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21 My Father’s Story: Pearl Earrings
ON A SUNNY Thursday at the begi
Abdullah Efendi’s restaurant had formerly been in Beyoğlu, on the main avenue next to Ağa Mosque. Back in those days it was where the rich and famous would stop for lunch if they were passing through the area or on their way to the cinema, but several years ago, after most of his customers had acquired cars, he had moved to the hills above Emirgân, to a little farm overlooking the Bosphorus. As we walked into the restaurant, my father assumed a jovial smile, shaking hands with the waiters he had known for years from the old Abdullah’s and other restaurants. Then he surveyed the large dining room, searching for anyone he knew among the customers. As the headwaiter was guiding us to our table, my father stopped to chat with one party, and waved in the direction of another, and flirted breezily with an elderly lady sitting at a third table with her daughter; this lady remarked how fast I’d grown up, how much I resembled my father, and how handsome I was. Once we had been seated by the headwaiter (who’d called me “little gentleman” throughout my childhood and, at some point, without anyone’s quite having noticed, began calling me “Kemal Bey”), my father ordered a few hors d’oeuvres for us to share-pastries, smoked fish, and suchlike-and also raki.
“You do want some, don’t you?” he asked me, adding, “You know you can smoke, too, if you like,” as if we had not come to a mutual understanding about my smoking in his presence after I’d returned from America.
“Bring an ashtray for Kemal Bey,” he told one of the waiters.
He picked up a few of the cherry tomatoes that came from the restaurant’s own greenhouse and sniffed them; as he knocked back his rakı, it seemed that there was something specific on his mind, though he had not yet decided how to broach the subject. For a moment we both looked out the window at Çetin Efendi in the distance, chatting with the other drivers waiting outside the entrance.
“Never forget Çetin Efendi’s worth,” my father said, sounding as if he were dictating his last testament.
“I do know his worth.”
“I’m not sure you do… I know he is always telling religious stories, but you should never laugh at them. He’s an honest man, Çetin, and he’s a gentleman, a thoroughly decent human being. He’s been like that for twenty years. If anything should ever happen to me, don’t send him away. Don’t change cars every two minutes like those nouveau riche upstarts. The Chevrolet’s a good car… This is Turkey, look… when the state ba
“I grew up in that car, Father, so you don’t need to worry,” I said.
“I’m glad to hear it,” said my father, in a tone suggesting he had come to the real subject. “Sibel is very special, a very charming girl,” he said, but no, this wasn’t what he had brought me here to discuss. “You don’t find such a person every day, do you? A woman, a rare flower like her-you must make sure you never break her heart. You must care for her always, and treat her with the utmost tenderness.” Suddenly a strange, shameful expression appeared on his face. He began to speak impatiently, as if something had irritated him: “Do you remember that beautiful girl?… You know, the one you saw me with once in Beşiktaş. When you first saw her, what did you think?”
“Which girl?”
My father got even more a
“No, Father, I don’t have any memory of this.”
“My son, how could you not remember? We came eye to eye. There was a very beautiful girl sitting next to me.”
“What happened next?”
“Not wishing to shame your father, you politely averted your eyes. Do you remember now?”
“No, I don’t.”
“No, you did see us!”
I truly had no such memory, but there was no convincing my father. After a long, awkward discussion, we agreed I must have wanted to forget and succeeded in doing so. Or perhaps he and the girl had merely panicked, thinking I’d seen them. This is how we came to the real subject.
“That girl was my lover for eleven years, and she was very beautiful,” said my father, proudly combining the two most important facts into a single sentence.
It was clear that my father had long dreamed of talking to me about this woman’s beauty, and the thought that I might not have seen it with my own eyes, or, even worse, that I might have seen her but forgotten how beautiful she was-this had dampened his spirits a little. He pulled a small black-and-white photograph from his pocket. It was of a dark, sorrowful girl-very young-standing on the back deck of a City Line ferry in Karaköy.
“That’s her,” he said. “It was taken the year we met. It’s a shame she’s so sad here; you can’t see how beautiful she was. She is beautiful, isn’t she? Do you remember now?”
I said nothing. It a
“Look, I don’t want you repeating any of what I say here to your brother,” my father said, slipping the photo back into his pocket. “He’s too stern, he wouldn’t understand. You’ve been to America, and I’m not going to be telling you anything that would shock you. All right?”