21 My Father’s Story: Pearl Earrings

ON A SUNNY Thursday at the beginning of June-nine days before the engagement party-my father and I had a long lunch together at Abdullah Efendi’s restaurant in Emirgân, and I knew even then that I would never forget it. My father, whose recent gloom was so troubling to my mother, had invited me, saying, “Before the engagement, let’s go out, just the two of us, so that I can give you some advice.” As we sat in the ’56 Chevrolet, with Çetin Efendi at the wheel, where he had been since I was a child, I listened respectfully to my father’s counsel (for instance, that I shouldn’t confuse my business associates with my friends), for I assumed this was yet another pre-engagement ritual; and as I listened I opened my mind to the Bosphorus views slipping past the windows, the beauty of the City Line ferries as they rode the currents, and the shadows of the wooded gardens of the yalıs on the shores of the Bosphorus: Even at midday they were almost dark as night. Instead of repeating the lectures he’d perhaps heard as a child-instead, that is, of warning against laziness, frivolity, and daydreams, instead of compelling me to shoulder my duties and responsibilities-he reminded me, as the fragrance of the sea and pine trees blew through the open windows, that I needed to make the most of life, because God’s gift is fleeting. Here I display the plaster bust by Somtaş Yontunç (it was Atatürk himself who had given him his name, which means “Solid-Stone Sculptor”) created ten years earlier, when, thanks to booming textile exports, and our soaring fortunes, my father had, on the advice of a friend, agreed to pose for this sculptor, who was connected to the Academy. I added the plastic mustache out of contempt for the academician, who rendered my father’s whiskers far thinner than they really were, so that he would look more Western. When I was small and he scolded me for idleness, I would watch my father’s mustache quiver as he spoke. When he warned me that working too hard might cause me to miss life’s great beauties, I took it to mean that my father was satisfied with the innovations I had implemented at Satsat and the other firms. When he asked that in the future I also involve myself with some of the business dealings in which my older brother had recently expressed an interest, and I eagerly agreed, adding that we had all paid dearly for my brother’s deeply conservative half measures in every family concern he touched, it wasn’t just my father who smiled appreciatively-Çetin the chauffeur smiled, too.

Abdullah Efendi’s restaurant had formerly been in Beyoğlu, on the main avenue next to Ağa Mosque. Back in those days it was where the rich and famous would stop for lunch if they were passing through the area or on their way to the cinema, but several years ago, after most of his customers had acquired cars, he had moved to the hills above Emirgân, to a little farm overlooking the Bosphorus. As we walked into the restaurant, my father assumed a jovial smile, shaking hands with the waiters he had known for years from the old Abdullah’s and other restaurants. Then he surveyed the large dining room, searching for anyone he knew among the customers. As the headwaiter was guiding us to our table, my father stopped to chat with one party, and waved in the direction of another, and flirted breezily with an elderly lady sitting at a third table with her daughter; this lady remarked how fast I’d grown up, how much I resembled my father, and how handsome I was. Once we had been seated by the headwaiter (who’d called me “little gentleman” throughout my childhood and, at some point, without anyone’s quite having noticed, began calling me “Kemal Bey”), my father ordered a few hors d’oeuvres for us to share-pastries, smoked fish, and suchlike-and also raki.

“You do want some, don’t you?” he asked me, adding, “You know you can smoke, too, if you like,” as if we had not come to a mutual understanding about my smoking in his presence after I’d returned from America.

“Bring an ashtray for Kemal Bey,” he told one of the waiters.

He picked up a few of the cherry tomatoes that came from the restaurant’s own greenhouse and sniffed them; as he knocked back his rakı, it seemed that there was something specific on his mind, though he had not yet decided how to broach the subject. For a moment we both looked out the window at Çetin Efendi in the distance, chatting with the other drivers waiting outside the entrance.

“Never forget Çetin Efendi’s worth,” my father said, sounding as if he were dictating his last testament.

“I do know his worth.”

“I’m not sure you do… I know he is always telling religious stories, but you should never laugh at them. He’s an honest man, Çetin, and he’s a gentleman, a thoroughly decent human being. He’s been like that for twenty years. If anything should ever happen to me, don’t send him away. Don’t change cars every two minutes like those nouveau riche upstarts. The Chevrolet’s a good car… This is Turkey, look… when the state banned the import of new foreign cars ten years ago, it turned Istanbul into a museum for old American cars, but what does it matter; we’ve ended up with the best repair shops in the world.”

“I grew up in that car, Father, so you don’t need to worry,” I said.

“I’m glad to hear it,” said my father, in a tone suggesting he had come to the real subject. “Sibel is very special, a very charming girl,” he said, but no, this wasn’t what he had brought me here to discuss. “You don’t find such a person every day, do you? A woman, a rare flower like her-you must make sure you never break her heart. You must care for her always, and treat her with the utmost tenderness.” Suddenly a strange, shameful expression appeared on his face. He began to speak impatiently, as if something had irritated him: “Do you remember that beautiful girl?… You know, the one you saw me with once in Beşiktaş. When you first saw her, what did you think?”

“Which girl?”

My father got even more annoyed. “Oh come on now, I’m talking about that very beautiful girl you saw me with in Beşiktaş, in Barbaros Park, you know, ten years ago.”

“No, Father, I don’t have any memory of this.”

“My son, how could you not remember? We came eye to eye. There was a very beautiful girl sitting next to me.”

“What happened next?”

“Not wishing to shame your father, you politely averted your eyes. Do you remember now?”

“No, I don’t.”

“No, you did see us!”

I truly had no such memory, but there was no convincing my father. After a long, awkward discussion, we agreed I must have wanted to forget and succeeded in doing so. Or perhaps he and the girl had merely panicked, thinking I’d seen them. This is how we came to the real subject.

“That girl was my lover for eleven years, and she was very beautiful,” said my father, proudly combining the two most important facts into a single sentence.

It was clear that my father had long dreamed of talking to me about this woman’s beauty, and the thought that I might not have seen it with my own eyes, or, even worse, that I might have seen her but forgotten how beautiful she was-this had dampened his spirits a little. He pulled a small black-and-white photograph from his pocket. It was of a dark, sorrowful girl-very young-standing on the back deck of a City Line ferry in Karaköy.

“That’s her,” he said. “It was taken the year we met. It’s a shame she’s so sad here; you can’t see how beautiful she was. She is beautiful, isn’t she? Do you remember now?”

I said nothing. It annoyed me to listen to my father talking about an affair, no matter that it was ancient history. Though at that moment, I could not understand what exactly it was that bothered me.

“Look, I don’t want you repeating any of what I say here to your brother,” my father said, slipping the photo back into his pocket. “He’s too stern, he wouldn’t understand. You’ve been to America, and I’m not going to be telling you anything that would shock you. All right?”