“Kemal Bey,” he said, glancing at the raki glass in my hand, “I have the greatest respect for you, and your father, and your family. We’ve all had our bad days. Living as we do in this beautiful but impoverished country, we enjoy a good fortune that God bestows only on his most beloved subjects; and let us give thanks for that. Let us not be too proud, and let us remember Him in our prayers-that is the only way to be good.”
“I had no idea you were so religious,” I said mockingly.
“My dear Kemal Bey, what did I do wrong?”
“Turgay Bey, you broke the heart of a young girl who happens to be a member of my family. You treated her badly. You even offered her money. I’m talking about Füsun of the Şanzelize Boutique-she’s a very, very close relation on my mother’s side.”
His face turned ashen, and he looked down. That was when I realized that I was jealous of Turgay Bey not because he had been Füsun’s lover before me, but because, once the affair was over, he’d managed to get over her and return to his normal bourgeois life.
“I had no idea she was related to you,” he said with shocking sincerity. “I feel deeply shamed. If your family could not bear to see me, you had every right not to invite me to the engagement party. Do your father and your older brother feel equally offended? What can we honorably do about this-should we end our partnership?”
“Let’s end it,” I said, regretting my words even as I uttered them.
“In that case, let us say it is you who have canceled the contract,” he said, lighting a Marlboro.
The pain of love was now exacerbated by my shame at having misplayed my hand. Though I was very drunk by now, I drove myself back to the city. Since I’d turned eighteen, driving in Istanbul and especially on the shore road, along the city walls, had brought me huge pleasure, but now, with my sense of impending doom, the ride had become a form of torture. It was as if the city had lost its beauty, as if I could do nothing but put my foot on the accelerator in order to escape this place. Driving through Eminönü, under the pedestrian overpasses in front of the New Mosque, I very nearly ran someone over.
Reaching the office, I decided that the best thing to do was to convince Osman that ending the partnership with Turgay Bey was not such a bad idea. I summoned Kenan, who was well informed about this particular contract, and he listened, very intently, to what I had to say. I summarized the situation thus: “For personal reasons, Turgay Bey is behaving badly and has asked if we might fill this contract on our own,” adding that we had no option other than to part ways with Turgay Bey.
“Kemal Bey, if at all possible, let’s try and avoid this,” said Kenan. He explained that we could not possibly manage alone, and if we failed to fulfill the order in time, it would harm not just Satsat but the prospects of the other firms involved, and subject us to heavy penalties in the New York courts. “Is your brother aware of all this?” he asked. I must have been spouting raki fumes like a chimney, else he wouldn’t have questioned his boss so insolently. “The arrow has already left the bow,” I said. “We’ll have to carry on without Turgay Bey.” I knew this was impossible, even if Kenan hadn’t said so. But my reason had now shut down altogether, yielding to a troublemaking devil. Kenan remained in front of me, insisting that I needed to speak to Osman.
It goes without saying that I did not then hurl the stapler displayed here, or the accompanying ashtray bearing the Satsat logo, at Kenan’s head, however much I longed to do so. I do remember noting that, however laughable his tie was, it resembled the company ashtray in both ungainly size and coloring. “Kenan Bey,” I roared, “you are not working in my brother’s firm. You are working for me!”
“Kemal Bey, please don’t take offense. Of course I’m aware of this,” he said slyly. “But you introduced me to your brother at the engagement party, and since then we’ve been in touch. If you don’t ring him right away to talk about a matter this important, he’s going to be very upset. Your brother is aware that you’ve not been having the easiest time recently, and like everyone else, he only wants to help you.”
The words “everyone else” almost detonated my anger. I was tempted to fire him then and there, but I feared his audacity. Suffering like a trapped animal, I became aware that I would only feel better if I could just see Füsun once. To the world I was indifferent, because by now everything was so futile, so very vulgar.
34 Like a Dog in Outer Space
BUT INSTEAD of Füsun I saw Sibel. My pain was now so great, so all-consuming that when the office emptied out, I knew at once that if I remained by myself for too long I would feel as lonely as this dog after the Soviets sent him off in his little spaceship into the dark infinity of outer space. By calling Sibel to the office after hours, I gave her the legitimate expectation that we would be resuming our pre-engagement sex life. My well-intentioned fiancée was wearing Sylvie, a perfume I’d always liked, and these imitation net stockings that, as she knew very well, aroused me, with high-heeled shoes. She arrived elated, thinking that my “sickness” was retreating, and I could not bring myself to tell her that, quite to the contrary, I had called her here to rescue me from the scourge, however briefly; that I longed to embrace her as I had embraced my mother when I was a child. So Sibel did as she had done with such relish in the past: She walked me backward and sat me down on the divan, and proceeded to do her dumb secretary impression, cheerily peeling off her clothes, layer by layer, until, smiling sweetly, she sat on my lap. Let me not describe how the scent of her hair and her neck made me feel utterly at home, or how relaxed, even restored, I was by that familiar intimacy, because the reasonable reader, like the attentive museum visitor, will then assume that we went on to make love. He would be disappointed, as Sibel was, too. But it felt so good to embrace her that I had soon drifted off into a peaceful, happy sleep, and my dream was of Füsun.
When I woke up, in a sweat, we were still lying there in each other’s arms. The room was dark and we dressed in silence, Sibel lost in her own thoughts, and I wallowing in guilt. The headlights of the cars in the avenue and the purple sparks from the trolleybus rods illuminated the office just as they had in the days when we had made careless love.
Without discussion, we repaired to Fuaye, and when we sat down at our sparkling table in the crowded, bustling dining room, I thought once again how charming, beautiful, and understanding Sibel was. I remember that after we had talked about this and that for an hour, and laughed with various tipsy friends who had stopped by our table, we discovered from the waiter that Nurcihan and Mehmet had been in for supper earlier. But there was no avoiding the real issue indefinitely, as our evening was punctuated by longer and longer silences. I ordered a second bottle of Çankaya wine. By now Sibel was drinking a lot, too.
At last she said, “What’s going on with you? It’s time-”
“If I only knew,” I said. “There seems to be a part of my mind that doesn’t want to acknowledge the problem, or understand it.”
“So you don’t understand it either, is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes.”
“If you ask me, you know a lot more than I do,” said Sibel with a smile.
“What do you think I know so much more about than you do?”
“Do you ever worry what I might be thinking about your troubles?” she asked.
“I worry that if I don’t snap out of this, I’ll lose you.”
“Don’t worry about that,” she said, stroking my hand. “I’m patient and I love you dearly. If you don’t want to talk about it, then you don’t have to. And don’t worry, I don’t have any wild theories about all this. We have plenty of time.”