After our driving lessons in the park, when the sun was low in the sky, we would go to Emirgân for coffee and soda on the edge of the Bosphorus, or to a coffeehouse in Rumelihisarı for tea from a samovar, and these pleasures never failed to neutralize the aggravations of the lessons. But let no reader infer from this that we carried on like giddy lovers.
“We’re making better progress at these lessons than we did with mathematics!” I said once.
“We shall see,” Füsun replied cautiously.
Sometimes we would sit at the table and drink our teas in silence, like some long-married couple who had run out of things to say to each other; as we admired the Russian tankers passing by, or the City Line ferries on their way to Heybeliada, or (as happened once) the Sam-sun heading out on its tour of the Black Sea ports, we seemed lost in misery, in dreams of other lives and other worlds.
Füsun didn’t pass her second test either. This time they set her the very difficult task of maneuvering into an imaginary parking space while driving up a hill in reverse. When she made the Chevrolet tremble and judder again, they ordered her out of the car in the same humiliating way.
I had been watching from a distance with a mixed crowd of retired policemen, applicants, letter writers, teaboys, and various gawkers; when one of them saw a bespectacled examiner once again take the wheel from Füsun, he said, “They flunked that chick,” and a couple of others laughed.
As we drove back toward the house, Füsun was too upset to speak. Without asking her first, I parked the car in Ortaköy and sat down in a little meyhane in the market, where I ordered us some rakı with ice.
“Life is short but very sweet, Füsun,” I said after a few swigs of rakı. “The time has come to stop letting these fiends get the better of you.”
“How can they be so vile?”
“They want money. So let’s pay them.”
“Do you believe women can never be good drivers?”
“It’s not what I think, but it is what they think.”
“It’s what everyone thinks.”
“Darling, I beg you, don’t be so stubborn about this as well,” I said, hoping almost at once that Füsun had not heard me say this.
“I’m not stubborn in anything, Kemal,” she said. “But when your pride or your honor is being trampled on, you can’t just bow your head. Now I’m going to ask something of you, and I would like you to listen, please, and take it seriously. I am going to get my license without paying a bribe, Kemal, and on no account are you to interfere. Don’t you dare pay a bribe behind my back, and don’t try to pull any strings, either, because I’ll know if you do, and I will be extremely upset.”
“All right,” I said, looking down.
We drank our rakıs saying little more to each other. It was almost evening, and this meyhane in the middle of the market was empty. Impatient flies were perched uncertainly on its trays of fried mussels and little meatballs with thyme and cumin. Years later I went back for another look at that ramshackle meyhane whose memory is so dear to me, but the entire building had been razed and in its place were now shops selling evil eyes, trinkets, and other tourist souvenirs.
That evening, after we’d left the restaurant and were getting back into the car, I took Füsun by the arm.
“Do you know what, sweetheart? That was the first time in eight years we have eaten in a restaurant, just the two of us.”
“Yes,” she said. The light that flickered for a moment in her eyes made me inordinately happy. “I have something else to say to you. Give me the keys, I’m going to drive the car.”
“Of course.”
The junctions and hills of Beşiktaş and Dolmabahçe made her perspire a little, but even though she’d had a bit to drink, she was able to steer the Chevrolet as far as Firuzağa Mosque without incident. When I picked her up three days later from the usual spot, she wanted to drive the car again, but the city was crawling with police and I talked her out of it. Despite the hot weather, our lesson went amazingly well.
As we were driving back I looked at the whitecaps on the windy Bosphorus and said, “If only we’d brought our swimsuits!”
The next time we went out, when Füsun left the house in the usual floral print dress, she was wearing underneath it the blue bikini displayed here. After our lesson, at Tarabya Beach, she did not take off her dress until just before she jumped off the seawall into the water. For one brief moment of embarrassment, I could see my beloved’s body, and then she swam away, so fast you might have thought she was fleeing me. The bubbles and the churning water in the wake of her plunge, the beautiful light, the midnight blue of the Bosphorus, her bikini-all this gathered in my mind to form an indelible image, a feeling. I spent years searching out that sentiment, and those wondrous colors, in the old photographs and postcards of Istanbul ’s troubled collectors.
I jumped into the sea right after her. A strange voice inside warned of monsters and evil creatures perhaps lurking underwater, waiting to attack her. I needed to reach her in time and protect her from the depths of the waves. I remember that I was giddy as I searched for her in the choppy sea, that I swam as fast as I could, panicked at the thought that happiness might escape my grasp, and that at one moment at the height of my panic I couldn’t breathe. Füsun had been carried away by the Bosphorus currents! At that moment I wanted to die with her; I wanted to die at once. Just then the capricious waves of the Bosphorus opened up and there was Füsun right in front of me. Both of us breathless, we faced each other with the smiles of happy lovers. But when I tried to get closer, so that I might touch her, kiss her, she pulled a long face, like some modest girl with scruples; without further dallying, she did a cool breaststroke away from me. I swam after her, doing the same stroke. As I swam I admired the movement of her beautiful legs, the sweet roundness of her buttocks. Only much later would I notice how far we were from shore.
“Enough!” I said. “Stop running away from me. This is where the currents begin. They could sweep us both up, and we could die.”
I turned around, and when I saw how far away the shore was, I was afraid. The city surrounded us, the European shore now seeming almost as distant as the Asian shore behind us. There was Tarabya Bay, and the Huzur, the restaurant where we’d eaten on so many occasions, and all the other restaurants lining the shore, and the Tarabya Hotel, and the cars, minibuses, and red buses snaking along the shore road, and the hills rising above it, and the shantytowns above Büyükdere-the entire city had receded.
It was as if I were looking at a panoramic miniature painting, not just of the Bosphorus and the city, but of the life I’d left behind. It felt like a dream, this sense I had of being far from the city and my own past. To have reached the middle of the city, in the middle of the Bosphorus, to be so distant from everyone else but together with Füsun, felt like the chill of death. When a wave larger than the others hit Füsun unexpectedly and she let out a shriek, and wrapped her arms around my neck and shoulders to hold on, I knew then that only death would part us.
Just after this fiery touch-we can call it an embrace-she used the excuse of an approaching coal freighter to swim away. She swam gracefully and very fast, so fast I had a hard time keeping up. As soon as she had climbed to the shore, Füsun left me for the bathhouse. None of this called to mind two lovers without shame about each other’s bodies. We were as shy, quiet, and prudish as if we’d just been introduced by our families with marriage in mind: We couldn’t even look at each other unclothed.
By driving to and from her lessons, and sometimes to the city proper, Füsun had soon learned to drive well. But she did not pass the road test in early August either.