Orhan Pamuk - The Museum Of Innocence

Like a child she took a deep breath, sobbed once or twice, and burst into tears again. To touch her body and her lovely long arms, to feel her breasts pressed against my chest, to hold her like that, if only for a moment, made my head spin: Perhaps it was because I was trying to repress the desire, more intense each time I touched her, that I conjured up this illusion that we had known each other for years, that we were already very close. This was my sweet, inconsolable, grief-stricken, beautiful sister! For a moment-and perhaps because I knew we were related, however slightly-her body, with its long limbs, fine bones, and fragile shoulders, reminded me of my own. Had I been a girl, had I been twelve years younger, this is what my body would be like. “There’s nothing to be upset about,” I said as I caressed the blond hair.

“I can’t open the till to give you back your money,” she explained. “Because when Şenay Hanım goes home for lunch, she locks it and takes the key with her, I’m ashamed to say.” Leaning her head against my chest, she began to cry again, as I continued my careful and compassionate caresses of her hair. “I just work here to meet people and pass the time. It’s not for the money,” she sobbed.

“Working for money is nothing to be embarrassed about,” I said stupidly, heartlessly.

“Yes,” she said, like a dejected child. “My father is a retired teacher… I turned eighteen two weeks ago, and I didn’t want to be a burden.”

Fearful of the sexual beast now threatening to rear its head, I took my hand from her hair. She understood at once and collected herself; we both stepped back.

“Please don’t tell anyone I cried,” she said after she had rubbed her eyes.

“It’s a promise,” I said. “A solemn promise between friends, Füsun. We can trust each other with our secrets…”

I saw her smile. “Let me leave the handbag here,” I said. “I can come back for the money later.”

“Leave the bag if you wish, but you had better not come back here for the money. Şenay Hanım will insist that it isn’t a fake and you’ll come to regret you ever suggested otherwise.”

“Then let’s exchange it for something,” I said.

“I can no longer do that,” she said, sounding like a proud and tetchy girl.

“No really, it’s not important,” I offered.

“But it is to me,” she said firmly. “When she comes back to the shop, I’ll get the money for the bag from Şenay Hanım.”

“I don’t want that woman causing you any more upset,” I replied.

“Don’t worry, I’ve just worked out how to do this,” she said with the faintest of smiles. “I’m going to say that Sibel Hanım already has exactly the same bag, and that’s why she’s returning it. Is that all right?”

“Wonderful idea,” I said. “But why don’t I say the same thing to Şenay Hanım?”

“No, don’t you say anything to her,” Füsun said emphatically. “Because she’ll only try to trick you, to extract personal information from you. Don’t come to the shop at all. I can leave the money with Aunt Vecihe.”

“Oh please, don’t involve my mother in this. She’s even nosier.”

“Then where shall I leave your money?” Füsun asked, raising her eyebrows.

“At the Merhamet Apartments, 131 Teşvikiye Avenue, where my mother has a flat,” I said. “Before I went to America I used it as my hideout-I’d go there to study and listen to music. It’s a delightful place that looks out over a garden in the back… I still go there every lunchtime between two and four and shut myself in there to catch up on paperwork.”

“Of course. I can bring your money there. What’s the apartment number?”

“Four,” I whispered. I could barely get out the next three words, which seemed to die in my throat. “Second floor. Good-bye.”

My heart had figured it all out and it was beating madly. Before rushing outside, I gathered up all my strength and, pretending nothing unusual had happened, I gave her one last look. Back in the street, my shame and guilt mixed with so many images of bliss amid the unseasonable warmth of that May afternoon that the very sidewalks of Nişantaşı seemed aglow with a mysterious yellow. My feet chose the shaded path, taking me under the eaves of the buildings and the blue-and-white-striped awnings of the shop windows, and when in one of those windows I saw a yellow jug I felt compelled to go inside and buy it. Unlike any other object acquired so casually, this yellow jug drew no comment from anyone during the twenty years it sat on the table where my mother and father, and later, my mother and I, ate our meals. Every time I touched the handle of that jug, I would remember those days when I first felt the misery that was to turn me in on myself, leaving my mother to watch me in silence at supper, her eyes filled half with sadness, half with reproach.

Arriving home, I greeted my mother with a kiss; though pleased to see me early in the afternoon, she was nevertheless surprised. I told her that I had bought the jug on a whim, adding, “Could you give me the key to the Merhamet Apartments? Sometimes the office gets so noisy I just can’t concentrate. I was wondering if I might have better luck at the apartment. It always worked when I was young.”

My mother said, “It must be an inch thick with dust,” but she went straight to her room to fetch me the key to the building, which was held together with the key to the apartment by a red ribbon. “Do you remember that Kütahya vase with the red flowers?” she asked as she handed me the keys. “I can’t find it anywhere in the house, so can you check to see if I took it over there? And don’t work so hard… Your father spent his whole life working hard so that you young ones could have some fun in life. You deserve to be happy. Take Sibel out, enjoy the spring air.” Then, pressing the keys into my hand, she gave me a strange look and said, “Be careful!” It was that look my mother would give us when we were children, to warn us that life held unsuspected traps that were far deeper and more treacherous than, for instance, any consequence of failing to take proper care of a key.

MY MOTHER had bought the flat in the Merhamet Apartments twenty years earlier, partly as an investment, and partly as a place where she could retire occasionally for some peace and quiet; but before long she began to use it as a depot for old furniture she deemed to have gone out of fashion and new acquisitions that she immediately found tiresome. As a boy I had liked the back garden, where neighborhood children used to play football in the shade of the giant trees, and I had always loved the story my mother enjoyed telling about the name.

After Atatürk instructed the Turkish people to take surnames for themselves in 1934, it became fashionable to attach one’s new name to one’s newly constructed apartment building. Since in those days there was no consistent system for street names and numbers, and large, wealthy families tended to live collectively under one roof, just as they had done in the days of the Ottoman Empire, it made sense for the sake of navigating the city that these new apartment buildings be known by the name of the owners. (Many of the rich families I shall mention own eponymous apartment buildings.) Another aspirational fashion was for people to name buildings after high-minded principles; but my mother would say that those who gave their buildings names like Hürriyet (freedom), İnayet (benevolence), or Fazilet (charity) were generally the ones who had spent their entire lives making a mockery of those same virtues. The Merhamet (mercy) Apartments had been built by a rich old man who had controlled the black market in sugar during the First World War and later felt compelled to philanthropy. His two sons (the daughter of one of them was my classmate in primary school), upon discovering that their father planned to turn the apartment house over to a charity, distributing any income it generated to the poor, had their father declared incompetent and put him into a home for the indigent, whereupon they took possession of the building, but without bothering to change the name that I had found so peculiar as a child.