Orhan Pamuk - The Museum Of Innocence

At last she said, “What’s going on with you? It’s time-”

“If I only knew,” I said. “There seems to be a part of my mind that doesn’t want to acknowledge the problem, or understand it.”

“So you don’t understand it either, is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes.”

“If you ask me, you know a lot more than I do,” said Sibel with a smile.

“What do you think I know so much more about than you do?”

“Do you ever worry what I might be thinking about your troubles?” she asked.

“I worry that if I don’t snap out of this, I’ll lose you.”

“Don’t worry about that,” she said, stroking my hand. “I’m patient and I love you dearly. If you don’t want to talk about it, then you don’t have to. And don’t worry, I don’t have any wild theories about all this. We have plenty of time.”

“What wild theories?”

“Well, for example, I’m not worried that you might be a homosexual or something,” she said, smiling at once, to show that she wanted to reassure me, too.

“Oh, thanks. What else?”

“I don’t think it’s a sexual illness or some deep childhood trauma, or anything like that. But I still think that it might help to see a psychologist. There’s nothing wrong with that. In Europe and America, everyone goes to them… Of course, you’d have to tell this person what you can’t tell me… Come on, darling, tell me, don’t be afraid. I’ll forgive you.”

“I am afraid,” I said with a smile. “Shall we dance?” “Then you admit there is something you know and I don’t.” “Mademoiselle, please don’t decline my invitation to dance.” “Oh, monsieur! I am engaged to a troubled man!” she said, and we rose to our feet.

I have recorded these details, and displayed these menus and glasses, to evoke the uncanny intimacy, the private language, and-if that’s the right word for it-the deep love that existed between us during those hot July nights when, seeking relief, we’d go to clubs and parties and restaurants and drink with abandon. It was a love fed not by sexual appetite but by a fierce compassion, and on nights when, having both had a lot to drink, we rose to dance, it wasn’t so far from physical attraction. As the orchestra in the background played “Lips and Roses,” or as the disc jockey (a new fixture in Turkey at that time) spun his 45s, the songs would filter through the leaves of the still and silent trees on humid summer nights and I would take my beloved fiancée in my arms, embracing her no less passionately than on the divan in the office, and however motivated to protect myself, I treasured our camaraderie and common bonds; breathing in the scent of her neck and her hair, I found peace, and I would see how senseless it was to feel as lonely as a canine cosmonaut in space; and assuming that Sibel would always be at my side, I would woozily draw her closer. As we danced under the gaze of other romantic couples, we would sometimes lurch, as if to take a drunken spill onto the floor. Sibel enjoyed these alcoholic trances we fell into, as they transported us from the everyday world. Outside in the streets of Istanbul, communists and nationalists were gunning each other down, robbing banks, throwing bombs, and spraying coffeehouses with bullets, but we had occasion, and license, to forget the entire world, all because of my mysterious ailment, which in Sibel’s mind gave life a certain depth.

Later, when we sat down at our table, Sibel would again drunkenly broach the subject, now not as something she understood but something she accepted without fully understanding. Thus, thanks to Sibel’s efforts, my mysterious moods, my melancholy, and my inability to make love to her amounted to no more than a premarital test of my fiancée’s compassion and commitment, a limited tragedy soon to be forgotten. It was as if our pain gave us the distinction of standing apart from our coarse, superficial, rich friends, even as we boarded their speedboats. We no longer needed to join the careless drunks who jumped from the pier into the Bosphorus at the end of a party. My pain, and my strangeness, had graced us with a degree of difference. It pleased me to see Sibel embrace my pain with such dignity, and this, too, drew us closer together. But even amid all this drunken earnestness, if I heard a City Line ferry blowing its sad whistle in the distance, or if I glanced into the crowd and in the least likely of places spotted someone I thought was Füsun, Sibel would notice the strange expression on my face and intuit painfully that the danger lurking in the shadows was far more fearsome than she’d thought.

And so it was that by the end of July, Sibel’s loving suggestion that I see a psychiatrist turned into a requirement, and unwilling to lose her wonderful compassion and companionship I agreed. The famous Turkish psychoanalyst who the careful reader will recall offering an analysis of love was at that time recently returned from America and working hard, with his bow tie and his pipe, to convince a narrow segment of Istanbul society that they could no longer do without his profession. Years later, when I was trying to establish my museum, and I paid him a visit to ask what he remembered of that era (and also to solicit his donation of that same pipe and bow tie), I discovered that he had no memory of the troubles I was suffering at the time; what’s more, he’d heard nothing of my painful story, which was by then common knowledge in Istanbul society. He remembered me as being like so many of his other patients at that time-perfectly healthy individuals who rang his bell only out of curiosity. I shall never forget how Sibel insisted on coming with me, like a mother taking her ailing child to the doctor, and how she said, “I’ll just sit in the waiting room, darling.” But I hadn’t wanted her to come at all. Sibel, with the felicitous intuition so prevalent in the bourgeoisies of non-Western countries, and most particularly Muslim countries, saw psychoanalysis as a “scientific sharing of confidences” invented for Westerners unaccustomed to the curative traditions of family solidarity and shared secrets. When, after talking about this and that and neatly filling out the necessary forms, I was asked what my “problem” was, I felt compelled to disclose that I had lost the woman I loved and now felt as lonely as a dog sent into outer space. But instead I said that I had been unable to make love to my beautiful and cherished fiancée since our engagement. And he asked me what was the cause of my loss of desire-a surprise since I thought he would be the one to answer this question. Today, so many years later, when I remember the words that came to my mind with God’s help, I still smile, but I also see some truth in them: “Perhaps I’m afraid of life, Doctor!”

This would be my last visit to the psychoanalyst, who could do no more than send me off with the words: “Don’t be afraid of life, Kemal Bey!”

HAVING EVADED the snare of the psychoanalyst, I tricked myself into thinking that I was on the road to recovery, convinced that I was strong enough to return, just for a while, to the streets I had marked in red. It felt so good for the first few minutes, to be walking past Alaaddin’s shop, down streets where my mother had taken me shopping as a child, and to breathe in the air in those shops, so good that I came to believe I was not afraid of life and that my illness was abating. These hopeful thoughts emboldened me to think I could walk past the Şanzelize Boutique without pain-but this was a mistake. Just seeing the shop from a distance was enough to unnerve me.

For the pain was merely dormant, just waiting to be triggered, and in a moment its darkness suffused my heart. Desperate for an instant cure, I told myself that Füsun might be in the shop, and my heart started racing. With my head swimming, and my confidence draining fast, I crossed the street and looked in the window: Füsun was there! For a moment I thought I was going to faint; I ran to the door. I was about to walk in when I realized that it was not Füsun I’d seen but another specter. Someone had been hired to replace her! Suddenly I felt unable to stand. The life of nightclubs, those parties at which I’d taken drunken refuge-they revealed themselves now in all their falsity and banality. There was only one person in the world with whom I could live, only one person whose embraces I craved; the heart of my life was elsewhere, and to try to fool myself for nothing with vulgar distractions was disrespectful both to her and to myself. The regret and the guilt-ridden chaos that had enveloped me since my engagement now grew monstrous with a new realization: I had betrayed Füsun! I had to think only of her. I had to go at once to the place nearest to where she was.