Those Beyoğlu theaters with summertime double features (the Emek, the Fitaş, and the Atlas) and even those showing three films (the Rüya, the Alkazar, and the Lale) did away with the traditional five-minute intermission midfilm; and so it would not be until the lights went up between features that we would see what sort of an audience we’d been sitting with. During these intervals, as we watched the lonely men in wrinkled clothes, holding wrinkled newspapers, sprawled or reclining or doubled over in the seats of these huge, mildewy, dimly lit halls, and the elderly dozing in corners, and those desirous souls who had such a hard time wrenching themselves from the dream world of the film back to the reality of the dusty, murky theater, Füsun and I would exchange our news in whispers, though never holding hands. It was at one such interval, in a box at the Palace Cinema, that Füsun whispered the words I’d been awaiting for eight years: She and Feridun were officially divorced.
“The lawyer has the papers,” she said. “Now I am legally a divorcée.”
In that instant the gilded ceiling of the Palace Cinema, its faded glamour and its peeling paint, and its curtains, and its stage, and its drowsy slouching patrons, engraved itself forever in my memory. Even as recently as ten years ago, couples still used theater boxes at the Atlas and the Palace as they used Yıldız Park, to hold hands and kiss in private; while Füsun wouldn’t let me kiss her while we were sitting in a box, she did not stop me from resting my hand on her legs or petting her knees.
My last meeting with Feridun reached the necessary resolution, but contrary to my hopes and expectations, it left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I’d been shocked by Füsun’s insistence at the İnci Patisserie that they’d never made love, and by her demand that I believe this, because, after all, I (like so many men in love with married women) had been secretly clinging to this idea for eight long years. This is, in fact, the crux of our story, for it explains why I had been able to stay in love with her so long.
Had I dwelled long and hard and openly on the notion of Füsun and Feridun’s enjoying full marital relations (a painful proposition I’d tested once or twice with no desire to repeat the experience), my love could not have survived. Yet, when, following years of successful self-deception, Füsun had commanded that I had no choice but to believe it, I immediately and unequivocally told myself that it couldn’t be true, and indeed even bristled at the thought that she was tricking me. But as Feridun had in fact left her after six years of marriage, the deception clung by a reed of hope, though a moment’s thought to the contrary would make me unbearably jealous and also angry at Feridun, keen to humiliate him. We had muddled through eight years without conflict precisely because I’d felt no anger toward this man. Eight years on, it was easy to understand how their happy sex life had permitted Feridun to tolerate me, especially at the beginning. Like any man who is happy with his wife but also enjoys the company of friends, Feridun had wanted to spend the evenings in the coffeehouse relaxing and talking about work. As I looked into Feridun’s eyes, I was obliged to accept another fact I had long hidden from myself: that my presence had curtailed the happiness Füsun might have shared with her husband during the early years of their marriage.
It was during my last meeting with Feridun that I first heard the murmurings of the jealousy that had been lying voiceless and dormant for eight years, in the oceanic depths of my consciousness, and I decided then and there, as I had with certain old friends of my circle, that I would never see him again. Those who knew how, for many years, Feridun had been like a brother to me, and those who had pined for Füsun before I even knew her, may find it inscrutable that I should have borne him such ill will just as things were going my way. Suffice it to say that after so many years of seeing Feridun as an enigma, I was coming to understand him, and with that, let us close the subject.
Feridun’s eyes betrayed his own jealousy, though small, of the happiness Füsun and I had before us. But during that long final lunch at the Divan Hotel, we plied ourselves with enough raki to relax us; and so after ironing out the details of transferring full rights to Lemon Films to Feridun’s name, we were able to turn to another subject that soothed and charmed us both: Feridun was soon to start shooting his art film, Blue Rain.
I’d drunk so much that with an unsteady gait I went straight home, without even stopping off at Satsat, and immediately fell into bed. I remember remarking to my worried mother when she came to check on me, before dropping off, “Life is beautiful!” Two days later, on an evening when the skies were ripped open by thunder and lightning, Çetin drove my mother and me to Çukurcuma. My mother pretended to have forgotten her refusal to attend Tarık Bey’s funeral, and being agitated, as she always was on such occasions, she did not stop talking the whole way. “Oh, look how nicely they’ve done those sidewalks,” she said as we came closer to Füsun’s house. “I’ve always wanted to see this neighborhood. What a lovely hill that is. What nice snug places they seem to have here.” As we entered the house, a cool wind swept up the dust from the cobblestones, presaging rain.
My mother had previously telephoned Aunt Nesibe with her sympathies, and the two women had met a few times. And yet this visit to ask for Füsun’s hand seemed at first to be a condolence call, the occasion to express our regrets at Tarık Bey’s passing. But everyone felt that the regrets expressed went far deeper. After the requisite pleasantries and formalities (“How lovely it is here. Oh how I’ve missed you. I can’t tell you how sad we were to hear…”) Aunt Nesibe and my mother embraced and began to cry, whereupon Füsun fled the room, running upstairs.
When a lightning bolt struck somewhere nearby, the two women released each other and straightened up. “Dear God!” my mother said. Then, as the rain came pouring down and the sky continued to rumble, the twenty-seven-year-old divorcée brought us coffee on a tray that she carried as daintily as any eighteen-year-old who has just entered society. “Nesibe, Füsun is your spitting image!” said my mother. “How clever and knowing she looks when she smiles. What a beauty she’s become!”
“No, she is much more intelligent than I am,” said Aunt Nesibe.
“Mümtaz, may he rest in peace, he always used to say that Osman and Kemal were more intelligent than he was, but I was never sure he believed it. Who says the younger generation must have more brains than we do?” my mother said.
“The girls are certainly smarter,” said Aunt Nesibe. “Did you know, Vecihe”-for some reason, she was unable to, or wouldn’t, address her as “Sister Vecihe” in her old reverential way-“what I regret most in life?” She went on to tell how for a long time she’d dreamed of opening a shop and making a name for herself, but could never find the courage, only to live to see “people who don’t even know how to hold a pair of scissors or sew a stitch now own the finest fashion houses.”
Together we went to the window to watch the rain and the runoff pouring down the hill.
“Tarık Bey, may he rest in peace, was very fond of Kemal,” said Aunt Nesibe as she sat down at the table. “Every evening he’d say, ‘Let’s wait a little longer. Kemal Bey might be coming.’”
I could tell that my mother did not care for these words at all.
“Kemal knows his mind,” said my mother.
“Füsun knows what she wants, too,” said Aunt Nesibe.
“They’ve already made their decision,” said my mother.
But that was as close as my mother got to asking Aunt Nesibe for her daughter’s hand.
Aunt Nesibe and Füsun and I each drank our usual glass of raki; my mother drank only rarely, but she asked for a glass, too, and after two sips turned cheerful-not so much because of the effect of ingesting the raki itself, but because of the fragrance, as my father used to say. She recalled the days when she and Nesibe had stayed up until dawn to complete an evening gown. They both enjoyed reminiscing about the weddings and dresses of that era.