The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk

relive those moments of love, and my attachment to those pleasures. For years, whenever I recalled those moments, seeking to understand the bond I still felt with her, images would form before my eyes, crowding out reason; for example, Füsun would be sitting on my lap, and I would have taken her large left breast into my mouth…. Or while drops of perspiration fell from the tip of my chin onto her graceful neck, I’d gaze with awe at her exquisite backside…. Or, after crying out rapturously, she would open her eyes for just one second…. Or at the heights of our pleasure, the look on Füsun’s face …
    But as I later came to understand, these images were not the reason for my elation, but merely provocative representations of it. Years later, as I struggled to understand why she was so dear to me, I would try to evoke not just our lovemaking but the room in which we made love, and our surroundings, and ordinary objects. Sometimes one of the big crows that lived in the back garden would perch on the balcony to watch us in silence. It was the spitting image of a crow that had perched on our balcony at home when I was a child. Then my mother would say, “Come on now, go to sleep. Look, the crow is watching you,” and that would frighten me. Füsun, too, had had a crow that had frightened her that way.
    On some days it was the dust and the chill in the room; on others it was our pallid, soiled, spectral sheets, our bodies, and the many sounds that filtered in from the life outside, from the traffic, from the endless noise of construction work and from the cries of the street vendors that led us to feel our lovemaking belonged not to the realm of dreams but to the real world. Sometimes we could hear a ship’s whistle from as far away as Dolmabahçe or Beşiktaş, and together we would try to guess what sort of ship it was, as children might do. As we continued to meet, making love with ever-escalating abandon, I came to locate the source of my happiness not only in that real world outside, but also in the tiny flaws on Füsun’s body, the boils, pimples, hairs, and her dark and lovely freckles.
    Apart from our measureless lovemaking with childlike abandon, what was it that bound me to her? Or else why was I able to make love to her with such passion? Did the pleasure of satisfying our ever-renewing desire give birth to love, or was this sentiment born of, and nurtured by, other things as well? During those carefree days when Füsun and I met every day in secret, I never asked myself such questions, behaving only like a child greedily gulping one sweet after another.

14
    Istanbul’s Streets, Bridges, Hills, and Squares
    ONCE, WHEN we were talking aimlessly, Füsun happened to mention a teacher she’d liked at lycée, saying, “He wasn’t like other men!” and when I asked her what she meant by that, she did not answer. Two days later I asked her once again what she’d meant by his not being “like other men.”
    “I know you are asking this question in all seriousness,” said Füsun. “And I want to give you a serious answer. Shall I try to do that?”
    “Of course … Why are you getting up?”
    “Because I don’t want to be naked when I say what I have to say to you.”
    “Shall I get dressed, too?” I said, and when she didn’t answer I too got dressed.
    The cigarette packets exhibited alongside this Kütahya ashtray, retrieved from a cupboard elsewhere in the flat and brought to the bedroom, are—like the teacup (Füsun’s), the glass, and the seashell that Füsun kept fingering so nervously as she told her stories—assembled here to evoke the room’s heavy, draining, crushing atmosphere at that moment. Füsun’s girlish hair clip should remind us that the stories she told had happened to a child.
    Füsun’s first story was about the owner of a little shop on Kuyulu Bostan Street that sold tobacco, toys, and stationery. This Uncle Sleaze was a friend of her father’s, and from time to time he