Füsun and Turgay’s Romance

Füsun’s romance with Turgay Bey is an earlier, unequal relationship whose remembered tenderness is inseparable from pressure and coercion. As she recounts it to Kemal, she describes a married family friend who courted her with gifts and long drives, but whose insistence culminated in an attempt to force himself on her. Her account ends with her refusal to see him again; its consequences continue in Kemal, whose jealousy turns their intimacy more forceful and possessive.

Courtship and Circumstances

Füsun tells Kemal about Turgay Bey after he asks whether she has ever felt anything comparable to what they share. She had once thought she might love this man in return. He was rich, handsome, thirty-five, and married, a textile businessman whose family was known to Kemal. By day he appeared in Nişantaşı as a prosperous, devoted family man, strolling with his wife and children; Füsun’s story reveals the secret courtship concealed beneath that respectable public image.

For months, Turgay Bey came to the Şanzelize Boutique in hopes of seeing Füsun. Şenay Hanım knew what he wanted and encouraged Füsun not to hurt a valued customer. Füsun accepted his presents, then began meeting him once she felt certain of his affection. She describes the meetings as driven partly by curiosity and recalls feeling strangely close to him. That closeness was real to her, but it existed within a courtship shaped by his wealth, persistence, and the boutique’s commercial interests.

Meetings and the Broken Boundary

After the shop closed, Turgay Bey would pick Füsun up in his Mustang at the corner of Akkavak Street. They drove to places where people parked and drank tea while looking toward the Bosphorus, or to an empty lot in front of the Sports Arena. In the dark, sometimes in the rain, they kissed for a long time. During those encounters, he would ask her to marry him, apparently setting aside the fact that he already had a wife and children.

The boundary of the relationship became unmistakable on a snowy day. At Şenay Hanım’s insistence, Füsun accompanied Turgay Bey to help a friend who had opened a boutique in Bebek. On the way back, they stopped in Ortaköy to eat. After drinking several rakıs, he pressed her to go to his garçonnière in a backstreet in Şişli under the pretext of having coffee. When she refused, he offered to buy her anything. He then drove through empty lots and backstreets, trying to kiss her as before; when Füsun continued to resist, he tried to possess her by force and invoked money while doing so. The episode breaks the courtship’s earlier pattern: gifts and affection do not make his advances welcome, and Füsun’s refusal is not a temporary obstacle to be overcome.

Refusal and Withdrawal

The next evening, Füsun did not meet him after work. When he came to the boutique the day after that, he either had forgotten what he had done or chose not to remember it. He pleaded with her and left a Matchbox Mustang with Şenay Hanım, but Füsun never got into his car again. Looking back, she thinks she should have told him firmly not to return. Instead, his childlike persistence and apparent readiness to accept rejection moved her, making it difficult for her to end the contact decisively.

Turgay Bey continued visiting the shop, buying generously and seeking brief moments alone with Füsun to ask whether they could return to their former routine of evening drives. After she met Kemal, she began hiding in the back room whenever Turgay Bey arrived. His visits gradually became less frequent. The change is practical as well as emotional: Füsun withdraws from the relationship, but does so by making herself unavailable rather than by confronting him directly. She also tells Kemal that she had not yet turned eighteen during the previous winter’s meetings; her eighteenth birthday, April 12, fell two weeks before she and Kemal met at the shop.

Jealousy and Narrative Significance

Füsun’s disclosure transforms a story about an absent suitor into a test of Kemal’s own feelings. He had initially been able to smile at Turgay Bey’s predicament and suppress his jealousy. Learning the man’s identity, and recognizing him as a family friend and business associate of Kemal, his father, and his brother Osman Bey, provokes an envy that confounds him. The contrast between Turgay Bey’s familiar public image as an honest businessman and family man and Füsun’s account of his coercion intensifies the revelation for Kemal.

Kemal tries to explain his preoccupation with Füsun as a reaction to the other men in her past, and treats jealousy as a possibly temporary sign rather than proof of love. He later assimilates her account, even feeling contempt for men who had not persuaded her to go further. But the immediate effect is more troubling: when he and Füsun make love, he does not fall into their usual playful happiness. Instead, he feels an urge to master her, uses increasingly harsh force to express his desire, and is surprised by his own behavior. The relationship with Turgay Bey thus matters not because Füsun returns to him, but because her frank account exposes how another man’s pursuit can be remembered as affection while still carrying the danger of entitlement—and how Kemal’s jealousy reproduces a possessive logic he does not recognize in himself.