“Please tell Sibel that I’m not a bad person.”
“I tell her all the time,” I said as I stood up. There was a silence. “I appreciate the sacrifices you’re making for me,” I said. “But when you are minding Füsun, be careful, don’t let yourself fall for her. Because she’s very sweet.”
Zaim’s expression, so full of understanding, liberated me from feeling shame for my jealousy. It brought me peace, if only short-lived.
Back at my parents’ table I told my father, who had drunk himself into a stupor, that I wanted to introduce a very clever and industrious young clerk named Kenan, who was sitting at the Satsat table. So as not to inflame the other ambitious Satsat employees, I jotted down a note in my father’s name and gave it to Mehmet Ali, a waiter who’d known us since the time the hotel had first opened, instructing him to pass it to Kenan at the next pause in the music. At that moment, my mother reached out and tried to grab my father’s raki, saying, “You’ve had enough,” and in the tussle, spilled some on his tie. They were serving ice cream in glasses when the Silver Leaves took a break. In those days, we would all enjoy a cigarette before each new course. The bread crumbs, the tumblers smeared with lipstick, the stained napkins, overflowing ashtrays, lighters, dirty plates, and crumpled cigarette packets all fired painful sensations in my muddled mind that the evening’s end was fast approaching. At one point, a little boy, perhaps six or seven years old, climbed onto my lap, and Sibel seized the excuse to come over to sit beside me and play with him. The sight of this moved my mother to remark, “What a lovely way you have with him.” People were still dancing. A few moments later my young, handsome, dapper clerk had joined the table and as the former foreign minister rose to his feet, a courtly Kenan told him and my father what an honor it was to meet them both. After the former foreign minister had lumbered off, I explained how Kenan Bey had given considerable thought to Satsat’s potential expansion into the provinces, and that he was particularly knowledgeable about Izmir. I praised him at length so that everyone at the table could hear. My father then began to ask him the same questions he asked all the new clerks. “What foreign languages do you speak, my child? Do you read books, do you have any hobbies, are you married?” “He’s not married,” my mother said. “Just a moment ago he was dancing very nicely with Nesibe’s daughter, Füsun.” “She’s blossomed into quite a beauty,” said my father. “Don’t let this father and son wear you down with business talk, Kenan Bey,” said my mother. “You must want to get back to your friends.” “Not at all, madam! The honor of meeting Mümtaz Bey-meeting all of you-is much more important.” “Such a courteous, refined young man,” my mother whispered, though loud enough for Kenan to hear. “Shall I invite him over one evening?”
When my mother liked or generally approved of someone, she would make sure he heard it when she discreetly told us so, because she enjoyed seeing in his embarrassment proof of her own power. My mother was smiling with this satisfaction when the Silver Leaves resumed with a very slow, sentimental number. I saw Zaim escort Füsun to the dance floor. “Let’s talk about Satsat’s chances in the provinces now, while my father is here, too,” I said. “My son, are you telling me that you are going to talk business now, at your own engagement party?” “Madam,” said Kenan to my mother, “you may not be aware of this, but three or four times a week, when everyone else has gone home, your son stays very late and carries on working.” “Sometimes Kenan and I work late together,” I added. “Yes. Kemal Bey and I enjoy our work,” said Kenan. “Sometimes when it’s very late we make up expressions that rhyme with the names of the people who owe us money.” “That’s fine,” said my father. “But what do you do with the bounced checks?” “I would like for us to meet the distributors to discuss this, Father,” I said.
As the orchestra played one slow dance after another, our talk ranged from possible innovations at Satsat, to the places of entertainment that my father had frequented in Beyoğlu when he was Kenan’s age, to the methods adopted by İzak Bey (my father’s first accountant), to whose table we now turned, raising our glasses in what must have seemed to the accountant a puzzling tribute, after which we went on to contemplate what my father hailed as the beauties of youth and of this evening, and, he added in jest, of “love.” Despite my father’s pressing the matter, Kenan would not be made to admit whether or not he was in love. This did not stop my mother from grilling him about his family, and upon learning that his father was employed by the city council and had for years worked as a streetcar driver, she said with a sigh, “Oh how beautiful they were, those old streetcars!”
More than half the guests had left by now. My father was having a hard time keeping his eyes open.
As my mother and father kissed us each on our cheeks, preparing to take their leave, my mother said, “Don’t you stay out too late either, my son,” looking into Sibel’s eyes, not mine.
Kenan wanted to return to his friends at the Satsat table, but I wouldn’t let him go. “Let’s find my brother and discuss this shop we might open in Izmir,” I said. “It’s not often that the three of us are together in one place.”
I took it upon myself to introduce Kenan to my brother, and my brother (who had known him for some time) raised an eyebrow in disdain, declaring that I must be seriously drunk. Then he looked at Berrin and Sibel, nodding in the direction of the glass in my hand. Yes, I had downed two glasses of raki at around that time, one after the other, because every time I caught a glance of Zaim dancing with Füsun, the raki was my only relief from a ridiculous jealousy. As my brother talked to Kenan about the logistics of collecting on overdue accounts, everyone at our table, including Kenan, watched Zaim dancing with Füsun. Even Nurcihan, who had her back to them, sensed that Zaim had taken an interest in someone else and she was becoming uneasy. At one point I said to myself, “I am happy.” As drunk as I was, I still felt as if everything was going to go my way. On Kenan’s face I recognized an all too familiar species of disquiet, and so I took this long, slender glass (see exhibit) and poured a consoling raki for my ambitious greenhorn friend, who, on account of his bosses having taken a sudden interest in him, had lost the girl he’d been holding in his arms only a few minutes before. At that moment, Mehmet finally asked Nurcihan to dance, and Sibel turned to give me a conspiratorial wink, adding sweetly, “You’ve had enough, darling. Don’t have any more.”
Charmed by her solicitude, I took Sibel to the dance floor, and the moment we got there I knew I had made a mistake. The Silver Leaves were playing “A Memory from That Summer,” which called to mind the previous summer, when Sibel and I had been so happy, and as the music evoked these memories with arresting force-just as I hope the exhibits in my museum are doing-Sibel embraced me as if for the first time. How I wanted in return to embrace with the same ardor my fiancée, the one with whom I was to share the rest of my life. But I could think only of Füsun. Because I was trying to catch a glimpse of her in the crowd, because I did not want her to see me in a warm embrace with Sibel, I held myself back. I let the other couples distract me. They smiled at me affectionately, as people will at seeing a groom a little worse for wear at the end of his engagement party.
At one point we came shoulder to shoulder with the best-loved columnist of that era dancing with an attractive dark-haired woman: “Celâl Bey, love has nothing in common with a newspaper column, does it?” I said. When Mehmet and Nurcihan came alongside us, I treated them as if they’d been lovers for ages. I slurred an attempt at a quip in French to Zümrüt Hanım, who spoke French whenever she visited my mother, even when there was no one around, supposedly to keep the servants from understanding her. By now Sibel had given up on having a dance she would remember forever, and was whispering into my ear, telling me how sweet I was when I was drunk, apologizing for having forced me into matchmaking, which she’d done, she insisted, only to make our friends happy, and alerting me that the fickle Zaim had moved on from Nurcihan and set his sights on that girl who was my distant relation. Frowning, I told her that Zaim was a very good person, and a trusted friend. I added that Zaim had wanted to know why she was treating him so badly.