The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk Read Free Book Online Page A

doing so. There had been no coyness, no indecision, not even when she was taking off her clothes.
    At home I found our sitting room empty; sometimes I would come home to find that my father, having gotten up in the middle of the night, was sitting out there in his pajamas, and I would enjoy chatting with him before I went to bed; but tonight both he and my mother were asleep—through their bedroom door, I could hear his snores and her sighs. Before going to bed I poured myself another raki and smoked another cigarette. But even so I did not drop off to sleep at once. My head was still swimming with visions of our lovemaking, and these began to mix with the details of the night’s engagement party.

11
    The Feast of the Sacrifice
    AS I WAS drifting off to sleep I thought about my distant relation Uncle Süreyya, and about his son, whom I’d seen at Yeşim’s party and whose name I kept forgetting. Uncle Süreyya had been at the house for one of Füsun’s holiday visits—the time we’d gone out for a ride in the car. As I lay in bed, stalking sleep, a few images from that cold, gray morning came back to me. As they paraded before my eyes, they seemed both very familiar and very strange, as memories do when they find their way into dreams: I remembered the tricycle, and I remembered going outside with Füsun, watching silently as a lamb was slaughtered, and then taking a ride in the car.
    “We returned that tricycle from our house,” said Füsun, who remembered everything much better than I did when we met the next day at the Merhamet Apartments. “After you and your brother outgrew it, your mother gave it to me. But by then I’d grown too old for it as well, so I didn’t ride it anymore, and when we went to visit you that year, my mother brought it back.”
    “And then my mother must have brought it here,” I said. “Now I can remember Uncle Süreyya also being there that day.”
    “Because he was the one who asked for the liqueur,” said Füsun.
    Füsun’s recollection of that impromptu car excursion was likewise better than my own. I would like to pause here to relate the story that came back to me once she’d told it to me. Füsun was twelve and I was twenty-four years old. It was February 27, 1969, the first day of the Feast of the Sacrifice. On that morning, as on all holidays, our home in Nişantaşı was packed with relatives close and distant, all delighted to have been invited for lunch, and dressed up in suits and ties and their finest dresses. The doorbell kept ringing and newcomers arrived, for example, my younger aunt with her bald husband and her nosy but beautifully dressed children, and everyone would stand to shake hands and kiss them on both cheeks. Fatma Hanım and I were passing out sweets when my father took my brother and me to one side.
    “Uncle Süreyya’s complaining again that we have no liqueurs. Listen, boys, could one of you go down to Alaaddin’s shop and buy some peppermint and strawberry liqueur?”
    My mother had previously banned the customary serving of peppermint and strawberry liqueur in crystal glasses on a silver tray, because sometimes my father drank too much. She’d done this for his health. But two years earlier, on just such a holiday morning, when Uncle Süreyya had lodged his familiar complaint about there being no liqueur, my mother, hoping to cut the discussion short, had asked, “Why would anyone serve alcohol on a religious holiday?” a question that had paved the way for an endless back-and-forth about religion, civilization, Europe, and the Republic between my mother and my fervently secularist pro-Atatürk uncle.
    “Which one of you is going?” my father asked, peeling off a crisp ten-lira note from the wad of cash he’d taken out of the bank to pass out to the janitors and the watchmen and all the children who kissed his hand.
    “Let Kemal go!” said my brother.
    “No, let Osman go,” I said.
    “Why don’t you go, my boy,” my father said to