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.
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