19 At the Funeral
THE NEXT day at noon I left Satsat and went home to eat fried red mullet with my mother as promised. As we removed the delicious and brilliant pink membranous skin, and with the care of a surgeon cut away the fine, translucent spine, we discussed the state of arrangements for the engagement party and the latest rumors (my mother’s preferred word for gossip). Including those who had contrived to have themselves invited and a few other eager acquaintances whose hearts she couldn’t bear to break, the list reached 230; so for that day, the maître d’hôtel of the Hilton had been obliged to take steps to ensure there would be enough “foreign liquor”-the term made it sound like a fetish. For this purpose he had begun to contact colleagues in the other big hotels as well as to cajole liquor importers with whom he’d had dealings. As for Silky İsmet, Şaziye, Left-handed Şermın, Madame Mualla, and all the other seamstresses who catered to society ladies and had once been friends and competitors of Füsun’s mother, their order books were full and their apprentices were now working until dawn every night to outfit our guests in the elaborate dresses they had ordered for the engagement party. My mother seemed to have spurred our whole world to action, except for my father, who had been complaining of fatigue and was now dozing in the bedroom. It was not on account of his health, my mother thought, but rather that he was feeling despondent, though she could scarcely imagine what could make him so upset, with his son on the verge of getting engaged, and so she began probing to see whether I might know the reason. When Bekri, as he had done since my childhood, brought in the pilaf that he invariably served after fish to aid digestion-this was an unbendable household rule-it seemed almost as if the fish had been the source of her high spirits, because once it was cleared away my mother took on a mournful tone.
“I feel so bad about that woman,” she said, with genuine sorrow. “She suffered so much, and so many people were jealous of her. In fact she was a very good person. Very.”
Without once referring to Belkıs by name, my mother recounted how years ago, when the Demirbağs’ eldest son, Demir, had been her lover, my parents had spent time with them in Uludağ; and whenever my father and Demir went off to play poker, my mother and Belkıs would stay up long after midnight, drinking tea and knitting and chatting in the hotel’s “rustic bar.”
“She suffered so much, the poor woman, first on account of being so poor and then on account of men. Such suffering,” my mother said, before turning to Fatma Hanım to say, “Bring my coffee out to the balcony. We’re going to watch the funeral.”
Except for my years in America, I had spent my whole life in this big apartment whose sitting room and wide balcony overlooked Teşvikiye Mosque, where one or two funerals took place every day, and when I was a child, these spectacles initiated us into the fearful mystery of death. Not just Istanbul’s rich but also famous politicians, generals, journalists, singers, and artists had their funeral prayers said at the mosque, considered a prestigious point of departure for the “final journey,” whereby the coffin was carried slowly on shoulders to Nişantaşı Square-the procession accompanied, depending on the rank of the deceased, by a military band or the city council ensemble playing Chopin’s Funeral March. When my brother and I were little we would put long, heavy bolsters from the divan on our shoulders and Bekri Efendi, Fatma Hanım, Çetin the chauffeur, and others would follow us as we hummed the funeral dirge, swaying slightly, just as the bearers of the dead did, on our way down the corridor. Just before a funeral of broad public interest-if the deceased was a prime minister, a famous tycoon, or a singer-the doorbell would ring and unexpected guests would appear, saying, “I was just passing by, and I thought I’d drop in,” and though my mother never let her manners lapse, later on she would say, “They didn’t come to see us but to see the funeral.” And so we began to think of the ceremony not as a comfort against the sting of death or a chance to pay one’s last respects to the deceased, but as an amusing diversion.
“Come over to this side, you’ll have a better view,” my mother said as I joined her at the small table on the balcony. But when she saw me suddenly go pale, with no evident enjoyment at watching the crowd of mourners, she drew the wrong conclusion: “You know, it’s not that father of yours napping inside who is keeping me from attending the funeral of this woman I loved dearly. It’s the men down there like Rıfkı, like Samim, who are wearing their dark glasses not to hide their tearful eyes, but to hide that they shed no tears. Well, anyway, you can see it much better from here. What is wrong with you?”
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
Below the gate to the Teşvikiye Mosque courtyard, in the shaded area where women gathered as if by instinct, I’d seen Füsun among the covered women and the society women who, for the occasion, had draped chic, fashionable scarves over their heads, and at that moment, my heart had begun to race. She was wearing an orange scarf. As the crow flies there were seventy, perhaps eighty meters between us. She was breathing, she was frowning, her soft skin was perspiring slightly in the midday heat; annoyed by the crowd of covered women pressing against her, she was biting her lower lip, shifting the weight of her slender body from one foot to the other-of course, I did not just see all these things, I felt them inside me. I longed to cry out to her from the balcony and wave, but as in a dream I had no voice, and my heart continued to pound.
“Mother, I have to go.”
“Ah! What’s come over you? Your face is deathly white.”
On the street I watched her from afar. Şenay Hanım was next to her. As she listened in to her employer’s conversation with a potential if not actual customer, a stocky but stylish woman, she ran her fingers over the ends of the scarf she had tied so awkwardly under her chin. The scarf had endowed her with a proud and sacred beauty. The Friday sermon was blaring on loudspeakers in the courtyard, but the sound was so bad that no one could make out what the preacher was saying, except for a few words about death being the last station and his boorish and insistent repetition of the word “Allah,” a calculated bit of intimidation, I thought. From time to time, someone would rush into the crowd, as if arriving late to a party, and as all heads turned, a little black-and-white photograph of Belkıs would be pinned onto the latecomer’s collar. Füsun carefully eyed everyone around her, as they greeted one another with a wave across the crowd, arms open for embrace, a hug of consolation, and mutual concern.
Like everyone else Füsun was wearing the photograph of Belkıs on her collar. It had become commonplace at funerals following political assassinations (so frequent in those days), and the custom had quickly gained currency among the Istanbul bourgeoisie. Many years later I was able to assemble a small collection of these tokens, and I display them here. When crowds of sighing (but inwardly content) socialites sporting sunglasses took to such displays, like so many right-and left-wing militants, these photographs would give an ordinary lighthearted society funeral intimations of an ideal that might be worth dying for, a hint of common purpose, and a certain gravitas. In imitation of the Western conceit, the photograph was framed in black, by which formerly happy images appropriated for death notices assumed the cast of mourning, and the most frivolous images could attain in death the somber dignity usually reserved for victims of political assassination.
I left without coming eye to eye with anyone, rushing off to the Merhamet Apartments, where I impatiently awaited Füsun. Every now and then I glanced at my watch. Much later, and without giving it much thought, I found myself parting the dusty curtains to look through the always closed window that gave onto Teşvikiye Avenue, and I saw Belkıs’s coffin pass below slowly in the funeral car.