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and chestnut trees and oleanders. The family’s favourite plant was the absurd Japanese persimmon that sheltered under the wall. My father praised the apple-like fruit of the tree that loses its symmetrical leaves before winter. As the orange fruit of the bare plant gleamed in the dusk he would declare, ‘This is the painting by Nature that defeated René Magritte.’
    As the ezan died away, the wind began to wander here and there. I was sheltering in the room where I could sit back comfortably at my father’s desk. For the first time I noticed the pencil case of Armenian silverwork in the middle of the bulky wooden desk. Beside it was the bronze statue of Eros, a span high, which my mother, searching for a present for my father’s sixtieth birthday, had asked Selçuk Altun to buy at a Sotheby’s auction. It seemed I had failed to notice the sorrowful face of the naked object. Authentic icons were scattered throughout spaces on the bookshelves – silver vases made in Iran, a miniature yacht in a bottle, knick-knacks of half-naked naiads, grotesque porcelain figures, a giant bee imprisoned in an amber egg, three dried seahorses and a ruby globe scattering flaming light onto the shelf of dictionaries. As a first-time museum addict I would examine the date (19 June 1990) of the fall of the Berlin wall, and a heap of rubble, including early Byzantine coins. On a shelf containing the works of Aulus Gellius stood a glass cube engraved with one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s aphorisms. And above the science volumes, on a shelf that included a handwritten fifteenth-century work on geometry, a young shark, three and a half spans in length, stuffed with cotton, was waiting patiently, open-mouthed.
    In the drawing room, before starting on the first bottle in the drinks cabinet, I made a quick, guilty search of the desk drawers. In the lower left drawer lay a forgotten copy of
A King’s Story
, the autobiography of King Edward VIII, who abdicated in order to wed an American widow. Inside the front cover I caught sight of the cassette of a work by Dvořák, my father’s favourite composer. Beneath ‘Songs My Mother Taught Me’, the fourth section of Op. 55 – the
Gypsy Melodies
– were pencilled three question marks. (Suppose I hadn’t been curious about the bulge in the book?) The colour photograph, postcard size, which fell to the floor had been taken under an arbour on my ninth birthday. On either side of my father, Dalga and I were putting on a smile for my mother’s camera. I was shaken by painful feelings and quickly shrugged off the effect of the alcohol that had failed to anaesthetize my body. I imagined the tired pine needles flying skywards in a disciplined formation, and travelled back in hope to twenty years ago. Stroking the wings of Eros, I whispered Bufalino’s poetic aphorism, ‘What sad days those were, the happiest of my life.’

    Until her breasts began to appear, Dalga and I used to wrestle, no holds barred, pushing and shoving and horsing around. Unfortunately she was four years older than me. When I was ten I realized we were physically different, and at eleven I fell hopelessly in love. If the ancient doorbell rang – two short rings, one long – for the swimming pool, I enjoyed an additional pleasure. When we were sunbathing together I would make an excuse to go to my room, where I would masturbate as I stared intently through field-glasses at every inch of her long plump legs and her strong round hips.
    In our neighbourhood, her silent mother Sıla, whom my mother called ‘the Francophone with half a talent’, was my mother’s close friend and bridge partner. She had lost her naval-officer husband in an accident while he was on duty, and she and her daughter had taken refuge with her father-in-law. Ä°fakat kept asking if the little Georgian beauty was taking an interest in the assistant head of the lyceé where