Kemal alters the engagement invitation list

Kemal alters the engagement invitation list by removing Turgay Bey and secretly adding Füsun and her parents, turning a practical document into an instrument of jealousy and concealed desire. At a family supper in Anadoluhisarı, while engaged to Sibel, Kemal uses his access to the list to place Füsun’s family inside the celebration planned for his own engagement.

The change to the list

That evening, Kemal goes to supper with Sibel and her parents after hearing Füsun boast about Turgay Bey’s obsessive love. The gathering takes place at the old Bosphorus mansion in Anadoluhisarı that Sibel’s family uses as a summer home. The order of events matters: Kemal arrives at the engagement preparations already stirred by what Füsun has said, but the explanation he gives at supper makes no mention of her or of Turgay’s romantic attention.

After the meal, Kemal sits beside Sibel. She notices that he has been drinking heavily and asks whether something about the preparations is troubling him. He first answers that he is pleased the engagement party will be held at the Hilton, adding that his mother had wanted the party and was delighted by the arrangements. When Sibel presses him, he asks to see the invitation list. Her response—that his mother has given it to her mother—directs him to the person who can grant him access.

Kemal rises and crosses the room to sit beside his future mother-in-law. The movement is described through the mansion’s creaking floorboards: his three steps seem to strain the dilapidated building, each board making its own distinctive sound. In this old, fragile setting, he politely asks to inspect the list and receives permission. His request appears ordinary, but the purpose he has kept from Sibel is already specific.

Turgay removed, Füsun added

Although the rakı has made him see double, Kemal finds Turgay Bey’s name immediately and crosses it out with a ballpoint pen. He then adds Füsun, her parents, and their address on Kuyulu Bostan Street. The contrast between the two edits is sharp: the man whose obsessive love Füsun has just described is excluded, while Füsun and her household—her father and mother as well as Füsun herself—are brought into the engagement’s circle of invitees.

Kemal does not tell his future mother-in-law that jealousy prompted the revision. Instead, he describes Turgay as a valued family friend who has recently been overzealous in a yarn business deal and knowingly wronged Kemal’s family. He presents the crossed-out name as a matter of commercial grievance, supplying a socially credible reason for excluding Turgay while concealing the romantic context that has made his name urgent to him. The text establishes the discrepancy between the preceding conversation about Turgay’s obsessive love and Kemal’s business explanation, without making the explanation itself less consequential: it gives the alteration a respectable public cover.

His future mother-in-law accepts this account as an instance of friendship and humanity losing their value in the modern world. She hopes that the people Kemal has added will not cause similar trouble and asks how many there are. Kemal describes the additions as a history teacher and his wife, distantly related to his mother and formerly employed for many years as her seamstress, together with their lovely eighteen-year-old daughter. The family’s details turn the names into identifiable people and establish a link through Kemal’s mother, even as the true reason for including them remains unstated.

The engagement’s divided meanings

The future mother-in-law welcomes the additions for another reason: so many young men have been invited that the family had worried there would not be enough beautiful young women for them to dance with. Her cheerful response places Füsun’s invitation within the ordinary social logic of a party. Kemal’s act, however, carries a private charge the other guests do not know about. The list can be read as a plan for dancing and hospitality by the household, while for Kemal it records the presence he has arranged for Füsun at the very event marking his commitment to Sibel.

The invitation does not end Kemal’s engagement or disclose his feelings. Instead, it lets him alter the social scene without openly challenging it: Sibel’s engagement party remains planned, and Füsun’s family is added under an explanation about business. That double movement—public conformity alongside a concealed personal intervention—makes the list more than a record of attendance. The names and address preserve the practical form of an invitation, but the act of crossing out one man and writing in another family reveals how Kemal’s jealousy enters the arrangements of his respectable life.

After supper, Çetin Efendi drives the party home in Kemal’s father’s 1956 Chevrolet. Kemal dozes and intermittently watches the dark main avenues, cracked old walls marked by political slogans, mold, and moss, the searchlights of the City Line ferries illuminating their landing stations, and the high branches of plane trees receding in the rearview mirror. His father, rocked by the car’s movement over the cobblestones, softly snores. The journey supplies a quiet ending to the scene, but does not undo the small, deliberate alteration: Füsun’s family has been written into the approaching engagement celebration, while Turgay has been erased from its list.