The Museum of Innocence Read Online Free PDF Page B

thorough search.
    “I think I left it here,” she said innocently, pointing at the mirrored wardrobe.
    As we scoured the apartment, looking even in the most unlikely places, I asked her what she did in her “spare time”—as it was called in the celebrity magazines. The year before, she had not scored high enough on her university entrance exam to gain admission to the university course of study she had wanted. So now, whatever time she had left over from the Şanzelize Boutique, she spent on the Outstanding Achievement Course. There were only forty-five days left before this year’s examination, so she was studying very hard.
    “What course do you want to take?”
    “I don’t know,” she said, a bit embarrassed. “What I’d like, actually, is to go to the conservatory to train as an actress.”
    “Those classes are good for nothing; they’re all in it for profit, every last one of them,” I said. “If you find you’re struggling, especially with mathematics, why don’t you come over, since I’m here working every afternoon? I can teach you quickly.”
    “Do you help other girls with mathematics?” she asked mockingly, raising her eyebrows in that way again.
    “There are no other girls.”
    “Sibel Hanım comes to our shop. She’s very beautiful, and very charming, too. When are you getting married?”
    “The engagement party is in a month and a half. Will this umbrella suit you?” I said, offering her a parasol my mother had brought back from Nice. She said that of course she could not return to the shop with such an oddity. She wanted to leave now and was prepared to abandon her umbrella. “The rain has stopped,” she said joyfully. As she opened the door, I panicked, thinking I might never see her again.
    “Please, come again and we’ll just drink tea,” I said.
    “Don’t be angry, Kemal, but I don’t want to come back. And you know I am not going to. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone you kissed me.”
    “What about the umbrella?”
    “The umbrella belongs to Şenay Hanım but it can stay here,” she said, giving me a kiss on the cheek that was hasty but not devoid of emotion.

8
    Turkey’s First Fruit Soda
    HERE I am exhibiting the newspaper advertisements, the commercials, and the bottles of strawberry, peach, orange, and sour cherry flavors of Turkey’s first domestic fruit soda, Meltem, in memory of our optimism and the happy-go-lucky spirit of the day. That evening Zaim was celebrating the launch of his new product with an extravagant party in his perfectly situated Ayaspaşa apartment which had a sweeping view of the Bosphorus. Our whole group would be together again. Sibel was happy to be among my rich friends—she enjoyed the yacht trips down the Bosphorus, the surprise birthday parties, and the nights at clubs, which would end with all of us piling into our cars to roam the streets of Istanbul—but she didn’t like Zaim. She thought he was a show-off, too much a playboy and rather “coarse;” and his party tricks—like the “surprise” belly dancer at the end of the evening or his habit of lighting girls’ cigarettes with a lighter bearing the Playboy logo—she found “banal.” Sibel was even more disapproving of his dalliances with minor actresses and models (the latter a new phenomenon in Turkey, and still viewed with suspicion), whom he knew of course he would never marry, on account of their being known to have had sex; nor could she bear his misleading the nice girls he also took out with no intention of letting a relationship develop. That is why, when I phoned her to say that I was feeling unwell and unable to attend the party, or to go out at all, I was surprised to find Sibel disappointed.
    “They say the German model in the Meltem campaign is going to be there!” Sibel said.
    “But I thought you felt that Zaim was a bad influence on me….”
    “If you can’t even drag yourself to a Zaim party, you really must be sick. Now you have me worried.