“Your friend must have jumped into a car and followed us,” I said.
“Tahir Tan is not my friend,” said Feridun.
“Isn’t he the man who asked to come with us as we were leaving the Pelür?”
“Yes, but he’s not my friend. He poses for Turkish photoromans, and he plays in blood-and-thunder films. I don’t like him.”
“Why has he followed us?”
For a moment no one spoke. Füsun, sitting next to Feridun, had heard what we’d said and was growing uneasy. Tarık Bey was lost to the music, but Aunt Nesibe had been listening to us, too. Just then I guessed from Feridun’s and Füsun’s expressions that the man was approaching us, so I turned around.
“Do excuse me, Kemal Bey,” Tahir Tan said to me. “I did not mean to disturb you. I wish to speak to Füsun’s mother and father.”
He assumed the demeanor of a handsome, well-mannered youth who has seen a girl he likes at an officer’s wedding, and who has come to ask her parents for permission before inviting her to dance, following the advice given in newspaper etiquette columns.
“Excuse me, sir, there is something I want to discuss with you,” he said as he approached Tarık Bey. “There’s a film that Füsun…”
“Tarık, look, the man is trying to tell you something,” said Aunt Nesibe.
“I’m addressing you, too, madam. You’re Füsun’s mother, are you not? And you, sir, are her father. Do you know about this? Sir, there are two important producers, Muzaffer Bey and Hayal Hayati-both prominent figures in the Turkish film industry-who have offered your daughter important roles. But we have been given to understand that you would not give your consent because the films included kissing scenes.”
“It’s nothing like that,” Feridun said coldly.
As always in Tarabya, the noise level was very high. Tarık Bey had either not heard, or else-like so many Turkish fathers who find themselves in this situation-acted as if he hadn’t.
“Nothing like what?” Tahir Tan said, his voice rough now.
It was clear to all of us that he’d had a lot to drink and was spoiling for a fight.
“Tahir Bey,” Feridun said carefully, “we’re out for a family dinner this evening, and we have no desire to discuss film business.”
“But I do… Füsun Hanım, why are you so afraid? Can’t you just say you want a role in this film?”
Füsun looked away. She was smoking calmly and taking her time. I stood up. Feridun did likewise. We both stepped into the space between the man and the table. At the tables surrounding ours, heads began to turn in our direction. We must have assumed the fighting cock stance that Turkish men assume before a fight. No one wanted to miss the drama; all around us, curious, bored drunks settled in for a good show. Tahir’s friend rose from their table to approach us.
An elderly waiter who’d seen many years of bar brawls intervened. “Come on now, gentlemen, let’s not all crowd in here. Please move back.” He added, “We’ve all had a lot to drink, and tempers will flare. Kemal Bey, we’re bringing out your fried mussels and salted fish.”
Lest they misunderstand, let me inform visitors who come to our museum centuries hence-those happy generations of the future-that in those days Turkish men seized even the tiniest excuse to come to blows wheresoever they found themselves-be it a coffeehouse, a hospital queue, a traffic jam, or a football match, and that huge dishonor attached even to the appearance of shrinking away from a confrontation. Avoiding a fight or cowering was regarded as dishonor without degree.
Tahir’s friend came from behind and put his hand on Tahir’s shoulder; he took him away, making as if he wanted them to “be the ones who kept their dignity.” And Feridun took me by the shoulder, as if to say, “What’s the use, anyway?” and he sat me down. I was very grateful to him for doing this.
As the north wind blew, and a ship’s searchlight swept through the night, lighting up the choppy waves, Füsun carried on smoking, as if nothing had happened. I looked into her eyes for the longest time, and not once did she look away. There was something challenging, almost haughty, about the way she looked at me; I was suddenly aware that the change she had undergone over the past two years was far bigger and more dangerous than this little trouble we’d had with some drunken actor-and so were her expectations.
Tarık Bey added his voice to the song floating over from the Mücevher Gazino, slowly swaying his head and his raki glass as he intoned Selahattin Pınar’s “Why Did I Ever Love That Cruel Woman.” We all joined in, knowing that to share the sorrow of the song would do us all some good. Much later, around midnight, while driving home, singing all together in the car, singing still, it seemed as if we’d utterly forgotten the unpleasant incident.
61 To Look
BUT I had not forgotten Füsun’s treachery. It was clear that having noticed her at the Pelür, Tahir Tan was besotted with her and had persuaded Hayal Hayati and Muzaffer Bey to offer her film roles. Or, even likelier, having noticed Tahir Tan’s interest in Füsun, Hayal Hayati and Muzaffer Bey had offered her roles. After Tahir Tan had backed off, Füsun, acting like a cat that had just tipped over a bowl of milk, confessed that she had, at the very least, encouraged them.
After that night at the Huzur Restaurant in Tarabya in the summer of 1977, Füsun was banned from all the film world’s Beyoğlu haunts, and most particularly the Pelür; and her resentment of this regime, whether imposed by her husband, her father, or both, precipitated a sullen fury when I next visited.
Afterward, at the Lemon Films offices, Feridun clarified that Aunt Nesibe and Tarık Bey both had been frightened by the episode. And so not only was the Pelür off limits; for a time they’d even restricted her contacts with her neighborhood friends. She could not go out without asking her mother’s permission, as if still unmarried. Feridun tried to soften Füsun’s anger over this draconian but short-lived imprisonment by promising that he, too, would stay away from the Pelür. But it was clear to us that getting the art film under way was our only hope of restoring her spirits.
The film, however, was still in no fit state to pass the board of censors, and neither did it seem to me that Feridun could remedy the situation any time soon. In the back room, where she had now begun a painting of a seagull, Füsun revealed to me that she was perfectly and painfully aware of this fact, and I was sad for her, and yet the spectacle of her willfulness moved me to ask only rarely how her painting was going. It was only if I happened to spy her in a good mood, and thus felt certain our conversation would be of painting seagulls, that I followed her into the back.
Most of the time I would arrive to find a listless Füsun and sit down to feel her angry eyes on me. Sometimes she seemed convinced of being able to communicate in eloquent detail through looks alone, and she would fix me in a very particular way that I could only begin to decipher. Even if we’d spent four or five minutes in the back room, gazing at the painting, most of the evening would be devoted to those looks, and my efforts to make sense of them, to figure out what she thought of me, her life, and her feelings. I had once been quite disdainful of such games, but now I had given myself over to the subtleties of nonverbal communication, and before long, had become a very skilled practitioner.
As a young man, out with my friends at the cinema or sitting with them at a restaurant, in springtime on the top deck of a ferry, headed for the islands, I remember whenever one of us said, “Hey, look, those girls over there are staring at us,” while the others became eager I was suspiciously indifferent, knowing that, in fact, girls only rarely dared to glance at men in crowded places, and if they happened to come eye to eye with a man, they would look away immediately, as one might avert one’s eyes from the sun, never to cast their eyes again in that direction. During those first months after I’d begun to visit the Keskin household at suppertime, if we were all sitting at the table watching television and at some unexpected moment our eyes met, it was that very sort of aborted look Füsun gave me. It was, I thought, the way a Turkish girl might encounter a stranger in the street, and I didn’t like it. Later I began to see this as Füsun’s effort to provoke me, but at the time I was still new to the art of exchanging glances.