“I’d never let you down, my dear girl!” I pointed at the typescript in my hand. “Tell me, do you esteem the screenplay so highly because you’re meant to star in it, or is it because it’s meant to be an ‘art film’?” (A new concept in 1970s Turkey.)
“Both.”
“Then consider the film made.”
The screenplay was entitled Blue Rain, and there was nothing in it remotely to suggest an awareness of Füsun, or me, or our romance, or our story. Over the summer I had come to have respect for Feridun’s intelligence and his understanding of film; discussing cultivated and highly educated Turkish filmmakers longing to make art films in the manner of the West, he had very astutely identified their typical mistakes (imitation, artificiality, moralism, vulgarity, melodrama, and commercial populism, etc.), so why had he fallen into all the same traps? As I was reading this vexing screenplay, I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality. Even the three scenes, motivated by commercial considerations, in which Füsun’s character would appear nude (once making love, once pensively smoking a cigarette in a bubble bath, in the style of the French New Wave, and once wandering through a heavenly garden in a dream) were arty, insipid, and gratuitous!
My confidence in this project was never more than a pose, but after reading these scenes I was even more resolutely and angrily opposed than Tarık Bey would have been. But realizing that I had to keep the project alive for a while longer, I lavishly praised the script to both Füsun and her husband, going so far as to tell them that “as the producer” I was now ready to begin tryouts for actors and technicians, a zealousness for which I gently mocked myself, in the interest of making it more credible.
So with the onset of winter, Feridun, Füsun, and I delayed not a moment in visiting the backstreet haunts, the prospective production offices, and the coffeehouses where second-class actors, would-be film stars, bit players, and set workers played cards, as well as the bars where producers, directors, and semifamous actors were usually to be found from early evening, eating and drinking until the late hours. All these places were a ten-minute walk up the hill, and whenever I took this route I would remember how Aunt Nesibe had told me that Feridun had married Füsun in order to live within walking distance of such establishments. Some evenings I would collect them at the door, and some evenings we three-Feridun, with Füsun on his arm, and I-would walk together up to Beyoğlu, having had our supper with her parents.
Our most frequent destination was the Pelür Bar, popular with film stars and men with new money hoping to mingle with girls who hoped to become starlets, and the children of Anatolian landowners, now cast into the Istanbul business world by day and letting off steam in the evening, and moderately renowned journalists, film critics, and gossip columnists. All winter long we met many actors who’d played supporting roles in the films we’d seen that summer (including that mustached friend of Feridun’s who had played the crooked accountant), and we became part of that society of spirited, bitter, but ever hopeful souls who whiled away the evenings exchanging vicious gossip, recounting their life stories, and describing their ideas for films, and who couldn’t get through a day without the company of those like them.
They were very fond of Feridun, and because he held some of them in high esteem, had assisted some others, and wanted to ingratiate himself with the rest, he would go off to their tables, sitting with them for hours, leaving Füsun and me alone, though never happily on my part. When Feridun was with us, Füsun would address me as “Cousin Kemal,” only very rarely dropping this half-innocent pretense; if she did deign to speak to me sincerely, I read her change of register as a warning-about the men who came and went from our table, and her future life in the film world-that I ignored at my peril.
One evening after too much rakı, I found myself left alone with her again, and having tired of her aspirational fantasies and the pettiness of this milieu, I suddenly became convinced of the rightness of my next comment and of her receptiveness to it. “Take my arm, darling, let’s get up and leave this dreadful place together right now,” I said. “We could go to Paris, or Patagonia, to the other end of the world-it doesn’t matter so long as we forget all these people, and live happily ever after, just the two of us.”
“Cousin Kemal, how can you even say such a thing? Our lives are what they have become,” said Füsun.
After we’d been coming to the bar for several months, the drunken lot that gathered there every night (an “it” crowd in their own minds) didn’t bother us, having accepted Füsun as the young and beautiful bride and having pegged me with derisive suspicion as the “well-meaning idiot millionaire” who wanted to make an art film. But there were inevitably those who didn’t know us, or drunks who knew us but leered at Füsun anyway, or who had caught a glimpse of her from a distance while barhopping, or who nurtured an irrepressible longing to narrate their own life stories (this was an enormous crowd), and collectively they hardly left us alone. While I enjoyed it when a stranger joined us with a glass of raki in his hand, having taken me for Füsun’s husband, she would straightaway smile and correct them with an insistence that broke my heart every time, saying, “My husband is the fatso over there,” and emboldened the stranger to ignore me and attempt to make a pass at her.
Each attempt took a different form. Some claimed they were looking for a “dark-haired innocent-looking Turkish beauty” just like her to use in a photoroman; some would immediately offer her the lead in some new film on the prophet Abraham, headed imminently into production; some would gaze longingly into her eyes for hours saying nothing; while others would discourse on life’s little beauties and all the subtle wonders that no one paused to notice in this materialistic world, where only money mattered; then there were the ones who sat at remote tables reading the work of long-suffering imprisoned poets, poems about love, longing, and the nation; others from distant tables would either pay our tab or send us a plate of fruit. By the end of the winter we were frequenting these Beyoğlu haunts less, but every time we did go, we would inevitably see the same great hulking woman who often played the diabolical prison matron or the leading villainess’s bulky sidekick. She would invite Füsun to dance parties at her house, promising “lots of cultivated, well-schooled girls” like her. And there was always an old, squat little critic who wore bow ties and girded his enormous belly with suspenders; he would plant his ugly hand like a scorpion on Füsun’s shoulder, foretelling the “great fame” awaiting her, perhaps as the first Turkish actress to gain international renown, provided she gave careful consideration to every step she took.
Füsun would indeed give serious consideration to each and every film, photoroman, and modeling offer, however unsuitable or trivial; she would also remember the names of everyone she met, and in the case of film actors, no matter how obscure, she would shower them with outsize, even vulgar compliments, a want of proportion that I couldn’t help tracing back to her days as a shopgirl. Even as she tried to flatter and beguile everyone, she was also determined to achieve the often contradictory purpose of making herself seem interesting. Toward these ends she was ever more often pressing us to visit these places, and if I counseled against giving her phone number to everyone who made her an offer-“What would your father say?”-she would only snap at me that she knew what she was doing, even declaring that she needed options in the event that Feridun’s film failed to get made. I took deep offense at the implication and moved to another table, but then she would come over with Feridun and say, “Why don’t we three go out for supper, just like we did last summer?”