Orhan Pamuk - The Museum Of Innocence

“Which girl?”

My father got even more annoyed. “Oh come on now, I’m talking about that very beautiful girl you saw me with in Beşiktaş, in Barbaros Park, you know, ten years ago.”

“No, Father, I don’t have any memory of this.”

“My son, how could you not remember? We came eye to eye. There was a very beautiful girl sitting next to me.”

“What happened next?”

“Not wishing to shame your father, you politely averted your eyes. Do you remember now?”

“No, I don’t.”

“No, you did see us!”

I truly had no such memory, but there was no convincing my father. After a long, awkward discussion, we agreed I must have wanted to forget and succeeded in doing so. Or perhaps he and the girl had merely panicked, thinking I’d seen them. This is how we came to the real subject.

“That girl was my lover for eleven years, and she was very beautiful,” said my father, proudly combining the two most important facts into a single sentence.

It was clear that my father had long dreamed of talking to me about this woman’s beauty, and the thought that I might not have seen it with my own eyes, or, even worse, that I might have seen her but forgotten how beautiful she was-this had dampened his spirits a little. He pulled a small black-and-white photograph from his pocket. It was of a dark, sorrowful girl-very young-standing on the back deck of a City Line ferry in Karaköy.

“That’s her,” he said. “It was taken the year we met. It’s a shame she’s so sad here; you can’t see how beautiful she was. She is beautiful, isn’t she? Do you remember now?”

I said nothing. It annoyed me to listen to my father talking about an affair, no matter that it was ancient history. Though at that moment, I could not understand what exactly it was that bothered me.

“Look, I don’t want you repeating any of what I say here to your brother,” my father said, slipping the photo back into his pocket. “He’s too stern, he wouldn’t understand. You’ve been to America, and I’m not going to be telling you anything that would shock you. All right?”

“Of course, Father dear.”

“So now listen,” said my father, and as he took tiny sips of rakı , he told his story.

It was “seventeen and a half years ago on a snowy day in January 1958” that he’d first met that girl and was instantly struck by her pure and innocent beauty. The girl was working at Satsat, which my father had only just started. At first it was just a working relationship, but despite the twenty-seven-year difference in their ages it became something more “serious and emotional.” One year after the girl had begun relations with her handsome boss (my father, by my instant calculation, would have been forty-seven years old at the time) he forced her to leave Satsat. Again at my father’s behest, she did not look for another job; instead she went quietly to live in an apartment in Beşiktaş that my father set up for her, dreaming that one day they would marry.

“She was very good-hearted, very sensitive, and clever-a very special person,” said my father. “She wasn’t like other women at all. I’ve had a few escapades in my life, but I never fell for anyone the way I fell for her. My son, I thought a lot about marrying her… But what would have happened to your mother? What would have happened to you and your brother?…”

For a time we were silent.

“Don’t misunderstand me, my child, I’m not saying I made sacrifices so that you could be happy. In fact, of course, she was the one who really wanted marriage. I kept her dangling for years. I just couldn’t imagine life without her, and when I couldn’t see her I suffered enormously. But there was no one to share my pain with. Then one day she said, ‘Make up your mind!’ Either I left your mother and married her, or she was going to leave me. Pour yourself some raki .”

There was a silence. “When I refused to leave you boys and your mother, she left me,” said my father. To admit this exhausted him, but it also relaxed him. When he looked at my face and saw that he could go on confiding in me, he became more relaxed still.

“I was in pain, great pain. Your brother had married, and you were in America. But of course I tried to hide my anguish from your mother. To steal into a corner like a thief and suffer in secret-that was another agony. Your mother had sensed the existence of this mistress, just as she had with the others; understanding that something serious was going on, she said nothing. Your mother, and Bekri and Fatma Hanım-we lived together like a cast of characters imitating a happy family in a hotel room. I could see that I would find no relief, that if it carried on this way I would go mad, but I couldn’t bring myself to do what was necessary. At the same time, she” -my father never said her name-“was suffering just as much. She announced that an engineer had proposed marriage and that if I didn’t decide soon, she was going to accept. But I didn’t take her seriously… I was the first man she had ever been with. I thought she could not possibly want anyone else, that she must be bluffing. Even when I doubted my reasoning and started to panic, I was still paralyzed. So I tried just not to think about it. You remember that summer when Çetin drove us all to Izmir, to the fair… When we got back I heard that she had got married, but I couldn’t believe it. I was convinced she had just put the news out to get my attention, and make me suffer. She refused my every attempt to see her, even to speak with her; she wouldn’t answer the phone. She even sold the house I’d bought for her and moved somewhere I couldn’t find her. Had she really married? Who was this engineer husband? Had she had children? What was she doing? For four years I couldn’t ask anyone these questions. I feared the answers I might get, but to know nothing was agony, too. To imagine her living in another part of Istanbul, opening the papers to read the same news, watching the same TV programs, yet never to see her-it left me desolate. I began to feel as if life itself was futile. Please don’t misunderstand me, my son-I certainly felt proud of you, and the factories, and your mother. But this suffering was unimaginable.”

Because he’d been using the past tense, I sensed that the story had reached some sort of conclusion, and that my father had found some relief in his confession, but for some reason this displeased me.

“In the end, curiosity got the better of me, and one afternoon I rang her mother. The woman certainly knew all about me, but of course she didn’t recognize my voice. I lied to her, passing myself off as the husband of one of her girl’s lycée classmates. ‘My wife is ill and it would boost her spirits if your daughter could come to see her in the hospital,’ I said. Her mother said, ‘My daughter is dead,’ and began to cry. She’d died of cancer! I hung up at once so that I wouldn’t cry, too. I wasn’t expecting this, but I knew at once that it was true. She had never married an engineer… How terrifying life can be, how empty it all is!”

When I saw the tears forming in my father’s eyes, for a moment I felt utterly helpless. I understood his pain even as I felt anger, and the more I reflected on the story he had told me, the more my mind became muddled and I behaved as if I were a member of a tribe an old-fashioned anthropologist might describe as “primitive” and unable to think about its own taboos.

“So anyway,” my father said, pulling himself together after a short silence, “I didn’t bring you here just to upset you with tales of all my woes. But you’re about to get engaged, so it’s fitting for you to know your father better. But there is something else I want you to know. Can you understand?”