February 27, 1969

February 27, 1969, the first day of the Feast of the Sacrifice, is the date of a holiday morning that Kemal Basmacı later reconstructs from Füsun’s more vivid recollection. The episode places a family outing within a crowded gathering at his Nişantaşı home, where a dispute over serving liqueur had already exposed tensions between religious custom and secular ideas of modern life. Its later retelling also sits within a novel preoccupied with the difference between dates that can be counted and time as it is privately remembered.

The holiday gathering

The morning began with the bustle of a holiday at the Basmacı home: relatives arrived in their best clothes, the doorbell kept ringing, and greetings and sweets passed between guests. Kemal and Fatma Hanım were handing out sweets when Kemal’s father drew Kemal and his brother aside with a request prompted by Uncle Süreyya’s complaint that the house had no liqueurs. He asked one of them to go to Alaaddin’s shop for peppermint and strawberry liqueur.

That request carried a history. Kemal’s mother had banned the customary service of the two liqueurs in crystal glasses on a silver tray because Kemal’s father sometimes drank too much, and she was concerned for his health. Two years earlier, when Uncle Süreyya had made the same complaint on a holiday morning, she had challenged the appropriateness of serving alcohol on a religious occasion. The question had opened a prolonged argument about religion, civilization, Europe, and the Republic between her and her fervently secularist, pro-Atatürk brother-in-law. The 1969 request thus returns to a familiar domestic disagreement, even as the account moves toward the remembered car excursion.

A memory reconstructed later

The date and its circumstances reach the reader through recollection rather than an uninterrupted account of the holiday. After Füsun recalls the excursion, Kemal remembers his mother’s presence and Uncle Süreyya’s role in asking for liqueur; Füsun, he notes, remembers the episode better than he does. He pauses the later narrative to retell the story that her account has brought back to him. She was twelve and he was twenty-four, a difference that makes the family setting and their positions within it especially clear without turning the episode into a shared adult romance.

Private memory and measured time

The 1969 recollection stands far from the later period when Kemal regularly visited Füsun and her family for supper in Çukurcuma. Those visits began on October 23, 1976, and ended on August 26, 1984: over 2,864 intervening days, he went to supper 1,593 times. He describes the visits as irregular in their weekly rhythm, though never allowing more than ten days to pass without seeing Füsun. The contrast between one remembered holiday and this meticulously counted span shows how the narrative moves between singular episodes and accumulated duration.

The later household also gives that contrast a physical form. A German-made wall clock, with a wooden and glass case, pendulum, and chime, represented the continuity of the outside world, but television had increasingly taken over the work of keeping time. Each evening, the clock displayed on screen just before TRT’s seven o’clock news prompted Füsun to check her wristwatch and Tarık Bey to consult one of his pocket watches. Kemal remembers watching Füsun set her watch by the broadcast clock and smile when she had the time right. Official time continued to be announced and checked, while the meaning of the evening rested in the repeated act of being together.

Repetition interrupted

During those later visits, supper and television often shaped the evening. Kemal estimates that he usually arrived around seven and left after the national closing ceremony, near midnight, spending about five hours at the Keskin home. The 1980 military coup imposed martial law and a ten o’clock curfew, forcing him to leave at a quarter to ten; the shortened visit sharpened his sense that he had not seen enough of Füsun. Political time therefore interrupted a private routine that had become both regular and emotionally sustaining.

The routine was not made up only of important conversations. At the table there could be silence, rain against the windows, a car horn from the hill, a cigarette left burning in an ashtray, or a piece of coal added to the stove. Kemal might watch Füsun’s hand, lose track of a film, or think about what small gift to bring on his next visit. These repeated details belong to the later dinners, not to the 1969 excursion itself; together, however, they clarify the retrospective method through which the earlier date is presented. A moment becomes recoverable through remembered particulars, while the larger passage of time is measured in visits, clocks, broadcasts, and absences.