Füsun’s eventual success in the road test came after years of repeated examinations, humiliating setbacks, and pressure to obtain a license through Istanbul’s corrupt licensing network. Her refusal to pay a bribe made passing an act of persistence as well as a practical milestone; Kemal’s celebration of it gathered her family around her at a moment he later remembered as carrying the air of a farewell.

The Test and Its Setbacks

Füsun passed the written examination with a perfect score, but her first road test went badly. After she started the car and began driving, an examiner accused her of failing to check the mirrors. When she turned to ask what he had said, the committee ordered her to stop and get out. The regulations prohibited looking behind while driving, and the examiners’ abrupt exit from the car made the episode degrading as well as demoralizing for Füsun.

A retake was scheduled for four weeks later. She had learned to drive well by practicing with Kemal, including at Yıldız Park, but she failed again in early August. At the end of the summer she sat the test with the same examiners and failed once more. Their repeated judgments fed her anger at what she saw as prejudice against women drivers in Istanbul, recalling the earlier vulnerability she had described to Kemal when telling him about men who had pawed and molested her.

Refusal of the Informal System

The licensing process offered routes around its formal examination. Applicants were advised to enroll in expensive driving schools run by retired traffic policemen, where attendance was not compulsory but passing was effectively assured because examiners and police officers had business ties to the schools. For an additional payment, a candidate could bypass a school altogether. The special test car used by the schools had a hole in its floor to reveal road markings, while a guide concealed behind the sun visor explained how to use those markings to park. The arrangement turned the examination into a demonstration of procedural tricks as much as driving competence.

A policeman explained that candidates had to perform their awareness of the rules for the state as well as follow them for themselves: checking a mirror did not count unless the examiner could see the gesture. Against this system, Füsun would not allow even a small payment to enrich the policemen who had failed her. She and Kemal therefore continued their lessons rather than buy a shortcut. Her eventual pass followed several more failures, and the narration presents her persistence, not a successful maneuver through the bribery network, as the decisive outcome.

Passing and the Celebration

After three further failures, Füsun finally passed the road test in early 1984. By then, Kemal suggests, the examiners had tired of her and understood that she would never pay a bribe. That night he took Füsun, Nesibe, and Tarık Bey to Bebek Maksim Nightclub to hear Müzeyyen Senar sing old Turkish songs.

The family became drunk, and when the singer came onstage, they joined in. As they sang the refrains, they looked at one another and smiled. Kemal later imagined the gathering as having the atmosphere of a farewell ceremony. Tarık Bey, rather than Füsun, was the person most devoted to Senar’s singing, and Kemal had chosen the outing in the hope that Füsun would enjoy seeing her father drink and sing along. He also noticed that Feridun’s absence had become ordinary, and felt happy reflecting on the time he had spent alone with Füsun and her parents.

Significance in the Relationship

The test’s long, compromised process contrasts with the intimacy of the celebration. Kemal and Füsun’s driving lessons had created recurring time together, while their outings for coffee or tea after practice softened the frustrations of the examinations. Passing brought that sequence to a close, but the family celebration made the achievement part of a shared memory rather than simply a personal credential.

The farewell quality Kemal later assigns to the night complicates its celebratory surface. In his recollection, the event gathers the closeness he had enjoyed with Füsun and her parents while also registering how time and absence were changing their lives. The successful test is therefore both a concrete victory over an obstructive system and a marker in Kemal’s remembered chronology of intimacy and loss.