Orhan Pamuk - The Museum Of Innocence

“Oh, yes. How thoughtful of you.”

“I’m glad you like it. It will look so elegant on you at our engagement party.”

“I hate to say it, but the handbag I’m taking to our engagement party was chosen a long time ago,” said Sibel. “Oh, don’t look so downcast! It was so thoughtful of you, to go to all the effort of buying this lovely present for me… All right then, just so you don’t think I’m being unkind to you, I could never put this handbag on my arm at our engagement party, because this handbag is a fake!”

“What?”

“This is not a genuine Jenny Colon, my dear Kemal. It is an imitation.”

“How can you tell?”

“Just by looking at it, dear. See the way the label is stitched to the leather? Now look at the stitching on this real Jenny Colon I bought in Paris. It’s not for nothing that it’s an exclusive brand in France and all over the world. For one thing, she would never use such cheap thread.”

There was a moment, as I looked at the genuine stitching, when I asked myself why my future bride was taking such a triumphal tone. Sibel was the daughter of a retired ambassador who’d long ago sold off the last of his pasha grandfather’s land and was now penniless; technically this made her the daughter of a civil servant, and this status sometimes caused her to feel uneasy and insecure. Whenever her anxieties overtook her, she would talk about her paternal grandmother, who had played the piano, or about her paternal grandfather, who had fought in the War of Independence, or she’d tell me how close her maternal grandfather had been to Sultan Abdülhamit; but her timidity moved me, and I loved her all the more for it. With the expansion of the textiles and exports trade during the early 1970s, and the consequent tripling of Istanbul ’s population, the price of land had skyrocketed throughout the city and most particularly in neighborhoods like ours. Although, carried on this wave, my father’s fortune had grown extravagantly over the past decade, increasing fivefold, our surname (Basmacı, “cloth printer”) left no doubt that we owed our wealth to three generations of cloth manufacture. It made me uneasy to be troubled by the “fake” handbag despite three generations of cumulative progress.

When she saw my spirits sink, Sibel caressed my hand. “How much did you pay for the bag?”

“Fifteen hundred lira,” I said. “If you don’t want it, I can exchange it tomorrow.”

“Don’t exchange it, darling, ask for your money back, because they really cheated you.”

“The owner of the shop is Şenay Hanım, and we’re distantly related!” I said, raising my eyebrows in dismay.

Sibel took back the bag, whose interiors I had been quietly exploring. “You’re so knowledgeable, darling, so clever and cultured,” she said, with a tender smile, “but you have absolutely no idea how easily women can trick you.”

AT NOON the next day I went back to the Şanzelize Boutique carrying the same plastic bag. The bell rang as I walked in, but once again the shop was so gloomy that at first I thought no one was there. In the strange silence of the ill-lit shop the canary sang chik, chik, chik . Then I made out Füsun’s shadow through a screen and between the leaves of a huge vase of cyclamens. She was waiting on a fat lady who was trying on an outfit in the fitting room. This time she was wearing a charming and flattering blouse, a print of hyacinths intertwined with leaves and wildflowers. When she saw me she smiled sweetly.

“You seem busy,” I said, indicating the fitting room with my eyes.

“We’re just about finished,” she said, as if to imply she and her customer were at this point just talking idly.

My eyes flitted from the canary fluttering up and down in its cage, a pile of fashion magazines in the corner, and the assortment of accessories imported from Europe, and I couldn’t fix my attention on anything. As much as I wanted to dismiss the feeling as ordinary, I could not deny the startling truth that when looking at Füsun, I saw someone familiar, someone I felt I knew intimately. She resembled me. That same sort of hair that grew curly and dark in childhood only to straighten as I grew older. Now it was a shade of blond that, like her clear complexion, was complemented by her printed blouse. I felt I could easily put myself in her place, could understand her deeply. A painful memory came to me: my friends, referring to her as “something out of Playboy .” Could she have slept with them? “Return the handbag, take your money and run,” I told myself. “You’re about to become engaged to a wonderful girl.” I turned to look outside, in the direction of Nişantaşı Square, but soon Füsun’s reflection appeared ghostlike in the smoky glass.

After the woman in the fitting room had huffed and puffed her way out of a skirt and left without buying anything, Füsun folded up the discarded items and put them back where they belonged. “I saw you walking down the street yesterday evening,” she said, turning up her beautiful lips. She was wearing a light pink lipstick, sold under the brand name Misslyn, and though a common Turkish product, on her it looked exotic and alluring.

“When did you see me?” I asked.

“Early in the evening. You were with Sibel Hanım. I was walking down the sidewalk on the other side of the street. Were you going out to eat?”

“Yes.”

“You make a handsome couple!” she said, in the way that the elderly do when taking pleasure at the sight of happy young people.

I did not ask her where she knew Sibel from. “There’s a small favor we’d like to ask of you.” As I took out the bag, I felt both shame and panic. “We’d like to return this bag.”

“Certainly. I’d be happy to exchange it for you. You might like these chic new gloves and we have this hat, which has just arrived from Paris. Sibel Hanım didn’t like the bag?”

“I’d prefer not to exchange it,” I said shamefacedly. “I’d like to ask for my money back.”

I saw shock on her face, even a bit of fear. “Why?” she asked.

“Apparently this bag is not a genuine Jenny Colon,” I whispered. “It seems that it’s a fake.”

“What?”

“I don’t really understand these things,” I said helplessly.

“Nothing like that ever happens here!” she said in a harsh voice. “Do you want your money back right now?”

“Yes!” I blurted out.

She looked deeply pained. Dear God, I thought, why hadn’t I just disposed of this bag and told Sibel I’d gotten the money back? “Look, this has nothing to do with you or Şenay Hanım. We Turks, praise God, manage to make imitations of every European fashion,” I said, struggling to smile. “For me-or should I have said for us-it’s enough for a bag to fulfill its function, to look lovely in a woman’s hand. It’s not important what the brand is, or who made it, or if it’s an original.” But she, like me, didn’t believe a word I was saying.

“No, I am going to give you your money back,” she said in that same harsh voice. I looked down and remained silent, prepared to meet my fate, and ashamed of my brutishness.

As determined as she sounded, I sensed that Füsun could not do what she was supposed to do; there was something strange in the intensely embarrassing moment. She was looking at the till as if someone had put a spell on it, as if it were possessed by demons, so that she couldn’t bring herself to touch it. When I saw her face redden and crinkle up, her eyes welling with tears, I panicked and drew two steps closer.

She began to cry softly. I have never worked out exactly how it happened, but I wrapped my arms around her and she leaned her head against my chest and wept. “Füsun, I’m so sorry,” I whispered. I caressed her soft hair and her forehead. “Please, just forget this ever happened. It’s a fake handbag, that’s all.”