“He’ll never get anywhere,” said Berrin with a knowing air.
“Why not?”
“Just look at him. You can tell that type from a mile off,” said Berrin. “Men like him from the heart of Anatolia… Girls would rather marry him through a matchmaker because they know if they go gallivanting about town with him too much, a man like this will secretly begin to think of them as whores.”
“Mehmet doesn’t have that mentality.”
“But he’s from that mold. That’s what his family is like, that’s where he comes from. A girl with brains doesn’t judge a man by the way he thinks. She looks at his family, at the way he deports himself.”
“You do have a point,” I said. “I’ve seen brainy girls like this-no need to mention names-who shy away from Mehmet, even when he’s clear he’s serious about them, but when they’re around other men, even when they’re not sure the men would marry them, they’re much more relaxed, and much better at getting the ball rolling.”
“Exactly,” said Berrin proudly. “I can’t tell you how many men in this country treat their wives with disrespect even years later, just for having allowed them some intimacy before marriage. Let me tell you something: Your friend Mehmet has never really been in love with any of those girls who did not allow him to approach them. If he had been, those girls would have sensed it, too, and they would have treated him differently. I’m not saying they would have slept with him, of course, but they would have let him get close enough to make marriage a possibility.”
“But the reason that Mehmet couldn’t fall in love with them was that they wouldn’t let him get close enough, because they were conservative and frightened.”
“That’s not the way it works,” said Berrin. “You don’t have to sleep with someone to be in love. The sex is not what matters. Love is Leyla and Mecnun.”
I said something like “Hmmmmm.”
“What’s going on over there?” my brother shouted from the other end of the table. “Tell us, please! Who’s sleeping with whom?”
Berrin gave him a look that said, There are children listening! Then she whispered into my ear. “That’s the crux of it,” she said. “Why can’t this seemingly meek Mehmet of yours fall in love with any of these girls he wants to meet, or start something serious with them?”
Out of respect for Berrin’s intelligence, I was tempted for a moment to tell her that Mehmet was an incorrigible patron of whorehouses. He had “girls” he visited regularly in four or five private establishments in Sıraselviler, Cihangir, Bebek, and Nişantaşı. Even as he struggled in vain to form deep attachments with the women he met at work-virgins in their early twenties with lycée diplomas-he’d continued to frequent the high-class brothels for wild all-nighters with girls impersonating Western movie stars, though when he drank too much it became obvious what a hard time he had keeping up the pace, or even thinking straight. Nevertheless, when we emerged from a party in the wee hours, instead of returning to his house where his father was forever fretting over his worry beads and his mother brooded in her headscarf, and everyone, including his sisters, kept the fast during Ramadan, he would bid us good-bye and head to one of the pricier brothels of Cihangir or Bebek.
“You’re drinking rather a lot this evening,” said Berrin. “Slow down a little. There are a lot of people here and they’re all watching the family.”
“Fine,” I said, as I lifted my glass with a smile.
“Just look at Osman, how responsible he is,” said Berrin. “Then look at you, so mischievous at your own engagement… How could two brothers be so different?”
“Actually,” I said, “we’re very similar. And anyway, from now on I’m going to be even more serious and responsible than Osman.”
“Well, don’t go overboard. People can be so boring when they’re too serious,” Berrin began, and she continued in this half-hectoring vein until, much later, I heard, “You’re not even listening to me.”
“What? Of course I’m listening.”
“All right, then tell me what I just said!”
“You said, ‘Love has to be the way it is in the old legends. Like Leyla and Mecnun.’”
“I knew you weren’t listening to me,” said Berrin with a half smile, from which I could see she was worried about me. She turned to Sibel, to see if she had noticed what condition I was in. But Sibel was talking to Mehmet and Nurcihan.
That I’d not been able to put Füsun out of mind all this while; that throughout my conversation with Berrin I’d felt her presence behind me, at her table in the back; that I kept wondering how she was doing and what she must be thinking-I’d been trying to hide this from myself just as I’ve been keeping it from my readers, but enough! You already know that I failed. So from now on I’ll be straight with you.
I found an excuse to leave the table. I can’t remember what pretext I came up with. I cast my eyes over the back of the garden, but I couldn’t see Füsun. The place was very crowded, and as always, with everyone talking at once, shouting to be heard, and children shrieking as they played hide-and-seek among the tables, and the clink of knives and forks going on over their heads-a cacophony the orchestra only exacerbated-it added up to quite a roar. I walked through this infernal din toward the back, hoping to catch sight of Füsun.
“Many congratulations, my dear Kemal,” I heard someone say. “How much longer till the belly dance?”
This was Selim the Snob, who was sitting at Zaim’s table. I laughed, as if he’d said something hilarious.
“You’ve made an excellent choice, Kemal Bey,” a nice matron told me. “You probably don’t remember me. I’m your mother’s…”
But before she could make the connection, a waiter with a tray pushed me aside to make his way between us. By the time I had gathered my bearings, the well-wishing woman had been carried away in the flow of the crowd.
“Let me see your ring!” said a child, roughly twisting my hand.
“Stop, don’t be rude!” said the child’s fat mother, seizing the child roughly by the arm. She lunged, as if to slap him, but the brat was wise to her ways and wriggled out just in time. “Come here and sit down!” cried his mother. “I’m so sorry… and congratulations.”
A middle-aged woman I’d never seen before was laughing herself red in the face, but when our eyes met she suddenly became serious. Her husband introduced himself-he was a relation of Sibel’s, but apparently we’d both done our military service at the same time in Amasya-and he invited me to sit down with them. I surveyed the tables at the back of the garden, hoping to catch sight of Füsun, but she seemed to have vanished into thin air. Misery spread through my body.
“Are you looking for someone?”
“My fiancée is waiting for me, but of course I’d love to sit down and have a drink with you…”
They were very pleased, and at once they pushed together their chairs to make room for one more. No, I didn’t need a place setting, just a little more raki.
“Kemal, my friend, have you ever been introduced to Admiral Erçetin?” the man asked, pointing at the gentleman across the table.
“Yes, of course,” I said. In fact I had no memory of him.
“Young man, I am Sibel’s father’s aunt’s sister’s husband!” the admiral told me humbly. “I congratulate you.”
“Please excuse me, Admiral. I didn’t recognize you out of uniform. Sibel speaks highly of you.”
In fact, Sibel had told me how a distant cousin of hers had years ago spent the summer in Heybeliada and fallen in love with a handsome naval officer; thinking that this admiral must be one of those grandees that rich families treat so well so as to have someone to pull strings whenever they have dealings with the state, or when they need to arrange the deferment of some son’s military service, I hadn’t paid particular attention to her tale. I now had a strange urge to ingratiate myself by saying, “When is the army going to step in, sir? How much longer can we be pushed to the brink by communists on the one side and reactionaries on the other?” but I was composed enough to know that if I said these things in my present addled state, I would be judged drunk and disrespectful. Suddenly something prompted me to stand up, and there, in the distance, I saw Füsun.