to find a listless Füsun and sit down to feel her angry eyes on me. Sometimes she seemed convinced of being able to communicate in eloquent detail through looks alone, and she would fix me in a very particular way that I could only begin to decipher. Even if we’d spent four or five minutes in the back room, gazing at the painting, most of the evening would be devoted to those looks, and my efforts to make sense of them, to figure out what she thought of me, her life, and her feelings. I had once been quite disdainful of such games, but now I had given myself over to the subtleties of nonverbal communication, and before long, had become a very skilled practitioner.

  As a young man, out with my friends at the cinema or sitting with them at a restaurant, in springtime on the top deck of a ferry, headed for the islands, I remember whenever one of us said, “Hey, look, those girls over there are staring at us,” while the others became eager I was suspiciously indifferent, knowing that, in fact, girls only rarely dared to glance at men in crowded places, and if they happened to come eye to eye with a man, they would look away immediately, as one might avert one’s eyes from the sun, never to cast their eyes again in that direction. During those first months after I’d begun to visit the Keskin household at suppertime, if we were all sitting at the table watching television and at some unexpected moment our eyes met, it was that very sort of aborted look Füsun gave me. It was, I thought, the way a Turkish girl might encounter a stranger in the street, and I didn’t like it. Later I began to see this as Füsun’s effort to provoke me, but at the time I was still new to the art of exchanging glances.

  In the old days, even in Beyoğlu, regardless of whether her head was covered or not, a woman walking in the streets of Istanbul or wandering its shops or markets would not merely avoid the direct gaze of a man, she could hardly be seen casting her eyes in a man’s direction. On the other hand—apart from the majority who still lived by arranged marriages—I was young enough to know plenty of couples who having caught each other’s eye had proceeded to become acquainted, and eventually got married. “In the beginning we communicated with our eyes,” they’d invariably say. And even my mother insisted that before their marriage had been arranged, she and my father had first seen each other from afar at a ball attended by Atatürk, and that, having warmed to each other, they came to an understanding not by talking, but by looking. Though my father never contradicted her account, he once confided that while they had indeed both attended a ball with Atatürk, he sadly had no recollection of the sixteen-year-old in her fashionable dress and white gloves.

  It was perhaps because of having spent part of my youth in America that it took me so long to understand what it meant for the sexes to come eye to eye in a world like ours, where tradition dictated that a woman should never meet or come to know a man outside her family circle. It wasn’t until my thirties, when I’d met Füsun…. But when I’d discovered this reality I knew the worth of what I’d then come to understand, and how deep these currents were. The look Füsun gave me was the look women gave in the old Persian miniatures, and now to be observed in the love scenes and photoromans of the day. When I was sitting across from her at the table, my attention was not on the television but on reading the looks that beauty cast in my direction. Perhaps because she’d discovered how much pleasure I derived from the exchange and wanted to punish me, but whatever the reason, after a time, whenever our eyes met, Füsun’s eyes would dart away, as if she were some shy young girl.

  At first I thought she was informing me that she had no desire to remember or to remind me of what we’d been through together, not during a family meal, and that her resentment at our having not yet made
her a star burned hot as ever. I felt she had every right to such feelings. But later I came to resent such strenuous avoidance of my gaze as absurd pretense: After all our happy lovemaking, how could she represent herself as a shy virgin confronting a man she did not know? If no one was paying attention to us as we ate supper, and having given ourselves over to television, we had been moved to tears by the spectacle of lovers in some sentimental series saying their last farewells, a chance meeting of our eyes would bring me great joy, and I would have gladly acknowledged having gone there that evening just to look into her eyes. But Füsun would pretend not to notice the happiness of that moment; she would avert her gaze, and this would break my heart.

  Did she realize that I was there because I could not forget how happy we’d been together, once upon a time? Eventually I came to feel that she understood from my expressions that I was immersed in such thoughts, and feelings of hurt. Or perhaps I was just imagining this.

  This ambiguous realm in the cleft between the felt and the imagined was my second great discovery under Füsun’s tutelage in the intricate art of exchanging glances. Of course, staring was the only way to communicate when there were no words. Everything that was expressed, everything that was to be understood, though, was deeply rooted in an ambiguity we found entrancing. If I’d been unable to understand something Füsun had meant to say with her look, in time I would come to see that the thing the look meant to express was the look itself. There were, at first, those rare moments when a deep and powerful emotion registered on her face, and, sensing her anger, her determination, and her stormy heart, I would be thrown into confusion, feeling as if the ground had shifted beneath my feet. But later, when something on television evoked the happy memories we shared—for example, a couple kissing as we had once done—and my attempt to catch her eye was met with her looking away, and even turning her head, I would become enraged. Out of such emotion did I master the habit of staring at her insistently, stubbornly, without blinking.

  I would gaze straight into her eyes and study her carefully, as if there were all the time in the world. Of course, at the dinner table these looks of mine could never last longer than ten or twelve seconds, with my boldest attempt persisting for half a minute. Modern generations may well consider what I was doing as a form of harassment. Because by my insistent looks I was laying out on her family’s dinner table the intimacy, the love we had formerly shared, and which Füsun now wished to hide, or perhaps even forget. I cannot excuse myself by saying that we would all have had something to drink, or that I myself had overindulged. In my defense I can say only that had I denied myself even this joy of staring, I might have gone mad, even lost the will to visit the Keskins.

  Most nights Füsun could tell after the first few glances whether I was in that angry, obsessive mood, wherein I would resort to deep looks that evening, and ruthless prosecution of my claim, but she would never panic; rather, like all Turkish women schooled in this art, she would pretend not even to have noticed that a man was sitting across from her with menace in his eyes, and she would give me not so much as a glance in response. This maddening rejoinder would make me even angrier, and I would stare at her all the more fiercely. In his column in Milliyet, the famous columnist Celâl Salik had issued many stern warnings to the angry men who prowl our streets: “When you see a beautiful woman,” he’d said, “please don’t bore into her with your eyes as if intent on murder.” And the thought that Füsun might take my intense staring as proof that I was one of those Celâl had addressed made me burn with further fury.

  Sibel had talked to me at length about the way men recently arrived from the provinces harassed women; if they saw a beautiful woman wearing lipstick and without a scarf on her head, they would just stand and stare in vicious amazement. Often after a good, long stare, some of these men would stalk their quarry, while others would make their presence known in some more subtly menacing way, from a distance for hours, sometimes even days.

  One evening in October 1977, Tarık Bey went upstairs to bed early, saying he was feeling “indisposed.” Füsun and Aunt Nesibe were conversing tenderly, and I was watching them somewhat absentmindedly, I think, when suddenly Füsun looked me straight in the eye. I stared back in that careful way I had recently mastered.

  “Don’t do that!” Füsun said.

  That threw me for a moment. Füsun had done a very good impression of my stare. At first I was too ashamed to answer.

  “What are you trying to tell me?” I murmured.

  “I am trying to tell you to stop doing it,” Füsun said, and then she mimicked me again, this time exaggerating. Her imitation of me made me see my distasteful resemblance to the heroes in photoromans.

  Even Aunt Nesibe smiled at this. Then she took fright. “Stop imitating everybody and everything like a child, my girl!” she said. “You’re not a child anymore.”

  “Don’t worry, Aunt Nesibe,” I said, gathering all my strength. “I understand Füsun very well.”

  Did I really? It’s important, no doubt, to understand the person we love. If we cannot manage this, it’s necessary, at least, to believe we understand them. I must confess that over the entire eight years I only rarely enjoyed the contentment of the second possibility, let alone the first.

  It was threatening to become one of those evenings when I could not rise from my chair. Deploying my willpower, I finally did, and murmuring that it had gotten very late, I removed myself. At home, drinking myself into oblivion, I resolved never to visit the Keskins again. In the next room my mother was snoring—a painful-sounding moan, but it was perfectly healthy.

  The reader will already have guessed that I then sank into deep indignation. But it didn’t last long. Ten days later I rang the Keskins’ doorbell, as if nothing had happened. Stepping inside, I could see, from the moment our eyes met, that Füsun’s were shining, saying she was glad to see me. At that moment I was the happiest man on earth. We sat down at the table, where we continued to exchange looks.

  As the months and years went by, and I was still sitting and talking at the Keskin table, watching television with Tarık Bey and Aunt Nesibe, aimlessly gabbing about this and that—with Füsun joining in at the odd tangent—I tasted pleasures I’d never known before. You could say I was creating a new family for myself. Those nights sitting across from Füsun, taking part in the Keskin family’s conversations lifted my spirits and made the world look so bright to me, I almost forgot the sorrow that brought me here.

  So it was when in such a mood, late in the evening, at some unexpected moment, I would meet her eye by chance and suddenly I would remember my undying love, and I would bolt upright in excitement, as if having awakened, as if suddenly resurrected. I’d want Füsun to share my elation. For if she could for only a moment awaken as I had from this innocent dream, she would remember the deeper, truer world we’d once inhabited, and in no time she would leave her husband and marry me. But when I saw no such “recollection,” no such “awakening” in Füsun’s eyes, I would be far too dejected to rise from my chair.

  For the whole while our film plans were in limbo, she somehow managed almost never to look at me in a way to suggest any memory of how happy we once were. She looked blandly, pretended to be fascinated by whatever was on television or by the gossip she’d just heard about a neighbor, acting as if her life had found its fulfillment sitting at her parents’ dinner table, as if her quest for meaning ended there; it was in effect the abrupt halt of my quest, too—this impression of desolation, betokening no shared future, no hope that Füsun would ever leave her husband.

  Years after these events I saw how much Füsun’s indignant glances and the rest of her coded pantomime owed to the expressions of Turkish films. But it was no mere mimicry, for Füsun, like those heroines, was unable to explain her troubles to her mother, her father, or any man, so she channeled all her anger, her desire, and other emotions into those looks of hers, laden with meaning.

  62

  To Help Pass the Time

&
nbsp; SEEING FüSUN on a regular basis allowed me to impose some order on the rest of my life as well. Because I was getting enough sleep, I’d get to the office early in the morning. (Inge was still drinking Meltem soda and smiling down mysteriously from the wall of that apartment in Harbiye, but according to Zaim, her effect on sales had abated.) Freed of the need to think obsessively at all times of Füsun, I was even working productively: I could spot people’s tricks and make sound decisions.

  As expected, it wasn’t long before Tekyay, the company to which Osman had appointed Kenan manager, became Satsat’s competitor. But its success was not owing to the way Kenan and my brother ran it. Rather it was that the textile mogul Turgay Bey (my spirits plunged whenever I thought of his Mustang, his factory, and his infatuation with Füsun, though for some reason, I no longer felt jealous of him) had signed over the distribution rights of some of his key products to Tekyay. Being a man of fine feelings, Turgay Bey had forgotten all about the snub of the engagement party; he and his family were now on sound terms with Osman and his family. Subscribing to the same travel magazines, they’d go skiing together on Uludağ in the winter, and on shopping trips to Paris and London in the spring.

  I was taken aback by Tekyay’s aggressive tactics, though I could do little to counter them. Kenan went after the eager young managers I’d brought into the firm, as well as the two middle-aged ones whose hard work and honesty had been the mainstays of Satsat for many years; lured by the recklessly large salaries he was offering, they defected.

  More than once over supper with my mother I complained that Osman was so greedy and keen to seize advantage that he was competing with the firm his own father had founded, but in reply my mother only said, “I really don’t want to come between you two, my son.” I think Osman had encouraged her to believe that my separation from Sibel, my strange new private habits, and my visits to the Keskins’—of which I was certain she was somewhat aware by now—had rendered me incompetent to run my father’s business anyway.