As the dance floor became crowded, another couple bumped into us from behind, and for a moment our bodies were pressed together. After that shockingly intimate instant, I remained silent for some time. As I gazed upon her neck and her hair, I was so swept up in the fantasy of happiness with her that I would have gladly abandoned my books and my dreams of becoming a novelist. I was twenty-three years old and quick to anger when the bourgeoisie of Nişantaşı, even my own friends, would laugh at my decision to become a novelist, snidely telling me that no one my age could possibly have enough understanding of life for that. Exactly thirty years later, as I revise these lines, I would now like to add that I believe these people were right. Had I had any understanding of life then, I would have done everything in my power to intrigue her during our dance, I would have believed that she could take an interest in me, and when she slipped out of my arms, I would not have stood there so helplessly watching her go. “I’m tired,” she said. “Would you mind if I sat down after the second dance?” I was walking her back to her table, a courtesy I had learned from films, when I suddenly couldn’t hold myself back.
“What a boring lot,” I said priggishly. “Shall we go upstairs and find a comfortable place to sit and talk?” It was so noisy that she couldn’t really hear me, but she understood immediately from my expression what I was after. “I have to sit with my mother and father,” she said, as she politely drew away.
When he realized that I had chosen to end my story there, Kemal Bey congratulated me. “Yes, that would be just like Füsun. You understood her very well!” he said. “I would also like to thank you profusely for resisting the urge to omit those details damaging to your pride. Yes, that is the crux of it, Orhan Bey-pride. With my museum I want to teach not just the Turkish people but all the people of the world to take pride in the lives they live. I’ve traveled all over, and I’ve seen it with my own eyes: While the West takes pride in itself, most of the rest of the world lives in shame. But if the objects that bring us shame are displayed in a museum, they are immediately transformed into possessions in which to take pride.”
This was the first in a series of didactic pronouncements that Kemal Bey delivered himself of in his small attic chamber as we drank into the night. I was unfazed, mostly because everyone who runs into a novelist in Istanbul feels moved to edifying declarations and suchlike, but (as Kemal Bey so often suggested to me) I, too, was becoming confused about what to include in the book, and how to go about it.
“Do you know who it was that taught me the central place of pride in a museum, Orhan Bey?” Kemal Bey asked me during another late-night session in the attic. “The museum guards, of course. No matter where I went in the world, the guards would answer my every question with passion and pride. At the Stalin Museum in Gori, Georgia, an elderly woman guard spoke for almost an hour of what a great man Stalin was. And it was thanks to an amiable guard at the Museum of the Romantic Era in the city of Oporto in Portugal, who proudly talked with me at length, that I discovered in Carlo Alberto, the exiled king of Sardinia, who spent the last three months of his life in that building in 1849, a profound influence on Portuguese romanticism. Orhan Bey, if someone asks a question at our museum, the guards must describe the history of the Kemal Basmacı collection, the love I feel for Füsun, and the meanings invested in her possessions, with the same dignified air. Please put this in the book, too. The guards’ job is not, as is commonly thought, to hush noisy visitors, protect the objects on display (though of course everything connected to Füsun must be preserved for eternity!), and issue warnings to kissing couples and people chewing gum; their job is to make visitors feel that they are in a place of worship that, like a mosque, should awaken in them feelings of humility, respect, and reverence. The guards at the Museum of Innocence are to wear velvet business suits the color of dark wood-this being in keeping with the collection’s ambience and also Füsun’s spirit-with light pink shirts and special museum ties embroidered with images of Füsun’s earrings, and, of course, they should leave gum chewers and kissing couples to their own devices. The Museum of Innocence will be forever open to lovers who can’t find another place to kiss in Istanbul.”
I would sometimes tire of this declamatory style so reminiscent of the more outspoken political writers of the seventies, which Kemal Bey would adopt after two glasses of rakı, that I would stop taking notes, and in the days that followed I would have no wish for his company. But the twists of Füsun’s story, and the singular atmosphere created by the museum’s objects, were such that after a time I would always be drawn back, again want to visit the attic, to listen to this time-worn man deliver long monologues about Füsun, becoming more animated the more he drank.
“Never forget, Orhan Bey, that the logic of my museum must be that wherever one stands inside it, it should be possible to see the entire collection, all the display cases, and everything else,” Kemal Bey would say. “Because all the objects in my museum-and with them, my entire story-can be seen at the same time from any perspective, visitors will lose all sense of Time. This is the greatest consolation in life. In poetically well built museums, formed from the heart’s compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time. Please write this in the book, too. Let us not conceal the way in which I had you write it, or how you went about your work. When it is done, please give me all the drafts and your notebooks, so that we can display them, too. How much longer will it take? Those who read the book will certainly wish to come here to see locks of Füsun’s hair, her clothes, and her other belongings, just as you have. So please put a map at the end of the novel, so that anyone who cares to can make their way by foot through Istanbul ’s streets. Those who know the story of Füsun and me will certainly remember her as they walk those streets and see those prospects, just as I do, each and every day. And let those who have read the book enjoy free admission to the museum when they visit for the first time. This is best accomplished by placing a ticket in every copy. The Museum of Innocence will have a special stamp, and when visitors present their copy of the book, the guard at the door will stamp this ticket before ushering them in.”
“Where shall we put the ticket?”
“They should put it here, of course!”
“Thank you. And at the end, let’s put an index of names, Orhan Bey. It is thanks to your account that I remembered how many people witnessed our story or were otherwise acquainted with it. Even I have a hard time keeping all the names straight.”
In fact, Kemal Bey did not like my seeking out the people mentioned in the story, but he tolerated my novelist’s ways. Sometimes he was curious to know what the people I’d tracked down had said, or what they were doing now; sometimes he had no interest in them whatsoever, and could scarcely understand my interest in them.
For example, he could not begin to comprehend why I wrote a letter to Abdülkerim Bey, Satsat’s distributor in Kayseri, or why I met him during one of his visits to Istanbul. As for Abdülkerim Bey, who left Satsat to become the Kayseri distributor for Tekyay, the firm Osman founded with Turgay Bey, he regarded Kemal Bey’s story as the tale of love and disgrace that had brought down Satsat.
I was able to locate Sühendan Yıldız (also known as Conniving Sühendan), the actress who perennially played the she-devil and who had observed our lovers’ first months at the Pelür. She told me that while she had known Kemal Bey as a desperately lonely man, and though like everyone else she’d been well aware of how besotted he was with Füsun, she felt little pity for him, generally disapproving of rich men who prowled the film world for beautiful girls. Sühendan had, in fact, pitied Füsun, “whose impatience to play in films and be a star was something akin to panic.” Had she succeeded, surrounded by all those wolves, she would have come to a sad end anyway, Sühendan supposed, never understanding why Füsun had married “that fatso” (Feridun). As for the grandson for whom she was knitting a tricolor jumper in those days, he was now exactly thirty years old, and whenever he saw on television an old film in which his grandmother had starred, he could barely contain his laughter, but was also shocked to see how poor Istanbul had been in those days.