Toward five o’clock, still in bed, I remembered how, after my grand-father died, my grandmother changed not just her bed, but her bedroom in order to withstand her grief. With all my will, I resolved to extract myself from this bed, this room, and these objects that had aged so beautifully, that were so heavy with the fragrance of happy love, each one murmuring, creaking, rustling of its own accord. But I could not help doing the opposite, and embracing these objects. Either I was discovering the astonishing powers of consolation that objects held, or I was much weaker than my grandmother. The joyful shouts and curses of the children playing football in the back garden bound me to that bed until nightfall. It was only that evening, after I had downed three glasses of raki, and Sibel phoned to ask me about my cut, that I realized it had long since stopped bleeding.
Thus I continued to visit the Merhamet Apartments every day at two o’clock in the afternoon, until the middle of July. As the pain I felt while wondering whether Füsun might come grew less intense each day, I sometimes convinced myself that I was slowly growing accustomed to her absence, but there was no truth to this, none at all. It was simply that I was growing more adept at distracting myself with the happiness I found in objects. A week after the engagement party, she still occupied my every thought, and though these thoughts were not always overwhelmingly urgent, though I sometimes managed to banish them to the back of my mind, the sum total of my agony-to speak arithmetically-was not diminishing; against every hope, it was continuing to grow. It was almost as if I was going to the apartment so as not to lose the habit, or the hope of seeing her.
I would usually spend my two hours in the apartment daydreaming in bed, having selected some object charmed with the illusion of radiating the memories of our happiness-for example, this nutcracker, or this watch with the ballerina, with Füsun’s scent on its strap, with which I would stroke my face, my forehead, my neck, to try to transfer the charm and soothe the ache-until two hours had passed, and the time had come when we would have been awakening from the velvet sleep our lovemaking induced, and, depleted, I would try to return to my everyday life.
The light had gone out of my life by now. Having still not managed to make love to Sibel since our engagement (advancing as my excuse the embarrassment that the people at Satsat knew about our trysts in the manager’s office), I realized that my fiancée had come to see my nameless malady as some variety of nonspecific premarital panic, some form of melancholia for which medicine as yet had neither diagnosis nor cure. She accepted this affliction with a solemnity that made me admire her all the more, and because she secretly blamed herself for having failed to pull me out of it, she treated me very well. And I treated her as well in return, taking her to restaurants we’d never visited before, and introducing her to the new friends I managed to make. We continued to attend parties, and to visit the Bosphorus restaurants and clubs where the Istanbul bourgeoisie gathered in the summer of 1975 to display their wealth and happiness. Though I joined her merriment at watching the pleased Nurcihan torn between Mehmet and Zaim, I laughed knowingly. Happiness no longer seemed God’s gift to me from birth; no longer was it the right I could claim without effort; it had become a state of grace that only the luckiest, brightest, and most cautious people could attain, and with the most assiduous cultivation. One night, at the newly opened Mehtap, where bodyguards milled about the entrance, I was standing alone at the bar next to the pier extending over the Bosphorus drinking Gazel red wine (Sibel and the others were chatting cheerfully at our table) when I came eye to eye with Turgay Bey, and my heart began to race as fast as if I’d seen Füsun herself, and the tide of jealousy rushed in.
29 By Now There Was Hardly a Moment When I Wasn’t Thinking About Her
WHEN TURGAY Bey chose not to give me his customary bland, affable smile, turning his head instead, this wounded me more than I could have anticipated. Reason told me that he had every right to take offense at my not having invited him to the engagement party, but reason was no match for the paranoid hypothesis-that Füsun might have gone back to him to take revenge on me. I was seized by the urge to run after him and inquire the cause for this snub. Perhaps that very afternoon he had made love with Füsun in his garçonnière in Şişli. It would have sent me over the edge if he had so much as seen her, spoken to her. Though my humiliation was mitigated by the knowledge that he had been in love with Füsun before me, and once suffered an agony like mine, for the same reason I had never felt more loathing toward him than now. I knocked back quite a few drinks at the bar. Later on I wrapped my arms around the ever patient and compassionate Sibel, swaying with her as Pepino di Capri sang “Melancholy.”
Drinking was my sole defense, albeit temporary, against jealousy. When I woke up the next morning with a headache and my envy refreshed, I realized, with growing panic, that the pain was not abating, and that I felt more helpless than ever. As I walked to Satsat (Inge still smiling saucily at me from the Meltem poster on the side of the apartment), and later that morning, as I tried to bury my thoughts in paperwork, I was forced to acknowledge that the pain was gradually increasing, and that, far from forgetting Füsun as time wore on, I was thinking about her ever more obsessively.
Time had not faded my memories (as I had prayed to God it might), nor had it healed my wounds as it is said always to do. I began each day with the hope that the next day would be better, my recollections a little less pointed, but I would awake to the same pain, as if a black lamp were burning eternally inside me, radiating darkness. How I longed to think about her just a little less, and to believe that I would, in time, forget her! There was hardly a moment when I wasn’t thinking about her; in truth, with few exceptions, there was not a single moment. These “happy” interludes of oblivion were fleeting-a second or two-but then the black lamp would be relit, its baleful darkness filling my stomach, my nostrils, my lungs, until I could barely breathe, until merely to live became an ordeal.
As much as I would long for an escape from this suffering, I longed for someone to confide in, to find Füsun and talk to her, but when that longing went unfulfilled I would yearn to pick a fight with someone, anyone to whom I could attribute this damning, furious resentment. For all my willed self-restraint, to see Kenan at the office was to slip into temporary insanity. Though I had decided that there was nothing between them, I could not forget Kenan’s flirtatious attentions at the engagement party, which Füsun might well have enjoyed, and this was reason enough to hate him. By noon I would be concocting pretexts for his termination. Oh, he was a sly one, wasn’t he? Lunchtime brought the relative calm of knowing that I would go to the Merhamet Apartments, to wait for Füsun-even a tiny hope sustained me, even when the fear that she would not come was fulfilled. But I understood with fear that when she did not come, the pain of waiting brought to its excruciating climax, the prospect of the next day held out nothing but the same vain hope of the last.