Orhan Pamuk - The Museum Of Innocence

Could I be in love with her? The profound happiness I felt made me anxious. I was confused, my soul teetering between the danger of taking this joy too seriously and the crassness of taking it too lightly. That evening Osman came over with his wife, Berrin, and their children to my parents’ place for supper. I remember that while we were eating, I kept thinking of Füsun, and our kisses.

The next day I went to the cinema alone at lunchtime. I had no particular wish to see a film, but I couldn’t face eating in the usual little place in Pangaltı with Satsat’s aging accountants and the kindhearted, plump secretaries who so enjoyed reminding me what a sweetie I had been as a child. I wanted to be alone. To indulge my thoughts of Füsun and our kisses, longing for two o’clock to come, while joking with my employees, playing the “humble friendly boss” and all the while eating, would have been too much to manage.

As I wandered through Osmanbey, down Cumhuriyet Avenue, gazing at the shop windows, I was drawn into a film by a poster advertising a Hitchcock week. This film too had a kissing scene with Grace Kelly. This cigarette I smoked during the five-minute intermission, this usher’s flashlight, and this Alaska Frigo ice cream (which I display as a reminder to all housewives and lazy truants who ever attended a matinee) should imitate the desire and solitude I knew as a youth. I savored the coolness of the cinema after the heat of the spring day, the stale air heavy with mold, the handful of cineastes whispering excitedly, and I loved letting my mind wander as I gazed into the dark corners and the shadows at the edges of the thick velvet curtains; the knowledge that I would soon be seeing Füsun sent wave after wave of delight radiating through my body. After leaving the cinema, I walked through the higgledy-piggledy backstreets of Osmanbey, passing little clothes shops, coffeehouses, hardware stores, and laundries where they starched and ironed shirts, until I reached Teşvikiye Avenue and I remember telling myself as I headed toward our meeting place that this would have to be our last time.

First I would make an honest effort at teaching her mathematics. The way her hair tumbled onto the paper, the way her hand traveled across the table, the way she’d chew and chew a lead pencil, only to slip its eraser between her lips, as if sucking a nipple, the way her bare arm grazed my own from time to time-all this sent my head spinning, but I held myself in check. As she set out to balance an equation, Füsun’s face would fill with pride, and all of a sudden she would forget her manners and blow a puff of smoke straight at the book (and sometimes straight into my face), and throwing me a look from the corner of her eye, as if to say, Did you notice how fast I worked that one out?, she managed to ruin the whole thing because of a simple addition mistake. Unable to find her answer in a, b, c, d, or e, she would turn sad, and then upset, and she would make up excuses, like, “It wasn’t out of stupidity; it was carelessness!” So that she wouldn’t make the same mistake again, I would arrogantly tell her that being careful was a part of being clever, and I would watch the tip of her pencil pecking like the beak of a sparrow as she pounced on a new problem; she would pull at her hair nervously as she simplified an equation with some skill, and I would follow her work anxiously, with the same impatience, the same rising agitation. Then suddenly we would start to kiss, kissing for a long time before we’d make love, and while we made love, we would feel the entire weight of lost virginity, shame, and guilt-this we sensed in each other’s every movement. But I also saw in Füsun’s eyes her pleasure in sex, her growing amazement at discovering delights that she’d wondered about for so long. She called to mind an adventurer of old who, after years of dreaming of a distant legendary continent, sets out across the seas, and who, having crossed oceans, suffered hardships, and shed blood, finally steps onto its shores, to meet each tree, each stone, each creature with awe and enchantment, drawing from the same elation to savor each flower she smelled, each fruit she put into her mouth, exploring each novelty with a cautious, bedazzled curiosity.

Leaving aside the man’s tool, what interested Füsun most was not my body, nor was it the “male body” in general. It was her own form and her own pleasure that most occupied her. She needed my body, my arms, my fingers, my mouth, to find the pleasure spots and potentials of her body, her soft skin. Lacking experience, Füsun was sometimes shocked by the possibilities of what I was teaching her as her eyes turned inward with a lovely haziness, pleasure spreading through her veins to the back of her neck and her head, like a gradually intensifying shiver, and she would follow pleasure’s flow with awe, sometimes letting out a blissful cry, then once more await my assistance.

“Do that again, please? Do it like that again!” she whispered now and again.

I was very happy. But this was not an elation I could weigh in my mind and understand. It was something that I felt on the nape of my neck when I answered the phone, or at the tip of my spine when running up the stairs, or in my nipples when ordering food at a Taksim restaurant with Sibel, to whom I was to become formally engaged in four weeks’ time. I would carry this feeling around with me all day, like a scent on my skin, sometimes forgetting it was Füsun who had given it to me, as when, on several occasions, I was in my office after hours, hurriedly making love to Sibel, and it seemed to me I was in the grace of one great, all-consuming beatitude.

ONE EVENING, as we were eating at Fuaye, Sibel gave me a fragrance called Spleen that she’d bought for me in Paris; I exhibit it here. Though in fact I didn’t like wearing fragrance, I dabbed some on my neck one morning, just out of curiosity, and after we’d made love, Füsun noticed it.

“Was it Sibel Hanım who bought this cologne for you?”

“No. I bought it for myself.”

“Did you buy it because you thought Sibel might like it?”

“No, darling, I bought it because I thought you might like it.”

“You’re still making love with Sibel Hanım, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“Please don’t lie to me,” said Füsun. An anxious expression formed on her perspiring face. “I would consider it normal. Of course you are having sex with her, aren’t you?” She fixed her eyes on mine, like a mother gently steering a child away from his lie.

“No.”

“Believe me, lying will hurt me a lot more. Please tell me the truth. So why aren’t you making love, then?”

“Sibel and I met last summer in Suadiye,” I said, wrapping my arms around Füsun. “Our winter home was closed for the summer, so we would come to Nişantaşı. Anyway, in the autumn she went to Paris. I visited her there a few times over the winter.”

“By plane?”

“Yes. This December, after Sibel finished university and returned from France to marry me, we used the summer house to meet through the winter. But the house in Suadiye would get so cold that after a while it took the pleasure out of sex,” I continued.

“So you decided to wait until you had found a warm house?”

“At the beginning of March, two months ago, we went back to the house in Suadiye one night. It was very cold there. While we were trying to light a fire the house filled with smoke, and we had an argument, too. After that Sibel came down with a bad case of the flu. She had a fever, wound up in bed for a week, and we didn’t ever want to go back there to make love.”

“Which of you didn’t want to?” asked Füsun. “Her or you?” As curiosity consumed her, compassion gave way to desperation, and her expression, which a moment ago was saying, Please tell me the truth, now was pleading, Please tell me a lie. Don’t hurt me.