Kemal and Füsun’s Car Accident

Kemal and Füsun’s car accident is the decisive break in their life together: a drive that carries them toward what Kemal believes is the end of their happiness becomes a fatal collision, killing Füsun and leaving him to rebuild his life through memory. The scene is narrated retrospectively by Kemal, whose later account combines remembered details with facts he learned after the crash.

The Final Drive

As the car accelerated, Kemal noticed that Füsun was wearing the earring she had lost. He urged her to ease off the accelerator, but she pressed it to the floor. A dog appeared ahead in the road; Füsun sounded the horn, and the car swerved first right, then left. It straightened, but no longer followed the road: it was heading toward a plane tree rather than the hotel. Kemal understood that a crash was unavoidable. He read Füsun’s concentration on the tree as a sign that their allotted happiness had ended, and felt that their futures could no longer be separated. The speed—105 kilometers per hour—matched the tree’s reported age of 105 years, a stark coincidence as his father’s twenty-five-year-old Chevrolet hurtled into it.

The Collision and Füsun’s Death

The final seconds are remembered as an exchange of looks rather than words. Kemal later recalled that Füsun knew she was about to die and pleaded with her eyes to be saved, while he smiled at his fiancée, still full of vitality, believing that he too was dying. His response holds the scene’s last tenderness beside its helplessness: he understood her appeal but could do nothing to answer it.

The crash killed Füsun within six or seven seconds. The Chevrolet crumpled, its steering column pierced her chest, and her head struck the windshield. The accident report recorded a crushed skull, a severe neck laceration, broken ribs, and glass in her forehead; seatbelts would not become compulsory in Turkish cars for another fifteen years. Kemal’s account sets these injuries against the survival of the rest of her body, preserving the beloved person in memory even as the report fixes the physical facts of her death.

Kemal could not remember what followed the impact. His account of the immediate aftermath therefore depends on what others reported and what he later gleaned on returning to the crash site. That gap makes the accident both a witnessed ending and a story reconstructed afterward: the last look remains vivid, while the events around it had to be recovered from records and fragments.

Survival and the Afterlife of the Accident

Kemal’s survival was later attributed in part to the passenger-side window being open, allowing him to talk easily with Füsun, and to his instinctively throwing out his arm just before impact. The crash caused small hemorrhages in his brain; swelling left him comatose, and an ambulance took him to Istanbul University’s Çapa Hospital, where he was placed on a respirator. For a month he could not speak, and the world seemed frozen. When Berrin and his mother visited, they wept at the tube in his mouth. Osman showed an unusual tenderness, though his expression sometimes seemed to reproach Kemal. Friends, including Zaim and Mehmet, also appeared to combine sorrow with blame: the police report attributed the crash to driving under the influence, while the press added scandal to the account. Employees of Satsat, by contrast, treated him with their customary respect and conspicuous sympathy.

After six weeks, physical therapy began. Learning to walk again felt to Kemal like starting life over, but this new life remained fixed on Füsun. His thoughts of her gradually ceased to point toward a hoped-for future or the desire that had once shaped their relationship; she became a dream of the past, something held in memory. The change did not ease his suffering. It transformed it: instead of longing for her, he pitied himself for having lost her. At this unsettled point, between the fact of loss and the meanings he might give it, the idea of a museum first arose.

In the months after leaving the hospital, Kemal sought consolation in Proust and Montaigne and sat at supper across from his mother, with the yellow pitcher between them, paying little attention to the television. His mother understood Füsun’s death through the loss of Kemal’s father: each had lost a beloved, she felt, and both could grieve openly together. She also saw a parallel in the raki that had figured in the two deaths and in the secret worlds each departed person had kept until pressure forced disclosure. Kemal wanted to examine that resemblance, although his mother disliked it. At the Merhamet Apartments, sitting on the bed to smoke and look at the surrounding objects, he began to feel that telling his story might relieve his pain. The possibility depended on bringing his entire collection into the open, joining the private remnants of his life with Füsun to the public account he had yet to make.

Reconstruction and Narrative Significance

Months later, Kemal returned to the crash site and touched the wrecked Chevrolet. Its damaged parts brought back a detail he had previously recalled in dreams: just after the impact, he and Füsun had looked into each other’s eyes. The accident’s telling thus gathers two kinds of knowledge—the vivid, intimate image that persisted in Kemal’s memory and the physical facts he recovered from the report and the wreck. Its broken chronology reflects the break in his own life: what he could not remember continuously had to be approached through fragments.