Museum of Innocence
By Katrina Keegan
I read somewhere that losing your virginity shouldn’t mean the first time a penis enters your vagina, but rather the first time you orgasm. I had sex nearly every day for the three weeks I spent in Turkey, but by that definition, I flew home “innocent.”
The Museum of Innocence is a red building sidled between washed-out houses on a cobblestone street, like a blood stain on the rumpled linens of Istanbul. Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk curated the museum based on his novel by the same name. That is, he arranged salt shakers, toy dogs, and toothbrushes behind glass and haunted a home with a faux ghost-written memoir about a man’s secret relationship with an 18-year-old girl. I listened to the ghost whisper the audio book in my ear, starting with the first exhibit: tens of thousands of lipstick-stained cigarette butts, each marked with the smoker’s thoughts. One read: kötü insan değilim, “I am not a bad person.”
Flipping through the book, I found a scene where the lovers are having sex. Specifically, he “entered her from behind,” nibbling on her ear. My vagina throbbed with memory. Just like that – his lips against my ear, taking me from behind – I had sex without pain for the first time after many excruciating attempts with three different partners. I cried from relief then. Even now I cry a lot during sex, from hope, frustration, love, the overwhelming desire to be a “bad girl” and say yes while the pain often still says no.
The plot of the Museum of Innocence is tied to the no, but a different no: society’s no to losing your innocence before marriage. In Turkey’s context, that no comes partly from religion. I felt no quite strongly on a holiday in Turkey’s religious capital, the birthplace of the whirling dervishes.
The streets were naked, stripped of the colorful lamps and sweets that spilled from tourist shops just the day before. Men stared at me: the female body, exhibit A. Women, wrapped in scarves, looked away. My uncovered head usually put me in the majority in Turkey; that morning in Konya, I did not see a single female hair. Pressure built in my chest. I went back to the hotel and dug through my luggage for my white scarf. I put it on and felt instant relief. Women smiled at me. Men looked away.
Right after relief, I felt immoral – and giddy. Immoral, because I knew I was appropriating a sacred practice for my own comfort. Giddy, because by putting on the headscarf, I acquired the power to take it off with no moral trepidation, just to adjust it or let my sweaty neck breath for a moment. It felt like I became a secret foreign agent, who spoke enough Turkish to pass, but had sex that very morning, in a crowd of oblivious innocents, celebrating a Muslim holiday in the most holy city in Turkey.
Sacred places existed in Turkey long before Islam, and I had violated another one a few days earlier. Early Christians carved thousands of churches into the caves of Cappadocia. Many are showcased in the Goreme Open Air Museum, a UNESCO World Heritage site with many signs banning photography. The museum is next to a national park nearly devoid of any kind of signs, so my lover and I got lost there. I glanced into a cave above us and saw a carved stone pattern on the ceiling. We scrambled up the hill and found a church covered in frescos. I traced them with my finger in awe. We took a lot of pictures of my church, as I immediately thought of it. I imagined I was its “first,” at least in a thousand years.
Religion in Turkey predates both mosques and churches. My lover and I visited Ephesus, the ruins of an ancient Roman and, before that, Greek city. In the back of a small room, I noticed a white marble statue: a woman with hundreds of breasts. I learned later that it was a reproduction of a statue of Artemis that once stood in her temple. The hundred breasts made her an unusual Artemis, blended with the local mother goddess – the opposite of a the original Greek goddess, who was an eternal virgin. Her temple was burned down by a man who wanted eternal fame.
Innocence is in constant tension with the eternal. It is hard to preserve in a marble temple or behind museum glass. Innocence is anything that we are compelled to destroy, that we want to be the one to destroy. It takes a lot of choices over time to keep it, but just one well-executed choice to end it. Am I a bad person, with my fake headscarf corrupting a holy city, my camera taking illicit images of a church? Is my lover, with his attempts to make me orgasm, despite the fact that almost all of them ended in pain?
I sought out the Sufi whirling dervishes in Istanbul. I picked the one promising a genuine ceremony, not a show. For hours the men and women of the Sufi house discussed theology with an elder, recited prayers, chanted “Allah” to the beat of drums. Finally they cleared the floor, reentered in white robes to flute music, and started to spin. Most of the tourists pulled out their cameras. I took a lot of pictures of sacred things in Turkey, but in this case I abstained. I felt sickened by the photographers, even by my own presence, violating their worship. But the dervishes were not bothered. Eyes closed, white robes flared, they continued to whirl, a practice that was developed to help believers forget the world around them. Maybe innocence is not as fragile as I thought. Innocence is a choice, but it was not my choice. It was theirs.
I was the one who destroyed my own innocence, months later, in my bed.
I think I know how the girl felt when she wrote on her cigarette butt “I am not a bad person.” The “not a bad person” part doesn’t matter nearly as much as choosing who “I am.”
*
Katrina Keegan is an undergraduate student and writer who traveled in Turkey in September, 2017.
*