We made love for the longest time, somewhere in the middle reaching the point when we were both out of breath; I had just kissed Füsun’s moist shoulders and entered her from behind, biting first her neck and then her left ear, and it was at this, the happiest moment of my life, that the earring whose shape I’d failed to notice fell from Füsun’s lovely ear onto the blue sheet.
Anyone remotely interested in the politics of civilization will be aware that museums are the repositories of those things from which Western Civilization derives its wealth of knowledge, allowing it to rule the world, and likewise when the true collector, on whose efforts these museums depend, gathers together his first objects, he almost never asks himself what will be the ultimate fate of his hoard. When their first pieces passed into their hands, the first true collectors-who would later exhibit, categorize, and catalog their great collections (in the first catalogs, which were the first encyclopedias)-initially never recognized these objects for what they were.
After what I call the happiest moment of my life had passed, and the time had come for us to part, and the fallen earring unbeknownst to us still nestled between the folds of the sheet, Füsun looked into my eyes.
“My whole life depends on you now,” she said in a low voice.
This both pleased and alarmed me.
The next day it was much warmer. When we met at the Merhamet Apartments, I saw as much hope as fear in Füsun’s eyes.
“I lost one of those earrings I was wearing,” she told me after we had kissed.
So now I said, “I have it here, darling,” as I reached into the right-hand pocket of my jacket hanging on the back of a chair. “Oh, it’s gone!” For a moment I glimpsed a bad omen, a hint of malign fate, but then I remembered that I’d put on a different jacket that morning, because of the warm weather. “It must be in the pocket of my other jacket.”
“Please bring it tomorrow. Don’t forget,” Füsun said, her eyes widening. “It is very dear to me.”
18 Belkıs’s Story
THE ACCIDENT featured prominently in all the papers. Füsun hadn’t read them, but Şenay Hanım had talked about the dead woman all morning-until it seemed to Füsun as if people were coming into the shop just to talk about the accident. “Şenay Hanım is going to close the shop tomorrow at lunchtime, so that I can go to the funeral, too,” said Füsun. “She’s acting as if we all adored that woman. But that was not the case…”
“What was the case?”
“It’s true that this woman came to the shop a lot. But she’d take the most expensive dresses-the ones just in from Italy and Paris-and she’d say, ‘Let me try out this one and see how it goes,’ and after wearing it at some big party she’d bring it back, saying, ‘It doesn’t fit.’ Şenay Hanım would get angry-after everyone had seen the woman wearing that dress at that party, it would be hard to sell. Also this woman drove a hard bargain, so Şenay Hanım was always talking behind her back, but she didn’t dare cross her, because she was too well connected. Did you know her?”
“No. But for a while she was the sweetheart of a friend of mine,” I said, stopping there because I reckoned I would better enjoy recounting the sordid background details to Sibel, yet I was amazed that this calculation left me feeling deceitful, since less than a week ago it would have caused me no discomfort to hide something from Füsun or even to tell her a lie-lies, it had seemed to me, were an inevitable and rather enjoyable consequence of the playboy life. I considered whether I could cut the story here and there, adapting it for her consumption, when I realized that this would be impossible. Seeing she had guessed that I was hiding something, I said this: “It’s a very sad story. Because this woman had slept with quite a few men, people spoke ill of her.”
This wasn’t my true impression. That’s how recklessly I answered. There was a silence.
“Don’t worry,” said Füsun, almost in a whisper. “I won’t ever sleep with anyone else for the rest of my life.”
Returning to my office at Satsat, I felt at peace with myself, and for the first time in ages turning myself over to work, I took pleasure from making money. Together with Kenan, a new clerk who was a bit younger and bolder than I was, I went down the list of our hundred or so debtors, pausing now and again for a bit of levity.
“So what are we going to do with Cömert Eliaçık, Kemal Bey?” he asked, with a smile and his eyebrows raised, seeing as the man’s name meant “Generous Open-Hand.”
“We’ll just have to open his hand a little wider. We can’t help it if his name condemns him to loss.”
In the evening, on the way home, I walked past the gardens of the old pasha’s mansion, which had not yet burned down, and I breathed in the fragrance of lindens, seeking the shadows of the plane trees of Nişantaşı, now in full blossom. As I considered men angrily blowing their horns in the traffic jam I felt content, the love storm had passed, I was no longer racked with jealousy, and everything was back on track. At home I took a shower. As I took a clean ironed shirt out of the wardrobe, I remembered the earring; not finding it in the pocket of the jacket where I thought I’d left it, I searched my wardrobe and every drawer, checked the bowl where Fatma Hanım put stray buttons, collar bands, and any spare change or lighters she found in my pockets, but it wasn’t there either.
“Fatma Hanım,” I called softly. “Have you seen an earring around here?”
The bright side room where my brother had lived until he married was scented with steam and lavender. Fatma Hanım had spent the afternoon ironing, and now, as she put away our handkerchiefs, shirts, and towels, she said she hadn’t seen “earrings or anything.” From the heap of unpaired socks in the basket, she pulled out one sock as if it were a naughty kitten.
“Listen to me, Claw Nails,” she said, using one of her nicknames for me when I was a child, “if you don’t cut your nails, you won’t own a single sock without a hole in it. I’m not darning these for you anymore-that’s final.”
“All right, Fatma Hanım.”
In the sitting room, in the corner that overlooked Teşvikiye Mosque, my father, covered by a spanking white apron, was sitting in a chair, with Basri the barber cutting his hair, and my mother, as always, sitting across from him, bringing him up to date.
“Come on over,” she said when she saw me. “I’m reporting the latest gossip.”
Basri had been feigning concentration on his work, but stopped trimming and, with a grin that showed his huge teeth, made it clear he’d been listening attentively all along.
“What’s the latest?”
“You know how Lerzan’s younger son wanted to become a race car driver? Well his father wouldn’t let him, and so…”
“I know. He crashed his father’s Mercedes. Then he rang the police saying it had been stolen.”
“All right then. But did you hear what Şaziment did to marry her daughter off to the Karahans’ son? Where are you going?”
“I’m not here for supper. I’m picking up Sibel. We’re invited out.”
“Go tell Bekri so that he doesn’t fry the red mullet tonight for nothing. He went all the way to the fish market in Beyoğlu today just for you. Promise you’ll come for lunch tomorrow so that we can eat them then.”
“I promise!”
The corner of the carpet had been rolled up to protect it from my father’s thin, white hair falling strand by strand onto the parquet floor.
I got the car out of the garage and as I bumped over the cobblestone streets I turned on the radio, tapping my fingers on the steering wheel in time with the music. In an hour I had crossed the Bosphorus Bridge and was in Anadoluhisarı. Sibel heard me and ran out to the car seconds after I had honked the horn for her. The first thing I said was that the woman who had died in the crash the day before had once been Zaim’s lover (“You mean ‘ You-Deserve-It-All Zaim,’” she said with a smile); then I told her the whole story.