The Museum Of Innocence

Two weeks later Mehmet telephoned Satsat to apologize for having been unable to invite me to the wedding at the Hilton. He added that Zaim and Sibel had been a couple for some time now. He’d assumed I knew, considering everyone else did.

72 Life, Too, Is Just Like Love….

ONE EVENING at the begi

TRT 2, Turkey ’s arts and culture cha

That Thursday we watched Hitchcock’s Rear Window, but far from putting my troubled mind at ease, it heightened my anxiety. It was this film I’d gone to see eight years earlier, when, skipping out on my usual lunch with the Satsat employees, I took refuge in a cinema to contemplate Füsun’s kisses in solitude and peace. But now it was no consolation to see from the corner of my eye how engrossed Füsun was in the film, nor did it help to remark on something of Grace Kelly’s purity and refinement in her. Either in spite of the film or because of it, I had sunk into that stupor that afflicted me, if not often then at regular intervals, during suppers in Çukurcuma. It was like being caught in a suffocating dream, trapped in a room whose walls were advancing toward me. It was as if time itself was getting steadily narrower.

I struggled for a long time to convey for the Museum of I

The spiritual state is somewhat akin to what follows drinking alcohol or smoking marijuana, though it is different in certain ways. It is the sense of not really living in the present moment, this now. At Füsun’s house, as we were eating supper, I often felt as if I were living a moment in the past. Only a moment before we would have been watching a Grace Kelly film on television, or another like it; true, our conversations at the table were more or less alike, but it was not such sameness that invoked this mood; rather it was a sense of not abiding in those moments of my life as they were occurring, experiencing these moments as if I were not living them. While my body lived out the present on the screen, my mind was watching Füsun and me from a slight distance, and my soul watched from a greater one. So the effect of that moment I was living was of something I was remembering. Visitors to my Museum of I

To experience this present moment as a memory is to experience a temporal illusion. But I also experienced a spatial illusion. Exhibited here are a pair of optical illusions. Try to detect the seven differences between these two pictures, or decide which one is smaller; this puzzle is of the type that induced a similar disquiet when I was a boy and came across them in magazines for children. When I was a child, games like “Help the king find his way out of the labyrinth!” or “What burrow should the rabbit take to get out of the forest?” amused me as much as they u

“What’s wrong, Kemal? Didn’t you like the film?”

“No, I liked it.”

“Maybe you didn’t like what it was about,” she said cautiously.

“On the contrary,” I said, and I fell silent.

It was so unusual for Füsun to show interest in my mood, or ask how I was when we were still at the table, in her parents’ earshot, that I was moved to say a few admiring things about the film and Grace Kelly.

“But I know you’re feeling low this evening, Kemal, don’t try to hide it,” Füsun said.

“Fine, then, I’ll talk… It’s just that it seems as if something has changed in this house, but I can’t figure out what it is.”

They all burst out laughing.

“We’ve moved Lemon to the back room, Kemal Bey,” said Aunt Nesibe. “We were wondering why you hadn’t mentioned it.”

“Is that so?” I said. “How could I not have noticed? I mean, I love Lemon…”

“We love him, too,” said Füsun proudly. “I’ve decided to paint his portrait, so I’ve moved the cage into the other room.”

“Have you started painting yet? Could I have a look, please?”

“Of course.”

It had been some time since Füsun had given up on her bird series, for which she could no longer summon up the enthusiasm. Entering the room, before looking at Lemon himself, I inspected Füsun’s painting of the bird, only just begun.

“Feridun doesn’t take bird photographs anymore,” said Füsun. “And so I’ve decided to paint from life instead.”

Füsun’s mood, her poise as she talked about Feridun as if he were someone from her past-it all set my head spi

“But I’m not aiming for realism.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not going to paint his cage. Lemon will be perched in front of the window like a wild bird who has alighted there of his own free will.”

That week I went three more times to the Keskins’ for supper. Each night, when the meal was over, we went into the back room to Lemon’s emerging portrait. He seemed happier and livelier outside his cage, and when we went into the back room, we were now more interested in the painting than the bird itself. After an oddly serious but perfectly sincere discussion of the challenges of this project, we would speak of going to see the museums of Paris.