A breeze wafted in through the balcony window, tinged with the sea and linden leaves it lifted the tulle curtains, and they billowed down again in slow motion, chilling our naked bodies. We felt the same coolness rising from the musty mattress on which we were making love, the way children play, happily forgetting everything else. In the streets people still in their winter clothes were perspiring, but inside shops and buildings, and under the linden and chestnut trees, it was still cool. Outside the sky was shimmering as it does only in Istanbul in the spring. Our bliss was so profound that we went on kissing, heedless of the fall of the earring, whose shape I had not even noticed. Kissing Fusun's shoulder, already moist from the heat of our lovemaking, I gently entered her from behind, and as I softly bit her ear, her earring must have come free and, for all we knew, hovered in midair before falling of its own accord. In that moment, on the afternoon of Monday, May 26, 1975, at about a quarter to three, just as we felt ourselves to be beyond sin and guilt so too did the world seem to have been released from gravity and time. It took a few seconds, perhaps, for that luminous state to enfold me, suffusing me with the deepest peace, but it seemed to last hours, even years. Had I known, had I cherished this gift, would everything have turned out differently? Yes, if I had recognized this instant of perfect happiness, I would have held it fast and never let it slip away. It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn't know it. Pamuk says he's always been attracted to small museums and the "melancholy" that seems to permeate them. The idea for the museum came, in part, from the author's visits to small collections around the world. And, in an unusual instance of literature melding into real life, he plans to display those objects in an actual "Museum of Innocence," which he hopes to open in Istanbul in July 2010. Pamuk began collecting the objects that his protagonist Kemal would save before he even began writing the novel. "This is love in a semirepressed society, where communication between men and women is limited, where sex outside of marriage - especially before marriage - is also a taboo," Pamuk tells Robert Siegel. Set in Istanbul in the 1970s and 1980s, the novel focuses on the subtle ways people communicate love - including glances, silences and cherished mementos. Turkish novelist and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk describes his latest work as a love story that "doesn't put love on a pedestal." Instead, The Museum of Innocence is about one man's obsession with a beautiful young woman - and the museum collection he dedicates to the affair that derailed his life. By Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely
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