“A film about life and agony,” said my beauty, as her face clouded, “should be sincere.”
When one of the children squirting soda at one another came hurtling toward her, I took Füsun by the waist and pulled her toward me. A bit of the soda had splashed on her.
“You sons of donkeys!” said one old man as he slapped one of them on the neck. He looked to us for approval, and his eyes fell on my hand, still on Füsun’s waist.
How close we were to each other in that cinema garden, not just physically but spiritually! Füsun, fearful of the way I was looking at her, backed away, walking through the crowd of brats to reach for the soda bottles sitting arranged in the laundry basin; she had already broken my heart.
“Let’s buy one for Çetin Efendi, too,” said Füsun. She had two bottles opened.
I paid for the sodas and then I took one over to Çetin Efendi, who would never join us in the “family section” when we went to films, but sat alone in the section for single men.
“You shouldn’t have, Kemal Bey,” he said with a smile.
When I turned around I saw a child staring in awe as Füsun drank straight from her soda bottle. The child was bold enough to approach us.
“Are you an actress, sister?”
“No.”
Because the fashion has now passed, let me remind my readers that in those days this question was a way of telling girls they were pretty, and served as a popular pickup line for playboys wishing to approach well-groomed girls in outfits slightly more revealing than the norm, and who were not exactly upper-class. But this child, who looked to be about ten years old, had no such motives. He insisted: “But I’ve seen you in a film.”
“Which one?” asked Füsun.
“Autumn Butterflies, and you were wearing the same dress, you know…”
“What part was I playing?” Füsun asked, smiling with pleasure at this child’s fantasy.
But the child, now realizing his mistake, fell silent.
“Let me ask my husband now,” she said to spare the little boy’s feelings. “He knows all these films.”
You will have understood that when Füsun said “husband,” and looked across the chairs to pick him out in the crowd, and the child realized I was not the man in question, I felt wounded. But spurred on by the joy of being so close to her, drinking soda with her, I said this: “The child must have sensed that we’ll be making a film soon that will make you a star.”
“So you’re saying that you really are going to shell out the money to make this film? Please don’t take offense, Cousin Kemal, but Feridun is too embarrassed even to bring up the subject, but let me tell you, we’re sick and tired of waiting.”
“Is that so?” I said. I was dumbstruck.
53 An Indignant and Broken Heart Is of No Use to Anyone
I DID not say another word all night. Because so many languages describe the condition I was in as “heartbreak,” let the broken porcelain heart I display here suffice to convey my plight at that moment to all who visit my museum. The pain of love no longer manifested itself as panic, hopelessness, or anger, as it had done the previous summer. By now it had become a more viscous substance that coursed through my veins. Because I had been seeing Füsun every other day if not every day, the heartache of absence had lessened, and I had developed new habits to cope with the new milder pain of her presence; after a summer of careful practice these habits had become second nature, making me a new man. I no longer spent my days battling with my pain; instead I could suppress it, veil it, or act as if there were nothing wrong with me.
The new pain, the pain of presence, was in fact the pain of humiliation. It seemed that Füsun did take care to spare me pain of that kind, shying away from subjects and situations that might wound my pride. But in the face of those crude last words of hers, I finally realized that to pretend nothing was amiss was no longer possible.
I had tried at first pretending not to hear them reverberating in my mind: “shell out the money… We’re sick and tired of waiting.” But my feeble mumbled rejoinder (“Is that so?”) was proof that I had heard her. I could not, therefore, act as if no offense had been taken; and, anyway, who could have missed my grim expression, which spoke of spirits plummeting and utter humiliation. Her insult ringing in my head, I went back to my chair and sat down, still clutching my soda bottle. It was hard for me to move. The worst part was not even those cutting words, but Füsun’s evident awareness of my humiliation and the upset it caused me.
I forced myself to think of something else, ordinary matters. I remember asking the same question I would ask myself in my youth whenever I thought I would explode from boredom, surrendering to metaphysical musing, as in: “What am I thinking now? Am I thinking that I’m thinking?” After repeating this sentence silently many times over, I turned to Füsun in a decisive way and said, “They want us to return the empties,” and, taking the empty bottle from her hand, I stood up and walked away. In my other hand was my own bottle. There was still some soda in it. No one was looking, so I poured my soda into Füsun’s bottle, handing mine, now empty, back to the boys selling the sodas. So I was able to return to my seat with Füsun’s bottle, which I display here.
Füsun was talking to her husband; they didn’t notice me. I cannot recall a single thing about the film we watched next. This is because the bottle that had touched Füsun’s lips only a few moments earlier was now in my trembling hands. I had no interest in anything else. I wanted to return to my own world, to my own things. This bottle would remain for many years on the bedside table at the Merhamet Apartments, meticulously preserved. Visitors will recognize it by its shape as a bottle of Meltem soda, the soda launched at the time our story begins, and now available throughout the country, but the soda inside was not Zaim’s highly praised recipe. For already very poor imitations of our first great national soda brand were turning up everywhere. There were little local pirate soda plants operating underground that would collect empty Meltem bottles, fill them with the cheap counterfeit, and distribute them to unsuspecting or indifferent vendors. When he noticed me with the bottle against my lips as we drove back in the car, Feridun, quite unaware of my conversation with his wife, said, “This Meltem soda is great stuff, isn’t it, brother?” I told him that the soda wasn’t “genuine” Meltem, from which he deduced the scheme and felt compelled to comment: “In the backstreets of Bakırköy there’s a secret propane-filling depot. They fill Aygaz canisters with cheap cooking gas. We bought it, too, once. Brother Kemal, please believe me when I tell you-the fake burned better than the real thing.”
I brushed the bottle against my lips with care. “This one tastes better, too,” I said.
As the car rumbled over the silent backstreets, passing through pools of pale lamplight and shuddering gently over the cobblestones, the shadows of trees and leaves flickered on the windshield as they do in dreams. Sitting in the front next to Çetin the chauffeur as always, I could feel my heart swelling painfully, so I did not turn around to look at them, even when the usual talk about the films began. Çetin Efendi was not inclined to join these conversations we had on the way home, and it was perhaps because the silence was making even him uncomfortable that he ventured to observe how certain parts of the film were not credible. An Istanbul chauffeur would never scold the young lady he worked for, not even politely, as in the film, he insisted.
“But he’s not really a chauffeur,” said Feridun the son-in-law. “He’s the famous actor Ayhan Işık.”
“You’re right, sir,” said Çetin. “And that’s why I liked it. In a way, it was educational… As entertaining as the films we’ve seen this summer have been, I love them more for offering lessons about life.”
Füsun was silent, as was I. When I heard Çetin Efendi say “this summer,” my pain grew sharper. For his words reminded me that these lovely summer nights were drawing to a close: No longer would we be coming to these cinema gardens to see films; the joy I’d known sitting beside Füsun under the stars would soon be a memory, and I was ready to talk about anything that might have popped into my head, just to hide my distress from her, but my lips remained pressed so tightly shut one couldn’t have pried them open with a knife. I was sinking into a bitterness that would, I suspected, last a very long time.