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First I would make an honest effort at teaching her mathematics. The way her hair tumbled onto the paper, the way her hand traveled across the table, the way she’d chew and chew a lead pencil, only to slip its eraser between her lips, as if sucking a nipple, the way her bare arm grazed my own from time to time-all this sent my head spi
Leaving aside the man’s tool, what interested Füsun most was not my body, nor was it the “male body” in general. It was her own form and her own pleasure that most occupied her. She needed my body, my arms, my fingers, my mouth, to find the pleasure spots and potentials of her body, her soft skin. Lacking experience, Füsun was sometimes shocked by the possibilities of what I was teaching her as her eyes turned inward with a lovely haziness, pleasure spreading through her veins to the back of her neck and her head, like a gradually intensifying shiver, and she would follow pleasure’s flow with awe, sometimes letting out a blissful cry, then once more await my assistance.
“Do that again, please? Do it like that again!” she whispered now and again.
I was very happy. But this was not an elation I could weigh in my mind and understand. It was something that I felt on the nape of my neck when I answered the phone, or at the tip of my spine when ru
13 Love, Courage, Modernity
ONE EVENING, as we were eating at Fuaye, Sibel gave me a fragrance called Spleen that she’d bought for me in Paris; I exhibit it here. Though in fact I didn’t like wearing fragrance, I dabbed some on my neck one morning, just out of curiosity, and after we’d made love, Füsun noticed it.
“Was it Sibel Hanım who bought this cologne for you?”
“No. I bought it for myself.”
“Did you buy it because you thought Sibel might like it?”
“No, darling, I bought it because I thought you might like it.”
“You’re still making love with Sibel Hanım, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“Please don’t lie to me,” said Füsun. An anxious expression formed on her perspiring face. “I would consider it normal. Of course you are having sex with her, aren’t you?” She fixed her eyes on mine, like a mother gently steering a child away from his lie.
“No.”
“Believe me, lying will hurt me a lot more. Please tell me the truth. So why aren’t you making love, then?”
“Sibel and I met last summer in Suadiye,” I said, wrapping my arms around Füsun. “Our winter home was closed for the summer, so we would come to Nişantaşı. Anyway, in the autumn she went to Paris. I visited her there a few times over the winter.”
“By plane?”
“Yes. This December, after Sibel finished university and returned from France to marry me, we used the summer house to meet through the winter. But the house in Suadiye would get so cold that after a while it took the pleasure out of sex,” I continued.
“So you decided to wait until you had found a warm house?”
“At the begi
“Which of you didn’t want to?” asked Füsun. “Her or you?” As curiosity consumed her, compassion gave way to desperation, and her expression, which a moment ago was saying, Please tell me the truth, now was pleading, Please tell me a lie. Don’t hurt me.
“I think Sibel is hoping that if we make love less before we marry, I might prize the engagement, our marriage, and even her, a bit more,” I said.
“But you’re saying that before all this you did make love.”
“You don’t understand. This is not about making love for the first time.”
“You’re right, it isn’t,” said Füsun, lowering her voice.
“Sibel showed me how much she loved me, and how much she trusted me,” I said. “But the idea of making love before marriage still makes her uncomfortable… I understand this. She’s studied in Europe, but she’s not as modern and courageous as you are…”
There was a very long silence. Having spent years pondering the meaning of this silence, I think I can now summarize it in a balanced way. That last thing I’d said to Füsun had an implied meaning. I had suggested that what Sibel had done before marriage out of love and trust, Füsun had done out of courage and a modern outlook. I have suffered many years of remorse for labeling Füsun as “modern and courageous,” for the compliment also said that I would feel no special obligations to her just because she’d slept with me. If she was “modern,” she would not see sex with a man before marriage as a burden, and neither would she worry about being a virgin on her wedding day. Just like those European women we entertained in our fantasies, or those legendary women who were said to wander the streets of Istanbul. How could I have said those words believing Füsun would warm to them?
Though I may not have understood everything quite so clearly during that silence, these thoughts went through my mind as I watched the trees in the back garden slowly swaying in the wind. After making love, as we lay in bed chatting, we would look out the window at those trees, the apartment houses behind them, the random flights of crows among their branches.
“Actually, I’m not modern or courageous!” Füsun said, after a long while.
At the time I took these words to express her unease at discussing this weighty subject, and even humility, and I didn’t dwell on them.