Just over his bed, Tarık Bey had hung a framed photograph from his days as a teacher at Kars Lycée: It showed him standing with his students at the end of a play they had performed in the famous theater that dated back to the time when the city had belonged to the Russians. The top of the bedside table and its half-open drawer also brought back strange memories of my father. It emanated a sweet fragrance, a mixture of dust, medicine, cough syrup, and yellowing paper. Above the drawer I saw a water glass containing his false teeth and a book by his beloved Reşat Ekrem Koçu. Inside the drawer there were old medicine bottles, cigarette holders, telegrams, folded doctors’ reports, newspaper articles about bankers, electric and gas bills, coins now gone out of circulation, and many other odds and ends.

Before any of the day’s visitors gathered at the Keskin house, I left for Nişantaşı. My mother was up and having breakfast in bed, eating from a tray Fatma Hanım had brought her and propped on a pillow: boiled eggs, marmalade, black olives, and toasted bread. She perked up when she saw me. When I told her about Tarık Bey, her face dropped, and she looked genuinely sorry. I could tell that she felt Nesibe’s grief. But beneath that I sensed something else.

“I’ll be going back there,” I said. “Çetin can bring you to the funeral.”

“I’m not going to the funeral, my son.”

“Why not?”

First she gave two ridiculous excuses. “There’s been no announcement in the papers. Why are they in such a big hurry?” and “Why aren’t they having the funeral at Teşvikiye Mosque? Everyone else started their funeral processions there.” I could see that she felt deeply for Nesibe, whom she’d liked so much, and with whom she’d had such good fun during the days when Nesibe had come to the house to sew. But underneath there was something else, something unyielding. When she saw how unsettled I was by her refusal, and how determined to know the true reasons for it, she lost her temper.

“Do you want to know why I’m not going to the funeral?” she said. “Because if I do, you’ll marry that girl.”

“Where did you get that idea? She’s married already.”

“I know. It will break Nesibe’s heart. But my son, I’ve known all about this for years. If you insist on marrying her, it won’t be a pretty picture to most people.”

“Does it really matter, Mother dear? People will always talk.”

“Please, I beg of you, don’t take offense.” Looking very serious, she set her toast on the tray, and next to it, her knife, smeared with butter; and she looked intently into my eyes. “At the end of the day, what other people say has no importance whatsoever. Of course, what’s important is the truth, the honesty of our feelings. I have no complaints about that, my son. You fell in love with a woman… And that’s wonderful, my son. I can’t complain about that. But has she ever loved you? What has she done over the past eight years? Why has she still not left her husband?”

“She’s going to leave him, I am certain of it,” I lied ashamedly.

“Look, your dear departed father was smitten with a poor woman young enough to be his daughter… He was obsessed with her. He even bought her a house. But he kept everything hidden; he didn’t make a fool of himself as you have done. Even his closest friend had no idea.” She turned toward Fatma Hanım, who had just entered the room, and said, “Fatma, we’re having a little talk.” When Fatma had withdrawn, shutting the door behind her, my mother continued. “Your dear departed father was a man of character and intelligence, and a gentleman, too, but even he had his weaknesses and desires. Years ago you asked me for the key to the Merhamet Apartments and I gave it to you, but knowing you to be your father’s son, I warned you. ‘For goodness’ sake, be careful,’ I said. Didn’t I? My son, you didn’t listen to me at all. All right, you say to me that if it’s your fault, where is Nesibe’s sin in all this? What I can never forgive is this torture she and her daughter have subjected you to, these ten long years.”

I did not say, It’s been eight, not ten, Mother. “All right, Mother,” I said. “I know what to say to them.”

“My son, you can’t find happiness with that girl. If you could, you’d have found it by now. I don’t think you should go to the funeral either.”

I did not infer from my mother’s words that I had ruined my life: Quite to the contrary, she’d reminded me, and I felt this all the time now, that I was soon to share a happy life with Füsun. And so I was not in the least angry with her; I even smiled as I listened to her lecture, my only wish being to return to Füsun’s side at once.

Seeing she’d made no impression on me, my mother was incensed. “In a country where men and women can’t be together socially, where they can’t see each other or even have a conversation, there’s no such thing as love,” she vehemently declared. “By any chance do you know why? I’ll tell you: because the moment men see a woman showing some interest, they don’t even bother themselves with whether she’s good or wicked, beautiful or ugly-they just pounce on her like starving animals. This is simply their conditioning. And then they think they’re in love. Can there be such a thing as love in a place like this? Take care! Don’t deceive yourself.”

Finally my mother had succeeded in angering me. “All right then, Mother,” I said. “I’m off.”

“When they hold funerals in neighborhood mosques, the women don’t even attend,” she called after me, as if this had been her real excuse all along.

Two hours later, as the crowd at Firuzağa Mosque dispersed after funeral prayers, I saw women among the mourners embracing Aunt Nesibe, though admittedly they were few. I remember seeing Ceyda and also Şenay Hanım, proprietor of the now defunct Şanzelize Boutique, as I was standing beside Feridun in his flashy sunglasses.

In the days that followed, I went to Çukurcuma early every evening. But I sensed a great uneasiness in the house, and at the table. It was as if the gravity and contrivance of the situation had now been uncloaked. It had always been Tarık Bey who was best at pretending not to see what was going on between us: It was he who’d excelled at acting “as if.” Now that he was gone, there was no acting naturally, nor could we fall back into the comfortable, half-rehearsed routines of the past eight years.

75 The İnci Patisserie

ON A RAINY day at the beginning of April, after chatting with my mother for most of the morning, I went to Satsat at around noon. As I was drinking my coffee and reading the paper at my desk, Aunt Nesibe phoned. She asked me not to come to visit for a while, saying that there’d been some unpleasant gossip going around the neighborhood, and that though she couldn’t go into detail over the phone, she had good news for me. With my secretary, Zeynep Hanım, listening in the next room, I did not inquire how things were going, not wishing to make my concern for Aunt Nesibe too obvious.

For two days I waited, eaten alive by curiosity, until-once more, just before noon-Aunt Nesibe came to see me at Satsat. Despite all the time we’d spent together over the past eight years, it was so strange seeing her at the office that I stared at her blankly as if at some visitor from the provinces or the outskirts of the city, who, having come to exchange a defective Satsat product or to collect her complimentary calendar or ashtray, had found her way upstairs by mistake.

By then Zeynep had figured out that the stranger was someone very important to me; perhaps she could tell from my awkwardness or Aunt Nesibe’s ease, or perhaps she’d already heard a few things. When she asked us how we’d like our Nescafés, Aunt Nesibe said, “I’ll have Turkish coffee, my girl-if that’s possible.”

I closed the connecting door. Aunt Nesibe sat down across from me at my desk and looked me straight in the eyes.