“Very rarely.”
“The rich of our country who have been to Europe only go to Turkish films to laugh at them. When I was twenty I thought that way, too. But I don’t look down on Turkish films the way I used to. Füsun now likes Turkish films very much.”
“Teach me, too, for God’s sake, so I, too, may love them as much,” I said.
“I’d be happy to teach you,” said Mr. Son-in-law, smiling sincerely. “But the film we make with your help won’t be at all like those, have no fear. For example, we won’t make a film in which Füsun leaves the village for the city, and three days later, thanks to her French nanny, becomes a lady.”
“Anyway, I’d be fighting with that nanny from the very beginning,” said Füsun.
“And you won’t see her playing Cinderella, despised by her rich relatives because she’s poor,” Feridun continued.
“Actually, I wouldn’t mind playing a despised poor relation,” said Füsun.
Although I didn’t believe she was mocking me, I felt in her words a buoyancy, a lightheartedness, that pained me all the same. It was in the same blithe spirit that we shared family memories; after recalling how we’d long ago toured Istanbul in the Chevrolet, with Çetin at the wheel, we discussed recent and imminent deaths of distant relations living in the narrow streets of distant neighborhoods, and much else. Our discussion of how to make stuffed mussels ended with the extremely pale Greek chef coming all the way from the kitchen to tell us, with a smile, that a dash of cinnamon was required. The son-in-law, whose innocence and optimism were beginning to win me over, was not overbearing as he promoted his screenplay and his film ambitions. When I dropped them off at the house, we agreed to meet again four days later.
During the summer of 1976 we dined together at many Bosphorus restaurants. Even years later, every time I looked out at the Bosphorus through the windows of those restaurants, I would remember being caught between my elation at sitting across from Füsun and the cool I needed to maintain to win her back, and would feel the same confusion that had beset me. At these meals I would listen respectfully to her husband holding forth on his dreams, on Yeşilçam films and Turkish audiences, keeping my doubts to myself; it was, after all, not my aim to offer the Turkish filmgoer “the gift of an art film in the Western sense of the term,” and so I would discreetly create difficulties; for example, asking to see the finished screenplay, only to express my excitement about another story before the first script came to hand.
Once, after Feridun (whom I had discovered to be cleverer and more adroit than many Satsat employees) had engaged me in a conversation about the cost of a “good and proper” Turkish film, I worked out that the cost of making Füsun a star would be roughly half that of a small apartment in the backstreets of Nişantaşı, but if we were unable to accomplish this purpose, it was not because this figure was unacceptable; it was because I had realized that seeing Füsun twice a week on the pretense of making a film was enough to assuage my pain, at least for now. After suffering so much I was content with what I now had. Even to wish for more was too daunting. It was as if, having endured such agony, I needed to give myself a little rest.
If, after our meal, Çetin drove us to İstinye for chicken breast pudding with lots of cinnamon on top, or he took us to Emirgân for a stroll, to laugh and talk as we ate paper helva and ice cream sandwiches and gazed into the dark waters of the Bosphorus, it would seem to me that there could be no deeper happiness in all the world. One evening, when I had placated the djinns of love and found peace in Yani’s Place, just by sitting across from Füsun, I recall being struck by the simple, ineluctable formula: Happiness means being close to the one you love, that’s all. (Taking immediate possession is not necessary.) Just before acknowledging this enigmatic mantra, I had looked out the restaurant window at the opposite shore; seeing the twinkling lights of the yali where Sibel and I had spent the previous summer together, I realized that love was no longer lacerating my stomach.
It was not just that the searing pains of love would disappear the moment I sat down at the same table with Füsun; I would immediately forget that until just now, this same pain had brought me to thoughts of suicide. So, at Füsun’s side, with the agony having subsided, I would forget my wretched undoing; convincing myself that I had been restored to “normal,” I returned to my old self; I would succumb to the illusion that I was strong, decisive, even free. But after our first three outings I came to notice that such ecstasy was inevitably followed by the familiar despair, and so, as I sat across from her, thinking how soon I would miss her, foreseeing the pain of the days to come, I would discreetly pilfer various objects from the table as reminders of the happiness I’d felt there and then-and to fortify myself later when I was alone. This little tin spoon, for example: One evening, at Aleko’s Place in Yeniköy, I had a short conversation with her husband about football-it was fortunate we were both Fenerbahçe supporters, which spared us shallow arguments-when Füsun, getting bored, put this spoon into her mouth, toying with it for some time. This saltshaker: Just as she picked it up a rusty Soviet tanker rumbled past the window, the violence of its propeller shaking the bottles and glasses on our table, and she held it for a good long time. On our fourth meeting, we went to Zeynel in İstinye, and as we all strolled, I was just behind her, Füsun cast off this half-eaten cone, which I retrieved from the ground and pocketed in a flash. Returning home, I would gaze drunkenly at these objects; a day or two later, not wishing my mother to see them, I would take them over to the Merhamet Apartments to arrange them among similarly precious artifacts, and as the agonies of love set in, I would conjure my relief with them.
During that spring and summer my mother and I grew closer-our camaraderie now resembled nothing we had known before. The reason, no doubt, was that she had lost my father, just as I had lost Füsun. Loss had brought us both greater maturity, and made us more indulgent. But how much did my mother know of my grief? Were she to find the spoons and ice cream cones I brought home with me, what would she think? If she had interrogated Çetin, how much would she have learned of my movements? Sometimes, in moments of misery, I would worry about such things; on no account did I want my mother to grieve for me; I did not want her thinking of me in the grip of an intolerable obsession driving me to mistakes I might “regret for a lifetime.”
Sometimes I would feign being in higher spirits than she was; I could never tell her, even in jest, that her attempts to arrange a marriage for me were pointless, and so I would still listen intently to her detailed reports on the girls she had investigated on my behalf. One of these was the Dağdelens’ youngest daughter, Billur; according to my mother, the spate of bankruptcies that had now come to pass had not arrested their “life of dissipation,” complete with cooks and servants; though she conceded that the girl had a pretty face, she added that she was very short, and when I said I was not prepared to marry a dwarf, she closed the case file. (From our earliest youth, our mother had been telling us, “Don’t you take any girl under 1 meter 65 centimeters, please; I don’t want you marrying a dwarf.”) As for the Mengerlis’ middle daughter, whom I had met with Sibel and Zaim at the Cercle d’Orient in Büyükada early the previous summer, my mother decided that she wasn’t suitable either: The girl had been very recently left in the lurch by the eldest Avunduk son, with whom she had been madly in love, and whom she hoped to marry-a state of affairs that, as my mother had only lately discovered, had been scrutinized by all Istanbul society. My mother continued her search all summer long, and always with my blessing, sometimes because I actually hoped that her efforts might somehow produce a joyous outcome, and sometimes because I hoped this project would bring her out of the reclusiveness she had entered after my father’s death. On any given afternoon, my mother might call the office from her house in Suadiye to tell me of a girl she really wanted me to see: She had been coming in the Işıkçıs’ motorboat to spend her evenings on our neighbor Esat Bey’s wharf, and if I came over to the other side before it got dark and went down to the shore, I could have a look and if I wished, I could meet her-this intelligence all relayed as dutifully as a peasant might do when leading hunters to the place where the partridges had gathered.