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“Her name was Belkıs; she was a few years older than me, thirty-two or thirty-three, I guess. She came from a poor family. After she entered society, her enemies began to gossip about her mother’s headscarf. In the late 1950s, when Belkıs was a lycée student, she’d met a boy at field day celebrations of the nineteenth of May, and they fell in love. This boy, Faris, was her age, the youngest son of the Kaptanoğlus, who had, as you know, made a fortune in shipping by then, to become one of Istanbul ’s richest families. This romance between the rich boy and the poor girl was right out of some Turkish film and it went on for years. Their passion was so great or they were so stupid that these teenagers were making love and flaunting it. Certainly they should have married, but the boy’s family convinced themselves that the poor girl had surrendered her virtue just to trick him into marriage, and that everyone knew this, so they opposed the match. It’s clear that the boy lacked the strength, the cast of mind, and the personal income to stand up to his family, take the girl by the hand, and marry her. So the family’s solution was to pack the boy off to Paris with the girl to live out of sight as an unmarried couple. Three years later because of drugs or despair the boy somehow died in Paris. Instead of ru
“It surprises me that not a single one of these men would marry her,” said Sibel. “It means that no one ever loved her enough to take the plunge.”
“Actually, men fall madly in love with women like that. But marriage-that’s something else. If she had been able to marry the Kaptanoğlu boy, Faris, right away, and without having slept with him, people would have been quick to forget how poor her family was. Or if Belkıs had come from a wealthy family, they would have overlooked her not being a virgin when she married. Because she didn’t take account of the rules and went on enjoying her sex life, all those society women, envious just a moment ago, began calling her the ‘Consoling Whore.’ But maybe for that very reason, because she gave herself to the first boy she ever loved, gave herself to her lovers without hiding it from anyone, perhaps we should have some respect for Belkıs, too.”
“Do you feel respect for her?” asked Sibel.
“No, to be honest, I found the deceased repulsive.”
The party-I forget the occasion-was on the long concrete patio of a house on the Suadiye shore. Sixty or seventy people were standing there with drinks in hand, conversing in near whispers as they looked to see who was there, who was just arriving. Most of the women seemed concerned about the length of their skirts, with the ones in short skirts uneasy in the extreme, imagining their legs were too short or too thick. Perhaps this was why, at first sight, they all looked like awkward, surly bar girls. Right next to the patio, on the jetty, a big sewer was emptying into the sea, producing quite a smell for guests as white-gloved waiters wandered among them.
After wandering around a bit myself, I met a “psychiatrist” who had just returned from America and opened an office; he gave me his new card the moment we met, and at the incitement of a vivacious middle-aged woman, he offered up a definition of love to the cluster of guests who were discovering him: When one forsook all other opportunities, wishing only to make love consistently with the same person, this feeling, which he held to be conducive to happiness, was “love.” After the discourse on love, a mother, having introduced me to her beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter, sought my advice about where to send the girl to university, so as to spare her the Turkish universities’ continual politically motivated boycotts. The conversation began with a discussion of a report in that day’s papers about how, to prevent the theft of the question booklets for the university entrance exams, the printers had been subject to a prolonged sequestration.
Much later, Zaim appeared on the patio. He cut a handsome figure with his long limbs, sculpted chin, and beautiful eyes, and especially with the German model Inge, just as tall and elegant, on his arm. What stung hearts most about Inge, with her blue eyes, long and slender legs, fair skin, and natural blond hair, was the merciless reminder to the women of Istanbul society that even as they bleached their hair, plucked their eyebrows, and scoured boutiques for outfits that might let them feel more European, their darker skin and fuller figures were never entirely redeemed by such efforts. But I was less struck by the woman’s northern looks than by her familiar smile that I enjoyed seeing every day in the newspaper ads and on the side of the apartment building in Harbiye-it was like seeing an old friend. Soon enough the inevitable crowd had gathered around her.
On the drive home Sibel broke the silence. “That You-Deserve-It-All Zaim, yes, I can see he is a good egg. But that fourth-rate German model, who looks like she would sleep with any Arab sheikh who asked… Wasn’t it enough to use her in his ad campaign? Must he parade her around just so everyone knows he’s bedded her?”
“I give Zaim credit for making a go of that new soft drink of his. I remember he once told me that Turks relish the taste of a modern Turkish product much more once they’ve seen Westerners enjoying it, too… You know, it’s highly likely that, in her friendly way, this model sees no difference between us and Arab sheikhs.”
“When I was at the hairdresser I saw a photo of her with Zaim in Hafta Sonu, the centerfold, no less, and there was also an interview plus a very tacky picture of her half-naked.”
The silence returned and remained for some time. At last I smiled and said: “You know that guy who was prattling away in broken German, complimenting her on the ads, and staring at her hair just to avoid looking at her breasts falling out of her dress-that big, bashful guy, Sabih the Bear… Well that was Belkıs’s second lover.”
But as we drove under the Bosphorus Bridge, obscured in the haze, I saw that Sibel had fallen asleep.