I had a friend from my army days, Abdülkerim, the son of a wealthy Kayseri landowner. After our military service had ended, he had kept in touch with holiday and New Year’s cards, which he signed in a careful floral script, and so I had made him the Kayseri distributor for Satsat. Because I’d thought Sibel would find him far too “à la Turca ” I had not spared him much time during his visits to Istanbul over the last few years, but four days after my visit to Füsun’s family, I took him to a new restaurant named Garaj that had found immediate favor with Istanbul society. As we reminisced, it was almost as if I were seeing my life through his eyes; to make myself feel better, I told him stories about the wealthy patrons entering and leaving the restaurant, sometimes even just before or after they had visited our table to offer us polite and affable handshakes. Before long it was clear that Abdülkerim was less interested in stories of ordinary human frailty, pain, and transgression than in the sex lives, scandals, and domestic peccadillos of rich Istanbullus whom he hardly knew; one by one he focused on each girl rumored to have had sex before marriage, or even before her engagement, and I did not like this. Perhaps this is why, by the end of the evening, having fallen into a contrarian frame of mind, I told Abdülkerim my own story, describing the love I’d felt for Füsun, but telling it as if it had all happened to some other rich idiot. As I told the story of the young rich man, much admired in society, who had fallen so madly in love with a “shopgirl,” only for her, in the end, to marry someone else, I was so anxious to keep Abdülkerim from suspecting that “he” was me that I pointed out a young man sitting at a distant table.

“Well, no harm done. This promiscuous girl has been married off, so the poor man is off the hook,” said Abdülkerim.

“Actually, when I think of what that man risked for love, I can’t help feeling a lot of respect for him,” I said. “He broke off his engagement for this girl…”

For a moment Abdülkerim’s face lit up with gentle understanding; but then he turned to look covetously at Hicri Bey, the tobacco magnate, with his wife and two swanlike daughters, making their way toward the exit. “Who are those people?” he asked without looking at me. The younger of Hicri Bey’s two dark-haired daughters-her name was Neslişah, I think-had bleached her hair. I did not like the way Abdülkerim looked at them, half mocking, and half admiring.

“It’s late. Shall we go?” I said.

I asked for the bill. We said nothing to each other until we had left the restaurant and were saying our good-byes.

I did not walk straight home to Nişantaşı; instead I headed for Taksim. I had returned Füsun’s orphaned earring to her, but not formally-in my stupor, I had merely left it in the bathroom. This was demeaning, both for them and for me. My pride demanded that I make it clear to them that this had been no mistake but something I’d done deliberately, intending she would find it. So I would have to apologize, and being secure in the knowledge that I would never see her again, I could smile at Füsun and say one last indifferent good-bye. As I walked through the door, Füsun would understand that this was to be her last glimpse of me, and perhaps she would panic, but I would elude her in a deep silence, as she had done to me for the past year. I would not even say that we would never see each other again, but I would wish her well in such a way that she could not conclude otherwise and would thus be undone.

As I slowly made my way toward Çukurcuma through the back-streets of Beyoğlu, it crossed my mind that there was a chance Füsun might not be undone at all; it was possible she was perfectly happy, living in that house with her husband. But if that was the case, if she loved that dullard so much that she would choose to live penuriously in that rickety house, then I would surely have no wish to see her again anyway. Along the narrow streets, uneven sidewalks, and stairs, I looked through the half-drawn curtains to see families turning off their television sets and preparing for bed, or poor, elderly couples sitting across from each other, smoking their last cigarettes of the day, and it struck me on this spring evening, in the pale lamplight, that the people living in these silent backstreets were happy.

I rang the doorbell. A bay window on the second floor swung open. “Who is it?” Füsun’s father called out into the darkness.

“It’s me.”

“Who?”

As I stood there, wondering if I should run away, her mother opened the door.

“Aunt Nesibe, I am sorry to disturb you at such a late hour.”

“Never mind, Kemal Bey. Do come in.”

As I followed her up the stairs, just as I had done on my first visit, I told myself, “Don’t be bashful! This is the last time you’ll see Füsun!” I went inside, fortified by my resolve never to let myself be degraded that way again, but as soon as I saw her, my heart began to pound and I felt embarrassed. She was sitting in front of the television with her father. When they saw me, they both jumped to their feet in a surprised confusion that softened apologetically when they noticed my furrowed brow and the liquor on my breath. During the first four or five minutes, which I do not like to remember, not at all, I told them laboriously how very sorry I was to have disturbed them, but that I had just been passing by and had something on my mind that I wished to discuss with them. In that interval I had discovered that her husband was not at home (“Feridun went out with his film friends”), but I couldn’t find a way to broach my subject. Her mother went into the kitchen to make tea. After her father got up without excusing himself, we found ourselves alone.

“I’m very sorry,” I said, as we both kept our eyes on the television. “I meant no harm. It was because I was drunk that I left your earring next to the toothbrushes that evening, though I meant to hand it back to you properly.”

“There wasn’t any earring near the toothbrushes,” she said with a frown.

As we looked at each other, struggling to make some sense of this, her father came in holding a bowl of semolina and fruit helva, which he said was just for me. After taking one spoonful, I praised the helva to the skies. For a moment we were silent, as if it were for the helva that I had come here in the middle of the night. That was when I realized, as drunk as I was, that the earring had been an excuse: I had come here to see Füsun. And now she was teasing me, telling me she had not found the earring. During that silent interlude I remarked to myself that the pain of not seeing Füsun had been far more soul-destroying than the shame I had suffered in order to see her. I also knew at that moment that I was prepared to endure more situations like this to be spared the pain of not seeing her, though I was more defenseless in the face of shame than in that of longing. Caught now between the fear of humiliation and the fear of suffering her absence, I had no idea what to do, so I stood up.

There, right across from me, I saw my old friend Lemon. I took one step toward its cage, coming eye to eye with the bird. Füsun and her parents had stood up with me, perhaps relieved to see me go. Again I was delivered to the dreadful awareness that had driven me from this wretched house the last time. Füsun was married now; I would not be able to lure her away. Remembering, too, what conclusion I had drawn following the last visit-that she was after my money-I resolved once more that this was the last time I’d ever see her. I was never going to set foot in this house again.

Then the doorbell rang. This oil painting captures that moment when Lemon and I were staring at each other, while Füsun and her parents were staring at me and the canary from behind, just before the doorbell rang and we all turned to look at the door: I commissioned it many years after these events. Because the point of view is that of Lemon the canary, with whom I had identified in some strange way at that moment, none of our faces are depicted. It portrays the love of my life, viewed from the back, just as I remembered, and every time I see it, this painting brings me to tears; and let me add with pride that the artist has caught the night peeking through the parted curtains, the dark neighborhood of Çukurcuma in the background, and the room’s interior with perfect fidelity to my descriptions.