Traveller_Levin's Blog

Distant Relations

by Orhan Pamuk September 7, 2009

 The series of events and coincidences that would change my entire life began on April 27, 1975, when Sibel happened to spot a purse designed by the famous Jenny Colon in a shopwindow as we were walking along Valikonagi Avenue, enjoying the cool spring evening. Our formal engagement was not far off; we were tipsy and in high spirits. We’d just been to Fuaye, a posh new restaurant in Nisantasi; over dinner with my parents, we’d discussed at length the preparations for the engagement party, which was scheduled for the middle of June, so that Nurcihan, Sibel’s friend since her days at the Lycée Notre Dame de Sion, in Paris, could come from France to attend. Sibel had long ago arranged for her engagement dress to be made by Silky Ismet, who was then the most expensive and sought-after dressmaker in Istanbul, and that evening Sibel and my mother discussed how they might sew on the pearls that my mother had given her for the dress. It was my future father-in-law’s express wish that his only daughter’s engagement party be as extravagant as a wedding, and my mother was delighted to help fulfill that wish as best she could. As for my father, he was charmed enough by the prospect of a daughter-in-law who had “studied at the Sorbonne,” as was said in those days among the Istanbul bourgeoisie of any girl who had gone to Paris for any kind of education.

It was as I was walking Sibel home that evening, my arm wrapped lovingly around her sturdy shoulders, and thinking with pride how happy and lucky I was, that she said, “Oh, what a beautiful bag!” Though my mind was clouded by the wine I’d drunk at dinner, I took note of the purse and the name of the shop, and the next day I went back. In fact, I had never been one of those suave, chivalrous playboys who are always looking for the slightest excuse to buy women presents or send them flowers, though perhaps I longed to be. In those days, bored Westernized housewives in the affluent neighborhoods of Sisli, Nisantasi, and Bebek did not open “art galleries,” as they did later, but ran boutiques, stocking them with trinkets and entire ensembles smuggled in their luggage from Paris and Milan or with copies of “the latest” dresses featured in imported magazines like Elle and Vogue, and selling these goods at ridiculously inflated prices to other rich housewives who were as bored as they were.

The proprietress of the Sanzelize (its name a transliteration of the legendary Parisian avenue), Senay Hanim, was a very distant relation on my mother’s side, but she wasn’t there when I walked into the boutique at around twelve and the small bronze double-knobbed camel bell jingled two notes that can still make my heart pound. It was a warm day, but inside the shop it was cool and dark. At first I thought that there was no one there, my eyes still adjusting to the gloom after the noonday sunlight. Then I felt my heart rise into my throat, with the force of an immense wave about to crash against the shore.

 “I’d like to buy the handbag on the mannequin in the window,” I managed to say, staggered by the sight of her.

“Do you mean the cream-colored Jenny Colon?”

When we came eye to eye, I immediately remembered her.

“The handbag on the mannequin in the window,” I repeated dreamily.

“Oh, right,” she said and walked over to the window. In a flash she had slipped off one of her high-heeled yellow pumps, extending her bare foot, whose nails she’d carefully painted red, onto the floor of the display area, and stretching her arm toward the mannequin. My eyes travelled from her empty shoe over her long bare legs. It wasn’t even May yet, and they were already tanned.

Their length made her lacy yellow skirt seem even shorter. Hooking the bag, she returned to the counter and, with slender, dexterous fingers, removed the balls of crumpled tissue paper, showing me the inside of the zippered pocket, the two smaller pockets (both empty), and also a secret compartment, from which she produced a card inscribed “Jenny Colon,” her whole demeanor suggesting mystery and seriousness, as if she were showing me something very personal.

“Hello, Füsun,” I said. “You’re all grown up! Perhaps you don’t recognize me.”

“Of course, Kemal, sir, I recognized you right away, but when I saw that you did not recognize me I thought it would be better not to disturb you.”

There was a silence. I looked again at one of the pockets she had pointed to inside the bag. Her beauty, or her skirt, which was in fact too short, or something else altogether, had unsettled me, and I couldn’t act naturally.

“Well . . . what are you up to these days?”

“I’m studying for my university entrance exams. And I come here every day, too. Here in the shop, I’m meeting lots of new people.”

“That’s wonderful. So, tell me, how much is this handbag?”

Furrowing her brow, she peered at the handwritten price tag on the bottom: “One thousand five hundred liras.” (At the time, this would have been six months’ pay for a junior civil servant.) “But I am sure Senay Hanim would want to offer you a special price. She’s gone home for lunch and must be napping now, so I can’t phone her. But if you could come by this evening . . .”

“It’s not important,” I said, and, taking out my wallet—a clumsy gesture that, later, Füsun often mimicked—I counted out the damp bills. Füsun wrapped the purse in paper, carefully but with evident inexperience, and then put it into a plastic bag. Throughout this process she knew that I was admiring her honey-hued arms and her quick, elegant gestures. When she politely handed me the shopping bag, I thanked her. “Please give my regards to Aunt Nesibe and your father,” I said, having failed to remember his name in time. Then, for a moment, I paused: my ghost had left my body and was now, in some corner of Heaven, embracing Füsun and kissing her. I made quickly for the door. The bell jingled, and I heard a canary warbling. I went out into the street, glad to feel the heat. I was pleased with my purchase; I loved Sibel very much. I decided to forget this shop, and Füsun.

Nevertheless, at dinner that evening I mentioned to my mother that I had run into our distant relation Füsun while buying a handbag for Sibel.

“Oh, yes, Nesibe’s daughter is working in that shop of Senay’s, and what a shame it is!” my mother said. “They don’t even visit us for the holidays anymore. That beauty contest put them in such an awkward spot. I walk past the shop every day, but I can’t even bring myself to go inside and say hello to the poor girl—nor, in fact, does it even cross my mind. But when she was little, you know, I was very fond of her. When Nesibe came to sew, she’d come, too, sometimes. I’d get your toys out of the cupboard and, while her mother sewed, she’d play with them quietly. Nesibe’s mother, Aunt Mihriver, may she rest in peace—she was such a wonderful person, too.”

“Exactly how are we related?”

Because my father was watching television and paying us no mind, my mother launched into an elaborate story about her father, who was born the same year as Atatürk and, just like the founder of the Republic, attended Semsi Efendi School. It seems that long before my grandfather, Ethem Kemal, married my grandmother he had made a very hasty first marriage, at the age of twenty-three, to Füsun’s great-grandmother, who was of Bosnian extraction, and who died in the Balkan wars, during the evacuation of Edirne. Though the unfortunate woman had not given Ethem Kemal children, she had already had a daughter, named Mihriver, by a poor sheikh, whom she’d married when she was “still a child.” So Aunt Mihriver (Füsun’s grandmother, who had been brought up by a very odd assortment of people) and her daughter, Nesibe Hanim (Füsun’s mother), were not, strictly speaking, relatives; they were more like in-laws, and though my mother had always emphasized this she had still directed us to call the women from this far branch of the family “Aunt.” During their last holiday visit, my mother had given these impoverished relations (who lived in the backstreets of Tesvikiye) an unusually chilly reception that had led to hurt feelings, because, two years earlier, Aunt Nesibe, without saying a word, had allowed her sixteen-year-old daughter, then a student at Nisantasi Lycée for Girls, to enter a beauty contest. My mother, on subsequently learning that Aunt Nesibe had in fact encouraged her daughter, even taking pride in this stunt, which should have caused her to feel only shame, had hardened her heart against Aunt Nesibe, whom she had once so loved and protected.

For her part, Aunt Nesibe had always esteemed my mother, who was twenty years older and had been supportive of her when she was a young woman going from house to house in Istanbul’s most affluent neighborhoods, in search of work as a seamstress.

“They were desperately poor,” my mother said. And, lest she exaggerate, she added, “Though they were hardly the only ones, my son—all of Turkey was poor in those days.” My mother had recommended Aunt Nesibe to all her friends, and once a year (sometimes twice) she herself would call her to our house to sew a dress for some party or wedding.

Because these sewing visits almost always took place during school hours, I didn’t see her much. But in 1957, at the end of August, my mother, urgently needing a dress for a wedding, had called Nesibe to our summer home, in Suadiye. Retiring to the back room on the second floor, overlooking the sea, she and Nesibe set themselves up next to the window, from which, peering between the fronds of the palm trees, they might see the rowboats and motorboats and the boys jumping off the pier. When Nesibe had unpacked her sewing box, whose lid was adorned with a view of Istanbul, they sat surrounded by her scissors, pins, measuring tape, thimbles, and swatches of lace and other material, complaining of the heat, the mosquitoes, and the strain of sewing under such pressure, joking like sisters, and staying up half the night to slave away on my mother’s Singer sewing machine. I remember Bekri, the cook, bringing one glass of lemonade after another into that room (the hot air thick with the dust of velvet), because Nesibe, who was twenty and pregnant, was prone to cravings; when we all sat down to lunch, my mother would tell Bekri, half joking, “Whatever a pregnant woman desires, you must let her have, or else the child will turn out ugly!” And, with that in mind, I remember looking at Nesibe’s small bump with a certain interest. That must have been my first awareness of Füsun’s existence, though no one knew yet whether she was a girl or a boy.

“Nesibe didn’t even inform her husband—she just lied about her daughter’s age and entered her in that beauty contest,” my mother said, fuming at the thought. “Thank God, she didn’t win, so they were spared that public disgrace. If the school authorities had got wind of it, they would have expelled the girl. . . . She must have finished lycée by now. I don’t expect that she’ll be doing any further studies, but I’m not up to date, since they don’t come to visit on holidays anymore. . . . Can there be anyone in this country who doesn’t know what kind of girl, what kind of woman, enters a beauty contest? How did she behave with you?”

This was my mother’s way of suggesting that Füsun had begun to sleep with men. I’d heard the same from my Nisantasi playboy friends when Füsun appeared in a photograph with the other finalists in the newspaper Milliyet, but as I’d found the whole thing embarrassing I tried to show no interest. After we both fell silent, my mother wagged her finger at me ominously and said, “Be careful! You’re about to become engaged to a very special, very charming, very lovely girl! Why don’t you show me this purse you’ve bought her. Mümtaz!”—she was calling my father—“Look! Kemal’s bought Sibel a purse!”

“Really?” my father said, his contented expression suggesting that he had seen and approved of the bag as a sign of how happy his son and his son’s sweetheart were, though not once did he take his eyes off the screen.

Once I’d graduated from business school in America and completed my military service, my father demanded that I follow in my brother’s footsteps and become a manager in his business, which was growing by leaps and bounds, and so when I was still very young he appointed me the general manager of Satsat, his distribution-and-export firm. Satsat had an inflated operating budget and made hefty profits, thanks not to me but to various accounting tricks by which profits from my father’s other factories and businesses were funnelled into Satsat (which could be translated into English as “Sellsell”). I spent my days mastering the finer points of the business from worn-out accountants, twenty or thirty years my senior, and large-breasted lady clerks as old as my mother; mindful that I would not have been in charge if I weren’t the owner’s son, I tried to show some humility.

At quitting time, while buses and streetcars as old as Satsat’s clerks rumbled down the avenue, shaking the building to its foundations, Sibel, my intended, would come to visit, and we would make love in my office. Despite her modern outlook and the feminist notions she had brought back from Europe, Sibel’s ideas about secretaries were no different from my mother’s. “Let’s not make love here. It makes me feel like a secretary!” she’d say sometimes. But, as we proceeded to the leather sofa in the office, the real reason for her reserve—that Turkish girls, in those days, were afraid of sex before marriage—became obvious.

Little by little, sophisticated girls from wealthy Westernized families who had spent time in Europe were beginning to break this taboo and sleep with their boyfriends before marriage. Sibel, who occasionally boasted of being one of those “brave” girls, had first slept with me eleven months earlier. But, by this point, she felt that the arrangement had gone on long enough and it was about time we married. I do not want to exaggerate my fiancée’s daring or make light of the sexual oppression of women, because it was only when Sibel saw that my “intentions were serious,” when she was confident that I was “someone who could be trusted”—in other words, when she was absolutely sure that there would, in the end, be a wedding—that she gave herself to me. Believing myself a decent and responsible person, I had every intention of marrying her; but, even if I hadn’t wished to, there was no question of my having a choice now that she had “given me her virginity.” Before long, this burden cast a shadow over the common ground between us, which we were so proud of—the illusion of being “free and modern” (though, of course, we would never have used such words for ourselves), on account of having made love before marriage—and in a way this, too, brought us closer.

A similar shadow fell over us each time Sibel anxiously hinted that we should set a date soon, but there were also times when she and I were very happy, making love in the office, and I remember wrapping my arms around her in the dark, as the noise of traffic and rumbling buses rose from Halaskargazi Avenue, and telling myself how lucky I was, how content I would be for the rest of my life. Once, after our exertions, as I was stubbing out my cigarette in an ashtray bearing the Satsat logo, Sibel, sitting half naked on my secretary’s chair, started tapping at the typewriter, and giggling over her impression of the dumb blonde who featured so prominently in the jokes and humor magazines of the time.

Over dinner at Fuaye on the evening of the day I bought the purse, I asked Sibel, “Wouldn’t it be better if from now on we met in that flat my mother has in the Merhamet Apartments? It looks out over such a pretty garden.”

“Are you expecting some delay in moving to our own house once we’re married?” she asked.

“No, darling, I meant nothing of the sort.”

“I don’t want to skulk about in secret apartments, as if I were your mistress.”

“You’re right.”

“Where did this idea come from, to meet in that apartment?”

“Never mind,” I said. I looked at the cheerful crowd around me as I brought out the purse, still hidden in its plastic bag.

“What’s this?” Sibel asked, sensing a present.

“A surprise! Open and see.”

“Is it really?” When she opened the plastic bag and saw the purse, the childish joy on her face gave way first to a quizzical look, and then to a disappointment that she tried to hide.

“Do you remember?” I ventured. “When I was walking you home last night, you saw it in the window of that shop and admired it.”

“Oh, yes. How thoughtful of you.”

“I’m glad you like it. It will look so elegant on your arm at our engagement party.”

“I hate to say it, but the purse I’m taking to our engagement party was chosen a long time ago,” Sibel said. “Oh, don’t look so downcast! It was so thoughtful of you to go to all the effort of buying this lovely present for me. . . . All right then, just so you don’t think I’m being unkind to you. I could never put this purse on my arm at our engagement party, because this purse is a fake!”

“What?”

“This is not a genuine Jenny Colon, my dear Kemal. It’s an imitation.”

“How can you tell?”

“Just by looking at it, dear. See the way the label is stitched to the leather? Now look at the stitching in this real Jenny Colon I bought in Paris. It’s not for nothing that it’s an exclusive brand in France and all over the world. She would never use such cheap thread.”

For a moment, as I looked at the genuine stitching, I asked myself why my future bride was taking such a triumphant tone. Sibel was the daughter of a retired ambassador who had long since sold off his pasha grandfather’s land and was now penniless; technically, this made her the daughter of a civil servant, and this status sometimes caused her to feel uneasy and insecure. Whenever her anxieties overtook her, she would talk about her paternal grandmother, who had played the piano, or about her paternal grandfather, who had fought in the War of Independence, or she’d tell me how close her maternal grandfather had been to Sultan Abdülhamid. But her timidity moved me, and I loved her all the more for it. With the expansion of the textile and export trades in the early seventies, and the consequent tripling of Istanbul’s population, the price of land had skyrocketed throughout the city and particularly in neighborhoods like ours. Although my father’s fortune, carried on this wave, had grown extravagantly over the past decade, increasing fivefold, our surname (Basmaci, “cloth printer”) left no doubt that we owed our wealth to generations of cloth manufacture. It made me uneasy to be troubled by the “fake” purse, despite all our cumulative progress.

When she saw my spirits sink, Sibel caressed my hand. “How much did you pay for the bag?”

“Fifteen hundred liras,” I said. “If you don’t want it, I can exchange it tomorrow.”

“Don’t exchange it, darling. Ask for your money back, because they really cheated you.”

“The owner of the shop is Senay Hanim, and we’re distantly related!” I said, raising my eyebrows in dismay.

Sibel took back the bag, whose interiors I had been quietly exploring. “You’re so knowledgeable, darling, so clever and cultured,” she said, with a tender smile, “but you have absolutely no idea how easily women can trick you.”

At noon the next day, I went back to the Sanzelize Boutique carrying the purse in the same plastic bag. The bell rang as I walked in, but once again the shop was so gloomy that at first I thought no one was there. In the strange silence of the ill-lit shop, the canary sang chik-chik-chik. Then I made out Füsun’s shadow through a screen, between the leaves of a huge vase of cyclamens. She was waiting on a fat lady, who was trying on an outfit in the fitting room. This time, she was wearing a charming and flattering blouse, a print of hyacinths intertwined with leaves and wildflowers. When she looked around the screen and saw me, she smiled sweetly.

“You seem busy,” I said, indicating the fitting room with my eyes.

“We’re just about finished,” she said, as if to imply that she and her customer were just talking idly at this point.

My eyes caught the canary, fluttering up and down in its cage, a pile of fashion magazines in the corner, and an assortment of accessories imported from Europe, but I couldn’t fix my attention on anything. Much as I wanted to dismiss the feeling as ordinary, I could not deny the startling truth that when I looked at Füsun I saw someone familiar, someone I felt I knew intimately. She resembled me. The same sort of hair that grew curly and dark in childhood only to straighten as we grew older. On her, it was now a shade of blond, which, like her clear complexion, was complemented by her print blouse. I felt that I could easily put myself in her place, could understand her deeply. A painful memory came to me: my friends referring to her as “something out of Playboy.” Could she have slept with them? “Return the purse, take your money, and run,” I told myself. “You’re about to become engaged to a wonderful girl.” I turned to look outside, in the direction of Nisantasi Square, but soon Füsun’s reflection appeared ghostlike in the smoky glass.

After the woman in the fitting room huffed and puffed her way out of a skirt and left without buying anything, Füsun folded up the rejected items and put them back where they belonged. “I saw you walking down the street yesterday evening,” she said, turning up her beautiful lips. She was wearing a light-pink lipstick, sold under the brand name Misslyn, and though it was a common Turkish product, on her it looked exotic and alluring.

“When did you see me?” I asked.

“Early in the evening. You were with Sibel Hanim. I was walking down the sidewalk on the other side of the street. Were you going out to eat?”

“Yes.”

“You make a handsome couple!” she said, as the elderly do when taking pleasure in the sight of happy young people.

I did not ask her how she knew Sibel. “There’s a small favor we’d like to ask of you,” I said. As I took out the bag, I felt both embarrassment and panic. “We’d like to return this bag.”

“Certainly. I’d be happy to exchange it for you. You might like these chic new gloves and we have this hat, which has just arrived from Paris. Sibel Hanim didn’t like the bag?”

“I’d prefer not to exchange it,” I said shamefacedly. “I’d like to ask for my money back.”

I saw shock on her face, even some fear. “Why?” she asked.

“Apparently this bag is not a genuine Jenny Colon,” I whispered. “It seems that it’s a fake.”

“What?”

“I don’t really understand these things,” I said helplessly.

“Nothing like that ever happens here!” she said in a harsh voice. “Do you want your money back right now?”

“Yes!” I blurted out.

She looked deeply pained. Dear God, I thought, why hadn’t I just disposed of the bag and told Sibel I’d got the money back? “Look, this has nothing to do with you or Senay Hanim. We Turks, praise God, manage to make imitations of every European fashion,” I said, struggling to smile. “For me—or should I say for us—it’s enough for a bag to fulfill its function, to look lovely in a woman’s hand. It’s not important what the brand is, or who made it, or if it’s an original.” But Füsun, like me, didn’t believe a word I was saying.

“No, I am going to give you your money back,” she said in that same harsh voice. I looked down and remained silent, prepared to meet my fate, and ashamed of my brutishness.

Determined as she sounded, I sensed that Füsun could not do what she intended to do; there was something strange in the intensely embarrassing moment. She was looking at the till as if someone had put a spell on it, as if it were possessed by demons and she couldn’t bring herself to touch it. When I saw her face redden and crinkle up, her eyes welling with tears, I panicked and drew two steps closer.

She began to cry softly. I have never worked out exactly how it happened, but I wrapped my arms around her and she leaned her head against my chest and wept. “Füsun, I’m so sorry,” I whispered. I caressed her soft hair and her forehead. “Please, just forget this ever happened. It’s a fake purse, that’s all.”

Like a child, she took a deep breath, sobbed once or twice, then burst into tears again. To touch her body and her beautiful arms, to feel her breasts pressed against my chest, to hold her like that, if only briefly, made my head spin. Perhaps it was because I was trying to repress my desire, stronger each time I touched her, that I conjured up the illusion that we had known each other for years, that we were already very close. She was my sweet, inconsolable, grief-stricken, beautiful sister! For a moment—and perhaps because I knew that we were related, however distantly—her body, with its long limbs, fine bones, and fragile shoulders, reminded me of my own. Had I been a girl, had I been twelve years younger, this was what my body would have been like. “There’s nothing to be upset about,” I said, as I caressed her blond hair.

“I can’t open the till to give you back your money,” she explained. “Because when Senay Hanim goes home for lunch she locks it and takes the key with her, I’m ashamed to say.” Leaning her head against my chest, she began to cry again, as I continued my careful and compassionate caressing of her hair. “I just work here to meet people and pass the time. It’s not for the money,” she said, sobbing.

“Working for money is nothing to be embarrassed about,” I said stupidly, heartlessly.

“Yes,” she said, like a dejected child. “My father is a retired teacher. . . . I turned eighteen two weeks ago, and I didn’t want to be a burden.”

Fearful of the sexual beast now threatening to rear its head, I took my hand from her hair. She understood at once and collected herself; we both stepped back.

“Please don’t tell anyone I cried,” she said, after rubbing her eyes.

“It’s a promise,” I said. “A solemn promise between friends, Füsun. We can trust each other with our secrets.”

I saw her smile. “Let me leave the purse here,” I said. “I can come back for the money later.”

“Leave the bag if you wish, but it’d be better if you didn’t come back here for the money. Senay Hanim will insist that it isn’t a fake and you’ll come to regret that you ever suggested otherwise.”

“Then let’s exchange it for something,” I said.

“I can no longer do that,” she said, sounding like a proud and tetchy girl.

“No, really, it’s not important,” I offered.

“But it is to me,” she said firmly. “When Senay Hanim comes back to the shop, I’ll get the money from her.”

“I don’t want that woman causing you any more upset,” I replied.

“Don’t worry, I’ve just worked out how to do it,” she said with the faintest of smiles. “I’m going to say that Sibel Hanim already has exactly the same bag, and that’s why she’s returning it. Is that all right?”

“Wonderful idea,” I said. “But why don’t I say that to Senay Hanim?”

“No, don’t you say anything to her,” Füsun said emphatically. “Because she’ll only try to trick you, to extract personal information from you. Don’t come to the shop at all. I can leave the money with Aunt Vecihe.”

“Oh, please, don’t involve my mother in this. She’s even nosier.”

“Then where shall I leave your money?” Füsun asked, raising her eyebrows.

“At the Merhamet Apartments, 131 Tesvikiye Avenue, where my mother has a flat,” I said. “Before I went to America, I used it as my hideout—I’d go there to study and listen to music. It’s a delightful place that looks out over a garden in the back. . . . I still go there at lunchtime, between two and four, to catch up on paperwork.”

“Of course. I can bring your money there. What’s the apartment number?”

“Four,” I whispered. I could barely get out the next three words, which seemed to die in my throat. “Second floor. Goodbye.”

My heart had figured it all out and was beating madly. Before rushing outside, I gathered up my strength and, pretending that nothing unusual had happened, gave her one last look. Back in the street, my shame and guilt mixed with so many images of bliss in the unseasonable warmth of that April afternoon that the very sidewalks of Nisantasi seemed aglow with a mysterious yellow. My feet chose the shaded path, taking me under the eaves of the buildings and the blue-and-white striped awnings of the shopwindows, and when, in one of those windows, I saw a yellow jug, I felt compelled to go inside and buy it. Unlike any other object acquired so casually, this yellow jug drew no comment from anyone during the twenty years that it sat on the table where my mother and father and, later, my mother and I ate our meals. Every time I touched the handle of that jug, I would remember those days when I first felt the misery that was to turn me in on myself, leaving my mother to watch me in silence at dinner, her eyes filled half with sadness, half with reproach.

Arriving home, I greeted my mother with a kiss; though pleased to see me early in the afternoon, she was nevertheless surprised. I told her that I had bought the jug on a whim, adding, “Could you give me the key to the Merhamet Apartments? Sometimes the office gets so noisy I just can’t concentrate. I was wondering if I might have better luck at the apartment. It always worked when I was young.”

My mother said, “It must be an inch thick with dust,” but she went straight to her room to fetch the key to the building, which was attached to the apartment key by a red ribbon. “Do you remember that Kütahya vase with the red flowers?” she asked as she handed me the keys. “I can’t find it anywhere in the house, so can you check to see if I took it over there? And don’t work so hard. . . . Your father spent his whole life working hard so that you young ones could have some fun in life. You deserve to be happy. Take Sibel out and enjoy the spring air.” Then, pressing the keys into my hand, she gave me a strange look and said, “Be careful!” It was the look that she would give us when we were children, to warn us that life held unsuspected dangers that were far deeper and more treacherous than, for instance, failing to take proper care of a key. ♦