“Please! Please come in and make yourself at home. I’ll be right back,” I said and ran to the bedroom.
I closed the bedroom door and leaned back against it. My heart, pounding madly, skipped a beat.
I sat in front of the mirror, put on make-up with shaking hands, and then took everything out of my wardrobe, struggling to decide what to wear.
After a few unsuccessful trials, I managed to gather my hair in a bun, put on my pearl earrings, and from all the blouses, skirts and pants I had thrown onto the bed, I chose a dark green and light brown plaid dress with a white collar and belted at the waist.
I turned around and inspected the image in the mirror. I powdered my face. Now I looked exactly like a high school girl going out for the afternoon.
Turgut and Fuat were standing in the hallway, waiting for me to join them. I picked up my handbag, and we left.
It was a hot day, but you could feel that autumn was on its way. A chauffeur in a uniform and a hat held the door for us, and we got in the car. Turgut and I sat on one large single seat, and Fuat sat facing us.
As we turned to get to the square, we found ourselves in the middle of a demonstration.
The crowd, accompanied by mounted policemen, was protesting for the rights of black people. “Stop slavery!” was written across their signs.
While we sat in the car, waiting for the demonstrators, shouting slogans, to pass, Fuat did something unexpected. “Come,” he said, and got out of the car. At a loss for words, we followed him. He pushed the policemen in front of us to get to the front and took the arms of the protesters in the front row. We suddenly found ourselves shouting slogans with them. Turgut was nervous. “Let’s hope no one takes a picture of us. It would be a disaster.”
But Fuat didn’t care. Marching in the front row, he was screaming, “Slavery must end! Give people their rights!”
Later, at lunch, he told us the story of the senseless killing of a black child by white men a few weeks ago. He also told us about Ankara and that he still had not become used to being at the center of politics.
Our eyes met just once. Most of the time, he talked to Turgut, giving him advice like an older brother. Soon, the Cyprus issue arose. Fuat took out an old hardcover copy of Othello and read with his perfect English some parts he had underlined, but I felt as if neither of them wanted to delve into that subject in my presence.
Honestly, I did not care what Fuat talked about as long as he continued to speak. One could listen to him for ages. He talked with such enthusiasm, using long intricate sentences and phrases embellished with a tone that was sometimes full of ardor and other times calm and withdrawn, making you think he was reading lines from a book.
We were sitting at a table next to the window. The restaurant was crowded. With the hum of voices in the background, we listened intently to every word he said. After coffee, he took a cigarette out of a silver case with his long elegant fingers, lit it, and stopped abruptly for a single moment to stare at me. Then he turned his eyes to look off in the distance, as if he were no longer in that room. A melancholy song was playing. It was probably Doris Day, singing “Secret Love”.
That momentary lapse into silence when he lost himself in thought was one of the first special moments I recorded about him in my memory.
Then he opened the newspaper on the table. “Look at that!” he exclaimed. “There’s a concert at the museum at four o’clock.” Turgut glanced at his watch uneasily. “No, no, don’t worry,” Fuat continued. “You go back to work. I’ll go there by myself. Besides, I’m leaving in the evening.”
He knew, of course, that we wouldn’t let him go there alone and that I would have to accompany him.
Much later, he told me laughing, “I wonder how it occurred to me to take a look at the paper that day.”
We walked to the museum, and I took his arm as we climbed the stairs to the entrance. I pretended to be hosting an important guest as usual, but the truth was different. At the same time, I felt like a brash high school girl who was arm in arm with a man much older than herself. Whatever I did, no matter how much I spoke, I couldn’t stop my heart from beating madly. In my mind, I sang to myself that melody without a break.
We entered the museum, bought our tickets, and began to walk around the ground floor. The concert would not start for more than an hour.
As soon as we passed through a huge door, entered the great hall, and saw that painting facing us, I realized what was happening to me.
It was as if someone had placed the painting there to tell me, “Don’t you really understand what is happening to you?”
A plump child with wings hovered above the clouds in the sky with a bow in his hand. The cherub had an odd smile on his face, and he resembled a mischievous kid who expected to be punished.
The arrow he shot traveled all the way through the colors, clouds, and forests in the painting and pierced my heart.
It was so real that I even felt an abrupt pain in my chest.
I regained my senses when Fuat said, “He doesn’t look like the god of love but a small child. Don’t you think he looks rather innocent?”
Innocent?
“I don’t know,” I replied. “He looks as if he’s shooting arrows just to make mischief.”
Fuat laughed. “But isn’t love a mischievous thing?”
I suddenly recalled that day years ago. The morning in Ankara when we had first met. Wasn’t that the same thing he had told me then? “Your little sister is a little mischievous, I suppose.”
Surely, he didn’t remember that.
Standing in that huge, empty hall under the high ceiling decorated with paintings from hundreds of years ago, we stood trans-fixed by that splendid painting.
I stood there like a small girl who was confused about feelings she couldn’t define and did not know what to do. Let me tell you, at that moment I wanted time to stand still and stay there forever.
Our identities, our attachments, the time and the place were obliterated. I almost felt as if I were the woman from the past in the painting, who secretly met her lover among the trees, and whose long skirt could be heard rustling from where I stood. If I closed my eyes, I thought, I would be able to walk into that painting and along the same path into a new life and replace her.
In fact, I now know why that plump little angel was laughing so mischievously. I also know that at that very moment, I entered another path inside of me and set off for an unknown period in time beyond my control.
To an unknown time.
To an unknown destination.
Don’t we think that we are very different from all the people that we pass on the street as we wander about with an arrow thrust into our heart, certain that we are on cloud nine?
Until we feel the penetrating pain of the arrow.
