“So that’s what you learned in America,” he said. “I’m impressed.”
I didn’t want to refuse my father his happiness, so I drank another glass of raki, though all the while I kept glancing at my watch, not wanting to be late for my rendezvous with Füsun, on this of all afternoons.
“Don’t rush off, my son, let’s sit here a little longer. See how easy we are with each other, a lovely conversation between father and son. Give me a moment before you go off to get married and forget us!” my father said.
“Father dear,” I said, as we were leaving, “I can see how much you’ve suffered, and I will never forget this invaluable advice you’ve given me today.”
As he got older, whenever he was overcome by a great emotion my father’s lips would quiver at the edges. He took my hand and squeezed it with all his might. When I squeezed his in return, just as hard, it was as if I’d squeezed a sponge hidden in his cheeks, because suddenly his eyes welled.
He quickly composed himself, calling for the bill, and on the way home, as Çetin drove so carefully that the car scarcely rumbled over the cobblestones, he dozed off.
Once at the Merhamet Apartments, I didn’t suffer much indecision. After Füsun arrived, we kissed for a very long time, and then I took the velvet box from my pocket, explaining that I smelled of spirits because I’d had lunch with my father.
“Open it,” I said.
And she did so, with great care.
“These are not my earrings,” she said. “These are pearl.”
“Do you like them?”
“Where is my earring?”
“It vanished into thin air, and then one morning I looked at my bedside, and there it was, with its mate. I put them both into this velvet box to reunite them with their beautiful owner.”
“I’m not a child,” said Füsun. “These are not my earrings.”
“They are in spirit, darling-as I see it, anyway.”
“I want my own earring.”
“I’m giving you these as a present,” I said.
“I couldn’t ever wear these… They’re very expensive. Everyone would want to know where they’re from…”
“Don’t wear them, then. But don’t refuse my present.”
“But this is something you’ve given me to replace my earring… If you hadn’t lost the one I left behind, you would never have brought me these. I have no way of knowing what you really did with it, if you actually lost it.”
“I’m sure it will turn up one day, in some drawer at home.”
“One day…” said Füsun. “How easily you say that. How irresponsible you are. When do you expect it to turn up exactly? How long will I have to wait?”
“Not very long,” I said, scrambling to save the moment. “It will be the day I take that tricycle and come to your house to have supper with your parents.”
“I’ll be waiting to hear from you, then,” said Füsun. Then we kissed. “You reek of drink.”
But I went on kissing her, and as we began to make love we forgot all our troubles. As for the earrings my father had bought for his lover-I left them at the flat.
22 The Hand of Rahmi Efendi
AS THE DAY of the engagement party approached, I was so distracted by the preparations that there was no time left to worry about affairs of the heart. I recall sounding out my friends at the club, whom I’d known since childhood and whose fathers were my father’s friends, and had long conversations on how to procure the champagne and other “European” beverages that we hoped to serve to our guests at the Hilton. May I remind visitors entering my museum in the future that in those days the import of foreign alcohol was strictly, one might even say jealously, limited by the state, and that even the state lacked the foreign currency reserves to pay importers for the full quantities allowed under the quotas, with the result that very little champagne, whiskey, or indeed any foreign alcohol came into the country legally. But there was never any shortage of champagne, whiskey, or American cigarettes, for delicatessens in rich neighborhoods were well stocked with black market goods, as were the bars in the city’s most fashionable hotels, and likewise the thousands of tombala men who roamed the streets with their bags of black market raffle tickets. Anyone organizing an elaborate party felt compelled to offer “European” drinks, and it was left to the host to hunt down provisions for the hotel. Most head barmen at the larger establishments knew one another and would in such situations depend on colleagues to funnel extra bottles their way, thus ensuring that unusually large functions came off without an embarrassing shortfall. Still one had to be mindful that the society pages enjoyed reporting the day after an event how much “real foreign” alcohol had been served, and how much of it was mere Ankara Viski.
If ever I had a free moment amid all this, Sibel would pick up the phone and we’d be off to see a new house with an enviable view, either in the hills above Bebek and Arnavutköy, or in the then emerging neighborhood of Etiler. Like her, I came to enjoy standing in these unfinished apartments that still smelled of plaster and cement, imagining the bedroom and the dining room, trying to figure out where the long divan we had seen in a Nişantaşı furniture store might be placed to provide the best possible prospect of the Bosphorus. At parties in the evenings Sibel did not rest from her day’s calculations and only too happily regaled friends with impressions of the new neighborhoods, discussing our plans with others, apartment locations, their advantages and drawbacks; whereas I, feeling oddly constrained by shame, would change the subject, talk to Zaim about football, the success of Meltem soda, or the new bars, clubs, and restaurants that had just opened for the summer. My secret bliss with Füsun had made me more subdued in the company of friends, and more and more I preferred to watch the goings-on from the sidelines. Sorrow was slowly consuming me, though at the time I couldn’t see it clearly, recognizing it only now, so many years later, as I tell this story. Then I noticed only that I had become more “quiet,” as others were noting, too.
“You’ve been pensive lately,” said Sibel late one night as I was taking her home in the car.
“Really?”
“We haven’t exchanged a word for half an hour.”
“That lunch I had with my father a while ago… my mind keeps going back to it. He can deny it, but to me he sounds like a man preparing for death.”
On Friday the sixth of June, eight days before the engagement party and nine days before Füsun’s university entrance exam, my father, my brother, and I went with Çetin in the Chevrolet to a house between Beyoğlu and Tophane, just below Çukurcuma Hamam, to offer our condolences. The deceased, an old employee from Malatya, had been with my father since he’d first gone into business. This kindly, hulking man was a part of the company family, and he’d been running errands for as long as I could remember. He had an artificial hand, his real one having been crushed in a machine on the factory floor. My father, who had liked this hardworking man a great deal, had transferred him to the office, and that was when we’d gotten to know him. In the beginning, my brother and I were terrified of the artificial hand, but because of Rahmi Efendi’s big smile and his unfailing kindness to us, in time he made the hand into a toy for us. Once, I remember Rahmi Efendi going into an empty room, putting his artificial hand to one side, and spreading out his prayer rug; then he knelt down to say his prayers.
Rahmi Efendi had two strapping sons who were as good-hearted as he was. They both kissed my father’s hand. His still buxom, pink-skinned, but careworn wife burst into tears the moment she saw my father, wiping her eyes with the edges of her headscarf. As he consoled her with a sincerity that neither my brother nor I could ever have matched, embracing the two sons and kissing their cheeks, he managed, in no time, to make all the other visitors in the room feel as if they shared one soul, one heart. At the same time, however, my brother and I were each overcome by a crisis of guilt, he speaking in a didactic tone of voice, and I unable to resist reciting memories.