Every time Tarık Bey used it as his raki glass over the three and a half years that followed, I would want to recall the happiness of the last time Füsun and I had made love, but like a child conditioned by some taboo to drive a certain thought from mind, I could not entertain this memory properly while sitting at the table with Tarık Bey.
The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also in the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory-of this there is no doubt. At some other time I would have had no interest in the bars of Edirne soap in this basket, and might even have found them tawdry, but having served as tombala presents on New Year’s Eve, these soaps formed in the shape of apricots, quinces, grapes, and strawberries remind me of the slow and humble rhythm of the routines that ruled our lives. It is my devout, and uncalculating, belief that such sentiments belong not just to me, and that, seeing these objects, visitors to my museum many years later will know them, too.
With the same conviction, I display here a number of New Year’s lottery tickets from the period. Like my mother, Aunt Nesibe would buy a ticket for the grand drawing on December 31, to serve as one of the tombala presents. To whomever won the ticket, the others at the Keskin table, as at our home, would say almost in unison: “Oh, look at that, you’re lucky tonight… You’re sure to win the ticket for the grand drawing, too.”
By some strange coincidence, Füsun won the lottery ticket every year between 1977 and 1984. But when the winning ticket was announced on the radio and television a short while later, by an equally strange coincidence, she never won a prize, not even a refund.
At our house as at the Keskin table, the old saw about poker, love, and life was oft repeated, especially when Tarık Bey was playing cards with guests.
“Unlucky at cards, lucky at love.”
Everybody said it compulsively, and so in 1981, on New Year’s Eve, after we had watched the live broadcast of the grand drawing, supervised by the First Notary Public of Ankara, after it was clear that Füsun had won nothing, I drunkenly, thoughtlessly, uttered it too.
“Seeing as you’ve lost the lottery, Miss Füsun,” I said, imitating the English gentleman hero we watched on television, “you are bound to be a winner at love!”
“I have no doubt about that, Kemal Bey!” said Füsun, without missing a beat, just like the clever, elegant heroines of the same films.
Conservative newspapers like Milli Gazete, Tercüman, and Hergün were forever fulminating against New Year’s Eve, which, thanks to tombala, the National Lottery, all this card playing, and the ubiquitous promotions for restaurants and nightclubs, was slowly turning into an orgy of drinking and gambling. When some rich Muslim families in Şişli and Nişantaşı began buying pine trees to decorate and display in windows the way Christians did in films, I remember that even my mother felt uneasy, but because these were people she knew, she refrained from calling them “degenerates” or “infidels” as the religious press would, dismissing them rather as “harebrained.”
In the run-up to New Year’s there would be thousands of vendors selling tickets for the National Lottery in the streets of Istanbul, and some would go dressed as Santa Claus into the wealthy neighborhoods. One evening in December 1980, when I was choosing what tombala presents to take to Füsun’s house, I saw a small mixed group of lycée students deriding one such Santa Claus, pulling his beard of cotton wool and laughing. When I drew closer I saw that this man was the janitor of the apartment house across the street; as the teenagers tugged at his cotton wool mustache, Haydar Efendi stood there silently, holding his tickets, his eyes downcast. A few years later the conservatives’ anger at the drinking and gambling during the celebration overflowed when Islamists set off a bomb in the Marmara Hotel on Taksim Square, in the patisserie that had been decorated for New Year’s with an enormous pine tree. At the Keskin dinner table, I recall, the bombing was, of course, an urgent topic, but it was nothing compared to what happened to the belly dancer who was expected to appear on a New Year’s Eve telecast. When Sertap, the most famous belly dancer of the day, appeared on television in 1981 despite the angry diatribes in the conservative press, we were dumbfounded, along with almost everyone else in the country. The TRT management had draped the beautiful and curvaceous Sertap in so many layers that not only were her “world-famous” belly and breasts covered, but even her legs.
“They might as well have veiled her, the disgraceful buffoons!” said Tarık Bey. Actually he hardly ever got angry at the television, and no matter how much he’d had to drink, he never shouted at the screen the way the rest of us did when sufficiently annoyed.
For some years, I’d been buying a Saath Maarif Takvimi, the calendar indicating the prayer times, from Alaaddin’s shop to take to Aunt Nesibe’s as a tombala present. On New Year’s Eve, 1981, it was Füsun who won it, and at my insistence she tacked it on the wall between the television and the kitchen, but no one would pay attention to the pages on days when I wasn’t there, despite there being a poem of the day, a daily note about the historical events whose anniversary it was, and a picture of a clock face, so that those who could not read and write might know the prayer times, as well as recommended recipes, historical anecdotes, and a bit of wisdom.
“Aunt Nesibe, you’ve forgotten to pull the page off the calendar again,” I would say at the end of the evening, when the soldiers would be saluting the flag as they goose-stepped across the screen, and we would have polished off a lot of raki.
“Another day is over,” Tarık Bey would say. “Thank God we are not hungry or without shelter, that our stomachs are full, that we are sitting in a warm house-what more could a person want in life?”
For some reason it lifted my heart to hear Tarık Bey say these homely words as the evening wound down, and so-even though I’d noticed on my arrival that they’d forgotten to pull the page off the calendar-I would omit to mention it until the moment I was about to leave, when I was ready to hear this thanksgiving.
“The most important thing is that we’re here all together, with our loved ones,” Aunt Nesibe would add. As she said this, she would lean over to kiss Füsun, and if Füsun was not at her side, she would call out, “Come here, my little storm cloud, so that I can give you a kiss.”
Sometimes Füsun would assume a little girl’s expression and sit on her mother’s lap, allowing Aunt Nesibe to spend a long time caressing her, kissing her arms, her neck, her cheeks. No matter how mother and daughter were getting along, they kept up this ritual through the eight years. As they laughed and kissed and hugged, Füsun knew full well that I was watching her, but she never looked back at me directly.
There were times, too, when, after Aunt Nesibe pronounced her wisdom about “loved ones,” Füsun would not go to her mother’s lap, but instead would take a neighbor’s child, a fast-growing boy called Ali, onto her lap, and after caressing him and showering him with kisses, she would say, “Time for you to go home now, or else your parents will get angry at us for keeping you.” Finally, there were the occasions when Füsun was in a bad mood, because she and her mother had argued that morning, and at Aunt Nesibe’s plea, “Come over here, my girl,” she would say, “Oh, Mother, please!” leaving Aunt Nesibe to say, “Then at least pull the page off the calendar, so we don’t get our days confused.”
This would leave Füsun all smiles suddenly, and after getting up to pull the page off the Saath Maarif Takvimi, she would read out the day’s poem and the recipe in a loud semitheatrical voice and laugh. Aunt Nesibe would comment, “Oh, what a good idea, let’s make quince and raisin compote, it’s been ages,” or, “Yes, they’re suggesting artichokes, but you can’t pick artichokes when they’re still small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.” Sometimes she would ask a question that unsettled me: “If I made a spinach pastry, would you eat it?”