“Of course, Father dear.”

“So now listen,” said my father, and as he took tiny sips of rakı, he told his story.

It was “seventeen and a half years ago on a snowy day in January 1958” that he’d first met that girl and was instantly struck by her pure and innocent beauty. The girl was working at Satsat, which my father had only just started. At first it was just a working relationship, but despite the twenty-seven-year difference in their ages it became something more “serious and emotional.” One year after the girl had begun relations with her handsome boss (my father, by my instant calculation, would have been forty-seven years old at the time) he forced her to leave Satsat. Again at my father’s behest, she did not look for another job; instead she went quietly to live in an apartment in Beşiktaş that my father set up for her, dreaming that one day they would marry.

“She was very good-hearted, very sensitive, and clever-a very special person,” said my father. “She wasn’t like other women at all. I’ve had a few escapades in my life, but I never fell for anyone the way I fell for her. My son, I thought a lot about marrying her… But what would have happened to your mother? What would have happened to you and your brother?…”

For a time we were silent.

“Don’t misunderstand me, my child, I’m not saying I made sacrifices so that you could be happy. In fact, of course, she was the one who really wanted marriage. I kept her dangling for years. I just couldn’t imagine life without her, and when I couldn’t see her I suffered enormously. But there was no one to share my pain with. Then one day she said, ‘Make up your mind!’ Either I left your mother and married her, or she was going to leave me. Pour yourself some raki.”

There was a silence. “When I refused to leave you boys and your mother, she left me,” said my father. To admit this exhausted him, but it also relaxed him. When he looked at my face and saw that he could go on confiding in me, he became more relaxed still.

“I was in pain, great pain. Your brother had married, and you were in America. But of course I tried to hide my anguish from your mother. To steal into a corner like a thief and suffer in secret-that was another agony. Your mother had sensed the existence of this mistress, just as she had with the others; understanding that something serious was going on, she said nothing. Your mother, and Bekri and Fatma Hanım-we lived together like a cast of characters imitating a happy family in a hotel room. I could see that I would find no relief, that if it carried on this way I would go mad, but I couldn’t bring myself to do what was necessary. At the same time, she”-my father never said her name-“was suffering just as much. She announced that an engineer had proposed marriage and that if I didn’t decide soon, she was going to accept. But I didn’t take her seriously… I was the first man she had ever been with. I thought she could not possibly want anyone else, that she must be bluffing. Even when I doubted my reasoning and started to panic, I was still paralyzed. So I tried just not to think about it. You remember that summer when Çetin drove us all to Izmir, to the fair… When we got back I heard that she had got married, but I couldn’t believe it. I was convinced she had just put the news out to get my attention, and make me suffer. She refused my every attempt to see her, even to speak with her; she wouldn’t answer the phone. She even sold the house I’d bought for her and moved somewhere I couldn’t find her. Had she really married? Who was this engineer husband? Had she had children? What was she doing? For four years I couldn’t ask anyone these questions. I feared the answers I might get, but to know nothing was agony, too. To imagine her living in another part of Istanbul, opening the papers to read the same news, watching the same TV programs, yet never to see her-it left me desolate. I began to feel as if life itself was futile. Please don’t misunderstand me, my son-I certainly felt proud of you, and the factories, and your mother. But this suffering was unimaginable.”

Because he’d been using the past tense, I sensed that the story had reached some sort of conclusion, and that my father had found some relief in his confession, but for some reason this displeased me.

“In the end, curiosity got the better of me, and one afternoon I rang her mother. The woman certainly knew all about me, but of course she didn’t recognize my voice. I lied to her, passing myself off as the husband of one of her girl’s lycée classmates. ‘My wife is ill and it would boost her spirits if your daughter could come to see her in the hospital,’ I said. Her mother said, ‘My daughter is dead,’ and began to cry. She’d died of cancer! I hung up at once so that I wouldn’t cry, too. I wasn’t expecting this, but I knew at once that it was true. She had never married an engineer… How terrifying life can be, how empty it all is!”

When I saw the tears forming in my father’s eyes, for a moment I felt utterly helpless. I understood his pain even as I felt anger, and the more I reflected on the story he had told me, the more my mind became muddled and I behaved as if I were a member of a tribe an old-fashioned anthropologist might describe as “primitive” and unable to think about its own taboos.

“So anyway,” my father said, pulling himself together after a short silence, “I didn’t bring you here just to upset you with tales of all my woes. But you’re about to get engaged, so it’s fitting for you to know your father better. But there is something else I want you to know. Can you understand?”

“What is it?”

“What I feel now is only remorse,” said my father. “I never paid her enough compliments, and I would give anything to be able to tell her a thousand times over what a charming, precious person she was. She truly had a heart of gold, a lovely, modest, utterly enchanting girl… She wasn’t like other beauties I’ve seen here. She never flaunted it, as if her loveliness were her own doing; she was never demanding, never expected gifts or flattery. You see, it’s not just that I lost her; it’s also that I know I didn’t treat her as she deserved-that’s why I still suffer. My son, you must know how important it is to treat women well-but now, not later, not when it is too late.”

There was something ceremonial about that last pronouncement, as he reached into his pocket to bring out a faded velvet-covered jewel box. “That time we all went to the Izmir Fair, I bought these for her, so that she wouldn’t be angry with me, so that she’d forgive me, but fate did not allow me to give them to her.” My father opened the box. “Earrings were very becoming on her. These are pearls, very fine ones. For years I hid them away. But when I’m gone, I don’t want your mother finding them. You take them. I’ve given it some thought; these will look very good on Sibel.”

“Father dear, Sibel is not my mistress; she’s going to be my wife,” I said, looking into the box he’d handed to me.

“Come on, now,” said my father. “You won’t tell Sibel the story behind the earrings; she will never be the wiser. But when you see her wearing them, you’ll remember me. You will never forget the wisdom I’ve imparted to you today. You’ll treat that girl perfectly… Some men always treat women badly, and they’re proud of it. Don’t ever be one of them. Let my words remain on your ears as the earrings remain on Sibel’s.”

He closed the box, and with an old-fashioned gesture, pressed it into my hand with his own, as an Ottoman pasha might have pressed a tip into the hand of an inferior. “My boy,” he said to the waiter, “why don’t you bring us a bit more raki and some ice. What a beautiful day it is, don’t you think?” he said to me. “What a beautiful garden they have here. It smells of spring with all the linden trees.”

It took me another hour to convince him that I had a meeting I couldn’t cancel, and that, no, it wouldn’t do for the big boss to phone Satsat and call off his son’s appointment.