Ah, Orhan, andai stilistika prosa memiliki surga, maka salah satu surga itu akan bernama: “The Museum of Innocence”. Berikut saya kutipkan sebagian dari bab pertama “surga kata-kata” itu (versi Bahasa Inggris), begini indahnya:
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THE HAPPIEST MOMENT OF MY LIFE
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It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didnt know it. 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 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. 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. Kissing Füsuns 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. Our bliss was so profound that we went on kissing, heedless of the fall of the earring, whose shape I had not even noticed.
Outside the sky was shimmering as it does only in Istanbul in the spring. 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. We felt the same coolness rising from the musty mattress on which we were making love, the way children play, happily forgetting everything else. 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. From the bed of the back bedroom of the second-floor apartment, we could see a group of boys playing football in the garden below, swearing furiously in the May heat, and as it dawned on us that we were enacting, word for word, exactly those indecencies, we stopped making love to look into each others eyes and smile. But so great was our elation that the joke life had sent us from the back garden was forgotten as quickly as the earring.
When we met the next day, Füsun told me she had lost one of her earrings. Actually, not long after she had left the preceding afternoon, Id spotted it nestled in the blue sheets, her initial dangling at its tip, and I was about to put it aside when, by a strange compulsion, I slipped it into my pocket. So now I said, I have it here, darling, as I reached into the right-hand pocket of my jacket hanging on the back of a chair. Oh, its gone! For a moment, I glimpsed a bad omen, a hint of malign fate, but then I remembered that Id put on a different jacket that morning, because of the warm weather. It must be in the pocket of my other jacket.
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Di dalam foto lainnya terlihat Orhan Pamuk tengah berdiri di dalam museumnya yang unik, “The Museum of Innocence”, di Cukurcuma–sebuah distrik kecil di Istanbul, Turki. Ini adalah sebuah museum bagi benda-benda kecil yang ia kumpulkan selama 15 tahun proses penulisan novelnya, sebuah museum yang mencoba mengekalkan ingatan akan tokoh-tokoh dalam novel The Museum of Innocence. Mulai dari 4.213 puntung rokok, aneka anak kunci, gelas-gelas keramik, pas foto, jam weker tua, baju, bungkus rokok, dll.–sekumpulan narasi kecil untuk sebuah memori tentang cinta dan rasa sepinya–sebuah museum bagi riwayat individu yang mungkin terabaikan dan terlupakan dalam sejarah; sebuah museum bagi sekumpulan benda-benda kecil yang tak akan masuk hitungan sebagai benda-benda bersejarah bagi museum-museum lainnya.
Begini saja, rasa saya, Pamuk seakan hendak menyampaikan protes halusnya kepada narasi-narasi besar sejarah itu, lewat sebuah novel setebal 536 halaman dan sebuah museum bagi “benda-benda tak berharga”.
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Esai @ Ahmad Yulden Erwin, Februari 2016
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