“What sort of evil intentions?”
I didn’t want to continue this conversation; I went back to the table.
I could easily imagine a skilled director like Muzaffer Bey using Füsun as the main attraction in a commercial melodrama and making her famous from Edirne to Diyarbakır. With her beauty and kindness, she was sure to enchant audiences-the truants, the unemployed, the daydreaming housewives, and the sex-starved single men-who packed into the airless cinemas that stank of the coal stoves heating them. It was not long before it occurred to me that if her dream came true and she became a star, she would take to abusing not just me but Feridun, too, possibly even leaving us both. I couldn’t bear to imagine her as the sort of woman who would ruthlessly manipulate magazine writers in pursuit of fame and fortune. But in the looks of the Pelür crowd, I saw a lot of people who would do anything to part “us”-and I use that word because it was the first to enter my mind. If Füsun became a famous film star, it would only magnify my love for her, and with it my fear of losing her.
Füsun’s cross looks persisted to the end of the meal, and knowing my lovely was thinking not about me or even her husband, I became anxious, then frantic. I had long since calculated that if Füsun were to run off with some director or famous actor she met at one of these bars, abandoning me and her husband, my pain would be astronomically greater than anything I’d suffered in the summer of 1975.
How much did Feridun understand the danger besetting us both? He must have been at least vaguely aware of the commercial producers plotting to carry her off to a distant, depraved world, the hazards of which I was at pains to remind him-in veiled language-while hinting that the art film would cease to have meaning for me were Füsun to degrade herself by playing in some dreadful melodrama. Back at home, drinking raki alone, in my father’s chair, I would wonder anxiously whether I had revealed too much.
At the beginning of May, as outdoor weather and the filming season approached, Hayal Hayati came to Lemon Films to tell us that a semi-famous young actress lay in the hospital following a beating at the hands of her lover, and that this unfortunate development also proposed a wonderful opportunity for a beautiful and cultivated girl like Füsun, but Feridun, now well aware of my misgivings, courteously declined the offer, and I don’t think he ever even mentioned it to Füsun.
60 Evenings on the Bosphorus, at the Huzur Restaurant
SOMETIMES THE things we were obliged to do to keep Füsun away from the wolves and jackals besieging her on our every visit to the Pelür were less a source of distress than of mirth and even of moral uplift. When, for instance, we had heard that the White Carnation, the gossip columnist readers will remember from my engagement party at the Hilton, planned to write a piece about Füsun, in the “a star is born” genre, we concocted copious evidence of what a cad he was, and so she conspired with us to avoid him like a leper. When a journalist and self-described poet sat down at our table to inscribe a poem that had welled up from his innermost parts, and sweetly dedicated the inspiration to Füsun, I managed to ensure the timeless ode would not outlive that moment or have a single other reader by furtively instructing the elderly waiter Tayyar to toss it in the trash. Later, when Feridun, Füsun, and I would find ourselves alone after such episodes, we would merrily compare notes, and, although each of us withheld details according to his or her purposes, we would laugh in genuine complicity.
After a few drinks, most of the film people and journalists and artists who frequented bars and taverns like the Pelür were given to weepy self-pity, but after only two drinks Füsun would become as cheerful as a child, as chirpy as a flighty girl, and on our visits to summer cinemas and Bosphorus restaurants, I sometimes imagined that the reason for her happiness was that the three of us were together. Having long tired of all the gossip and wisecracks at the Pelür, I now seldom went there, and when I did it was to spy on those surrounding Füsun, and if possible, before the evening’s end, to extract Füsun and Feridun from the bar to drive with Çetin on a dinner excursion to the Bosphorus. Füsun would sulk over leaving the Pelür early, but once in the car she’d have such a good time chatting with Çetin and the rest of us that I’d decide, just as I had in the summer of 1976, that going out to eat together more often would do us all good. But first I had to persuade Feridun. It was out of the question for Füsun and me to go gallivanting to any restaurant on our own, like lovers. As Feridun resisted being dragged away from his film friends, I enlisted Aunt Nesibe to join the party and prevail on Füsun and her husband to come eat fish at Urcan in Sariyer.
In the summer of 1977 we cajoled Tarık Bey into joining us as well, and as he warmed to the idea, the entire team of television-watching Keskins would head out to eat on the Bosphorus, with Çetin at the wheel. I would like every visitor to our museum to find these outings as pleasant as I did, so I shall go into some detail here. After all, isn’t the purpose of the novel, or of a museum, for that matter, to relate our memories with such sincerity as to transform individual happiness into a happiness all can share? That summer these excursions to the meyhanes of the Bosphorus fast became a custom we all relished. In the years that followed, whether it was winter or summer, we would, at least once a month, get into the car, as excited as wedding guests, and go off to a restaurant or one of the large, famous gazinos, to listen to the melodies and aged crooners that Tarık Bey enjoyed so much. There were, of course, intervals when we’d fail to relish our pleasures-moments of tension or confusion between me and Füsun, anxiety that our film work would never begin-and these joyless spells would last for months until unexpectedly we would be driving around in the car together, and we would notice how delighted we actually were to be together, how close we had become and how much we loved each other.
In those days, the most popular place along the Bosphorus was Tarabya, with its line of crowded restaurants spilling across the sidewalks, and the tombala men wandering among the tables, along with the mussel vendors, the fresh almond vendors, the photographers who took your picture and brought back the developed shots within the hour, the ice cream men, the bands of musicians playing Ottoman music and the traditional singers who performed in most of the restaurants. (Back then you wouldn’t see a single tourist.) I remember how Aunt Nesibe laughed admiringly at the speed and daring of the waiters as they darted across the narrow road that divided the restaurants from the tables, weaving their way through the traffic with their heavy trays laden with food.
On our first excursion together we went to a relatively modest restaurant called Huzur (peace), which happened to have a free table, and which Tarık Bey had instantly taken to, because of its proximity to the flashy Mücevher Gazino next door, which meant that one could sit in the restaurant and hear the old Turkish songs being sung “from a distance and for free.” The next time, when I proposed that we could better hear the singers if we were actually sitting in the Mücevher itself, Tarık Bey said, “Oh no, Kemal Bey! Why pay to hear that awful band, and that woman who sounds like a crow?” but for the rest of the meal, he gave all his attention, sometimes joyful and sometimes angry, to the music blaring from the gazino. He would correct the “tuneless, tone-deaf” singers in a loud voice, and finish their lines before they could, just to prove he knew the lyrics, and after the third glass of rakı he would close his eyes and his head would sway to the music with deep spiritual rapture.
On our Bosphorus excursions from the house in Çukurcuma, to some extent we threw off the roles we played indoors, and that made me relish our trips. Füsun would sit right next to me in the car and at the restaurant, as she never did at the house. And as we sat surrounded by tables, no one noticed if my arm pressed up against her, and as her father listened to the music with his eyes shut and her mother watched the shimmering lights of the Bosphorus in the vaporous darkness, we would whisper to each other over the din, chatting about it didn’t matter what-the food, the beauty of the evening, how endearing her father was-as tentatively as two bashful young people who had just met and only recently discovered how a boy might flirt with a girl, or form a relationship with her, as they did in Europe. Füsun was otherwise liberated, too; while ordinarily averse to smoking in front of her father, in Bosphorus restaurants she would puff away on her cigarettes like some formidable European career woman. I remember once, having decided to try our luck, we bought a ticket from a rascally tombala man in dark glasses, and when we didn’t win a prize, we glanced at each other and both said, “Unlucky at cards…,” inducing in both of us a terrible embarrassment and then elation.