“Of course.” If I didn’t buy enough from Şenay Hanım, might she plant the seed of suspicion in Sibel, who came into this shop from time to time? It grieved me less to imagine myself falling slowly into this woman’s trap than to catch myself making such petty calculations. I imagined that Füsun had gone to the Merhamet Apartments while I was out, and not finding me, had left. In the bright spring day the sidewalks were swarming with housewives out shopping, young girls clomping around in the latest platform shoes paired with ill-fitting short skirts, and pupils swarming out of the schools from which they had just been dismissed. Still searching for Füsun, I cast my eyes over the gypsy flower seller, and the vendor of black market American cigarettes (who everyone said was a plainclothes policeman), and the other denizens of Nişantaşı.
A water tanker with the words LIFE-CLEAN WATER on its side sped by, and Füsun emerged from behind it.
“Where have you been?” we said in unison, joyous smiles coming to our lips.
“The witch stayed in during lunchtime, and she sent me off to a friend’s shop. So I got to the apartment late, and you weren’t there.”
“I got worried, so I went to the shop. Look, I bought the bag as a memento.”
Füsun was wearing the earrings of which one is displayed at the entrance to our museum. We walked down the street together. We turned off Valikonağı Avenue into Emlak Avenue, which was not so crowded. We had just passed the apartment that housed the dentist to whom my mother brought me when I was a child (as well as the doctor in whose office I had first felt the unforgettable hardness of the cold tongue depressor shoved into my mouth) when we saw that a crowd had gathered at the foot of the hill; a few others were running down to join it, while others still were coming toward us, their faces contorted by what they had seen.
There had been an accident; the road was closed. Only a few minutes earlier the “Life-Clean Water” tanker had swerved into the left lane while heading down the hill and had crushed a dolmuş. The driver of the shared taxi was cowering in a corner, his hands trembling as he smoked a cigarette. The weight of the water tanker had crushed the long nose of a 1940s Plymouth that did the Taksim-Teşvikiye route. All that survived was the taxi meter. Beyond the ever-growing crowd of onlookers, amid the shards of glass and broken car parts, I saw the body of a woman trapped in the front seat, and recognized her as the dark-haired woman I’d passed on my way out of the Şanzelize Boutique. The street was now covered with debris. Taking Füsun by the arm, I said, “Let’s go.” But she paid me no mind. She stood there silently, staring at the woman pinned inside the wreck, until she had had her fill.
By now the crowd had grown considerably, and I was beginning to feel uneasy, less on account of the dead woman inside the car (yes, she must have been dead by then) than out of fear that I might run into someone I knew, when at last a police car came into view; wordlessly we moved away from the accident. As we walked without speaking up the street where the police station was, straight to the Merhamet Apartments, we were fast approaching the “happiest moment of my life” mentioned at the beginning of this book.
In the coolness of the Merhamet Apartments stairwell, I took her in my arms and kissed her. I kissed her again when we went into the apartment, but there was a certain shyness in her playful lips, a certain reserve in her manner.
“I have something to say to you.”
“Then say it.”
“I’m afraid you might not take it seriously enough, or that you might react exactly the wrong way.”
“Trust me.”
“Well, I’m not sure I can, but I’m still going to tell you,” she said. She looked as if she’d made up her mind, as if the arrow had already left the bow and there was no longer any point in holding it back. “If you take it the wrong way, I’ll die.”
“Forget the accident, darling, and please, just tell me.”
She began to cry silently, just as she had done that afternoon in the Şanzelize Boutique, when she’d been unable to give me a refund. Her sobs were almost sullen, as those of a child who was furious at being wronged.
“I’ve fallen in love with you. I’m head over heels in love with you!”
Her voice was both accusatory and unexpectedly gentle. “I think about you all day long. I think about you from morning until night.”
She covered her face with her hands and cried.
Let me confess that my first impulse was to grin stupidly. But I didn’t. Instead I frowned, assuming a tender expression of concern, until finally I had overcome the force of my own feelings. Here, at one of the deepest, most profound moments of my life, there was something contrived in my demeanor.
“I love you very much, too.”
Though I was being utterly sincere, my words were neither as forceful nor as truthful as hers. She’d said it first. Because I’d said it after Füsun, my own truthful declaration of love had taken on a consoling, tactful, echoing tone. Now it didn’t matter if my feelings might in fact be stronger than hers, since Füsun had gone first in confessing the fearful dimensions of her sentiments, and so had lost the game. The “sage of love” within me (acquired from who knew what egregious experience) was crowing about Füsun’s misstep: By speaking too sincerely, she had lost. From this reaction I deduced that my jealous worries and obsessions would soon subside.
When she began to cry again, she took out of her pocket a crumpled, childish hankie. I embraced her, and while caressing the lovely velvety skin on her neck and shoulders, I said there could be nothing more ridiculous than the idea of a beautiful girl like her, whom everyone adored, in tears just for having admitted to falling in love.
Still crying, she said, “What do you mean-that beautiful girls never fall in love? If you know so much about everything, then tell me this…”
“What?”
“What’s going to happen now?”
This was the real question, and she now fixed me with a look as if to say she was not going to be distracted by sweet generalities about love and beauty, and that it was of the utmost importance that I give her the right answer.
I had no answer to give her. But this is how it seems now, so many years later. Sensing that such a question might come between us, I felt an unease for which I secretly blamed her and I began to kiss her.
Driven by desire and helplessness, our kisses grew more passionate. She asked if this was the answer to her question. “Yes,” I said. Content with this, she asked, “Weren’t we going to do some mathematics?” When I had bestowed another kiss, by way of an answer, she acknowledged it by kissing me back. To embrace, to kiss-it felt so much more genuine than any contemplation of the impasse to which we had come, so full of the irresistible power of the present moment. As she peeled off her clothes, Füsun changed from a fearful girl made sad by helpless passion into a healthy and exuberant woman ready to give herself over to love and sexual bliss. Thus did we enter what I have called the happiest moment of my life.
In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant “now,” even having lived such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happier moment to come. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse: If a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happiest moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so.
But when we reach the point when our lives take on their final shape, as in a novel, we can identify our happiest moment, selecting it in retrospect, as I am doing now. To explain why we have chosen this moment over all others, it is also natural, and necessary, to retell our stories from the beginning, just as in a novel. But to designate this as my happiest moment is to acknowledge that it is far in the past, that it will never return, and that awareness, therefore, of that very moment is painful. We can bear the pain only by possessing something that belongs to that instant. These mementos preserve the colors, textures, images, and delights as they were more faithfully, in fact, than can those who accompanied us through those moments.