The Museum of Innocence Read Free Page A

after our exertions, as I was stubbing out my cigarette in this ashtray bearing the Satsat logo, Sibel, sitting half naked on my secretary Zeynep Hanım’s chair, started rattling the typewriter, and giggling at her best impression of the dumb blonde who featured so prominently in the jokes and humor magazines of the time.

5
    Fuaye
    NOW, YEARS later, and after a long search, I am exhibiting here an illustrated menu, an advertisement, a matchbook, and a napkin from Fuaye, one of the European-style (imitation French) restaurants most loved by the tiny circle of wealthy people who lived in neighborhoods like Beyoğlu, Şişli, and Nişantaşı (were we to affect the snide tone of gossip columnists, we might call such folk “society”). Because they wished to give their customers a subtler illusion of being in a European city, they shied away from pompous Western names like the Ambassador, the Majestic, or the Royal, preferring others like Kulis (backstage), Merdiven (stairway), and Fuaye (lobby), names that reminded one of being on the edge of Europe, in Istanbul. The next generation of nouveaux riches would prefer gaudy restaurants that offered the same food their grandmothers cooked, combining tradition and ostentation with names such as Hanedan (dynasty), Hünkar (sovereign), Pasha, Vezir (vizier), and Sultan—and under the pressure of their pretensions Fuaye sank into oblivion.
    Over dinner at Fuaye on the evening of the day I had bought the handbag, I asked Sibel, “Wouldn’t it be better if from now on we met in that flat my mother has in the Merhamet Apartments? It looks out over such a pretty garden.”
    “Are you expecting some delay in moving to our own house once we’ve married?” she asked.
    “No, darling, I meant nothing of the sort.”
    “I don’t want any more skulking about in secret apartments as if I were your mistress.”
    “You’re right.”
    “Where did this idea come from, to meet in that apartment?”
    “Never mind,” I said. I looked at the cheerful crowd around me as I brought out the handbag, still hidden in its plastic bag.
    “What’s this?” asked Sibel, sensing a present.
    “A surprise! Open and see.”
    “Is it really?” As she opened the plastic bag and saw the handbag, the childish joy on her face gave way first to a quizzical look, and then to a disappointment that she tried to hide.
    “Do you remember?” I ventured. “When I was walking you home last night, you saw it in the window of that shop and admired it.”
    “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