Füsun’s absence during her disappearance

Füsun’s absence during her disappearance is defined less by any confirmed explanation than by the doors, calls, and letters that fail to bring her back. For Kemal, not knowing where she is becomes an active condition: he waits for signs, pursues fragments of information, and searches Istanbul, while the ordinary possibility of seeing her at her family home vanishes. Her absence also exposes the limits of his hope. He can preserve traces of her, but he cannot make those traces answer him.

Silence and Unanswered Contact

After Ceyda offered to pass on Kemal’s letter, no reply came. The silence did not settle into resignation. It fed his hope and pain at once: he continued to imagine that Füsun might respond, even as he began to recognize that his efforts to distract himself could not make the pain subside. The absence is presented through this imbalance between what he knows—nothing has arrived—and what he keeps expecting.

At lunchtime, when the office was empty, Kemal sometimes called Füsun’s home. Aunt Nesibe always answered; Füsun did not. Kemal took this as a sign that Füsun had not yet returned, and he also understood from the calls that her father was not there. He stayed silent, hoping that Aunt Nesibe might let something about Füsun slip, or that Füsun might speak in the background. The calls gave him a thin substitute for contact, but they also made Aunt Nesibe bear the strain of an unknown caller. As her alarm and anger became harder to endure, Kemal finally stopped calling. The cessation ended his intrusion, not his uncertainty: there was still no sign of Füsun.

The Family Home Disappears

At the end of August, Kemal’s concern sharpened when repeated calls began going unanswered and the telephone line was eventually cut off. He left preparations for the party at the empty Teşvikiye apartment and went to Kuyulu Bostan Street, a route he had been deliberately avoiding. From a distance, he saw that the curtains had been removed. The doorbell and his knocks brought no response; only the janitor’s wife explained that the residents had moved.

Kemal entered with a key obtained from the janitor’s wife, after giving her money and saying that he was interested in renting the apartment. The rooms were empty, but their details held the evidence of a life once lived there: the deteriorating kitchen, the bath in which Füsun had bathed, the gas heater that had frightened her, and the marks left by pictures and mirrors on the walls. He tore away a piece of wallpaper and took the small-room door handle, the porcelain handle from the toilet chain, a baby doll’s arm, a mica marble, and several hairpins. These were not news about Füsun or a route to finding her. They were objects she might have touched, and Kemal collected them as material traces of the person he could no longer reach.

The janitor’s wife said the family had argued with the landlord over rent and had left after a falling-out; she did not know where they had gone. The conflict over rent gives a practical reason for the move, but no destination or further explanation. More devastating to Kemal was the loss of a possibility he had taken for granted: he had counted, without admitting it to himself, on being able to ring the bell one day and plead his way inside to see Füsun. Now even that imagined approach was gone. Back at the Merhamet Apartments, he handled the objects from the empty rooms, finding temporary relief in their physical closeness and in the fact that Füsun had once touched them.

Searching a City Without a Destination

The move left Kemal without a known address, and later efforts to find the family yielded little. He pressed Ceyda for information and offered her bribes, but she would say only that Füsun was somewhere in Istanbul. Kemal had no dependable way to locate her. He sent Ramiz to make discreet inquiries about Füsun, her father, and Aunt Nesibe, using a supposed robbery as cover; the mission produced nothing. Selami Bey’s inquiries at registries, police stations, and council offices also failed. Because Füsun’s father had no criminal record, he was difficult to trace through those channels.

Kemal tried other paths. He visited the lycées where Füsun’s father had taught history, presenting himself as a former student grateful for his teacher, but found no lead. He also tried to locate Aunt Nesibe among the households for whom she had sewn. Zaim’s mother made inquiries, only to learn that very few people still did that kind of work and that no one could say where Aunt Nesibe was. Each failed attempt deepened Kemal’s distress. He spent lunch hours at the Merhamet Apartments or drove aimlessly, hoping chance might succeed where his inquiries had not.

His search gradually filled the old neighborhoods with imagined appearances of Füsun. In Vefa, Zeyrek, Fatih, and Kocamustafapaşa, he thought he saw her ghost in the streets; when a distant figure proved to be someone else, he stayed, reasoning irrationally that the appearance of a double meant Füsun herself must be nearby. The neighborhoods became charged with the possibility of encounter: their backstreets and coffeehouses were places in which he could wait. Yet the search repeatedly returned him to the same fact. He could find no Füsun there, only streets made newly meaningful by his expectation of her.

The Absence Persists

The loss of contact also shaped Kemal’s life with Sibel. He continued to visit the Merhamet Apartments and lie among Füsun’s belongings, sometimes mistaking temporary relief for evidence that his pain might pass. Social outings could revive Sibel’s spirits, but they did not restore their relationship; Kemal recognized that, apart from periods of heavy drinking and moments spent listening to the Fisherman and His Son, the two were unhappy. His longing for Füsun remained active even while he was engaged to Sibel, and his attempts to discover Füsun’s whereabouts repeatedly competed with that engagement.

After Kemal broke off the engagement, he still had to rely on letters carried through Ceyda. Weeks passed without an answer. Ceyda had confirmed that Füsun knew the engagement was over, but that knowledge did not secure a reply. Kemal’s letter mentioned that Füsun’s earring had turned up among his father’s possessions and that he wanted to return it, along with his father’s other earrings and the tricycle. It also reached toward the long-postponed evening when he would come to dine with Füsun’s parents. The letter gives his hope specific objects and a proposed meeting to hold on to, but the evidence of absence remains: he has sent a message, and he is still waiting.

Füsun’s disappearance is therefore not resolved by a single discovery. The family’s move closes the one door Kemal expected might remain open; searches and inquiries fail to replace it; and objects from the empty apartment offer touch without communication. His account establishes what her absence does to him, but not where she went or why. That unresolved gap is central to the state itself: Füsun remains present in Kemal’s routines, memories, and collected things precisely because she is unavailable to answer them.