Kemal and Füsun’s First Sexual Encounter

Kemal and Füsun’s First Sexual Encounter takes place on May 3, 1975, at the Merhamet Apartments. Remembered by Kemal years later, the meeting turns Füsun’s return to collect an umbrella into the beginning of their intimacy. The encounter is significant not only as a change in their relationship but as a scene in which affection, jealousy, and the social meaning of female chastity become inseparable in Kemal’s account.

The Return to the Merhamet Apartments

The previous day, Kemal had resolved to forget Füsun and never see her again. The following afternoon, however, he was at the apartment without expecting her to appear. His thoughts had been occupied by their recent meeting, objects from their childhood, and the room’s familiar furnishings. He was tidying when the doorbell rang; Füsun had come to collect her umbrella.

Kemal had hidden the umbrella behind a mirrored wardrobe the day before so that she would not leave immediately. When she asked how it had ended up there, he admitted what he had done. The admission exposes an asymmetry in the circumstances of their reunion: Füsun arrives with a practical reason to retrieve her property, while Kemal has deliberately created a reason for her to stay. He then leads her toward the kitchen under the pretext of making tea. Their closeness develops there, and they later sit together in the bedroom. The account presents the encounter as a decision with particular significance for Füsun, while Kemal’s own interpretation is already complicated by uncertainty and jealousy.

A First Experience and Its Aftermath

The narration identifies the day as the first time Füsun made love. Kemal reflects that her arrival may have meant she had made one of the most important decisions of her life, but he also doubts his own understanding. Rather than simply accepting the intimacy between them, he tries to fit what he observes into assumptions about virginity and prior experience. His uncertainty does not resolve the question; it shows how quickly his attention shifts from Füsun’s choice to what that choice might mean about her past.

Afterward, Füsun cries silently and pays little attention to Kemal’s words of consolation. She tells him that she will remember the day for the rest of her life, then falls silent. Kemal’s later narration treats the moment less as a conquest than as an occasion of tenderness and gratitude. He specifically distinguishes the care between them from the objects he preserves as evidence of their time together. The floral handkerchief Füsun folded and put away, the crystal inkwell and pen set she handled, and the belt Kemal remembers fastening become material traces of the encounter. In his retrospective account, these objects are meant to point toward the solicitude and vulnerability between the two, not to substitute for them.

A Practical Reason to Meet Again

Before leaving, Kemal urged Füsun to work hard during the remaining month and a half if she hoped to earn a university place. She responded by asking whether he feared she would remain a shopgirl forever. He offered to tutor her in mathematics and asked what material she was studying. Füsun explained that her course included both classical and modern mathematics, which she found confusing because the answers had to be matched on an answer sheet.

They agreed to meet at the apartment the next day to study. After she left, Kemal bought the books used in the lycée and her course, then looked through them at his office. Discovering that he could help her lifted his emotional burden and gave him an intense sense of happiness and pride. His thoughts already included the possibility of seeing her repeatedly at the apartment, but he understood that their meetings would have to appear ordinary. Tutoring thus supplies a socially legible purpose for continued contact while allowing their private relationship to continue.

Chastity, Trust, and Social Judgment

The later chapters place this private encounter within a wider account of premarital chastity in 1970s Istanbul. Kemal describes a society in which virginity could still be treated as a valuable attribute a young woman was expected to preserve until marriage, even as urbanization and Westernization altered the timing and expectations of marriage. In affluent Westernized circles, he says, sex between engaged couples could be tolerated when their intentions were considered serious; the same social recognition did not necessarily extend to a relationship without an engagement or an accepted prospect of marriage.

His account also records the harsher consequences assigned to women whose sexual relationships fell outside those expectations. He describes pressure to marry, possible legal action by a girl’s father when she was under eighteen, press photographs that concealed women’s identities, and popular films that organized women into moralized categories. He notes, too, that young men in different social groups circulated fantasies about women who supposedly had sex simply for pleasure. These are Kemal’s retrospective descriptions of prevailing beliefs and practices, not neutral rules that determine Füsun’s motives. Their relevance is that they show why an intimate decision could carry consequences beyond the couple.

Sibel later makes that conflict explicit when she objects to Kemal’s sense of obligation to the shopgirl and argues that either virginity should be unimportant to people who claim to be modern, or the same standard should apply to everyone. Her challenge brings the encounter’s double standard into the open: Kemal’s attachment to Füsun cannot be separated from the social value assigned to her chastity, while his own sexual conduct is judged differently. The scene therefore marks both a personal beginning and the point at which intimacy becomes entangled with questions of trust, reputation, and unequal expectations.