“What do you mean?”
“Well, every evening they’re out at the gazinos,” Zaim said carefully. “But they never go anywhere to be alone and make love.”
“How do you know that?”
“Where could they possibly go? Mehmet still lives with his parents.”
“He used to have a place where he took women, in the backstreets of Maçka.”
“He had me over there, for a whiskey,” said Zaim. “It’s a typical garçonnière. Nurcihan is too clever to go near that hideous place; she knows that if she did Mehmet would immediately see it as reason not to marry her. Even I felt strange there: The neighbors were peering through the peephole, to see if this guy had brought back another prostitute.”
“So what should Mehmet do? Do you think it’s easy for a single man to rent an apartment in this city?”
“They could go to the Hilton,” said Zaim. “Or he could buy himself an apartment in a decent neighborhood.”
“Mehmet loves living with his family.”
“You do, too,” said Zaim. “May I say something to you as a friend? But promise me you won’t get angry.”
“I won’t get angry.”
“Instead of meeting secretly at the office, as if you were doing something wrong, you should have taken Sibel to the Merhamet Apartments, where you took Füsun; then you two would still be together.”
“Did Sibel say that?”
“No, my friend. Sibel doesn’t talk about such things with just anyone,” said Zaim. “Don’t worry.”
For a time we were silent. We’d been having so much fun gossiping, but then suddenly it upset me to have my life discussed as if I’d suffered some sort of catastrophe. Zaim noticed that my spirits had fallen, so he told me about how he’d run into Mehmet, Nurcihan, Tayfun, and Faruk the Mouse all sitting together at a soup shop in Beyoğlu late one night.
Zaim may have been recounting this in the hope of luring me back into my old life, but he also enjoyed reporting all the fun he was having; I listened to him go on in detail, often exaggerating, but I didn’t pay it much mind until later in the evening, when I was at the Keskins’ and I caught myself reflecting fondly on such outings. But let no one imagine that I was grieving my lost friends or my days of prowling the city. It was just that sometimes at the Keskins’ dinner table it would suddenly seem to me that nothing was happening in the world, or if something was happening we were far away-that’s all.
On the night we ushered in 1977 I must have succumbed to such a feeling, because I remember a point when I wondered what Zaim, Sibel, Mehmet, Tayfun, Faruk the Mouse, and all the rest were doing. (Zaim had installed electric heaters in his summer house and had dispatched the caretaker to light a fire for a big party to which he had invited “everyone.”)
“Look, Kemal, twenty-seven’s come up, and you have one on your card!” said Füsun. When she saw I wasn’t paying attention, she put a dried bean on the 27 on my tombala card, and smiled. “Stop messing around and play the game!” she said, for a moment looking into my eyes with concern, anxiety, and even tenderness.
It was for just this sort of attention from Füsun that I was going to the Keskin house. I felt an extraordinary happiness, but it hadn’t been easy to achieve. Not wanting to upset my mother and my brother, I hid my plans for spending New Year’s Eve at the Keskins’ by eating supper at home with them. Afterward Osman’s sons-my nephews-had cried, “Come on, Grandmother, let’s play tombala!” so I was obliged to play a round with them. While we were all playing, I came eye to eye with Berrin, and perhaps she, too, was struck by the pretense of this happy family tableau, because I remember that she raised her eyebrows, as if to say, “Nothing wrong, I hope?”
“Nothing,” I whispered. “We’re having fun, can’t you see?”
Later, rushing toward the door on the pretext of going to Zaim’s party, I caught another look from Berrin, who was not fooled. But I didn’t respond.
As Çetin rushed me over to the Keskin house, I was anxious but happy. The first thing I did after running up the stairs and entering-and, of course, savoring the joy of meeting Füsun’s eyes-was to take out from the plastic bag some of the presents my mother had prepared for the tombala winners at our house, and to set them out at the end of the table, crying, “For the tombala winners!” Aunt Nesibe, too, had prepared her own little presents for tombala, just as my mother had done every New Year’s since I was a child, and we mingled her presents with my mother’s. The fun we had playing tombala that night would be repeated every New Year’s for the next eight years, and Aunt Nesibe’s presents would be thrown together with the ones I had brought with me.
Here I display the tombala set that we used for eight consecutive New Years at Füsun’s house. For forty years, from the late 1950s to the late 1990s, my mother used a similar set to amuse first my brother, my cousins and me, and later, her grandchildren. When the New Year’s Eve party had come to an end, the game was over, the presents distributed, and the children and the neighbors had begun to yawn and doze off, Aunt Nesibe, like my mother, would carefully gather up the pieces, fill the velvet pouch bag, and count the numbered wooden tiles (there were ninety in all). After also making a deck of all the numbered cards, and tying it with a ribbon, she would collect the dried beans we’d used to mark the numbers and put them into a plastic bag for the next New Year’s Eve.
Now, all these years later, as I undertake to explain my love as sincerely as I can, explicating each object in turn, it seems to me that tombala captures the strange and mysterious spirit of those days. Invented in Naples, and still played by Italian families at Christmas, the game passed, like so many other New Year’s rituals and customs, from the Italian and Levantine families of Istanbul into the general population after Atatürk’s calendar reform, in no time becoming a New Year’s ritual.
Every year Aunt Nesibe would include among her presents a child’s handkerchief. Was this to remind us of the old wisdom that “To play tombala on New Year’s makes children happy, and so grown-ups should be mindful of being as happy as children on that evening”? When I was a child and an elderly guest won a present intended for a child, they would say without fail, “Oh, this is just the sort of handkerchief I needed!” My father and his friends would then wink at one another, suggesting there was a second meaning beyond our childish reach. Seeing them do this I would feel as if the grown-ups were not taking the game seriously with their sarcasm. In 1982, on a rainy New Year’s Eve, when I managed to complete the top line of my tombala card first and cry “Chinko!” like a child, Aunt Nesibe said, “Congratulations, Kemal Bey,” and handed me this handkerchief. And, yes, I said, “This is just the sort of handkerchief I needed!”
“It’s one of Füsun’s childhood handkerchiefs,” said Aunt Nesibe, perfectly earnest.
My mother would include a few pairs of children’s socks among the presents, as if to imply no lavish indulgence, only the furnishing of a few household essentials. Making the presents feel less like presents did allow us to see our socks, our handkerchiefs, the mortar we used for pounding walnuts in the kitchen, or a cheap comb from Alaaddin’s as objects of greater value, if only for a short time. Over at the Keskin household, everyone, even the children, would rejoice not on account of winning socks, but because they had won the game. Now, years later, it seems to me that this was so because none of the Keskins’ possessions belonged strictly to a particular family member, but, like this sock, to the entire household and the whole family, while I had always imagined a room upstairs that Füsun shared with her husband, and in it a wardrobe, with her own belongings; I had many tormented dreams about this room and her clothes and the other things in it.
It was on New Year’s Eve 1980 that I brought a surprise tombala present-a memento of my grandfather, Ethem Kemaclass="underline" the antique glass from which Füsun and I had drunk whiskey at our last rendezvous, on the day of my engagement. Beginning in 1979 the Keskins had detected my habit of pocketing various belongings of theirs and replacing them with more valuable and expensive things, but like my love for Füsun, it was never discussed; so there was nothing remotely strange to them about a fancy glass such as one saw in Rafi Portakal’s antique shop turning up among the pencils, socks, and bars of soap. What broke my heart was that when Tarık Bey won, and Aunt Nesibe produced the presents, Füsun did not even begin to recognize it as the crystal glass from the saddest day of our affair.