On Tuesday evening, as we gazed at the painting of Lemon, I uttered the words I had prepared in advance, though I was as nervous as a lycée student: “Darling, the time has come for us to leave this house, this life, together,” I whispered. “Life is short, and in our stubbornness we have lost many days, many years. What we need is to go to another place to be happy.” Füsun acted as if she had not heard me, but Lemon answered with an abbreviated chk, chk, chk. “There’s nothing to fear anymore, nothing to hold us back. Let’s you and I, the two of us, leave this house together, for another place, another house, our own house, and let us live happily from then on. You are only twenty-five years old-we have half a century of life ahead of us, Füsun. We have suffered enough over these past six years to deserve those fifty years of happiness! Let’s leave together now. We’ve been stubborn with each other for long enough.”
“Have we been stubborn with each other, Kemal? That’s news to me. Don’t put your hand there, you’re scaring the bird.”
“I’m not scaring him. Look, he’s eating from my hand. We can give him the best place in the house.”
“My father will be wondering where we are,” she said, warmly, as if we were sharing a secret.
The next Thursday, we saw To Catch a Thief. Instead of watching Grace Kelly, I watched Füsun watching her, from start to finish. In everything-from the pulsing of the blue veins in my beauty’s throat to the way her hand fluttered across the table, straightened her hair, or held her Samsun-I saw her fascination for the screen princess.
When we went into the back room, Füsun said, “Do you know what, Kemal? Grace Kelly was bad at mathematics, too. And she got into acting by working as a model first. But the only thing I really envy her is that she could drive a car.”
In his introduction that week, as if he was giving inside information about a very close friend, Ekrem Bey informed Turkey ’s art film enthusiasts of the odd coincidence: that a year earlier the princess had died in a car accident on the same road she had driven down in this film.
“Why were you jealous?”
“I don’t know. Driving made her look so powerful, and free. Maybe that’s why.”
“I could teach you, if you like.”
“No, no, that would be impossible.”
“Füsun, I know that in two weeks I can teach you enough for you to get your license and drive comfortably around Istanbul. There’s nothing to it. Besides, Çetin taught me how to drive when I was your age [this wasn’t true]. All you need to do is to be calm, to have a little patience.”
“I’m patient,” Füsun said confidently.
73 Füsun’s Driving License
IN APRIL 1983 Füsun and I began to prepare for the drivers’ licensing examination, our first tentative plans having been followed by five weeks of indecision, feigned reluctance, and silence. We both knew there would be more at stake than a license since the intimacy between us was to be put to the test, once again in a tutelary setting. We had been given our second chance, and being quite sure that God would not give us a third, I was tense about it.
Still, I was jubilant at Füsun’s ultimate agreement and so I nurtured real hope of becoming steadily more relaxed, cheerful, and confident. The sun was emerging from behind the clouds after a long, dark winter.
It was on the afternoon of one such sunny, glistening spring day (April 15, to be exact, three days after we had celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday with a chocolate cake I’d bought at Divan) that I picked up Füsun in the Chevrolet in front of Firuzağa Mosque for her first driving lesson, and off we went, with me at the wheel and Füsun sitting beside me. She’d asked me not to pick her up in front of the house in Çukurcuma but on a corner higher up the hill, five minutes away from the curious eyes of the neighborhood.
It was the first time in eight years that we were going out alone together, though I was too tense and excited to notice my elation. I was meeting this girl after an agonizing eight-year wait-I had been put to so many tests, endured such pain-yet that is not how it felt. Rather it was as if I was meeting for the first time a splendid young girl who had been found for me by others, and who was, in their view, a perfect match.
Füsun was wearing a becoming print dress of orange roses and green leaves on a white background. It was the same elegant dress-with its V-shaped neckline and its skirt falling just below her knees-that she would wear to each driving lesson, as a sportswoman might wear the same tracksuit for every training session, and by the end of the lesson, her dress would be as dampened as any athlete’s suit. Three years after we had begun our lessons, when I spotted it in Füsun’s chest of drawers, I would pluck it out, instinctively sniffing its sleeves and its front for her unique scent, longing to remember the pleasure of those tense and dizzying lessons of ours, in Yıldız Park, just above Sultan Abdülhamit’s palace.
The underarms of Füsun’s dress would be the first to become moist, before the damp patches spread slowly and adorably over her breasts, her arms, and her abdomen. Sometimes the engine would stall in a bright spot in the park, and-just as eight years earlier, when we were making love-we would perspire lightly, feeling the sun on our skin. But it was not so much the sun that made Füsun and me perspire as the fact of being alone in that car, trapped in our own air, our own shame, tensions, and jangled nerves. When Füsun made a mistake, for example, rolling the right-hand front tire over the curb, grinding the gears, or causing the engine to stall, she would redden with anger and begin to perspire, never more profusely than when she bungled the clutch.
Füsun had made a careful study of all the traffic regulations, memorizing the books at home, and her steering wasn’t bad, but-as with so many new drivers-the clutch was her downfall. She’d drive carefully at a low speed down the learner’s lane, and slow down for the intersection, approaching the sidewalk as carefully as a captain landing at an island pier, and just as I said, “That’s wonderful, my lovely, you’re really catching on,” she’d take her foot off the clutch too fast and the car would lurch forward and strain for breath like a rasping old man. As the car stumbled on like a coughing invalid, I would cry, “The clutch, the clutch, the clutch!” But in her panic Füsun would hit the accelerator or the brakes instead. When it was the accelerator, the car would rock more menacingly before stalling. I’d observe the sweat pouring down Füsun’s red face, her forehead, the tip of her nose, and her temples.
“That’s it, I’ve had enough,” she’d say, wiping her face with the back of her hand, full of embarrassment. “I am never going to learn this. I give up! I wasn’t put on this earth to be a driver, after all.” Then she would step out of the car and storm off. Sometimes she would bolt from the car without a word, and fishing a handkerchief from her handbag, walk away as she wiped off the perspiration, and when she had reached a point forty or fifty paces away, she would stand there by herself, furiously smoking a cigarette. (On one such occasion, two men who thought she’d come to the park alone descended on her within seconds.) Other times she’d light her Samsun without getting out of the car, and it, too, would be saturated with her damp rage as she angrily stubbed it out into the ashtray, saying she was never going to get her license and, anyway, never really wanted it.
Naturally, I would panic, for it seemed not just the license that she was brushing away, but our future happiness, and I would almost beg Füsun to be patient and calm.
With her wet dress clinging to her shoulders, I would gaze at her lovely arms, the panic on her face, her frown, her anxious stretching, and her lithe frame, drenched in perspiration, as it had been during those spring days of making love. Not long after taking the driver’s seat, Füsun would become flushed, and in short order she would undo the top button of her dress, and perspire all the more profusely. Seeing the moisture on her neck and temples and behind her ears, I would try to remember, to glimpse those wondrous pear-shaped breasts that, eight years earlier, I had taken into my mouth. (And that night, back at the house, after downing a few glasses of raki in my room, I would dream I had seen her nipples, red as strawberries.) Sometimes when Füsun was driving I would sense her awareness of my intoxication at the sight of her, and feeling that she didn’t mind it, even liked it, in fact, I would grow more desirous still. When I’d lean over to show her how to shift gears smoothly in one sweet stroke, and my hand would brush against hers, or against her lovely arm, or her thigh, it would occur to me that before any physical union took place in this car, our two souls had become one. Then Füsun would remove her foot from the clutch too soon again, and my father’s ’56 Chevrolet would quiver like a poor, feverish horse, trembling violently until it passed out. With the engine stalled, we would notice the deep silence reigning in the park around us, in the summer villa before us, in the world everywhere. We would listen enchanted to the whirring of an insect beginning vernal flight before the onset of spring, and we would know what a wondrous thing it was to be alive in a park on a spring day in Istanbul.