The Museum of Innocence Read Online Free

a handsome couple!” she said, in the way that the elderly do when taking pleasure at the sight of happy young people.
    I did not ask her where she knew Sibel from. “There’s a small favor we’d like to ask of you.” As I took out the bag, I felt both shame 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 Hanım 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 a bit of 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 this bag and told Sibel I’d gotten the money back? “Look, this has nothing to do with you or Şenay Hanım. We Turks, praise God, manage to make imitations of every European fashion,” I said, struggling to smile. “For me—or should I have said 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 she, 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.
    As determined as she sounded, I sensed that Füsun could not do what she was supposed 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, so that 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 handbag, that’s all.”
    Like a child she took a deep breath, sobbed once or twice, and burst into tears again. To touch her body and her lovely long arms, to feel her breasts pressed against my chest, to hold her like that, if only for a moment, made my head spin: Perhaps it was because I was trying to repress the desire, more intense each time I touched her, that I conjured up this illusion that we had known each other for years, that we were already very close. This was my sweet, inconsolable, grief-stricken, beautiful sister! For a moment—and perhaps because I knew we were related, however slightly—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 is what my body would be like. “There’s nothing to be upset about,” I said as I caressed the blond hair.
    “I can’t open the till to give you back your money,” she explained. “Because when Şenay Hanım 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 caresses of her hair. “I just work here to meet people and pass the time. It’s not for the money,” she sobbed.
    “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