16. Jealousy Fusun's House

"When I reached Kuyulu Bostan Street, I walked past a coffeehouse where my friends used to play cards and listen to the radio when we were young, and then past the schoolyard where we’d played football. My inner rationalist, though weakened by all the raki I’d drunk, was not yet dead, and now it warned me that it would be Füsun’s father who’d open the door and that the consequences might be scandalous. I walked only far enough to be able to see their house in the distance, and the lights in the windows. Just to see the second-floor windows reached by the chestnut tree was enough to make my heart pound.
I commissioned this painting to exhibit right here in our museum, providing the artist with all the necessary details, and while it offers a fine impression of the orangey lamplight cast onto the interior of Füsun’s apartment, and the chestnut tree shimmering in the moonlight, and the depth of the dark blue sky beyond the line of rooftops and chimneys of Nişantaşı, does it also, I wonder, convey to the visitor the jealousy I acknowledged as I beheld that view?" (The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk)

"The artist Kemal talks about is Ahmet Işıkçı. Ahmet Işıkçı, a painter from Istanbul, was born in 1940; his work is exhibited for the first time in this museum. Like millions of other non-Western artists, Işıkçı is unduly obsessed with 'authenticity.' " (The Innocence of Objects by Orhan Pamuk)