Füsun’s father went over to the bay window to look down at the mirror that was mounted in such a way as to reflect the front and, announcing that it was one of the neighbors’ children ringing the bell, he went downstairs. There was a silence. I went to the door. As I put on my coat I lowered my head and stayed silent. As I opened the door, it occurred to me that all was not lost: This could be the “revenge” scene I had been preparing for a year now, but keeping this fact to myself, I simply said, “Good-bye.”

“Kemal Bey,” said Aunt Nesibe. “We cannot begin to tell you how glad we were that you rang our bell as you were passing by.” She glanced at Füsun. “Don’t pay any attention to her pouting. She’s afraid of her father. If she weren’t, she’d have shown herself as happy as we were to see you.”

“Oh, Mother, please,” said my beloved.

It did cross my mind to begin the parting ritual with some pronouncement along the lines of Well, I can’t bear her hair being black, but I knew these words would ring false: I was willing to suffer all the pain in the world for her, and what’s more I knew that willingness would be the death of me.

“No, no, she looks fine,” I said, looking meaningfully into Füsun’s eyes. “Seeing how happy you are has made me happy, too.”

“It was seeing you that made us happy, too,” said Aunt Nesibe. “Now that your feet know how to get here, we hope you’ll visit us often.”

“Aunt Nesibe, this is the last time I’ll be visiting you,” I said.

“Why? Don’t you like our new neighborhood?”

“It’s our turn now,” I said with fake jocularity. “I’m going to talk to my mother and ask her to invite you over.” There was, I’d like to say, a certain indifference in the way I walked down the stairs, not once looking back at them.

“Good-night, my son,” said Tarık Bey softly when I met him at the door. The neighbor’s child had given him a package, saying, “This is from my mother!”

As I felt the fresh air cool my face, I thought how I would never again see Füsun, and for a moment I believed I had an untroubled, carefree, happy life before me. I imagined that Billur, the Dağdelens’ daughter, whom my mother was going to visit, would be charming. But with every step I took, farther from Füsun, I felt as if I were leaving a piece of my heart behind. As I walked up Çukurcuma Hill, I could feel my soul quivering in my bones, straining to return to the place I’d just left, but I still believed it was only a matter of letting this fever break and then I’d be over it.

I’d come a long way. What I needed now was to find ways to distract myself, to remain strong. I went into one of the meyhanes that was about to shut, and sitting in the atmosphere of thick blue cigarette smoke I drank two glasses of raki with a slice of melon. When I went back out into the street, my soul was telling my body we had not gone far from Füsun’s house. At this point I must have lost my way. In a narrow street I came across a familiar shadow that sent an electric shock through me.

“Oh, hello!” he said. It was Füsun’s husband, Feridun.

“What a coincidence,” I said. “I’m just coming back from your house.”

“Is that so?”

Once again I was shocked to see how young this husband was-how childish, in fact.

“Ever since my last visit, I’ve been thinking about this film business,” I said. “You’re right. We have to make art films in Turkey, too, just as they do in Europe… But since you weren’t there, I didn’t have a chance to talk about all this. Shall we get together some evening?”

I could sense an immediate confusion in his evidently tipsy mind (by the whiff of him, he’d had at least as much to drink that evening as I had).

“Why don’t I come and pick you up on Tuesday evening at seven?” I said.

“Füsun can come too, right?”

“Of course, if we are to make a European-style art film, we must have Füsun play the lead!”

For a moment we smiled at each other like two old friends who, having shared the long, trying years of school and military service, had at last seen their ship come in. In the lamplight I looked probingly into Feridun Bey’s eyes, each of us imagining he’d gotten the better of the other, and we parted in silence.

51 Happiness Means Being Close to the One You Love, That’s All

I REMEMBER that when I reached Beyoğlu, its shop windows were glittering and I was glad to walk among the crowds streaming out of the cinemas. My happiness-the joy I could take in life-was impossible to deny. That Füsun and her husband had invited me to their house so that I would invest in their preposterous film dreams should perhaps have caused me only shame and humiliation, but so great was the happiness in my heart that I felt no embarrassment whatsoever. That night my mind was fixed on one fantasy: the film premiere, and Füsun holding the microphone, speaking to the admiring audience at the Palace Cinema-or was the New Angel Cinema a better choice?-thanking me first and foremost. When I came on stage, those attuned to the latest gossip would whisper that during the filming the young star had fallen in love with the producer and left her husband. The photograph of Füsun kissing me on the cheek would appear in all the newspapers.

There is no need to dwell on the dreams my imagination was churning out, much as the rare safsa flowers that secrete their own opiated elixir and fall off to sleep. Like most Turkish men of my world who entered into this predicament, I never paused to wonder what might be going on in the mind of the woman with whom I was madly in love, and what her dreams might be; I only fantasized about her. Two days later, when I went to collect her and Feridun in the Chevrolet, with Çetin Efendi at the wheel, I saw, as soon as my eyes met hers, that our evening would in no way resemble the conjurings of my imagination, but being happy just to see her, I lost none of my enthusiasm.

I invited the newlyweds to sit in the backseat, while I sat in the front beside Çetin, and as we passed through streets darkened by the city’s shadows, and through dusty, disorderly squares, I tried to lighten the mood by turning my head around continually to make jokes. Füsun was wearing a dress the color of blood oranges and fire. To expose her skin to the exquisite fragrance of the Bosphorus breeze, she had left the top three buttons undone. I remember that as the car bumped over the cobblestones on the Bosphorus roads, every time I turned around to address them, happiness flamed up in me. That first night we went to Andon’s Restaurant in Büyükdere, and-as would become the rule whenever we met to discuss our film project-I soon realized that I was the one who was the most animated of our party.

We had just selected our mezes from the tray that the old Greek waiters brought to us, when Feridun, whose self-confidence I almost envied, said, “For me, Kemal Bey, cinema is the only thing in life that matters. I say this so that my age does not undermine your confidence in me. For three years now I’ve been working in the heart of Yeşilçam, our own Hollywood. I’m very lucky, I’ve met everyone. I’ve worked as a set hand, carrying lights and props, and I’ve worked as an assistant director. I’ve also written eleven screenplays.”

“And all of them were shot, and they did very well,” said Füsun.

“I’d really like to see those films, Feridun Bey.”

“Of course, Kemal Bey, we could go and see them. Most of them are still playing at summer cinemas, and some are still showing in Beyoğlu. But I’m not happy with those films. If I were content to produce work of that caliber, the people at Konak Films say that I’d be ready to start directing. But I don’t want to make that sort of film.”

“What sort of film would that be?”

“Commercial, melodramatic, mass audience stuff. Don’t you ever go to Turkish films?”