January 1958

January 1958 marks the snowy-day meeting that began the relationship at the center of Kemal's father's later confession to his son. The date anchors a story of attraction, a twenty-seven-year age difference, and a future marriage imagined but never realized.

The Meeting at Satsat

In recounting the past, Kemal's father placed their first meeting on a snowy day in January 1958, seventeen and a half years before the conversation with Kemal. The young woman worked at Satsat, a business Kemal's father had only recently started. He remembered being immediately struck by her beauty, which he described as pure and innocent.

Their relationship began as a working one. According to his account, it became serious and emotional despite the twenty-seven-year difference in their ages. The date therefore marks not simply an introduction, but the start of a relationship whose personal stakes would soon collide with his existing family life.

The Relationship and Its Limits

About a year after the relationship began, Kemal's father made the young woman leave Satsat. At his request, she did not seek another job. Instead, she went to live in an apartment he had arranged for her in Beşiktaş, holding on to the hope that they might marry one day. His recollection presents their circumstances as shaped by his decisions: he ended her employment and organized her housing, while her expectation of marriage remained attached to a future he had not secured.

Kemal's father told his son that he had considered marrying her, but framed that possibility against the consequences for Kemal's mother, Kemal, and Kemal's brother. His account thus makes January 1958 the beginning of an attachment that he remembered as exceptional, while also revealing the family obligations he said had kept him from acting on it.

Retrospective Significance

The meeting is known through Kemal's father's recollection, delivered years later as a story to Kemal. Its details—Satsat's recent opening, the snowy day, the young woman's work there, and the apartment in Beşiktaş—give a concrete chronology to a confession that otherwise centers on remembered feeling and a marriage left unrealized.

The date also establishes the scale of the age difference and the unequal practical power within the relationship: Kemal's father was her employer, and he later directed both her departure from the business and her move. January 1958 therefore begins a story of mutual attachment as he represented it, but one whose course and limits were largely determined by his choices.