Because we’d pulled strings, Füsun had no need to wait in any queue, and went into the interview smiling; but when, shortly, she emerged, she was purple in the face, and without so much as looking in my direction she went out to the street. I followed her out, catching her when she paused to light a cigarette. She wouldn’t tell me what had happened, but went into the National Sandwich and Refreshment Palace, where, having taken a seat, she announced, “I don’t want to go to Europe anymore. I give up.”
“What happened? Aren’t they giving you a visa?”
“They asked me about my whole life. They even asked why I got divorced. Even how did I support myself. They even asked me that. So I’m not going to Europe. I don’t want visas from any of them.”
“I can find another way to arrange things,” I said. “Or we could take a car ferry straight to Italy.”
“Kemal, believe me, I no longer want to take this trip to Europe. I can’t even speak the languages, and it makes me ashamed.”
“Darling, we could still see just a bit of the world… In other places, there are people who live differently, and more happily. We can walk down their streets holding hands. There’s more to this world than Turkey.”
“Ah, to be worthy of you I need to see some of Europe, is that it? Well, I’ve also given up on the idea of marrying you.”
“We’ll be so happy in Paris, Füsun.”
“You know how stubborn I can be, Kemal. Don’t pressure me, you’ll only make me dig in.”
But I did press her, and years later, whenever I recalled how I’d insisted and felt the sting of remorse, I also remembered that it had been my fantasy for years to make love to Füsun in a hotel along the journey. With the help of Selim the Snob, who imported paper from Austria, Füsun’s visa came through one week later. It was around the same time that we were also able to obtain the documentation to take the car abroad. We were sitting in a box at the Palace Cinema when I gave Füsun her passport, whose pages were now covered with colorful visas for all the countries we’d be visiting en route to Paris; at that moment I felt a strange pride at being a good husband. Years before, when I was seeing ghosts of Füsun on every corner, I’d encountered her apparition at the Palace Cinema, too. Taking her passport, she smiled at first, before assuming a dour expression as she turned the pages, inspecting each visa in turn.
Through a travel agency I booked three large rooms at the Hôtel du Nord in Paris, one for me, one for Çetin Efendi, and one for Aunt Nesibe and Füsun. I’d stayed at other hotels in Paris during the years Sibel was at a university, but like a student who dreams of the places he’ll go when he’s rich, I had a fantasy of the happy days I would spend one day in that venerable hotel, which seemed a place out of old films and memories.
“There’s no need for this. Get married and then go,” my mother kept saying. “Come on, if you’re going to travel with the girl you love, why not make the most of it?… Why drag Nesibe and Çetin Efendi there with you? First get married; that way the two of you can fly to Paris and honeymoon by yourselves…I could talk to White Carnation and have the whole thing written up as the sort of romantic story that everyone loves, and then in two days it will be forgotten, yesterday’s news. That old world is gone, anyway. Everywhere you look it’s all parvenus from the provinces.”
For my part, I kept saying: “And how am I supposed to manage without Çetin? Who’s going to drive me around?… Mother dear, you’ve only left the Suadiye house twice all last summer. Don’t worry, we’ll be back before the end of September. When you return to Nişantaşı at the beginning of October, Çetin will be there to drive you, I promise… And Aunt Nesibe will find you a dress for the wedding.”
77 The Grand Semiramis Hotel
ON AUGUST 27, 1984, at a quarter past twelve, Çetin parked the car in front of the house in Çukurcuma, ready to drive to Europe. It had been exactly nine years and four months since Füsun and I had met at the Şanzelize Boutique, but I did not give this coincidence much thought, nor did I dwell upon the ways in which my life and my character had changed in the intervening years. We had been delayed by my mother’s tears and ceaseless flow of advice, and also by the traffic, but none of it could dull my determination to end this chapter of my life and set out on our journey at once. After waiting endlessly for Çetin Efendi to load Aunt Nesibe’s and Füsun’s suitcases into the trunk, I grew outwardly petulant at the sight of smiling, waving neighbors and the children swarming around the car, but inside I felt a pride that I did not wish to acknowledge. As we headed down to Tophane, Füsun waved at Ali, returning from football practice. I told myself that soon Füsun and I would have a child like Ali.
As we drove over the Galata Bridge, we opened the windows, happily breathing in that familiar Istanbul smell of sea and moss, pigeon droppings, coal smoke, car exhaust, and linden blossoms. Füsun and Aunt Nesibe were sitting in the back. I was in front with Çetin-just as in my dreams-and as we drove through Aksaray past the city walls, past one poor neighborhood after another, rumbling over the cobblestone streets, in and out of potholes, I would occasionally throw my arm over the back of the seat and turn around to give Füsun a contented smile.
Outside the city limits, beyond Bakırköy, moving past little factories and depots, new neighborhoods and motels, I caught sight of Turgay Bey’s textile mill, which I’d visited nine years earlier, but now I could barely remember the jealousy that had stung me that day. Once the car had crossed the limits of Istanbul, all the suffering I’d endured for the love of Füsun was suddenly reduced to a sweet story that could be told in one breath. After all, a love story that ends happily scarcely deserves more than a few sentences! Perhaps this is why we became increasingly quiet once we’d left Istanbul behind. Even Aunt Nesibe-though full of mirth at the outset, and asking questions like, “Oh, we didn’t forget to lock the door, did we?” and admiring everything she saw through the window (even the emaciated old nags grazing in an empty lot)-had by the time we’d reached Büyükçekmece Bridge, fallen asleep.
As Çetin was filling the tank at the Çatalca exit, Füsun got out of the car with her mother. After buying a packet of the local fol cheese from an old lady selling her wares beside the road, they went into the teahouse next door, ordered tea and simits to accompany the cheese, and tucked into their makeshift feast. As I sat down with them, it occurred to me that if we continued at this pace, our European tour would last months, not weeks. Did I complain? No! As I sat across from Füsun, silently watching her, I felt the same sweet ache spreading through my chest and my stomach as I’d felt in early adolescence at a dance party, or upon meeting a beautiful girl at the start of summer. It was not the deep and corrosive agony of thwarted love that had once been so familiar, but a requited lover’s sweet impatience.
At 7:40 the sun shone into our eyes before sinking below the line of the sunflower fields. Not long after Çetin Efendi had turned on the headlights, Aunt Nesibe said, “For the grace of God, everyone, let’s not drive in this darkness!”
On the two-lane road the trucks bearing down on us from the opposite direction did not even bother to dim their lights. Just past Babaeski, my eyes were drawn to the blinking purple neon sign of the Grand Semiramis Hotel; it seemed a good place to stop for the night. I asked Çetin to slow down; making a turn in front of Türk Petrol, we heard the dog’s woof, woof, woof warning us off. Çetin stopped in front of the hotel, where my heart began to beat wildly, bursting with feeling, and the awareness that at this place, after nine years of longing, my dreams would come true.