Füsun and Turgay’s Past Romance

Füsun and Turgay’s Past Romance is a formative but painful episode in Füsun’s life, disclosed retrospectively through what she told Kemal and through Kemal’s later confrontation with Turgay. Their former intimacy matters not only as part of Füsun’s history: it exposes the gap between Turgay’s ability to resume his ordinary life and Kemal’s inability to let Füsun go. The relationship thus becomes both a wound in Füsun’s past and a test of Kemal’s understanding of his own jealousy.

The Earlier Affair

Before her relationship with Kemal, Füsun had been Turgay’s lover. Kemal remembers Füsun telling him that she and Turgay had kissed repeatedly in the seats of Turgay’s Mustang. She had also told him that Turgay groped her before she was eighteen. These recollections place their intimacy in a specific setting, but they do not make it a simple romance: Kemal describes Turgay as having broken Füsun’s heart and offered her money. The account presents the affair’s end as a painful turning point for Füsun, while leaving her own fuller perspective on its course outside the scenes recounted here.

The money is an important part of how Kemal understands Turgay’s conduct. In his accusation, the offer is not incidental: it belongs to a pattern of treating Füsun badly, as though an injury to her could be settled materially. That interpretation comes through Kemal, who is already emotionally involved and protective of Füsun; it should therefore be read alongside his jealousy, rather than mistaken for a detached account of the former couple’s relationship.

Kemal’s Jealous Recollections

In the summer of 1975, while attending a gathering with Sibel and their friends at the newly opened Mehtap, Kemal encountered Turgay at the bar. Seeing him made Kemal’s heart race as it might have at the sight of Füsun, and jealousy surged before the two men had even discussed their past. The reaction shows how an absent Füsun can dominate Kemal’s experience of an encounter with another man: Turgay’s presence calls up the old affair, and the remembered details of the Mustang become part of Kemal’s immediate emotional life.

Kemal later travelled from Istanbul to visit Turgay at his factory in Bahçelievler, ostensibly to apologize and discuss business. During the tour, seeing a figure from behind among the workers brought Füsun to mind. Kemal recognized that the prospect of hearing news of her, and of speaking about her, gave the visit its real emotional pull. He nevertheless continued to present it to himself as a business matter, a self-deception that, in his view, interfered with the apology he had come to make.

The Confrontation and Its Reversal

At lunch in a Bakırköy fish restaurant, Kemal tried to keep the conversation within the bounds of business. Turgay treated a disagreement over a bedsheet contract as something that could be settled without personal ill will. Kemal, drinking raki, shifted the discussion from partnership to conduct and accused Turgay of breaking the heart of a young woman in his family, treating her badly, and offering her money. He identified her as Füsun of the Şanzelize Boutique and described her as a close relation on his mother’s side.

Turgay’s response unsettled the accusation’s expected shape. He appeared genuinely ashamed and said he had not known Füsun was related to Kemal. He accepted that the family might have been offended by his exclusion from Kemal’s engagement party, asked what an honorable remedy would be, and even raised ending their business partnership. Kemal agreed to terminate it, then regretted the decision almost as soon as he had spoken. The exchange turns an encounter prompted by business into a public reckoning with the old affair, while revealing that Turgay does not appear to have understood the family connection Kemal invokes.

What the Past Reveals

The confrontation leads Kemal to recognize that his jealousy is not simply about Turgay having been Füsun’s lover first. What torments him is that Turgay seems to have recovered after the affair and returned to his normal bourgeois life. The contrast is decisive: Turgay’s apparent recovery makes visible Kemal’s own continuing attachment, and the old romance becomes a measure of the difference between them. Kemal cannot treat Füsun’s past as finished merely because Turgay can.

The account preserves that asymmetry without resolving the relationship from Füsun’s point of view. Its details are filtered through Kemal’s memory, his protective anger, and his admission that jealousy distorts what he is doing. Turgay’s apology complicates Kemal’s picture of him, but does not undo the remembered hurt or restore their partnership. The past romance therefore remains consequential in the present: it shapes Kemal’s view of Füsun’s vulnerability, fuels his confrontation with Turgay, and exposes the persistence of a love from which he cannot return to ordinary life.