Kemal and Füsun’s Brief Romance in 1975 was a forty-four-day intimacy that Kemal remembered for years after it ended. Its brevity sharpened rather than contained its effect: the gestures of their lovemaking became an enduring private archive, while Kemal’s hopes about Füsun’s later marriage helped sustain his love through a long separation.

The Forty-Four Days

Kemal later recalled that, in 1975, he and Füsun spent forty-four days making love. He remembered the relationship through particular gestures: Füsun’s moans and the tenderness that illuminated her face, her frown when he grasped her waist and reversed their positions, and the way her lips opened as they kissed. Recalled years afterward, these details gave the affair a physical specificity that outlasted its short span.

The memory was not made only of what Kemal could deliberately summon. During a later reunion, he recognized small mannerisms he had forgotten, including Füsun taking his wrist between two fingers and loosening her hold before gripping him again. The returned details made their renewed intimacy feel grounded in lived experience rather than solely in the imagined past. The 1975 romance thus persisted both as a cherished recollection and as a standard against which later experience could be felt as familiar or changed.

The Affair’s Long Afterlife

The brief relationship became inseparable from Kemal’s subsequent longing. He admitted that, for eight years, he had clung to the idea that Füsun and Feridun had never made love. When Füsun insisted that he believe their marriage had not been consummated, Kemal said he accepted her claim, but inwardly continued to doubt it. That self-deception offered him a precarious hope: fully imagining Füsun’s married life with Feridun made him jealous and angry, threatening the attachment he had managed to preserve.

Kemal’s later reckoning also unsettled his account of Feridun. He recognized that Feridun’s comfort in his marriage could have made him more tolerant of Kemal’s company, especially early on, and that Kemal’s presence may have curtailed the happiness Füsun could have shared with her husband. The romance’s afterlife was therefore not simply longing for an idealized past; it included Kemal’s belated recognition that his own presence had affected other people’s relationship.

Objects as Consolation

Kemal described hiding locks of Füsun’s hair, her handkerchiefs, her barrettes, and other things she had owned. For many years, these possessions consoled him. The collecting gave material form to an attachment that could not be sustained through ordinary closeness: objects retained the traces of the beloved while the relationship itself belonged to the past.

In telling his story to Orhan Pamuk, Kemal compared his habit to Gustave Flaubert’s keeping a lock of Louise Collet’s hair, a handkerchief, and a slipper, objects he reportedly took out to caress and contemplate. The comparison places Kemal’s collecting within a broader image of love preserved through intimate keepsakes. For him, the objects were not incidental souvenirs but a means of living with the long absence that followed the forty-four days.