At least twice a day my mother would find an excuse to ring me at the office, and after telling me how long she had cried after coming across some possession of my father’s at the back of a wardrobe-his black-and-white summer spectator shoes, for example, one of which I respectfully display here-she would say, “Don’t leave me alone, please!” and would go on to remind me that I shouldn’t stay in Nişantaşı, that it wasn’t good for me to be alone either, and that she was definitely expecting me for supper in Suadiye.
Sometimes my brother would come with his wife and his children. After supper-while my mother and Berrin discussed children, relatives, old habits, new shops and fashions, the ever-spiraling prices, and the latest gossip-Osman and I would sit under the palm tree, where my father had once sat alone in his chaise longue, gazing at the islands and the stars and dreaming of his secret lovers. Here we would discuss the business and the settlement of my father’s affairs. My brother would do as he always did in those days, urging me to come in on this business with Turgay Bey, but never insisting too much; and then he would tell me, again, what a good thing it had been promoting Kenan to the managerial ranks; he would go on to denounce the difficulties I’d made with Kenan, and my refusal to be part of this new venture; after warning me that this was my last chance to change my mind, and muttering that I would live to regret losing this opportunity, he would complain that I seemed to be avoiding him, and all our mutual friends, indeed, running away from success and happiness, both in private life and at work. “What’s eating you?” he would ask with a frown.
My answer would be that I was worn out after the loss of our father and the awkward ending of my engagement to Sibel-and left feeling a bit introverted. It was a very hot July evening when I told him that I wished to be alone with my grief, and I could see from Osman’s face that he saw this as a form of madness. It seemed to me that, for now at least, my brother was willing to tolerate this as a species of severe depression; but if my affliction got any worse, he would find himself caught between embarrassment and the agreeable prospect of seizing permanent control of our business dealings through the pretext of my incapacity. But I was only afflicted by such anxieties if I’d seen Füsun very recently; if a longer time had elapsed since I’d last seen her, and I was racked with the pain of her absence, my thoughts would be only of her. My mother could sense my obsession, and the darkness inside me, but although it worried her, she did not truly want to know the details. After every meeting with Füsun I was overcome by the innocent wish to convince myself that the love I felt was of no great importance; in much the same way, I tried to persuade my mother, without quite putting it into words, that the obsession more and more evidently ruining my life was nothing to worry about. To prove to my mother that I didn’t have a “complex,” I told her that I had taken Füsun, the daughter of Aunt Nesibe the seamstress, along with her husband, out to eat on the Bosphorus, also mentioning that, at the young husband’s insistence, we had all gone to see one of the films of which he was the screenwriter-such diversions as an obsessive could hardly afford to entertain!
“Goodness,” said my mother. “I’m glad they’re doing well. I’d heard how the child was spending time with film people, Yeşilçam people, and it made me very sorry. What can you expect for a girl who enters beauty contests! But if you say they’re all right…”
“He seems to be a reasonable boy.”
“You are going to the movies with them? You should still be careful. Nesibe has a very good heart, and she’s very good company, but she’s a conniver.” Then, changing course, she said, “There’s going to be a party on Esat Bey’s wharf this evening; they sent a man over with an invitation. Why don’t you go-I can have them put my chair under the fig tree, and I can watch you from here.”
52 A Film About Life and Agony Should Be Sincere
FROM THE middle of June 1976 to the beginning of October, we went to see more than fifty films at the summer cinemas, whose ticket stubs I display here, along with the lobby photographs and advertisements I was able to acquire in subsequent years from Istanbul ’s collectors. Toward nightfall I would go with Çetin to the house in Çukurcuma to collect Füsun and her husband in the Chevrolet, just as I had done on evenings when we went out to eat along the Bosphorus. In the morning Feridun would have discovered from managers and distributors he knew where the film we wished to see was showing, noting the neighborhood and the district on a piece of paper, and under his direction, we would try to find our way. Istanbul had grown wildly over the previous ten years while fires and new buildings had changed its face, and the narrow streets were so packed with fresh arrivals that we often lost our way. Only by frequently stopping to ask directions did we eventually find the cinema, and even then we were obliged to run, often arriving to find the garden already in darkness, and so we would have no idea what sort of place it was until the lights came on during the five-minute intermission.
In later years these cinema gardens would disappear-the mulberry and plane trees would be chopped down, replaced with apartment buildings or turned into parking lots, or mini football fields covered with AstroTurf; but in those days, each time I set eyes on these mournful places-surrounded by whitewashed walls, little factories, teetering old wooden houses, and two-or three-story apartments with too many balconies and windows to count-I was shocked by how crowded they were. Intermingled in my mind with the drama on the screen was the lively humanity I sensed in all those big families, the mothers in their headscarves, the chain-smoking fathers, the soda-sipping children, the single men, the barely suppressed fidgetiness of these people munching disconsolately on their pumpkin seeds as we watched the film, almost always a melodrama.
It was on one such screen in a gigantic open-air cinema that I first saw Orhan Gencebay, who with his songs and his movies, his records and his posters, was becoming a fixture in the lives of the entire Turkish public at that time-the king, in fact, of music and domestic film. The cinema was on a hill behind the new shantytowns between Pendik and Kartal, overlooking the Sea of Marmara, the sparkling Princes’ Islands, the factories, large and small, whose walls were covered with leftist slogans. The smoke, which looked even whiter by night, rising like puffs of cotton from the chimneys of the Yunus Cement Factory in Kartal had covered the entire area in white ash, and together with the plaster dust falling onto the audience produced an effect like snow in a fairy tale.
In this film Orhan Gencebay played a poor young fisherman named Orhan. There was a rich, evil man who was his patron, to whom he felt indebted. This patron’s spoiled son was even worse, and when the boy and his friends happened upon the girl played by Müjde Ar (who was just making her first films at the time) and raped her, mercilessly and at length, tearing off her clothes to give us a better view, the audience fell silent. Under pressure from his patron, to whom he felt so indebted, Orhan was then obliged to whitewash the whole affair by marrying Müjde. At this point, Gencebay cried out, “Down with the world, down with everything!” and once again he would sing the song he had made famous throughout Turkey.
During the film’s most affecting scenes, we would hear nothing but a rustling noise coming from the hundreds of people seated around us, munching pumpkin seeds (the first time I heard this, I thought it was coming from some machine in a nearby factory). Whenever I heard this sound, I felt as if we had all been abandoned to sorrows gathering up within us for many years. But the film’s ambience, the jostling of people who had come out to have a bit of fun, the wisecrackers in the section for single men at the front, and, of course, the implausible plot elements all hindered my ability to let myself go and luxuriate in my suppressed fears. But when Orhan Gencebay cried out in anger, “All is darkness, where is humanity?” I was very happy to be sitting in that cinema, among the trees and under the stars, with Füsun at my side. While I kept one eye on the screen, with my other I watched how Füsun squirmed in her blue jeans, in her wooden chair, how her chest rose and fell with each breath, and how, as Orhan Gencebay cried, “My destiny be damned!” she crossed those legs. I watched her smoke, and wondered how much she shared in the passions on-screen. When Orhan was forced to marry Müjde, and his angry song took on rebellious tones, I turned to Füsun, smiling with a look both impassioned and arch. But, caught up in the film, she didn’t even turn to look at me.