Drinking was my sole defense, albeit temporary, against jealousy. When I woke up the next morning with a headache and my envy refreshed, I realized, with growing panic, that the pain was not abating, and that I felt more helpless than ever. As I walked to Satsat (Inge still smiling saucily at me from the Meltem poster on the side of the apartment), and later that morning, as I tried to bury my thoughts in paperwork, I was forced to acknowledge that the pain was gradually increasing, and that, far from forgetting Füsun as time wore on, I was thinking about her ever more obsessively.
Time had not faded my memories (as I had prayed to God it might), nor had it healed my wounds as it is said always to do. I began each day with the hope that the next day would be better, my recollections a little less pointed, but I would awake to the same pain, as if a black lamp were burning eternally inside me, radiating darkness. How I longed to think about her just a little less, and to believe that I would, in time, forget her! There was hardly a moment when I wasn’t thinking about her; in truth, with few exceptions, there was not a single moment. These “happy” interludes of oblivion were fleeting-a second or two-but then the black lamp would be relit, its baleful darkness filling my stomach, my nostrils, my lungs, until I could barely breathe, until merely to live became an ordeal.
As much as I would long for an escape from this suffering, I longed for someone to confide in, to find Füsun and talk to her, but when that longing went unfulfilled I would yearn to pick a fight with someone, anyone to whom I could attribute this damning, furious resentment. For all my willed self-restraint, to see Kenan at the office was to slip into temporary insanity. Though I had decided that there was nothing between them, I could not forget Kenan’s flirtatious attentions at the engagement party, which Füsun might well have enjoyed, and this was reason enough to hate him. By noon I would be concocting pretexts for his termination. Oh, he was a sly one, wasn’t he? Lunchtime brought the relative calm of knowing that I would go to the Merhamet Apartments, to wait for Füsun-even a tiny hope sustained me, even when the fear that she would not come was fulfilled. But I understood with fear that when she did not come, the pain of waiting brought to its excruciating climax, the prospect of the next day held out nothing but the same vain hope of the last.
A question likewise debilitating took root in my mind: If I was suffering all this pain, how could she bear it, even if it was half as intense? I had to conclude that she must have found someone else right away, for otherwise she couldn’t have stood it. The joys of making love, disclosed to her only seventy-four days earlier-Füsun must now be sharing them with another… as I lay every day in agony, a bedridden idiot, a corpse. No, I wasn’t an idiot: She had tricked me. We’d known an immense happiness together, and despite the horrible awkwardness of the engagement party, we’d still had our dance together, during which she had promised to come to me the next day, right after her exam. If my engagement had broken her heart, she would have been entirely justified in wanting to end it with me, but then why lie to me? The pain within transmuted into a furious need to remonstrate with her, and lay bare her wrong. I would then prepare myself for an imaginary argument, during which I would be mollified in time, the accusations yielding to the heavenly images of our indelible hours together and the disarming power of her presence. I would all the same rehearse points I wanted to argue, one by one. She would have to tell me to my face that she was leaving me. If the university exam had gone badly I was not to blame. If she was going to leave me I had the right to know. For hadn’t she said that she would continue to see me for the rest of her life? Didn’t she owe me one last chance-at least to find the earring and bring it to her at once? Did she really believe that other men could love her as I did? With such resolve, I got out of bed and rushed out into the street.
30 Füsun Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
I RAN ALL the way to their house. Even before I passed the corner where Alaaddin had his shop, I was euphoric, already imagining how I would feel when I saw her. As I smiled at a cat dozing, shaded from the July sun, I asked myself why it had not occurred to me before simply to go to their house. The pain in the upper left-hand quadrant of my stomach was already abating; the leadenness in my legs and the fatigue in my back were even now gone. As I approached the house, however, the fear of not finding her set in, and so my heart began to race: What would I say to her, what was I going to say if it was her mother who came to the door? At one point I thought of turning back to collect the childhood tricycle. But I knew the moment we saw each other there would be no need for excuses. Like a ghost I entered the cool foyer of the little apartment house on Kuyulu Bostan Street, walked up the steps to the second floor, and rang the bell. Visitors to the museum might wish to press down on the button alongside this exhibit to hear the sound of a chirping bird-so fashionable as a door chime in Istanbul at that time-which I heard as my heart fluttered like a bird, trapped between my mouth and my throat.
It was her mother who answered the door. The foyer was so dark that at first she wrinkled her nose at this tired stranger, as if he might be an annoying salesman. Then she recognized me, and her face lit up. Taking hope from this, the pain in my stomach eased slightly.
“Oh! Kemal Bey! Do come in!”
“I was just passing by, Aunt Nesibe, so I thought I’d drop in,” I said, sounding like the earnest neighborhood teenager in a radio play. “I just noticed the other day, Füsun’s not working at the shop anymore. So I was wondering; she never dropped by to tell me how she did on the university exam.”
“Oh, Kemal Bey, my poor boy, come inside so that we can share our troubles.”
Without pausing to register what she might have meant by “sharing our troubles,” I went into that dingy backstreet apartment that my mother had never once visited, in spite of all those cozy sewing sessions at our home and all the talk of our being related. Slipcovered armchairs, a table, a buffet holding a candy bowl, a set of crystal tumblers, and a television crowned by a sleeping china dog-I found these things beautiful, because they had all assisted in the making of the wondrous miracle that was Füsun. In a corner I saw a pair of sewing scissors, lengths of cloth, threads of many colors, pins, the pieces of a dress that was being sewn together by hand. So Aunt Nesibe was still working as a seamstress. Was Füsun at home? She didn’t seem to be, but here was her mother, standing there waiting, as if about to bargain with me, or present me with a bill, and from this I drew hope.
“Do sit down, Kemal Bey,” she said. “Let me make you a coffee. You look pale. You need to relax. Would you like some water from the refrigerator, too?”
“Isn’t Füsun here?” asked the bird caught inside my parched throat.
“Noooo. Noooo,” said the woman, in a tone to suggest, if only you knew what has happened! “How would you like your coffee?” This time she used the polite word for “you.”
“Medium sweet!” I said.
What I now realize, all these years later, is that the woman went into the kitchen not to make me a coffee but to cook up an answer. But at the time, even with my senses on full alert, my mind was whirling from being in a house where the scent of Füsun was everywhere, and dizzy with the hope that I might see her. There, in its cage, was my friend the canary from the Şanzelize Boutique; its impatient twitter was something of a salve on my heart, and this confused me all the more. On the low table in front of me was the Turkish-made, thirty-centimeter wooden ruler with its fine white edge. I had given it to Füsun as a present at our seventh meeting, by my later calculations, for use in her geometry lessons. It was clear that Füsun’s mother was now using the ruler for her sewing. I picked it up, brought it to my nose, and as I remembered the scent of Füsun’s hand, there, before my eyes, she came to life. As Aunt Nesibe returned from the kitchen, I slipped the ruler into my jacket pocket.