Belkıs’s fatal traffic accident turns a chance reunion between Kemal Basmacı and Füsun into an encounter with sudden death, and its consequences continue into the funeral that brings Füsun back within Kemal’s sight. The event is at once brutally physical and socially mediated: a crushed taxi draws a crowd, newspaper coverage gives the death a public afterlife, and a framed photograph marks mourning as a visible custom. In Kemal’s retrospective account, the accident also stands immediately before the moment he later calls the happiest of his life.

The Collision

Kemal has gone to the Şanzelize Boutique and bought a bag as a memento while searching for Füsun. As he imagines that she may have visited the Merhamet Apartments and left without finding him, a water tanker bearing the words LIFE—CLEAN WATER passes. Füsun emerges from behind it. The two meet with smiles and ask at once where the other has been: she explains that Şenay Hanım sent her to a friend’s shop, delaying her arrival; he says he had grown worried and gone to the boutique. Their relief at finding one another briefly makes the street seem like the setting for a reunion rather than a catastrophe.

Walking together, they turn from Valikonağı Avenue into Emlak Avenue. A crowd has gathered at the foot of the hill, and people approach with faces altered by what they have seen. Only minutes earlier, the tanker had swerved into the left lane as it descended and crushed a shared taxi on the Taksim–Teşvikiye route. The taxi’s long-nosed 1940s Plymouth had been flattened; the taxi meter was the only part described as surviving. Its driver, trembling and withdrawn in a corner, smoked a cigarette while people pressed toward the wreckage.

Among shards of glass and broken car parts, Kemal sees a woman trapped in the front seat. He recognizes her as the dark-haired customer he had passed while leaving the boutique. The revelation links the collision to the ordinary shopping scene that preceded it: the woman had been alive and near him only minutes earlier, and he now understands that she is dead or dying in the wreck. He takes Füsun by the arm and urges her away. She does not move at once; she remains silent, staring at the pinned woman until she has looked as long as she needs.

From the Street to the Merhamet Apartments

As the crowd grows, Kemal’s unease is not only about the body in the car. He fears recognizing someone among the onlookers, a concern that exposes the social self-consciousness still operating even in the presence of death. When a police car arrives, he and Füsun leave without speaking. They walk up the street toward the police station and then straight to the Merhamet Apartments, carrying the scene with them in silence.

Kemal places the accident immediately before the “happiest moment of my life” announced at the beginning of the book. In the cool stairwell, he embraces and kisses Füsun; he kisses her again inside the apartment, where her playful lips seem shy and her manner reserved. The juxtaposition is not presented as the accident causing their intimacy. Rather, the collision interrupts their reunion with an irreversible death, and their departure from the crowd leads them into a private encounter whose emotional significance Kemal recognizes retrospectively. The street’s sudden exposure of mortality and the apartment’s closeness occupy the same short passage of time, but they remain sharply different worlds.

Belkıs and the Shop’s Account

The woman’s identity becomes more fully legible after her death. The accident is prominent in the newspapers, and Füsun says Şenay Hanım has talked about the dead woman throughout the morning. The shopkeeper plans to close the following day at lunchtime so Füsun can attend the funeral, though Füsun doubts that the people around the woman had adored her as their public attention might suggest.

Füsun describes a history of resentment at the boutique. Belkıs would take the most expensive dresses, including new arrivals from Italy and Paris, wear them to large parties, and return them on the claim that they did not fit. Once others had seen a dress at an event, it became harder for the shop to sell. Belkıs also bargained aggressively. Şenay Hanım complained about her behind her back but hesitated to confront her because of her connections. The account complicates the solemn attention that follows the accident: the dead woman had been disliked and gossiped about, yet her death commands public notice and attendance at her funeral.

When Füsun asks whether he knew Belkıs, Kemal says she had once been the sweetheart of a friend. He withholds the sordid details, thinking he would rather recount them to Sibel, and is surprised to feel deceitful about this calculation. Less than a week earlier, he had regarded concealment and lies as ordinary, even enjoyable, features of his playboy life. The accident therefore becomes a point of contrast in his own conduct as well as a death in the street: the former ease with which he hid things has begun to trouble him in his relationship with Füsun.

The Funeral and Its Afterlife

At the funeral, Füsun is among women gathered below the gate of the Teşvikiye Mosque courtyard. From a distance of roughly seventy or eighty meters, Kemal sees her wearing an orange scarf. His recollection fixes on her breathing, frown, perspiration, and shifting stance as the crowd presses around her. He longs to call and wave, but cannot make himself heard; his heart pounds as he watches. The funeral makes her visible to him while keeping them separated, turning the death’s public gathering into another scene of private longing.

Füsun also wears Belkıs’s photograph on her collar. The practice had become common at funerals following frequent political assassinations and had quickly spread among Istanbul’s bourgeoisie. The image, framed in black, gave even an ordinary society funeral a suggestion of shared purpose and solemnity; a formerly happy photograph could take on the dignity of a death notice. Years later, Kemal assembles a collection of these tokens and displays them in his museum, extending the funeral’s momentary convention into a lasting record of how people marked death.

Kemal leaves without meeting anyone’s eyes and hurries to the Merhamet Apartments to wait for Füsun. Later, through the usually closed window onto Teşvikiye Avenue, he parts the dusty curtains and sees Belkıs’s coffin pass in a funeral car. The sight brings a thought about people who spend their lives in pain through poverty, stupidity, or social exclusion, but the thought passes as the coffin does. Kemal reflects that, since he was twenty, he had felt protected by an invisible armor from trouble and misery, and that dwelling too long on other people’s suffering might pierce it. The accident thus has two afterlives in his account: it draws him toward Füsun at the height of their reunion, and it briefly exposes the fragile boundary he has maintained between his protected life and the suffering of others.