“Hilmi the Bastard’s just walked in with his wife, Neslihan,” Zaim said, looking at the door.

“Oooooh… hey, look who’s here!” Hilmi said, approaching our table. Neslihan was very fashionably turned out, and that suited Hilmi the Bastard well, for he had no confidence in the tailors and seamstresses of Beyoğlu, and wore only Italian clothes, which he selected with much consideration. It was pleasing to see a pair so well dressed, so affluent, but I knew I would not be able to join in their general disdain of all things and persons not up to their standards. As I shook hands, there was a moment when I thought I saw fear in Neslihan’s eyes, and so I remained reserved in their presence, a stance that suddenly seemed all-important. I couldn’t believe that a moment ago, speaking to Zaim, I had used that peculiar word “society,” an expression lifted from the magazines and celebrity pages my mother perused-and having declared a hope to return to it once I had redeemed myself, I now felt ashamed, and longed to return to Çukurcuma and the world I’d shared with Füsun.

Fuaye was as crowded as ever, and as I surveyed the vases of cyclamen, the plain walls, and the modish lamps like so many pleasant memories, the place looked time-worn, as if it had aged ungracefully. Would I be able to sit here with Füsun one day with an untroubled heart, sustained purely by the happiness of being alive and together? I let myself believe so.

“Is something on your mind? You have that faraway look. You’ve floated off into your daydreams,” said Zaim.

“I was thinking about your dilemma concerning Papatya.”

“Remember this summer she’ll be the face of Meltem-this woman has to appear at all our parties and so on. So what do you think?”

“What are you asking?”

“Will she be presentable? Will she know how to act?”

“Why wouldn’t she? She’s an actress, a star, in fact.”

“Well, that’s what I mean… You know how those Turkish film types carry on, the poor ones who play rich people. We can’t have that sort of thing, can we?”

Zaim owed his turn of phrase to his well-mannered mother, but what he meant was “we won’t.” Papatya was not the first person to stir up such concerns, which beset him whenever it was a matter of anyone he viewed as lower class. Put off though I was by his bigotry, I nevertheless saw nothing to be gained by showing my friend anger or disappointment as we sat there at Fuaye.

I asked Sadi, the headwaiter at the restaurant for many years, which fish he was recommending.

“You hardly ever come here anymore, Kemal Bey,” he said. “Your lady mother doesn’t come here, either.”

I explained that after my father died, my mother had lost interest in going out.

“Why don’t you bring the lady here yourself. Please, Kemal Bey-we could cheer her up. When the Karahans’ father died, they brought their widowed mother out to eat three times a week, and we put her at the table next to the window, where the lady would eat her steak and enjoy watching the passersby in the street.”

“Did you know that the lady in question came out of the last sultan’s harem?” said Zaim. “She’s Circassian, green-eyed, and still beautiful even in her seventies. What sort of fish have you got for us?”

Sometimes Sadi would affect an undecided air and recite the names one by one: “Whiting, bream, red mullet, swordfish, sole,” he would say, raising his eyebrows in approval or frowning to indicate the freshness or quality of each. Other times he’d cut it short: “I’m going to give you fried sea bass today, Zaim Bey.”

“What will you serve with it?”

“Mashed potatoes, arugula, whatever you like.”

“And to start?”

“We have this year’s salted bonito.”

“Bring red onions with it,” said Zaim without raising his eyes from the menu, and then turning it over to the beverage list. “God bless, you have Pepsi, Ankara soda, and even Elvan, but still no Meltem!” he blurted.

“Zaim Bey, your people bring one delivery, and then we never see them again. Cases of empties have been sitting in the back for weeks.”

“You’re right, our Istanbul distributors are useless,” said Zaim. He turned to me. “You know this business. How is Satsat managing? What can we do about our distribution problem?”

“Forget about Satsat,” I said. “Osman set up a new firm with Turgay, and he’s done us in. Since my father died, Osman cares only for money.”

Zaim did not care for Sadi hearing us talk about our private failures. “Bring us each a double Kulüp raki with ice on the side, would you? That would be best,” he said. When Sadi left he frowned as if waiting for an answer. “Your beloved brother, Osman, wants to do business with us, too.”

“I’d rather stay out of that,” I said. “I’m not about to take it amiss if you choose to do business with Osman. Business is business. What other news, Zaim?”

He knew at once that I meant society news, and hoping to cheer me up, he offered quite a few amusing stories. Güven the Ship Sinker had run a rusty cargo ship aground, this time between Tuzla and Bayramoğlu. Güven specialized in rotting, polluting derelicts that had been decommissioned. He would buy them abroad at scrap prices and with the help of his contacts in the government and the state bureaucracy fiddled the paperwork to make them seem valuable and seaworthy vessels; by bribing the right people he could then take out interest-free loans from the Turkish Maritime Development Fund, putting the ships up as collateral, and soon thereafter he’d sink them and receive big payouts from the state-owned Başak Insurance. And so by the time he’d sold the beached cargo ship to his scrap yard friends, he’d made himself a pot of money without ever getting up from his desk. Plied with a few drinks, Güven would brag to his friends at the club that he was “the biggest shipowner who’d never been aboard a ship.”

“The scandal erupted not because of this chicanery, but because he ran the ship aground just next to the summer home he had bought his mistress, so that he wouldn’t have to travel far to see the shipwreck. But the residents of those beach and summer homes raised an awful hue and cry over his having polluted the water. Even his mistress couldn’t stop crying, apparently.”

“What else?”

“The Avunduks and the Mengirlis invested everything with Deniz the Banker and were wiped out, and that, by the way, is why the Avunduks have pulled their daughter out of Notre Dame de Sion and are trying to marry her off.”

“That girl is hideous. Good luck to them,” I said. “On top of that-who would trust somebody called Deniz the Banker? I’ve never even heard of him.”

“Do you have any money with brokers?” asked Zaim. “Is there a reputable one you know and trust?”

Having arrived at this new profession after running kebab restaurants, truck tire depots, and even lottery shops, these bankers were offering such ludicrously high interest rates that it was clear they would not stay in business indefinitely. But so ubiquitous and seductive was their advertising that they’d taken in enough cash to stay afloat temporarily, because even those who derided and exposed them in the press-among them even economics professors who saw them clearly as con men-were apparently dazzled enough by the advertised rates to invest their own money, “just for a month or two.”

“I don’t have any money with brokers,” I said. “Our companies don’t either.”

“With those returns it seems idiotic to put money into an ordinary business. To think if I’d given Kastelli the money I’ve sunk into Meltem, I’d have doubled my investment by now and avoided these headaches.”

Whenever I remember that conversation we had among the crowd at Fuaye, it seems to me as empty and meaningless as it did that day. But then as now I did not blame the general idiocy-or more politely, the general unreflectiveness-of the world in which my story takes place, but rather I imputed a sad want of seriousness, which could never trouble me unduly, and more typically moved me to laugh, to embrace it with pride.