Kemal moves into the Fatih Hotel and searches Istanbul for Füsun

Kemal moves into the Fatih Hotel and searches Istanbul for Füsun during the months when he is still engaged to Sibel but cannot stop longing for Füsun. Unable to obtain her address or news beyond the fact that she is somewhere in the city, he turns the search into a way of life: first by mapping places he must avoid, then by walking the old neighborhoods where he imagines Füsun might appear. His move to the Fatih Hotel marks a break from the yali and its family scrutiny, but the search yields a more complicated discovery than reunion. The streets, objects, and routines that intensify his pain also give him a sense of closeness to life that he recognizes as happiness only in retrospect.

Withdrawal and the Map of Prohibition

Kemal’s search begins with an attempt not to search. He has repeatedly tried to forbid himself from going to the Merhamet Apartments, waiting for Füsun, or touching things that recall her, but he finds ways around each restriction. Even a trip to buy flowers for Sibel near the Şanzelize Boutique can become an excuse to approach a place associated with Füsun. He therefore makes the prohibitions more drastic, removing familiar streets and locations from his mental map of Istanbul.

The map gives his private distress a geography. He marks in red the Şanzelize Boutique, the Merhamet Apartments, the police station, Alaaddin’s shop, Kuyulu Bostan Street, and the street still commonly called Emlak Avenue. The ban extends to side streets, too. Orange streets are permissible only in absolute necessity, if he has not been drinking and can cross in under a minute without lingering. His home and Teşvikiye Mosque fall into this category. Yellow streets are also dangerous: they include his accustomed route from Satsat to the Merhamet Apartments and the road Füsun once took from the boutique toward home. The map includes places from their earlier history, among them the empty lot where lambs were sacrificed when they were children and a corner of the mosque courtyard where he watched her from afar. He treats these restrictions as inviolable, an ascetic regimen intended to cure him slowly.

Yet the map cannot contain memory. Kemal begins to see Füsun’s ghost in crowded public places, including cinemas and streets. He knows these apparitions are not Füsun, but the brief consolation they bring is enough to make him seek out places where they might recur. He adds such locations to his mental map until Istanbul becomes a network of signs pointing back to her. The forbidden map and the expanding map of apparitions work in opposite directions: one tries to remove Füsun from his daily routes, while the other makes almost any route capable of returning her to view.

From Waiting to an Active Search

As winter approaches, Kemal treats Sibel’s proposed Christmas trip to Paris with Nurcihan as an opportunity. Nurcihan is preparing to become formally engaged to Mehmet, and Sibel is interested in going with her. Kemal encourages the trip, privately planning to search every corner of Istanbul for Füsun while Sibel is away. He imagines that if the search fails, he will try to cast off his pain and remorse and marry Sibel when she returns. He tells Sibel that a change of scene might help them resume their life together at the yali, and invokes marriage without emphasizing it. Sibel suspects his encouragement, but hopes that the separation might restore their relationship.

At the airport, Kemal and Sibel sit with Nurcihan and Mehmet and drink Meltem sodas while waiting. Sibel has tears in her eyes when he embraces her. Her sadness makes him fear that their former life may not resume, though he immediately scolds himself for taking so dark a view. The departure leaves Kemal with a plan, but not with a reliable route to Füsun. His efforts to obtain one have already failed. Ceyda, whom he asks for help while she is close to giving birth, will say only that Füsun is somewhere in Istanbul. He has offered bribes and found work in Satsat’s accounting department for one of Ceyda’s relatives in exchange for carrying letters, but cannot bring himself to pressure her harshly for the address.

Other inquiries bring no better result. Kemal sends Ramiz, who had handled his father’s security and less respectable business dealings, on a discreet mission to find Füsun, her father, and Aunt Nesibe; Ramiz returns empty-handed. Selami Bey, a retired police commissioner who had assisted Satsat with official problems, explains that finding Füsun’s father will be difficult because he has no criminal record. Kemal disguises himself as a grateful former student and visits the lycées where the father taught history, without success. He also tries to trace Aunt Nesibe through households that once employed her as a seamstress, but discovers that almost no one does that kind of sewing work anymore. The failures sharpen his distress and send him repeatedly to the Merhamet Apartments at lunch, or out driving aimlessly in the hope of finding Füsun by chance.

Walking the Old City

When Füsun’s ghost appears in the poor neighborhoods on the old side of the Golden Horn, Kemal concentrates his search there. He drives through Vefa, Zeyrek, Fatih, and Kocamustafapaşa, then gets out to walk. A sudden glimpse makes him stop the car; even when he discovers that the figure is not Füsun, he stays in the neighborhood, persuaded by an irrational hope that her double must mean she is nearby. The search alters his response to surroundings that might otherwise seem forbidding. A broken marble fountain about 220 years old stands in a square full of cats; walls and other surfaces carry slogans and death threats left by rival left- and right-wing factions. Kemal feels no alarm. With Füsun imagined close at hand, the defaced streets seem enchanted.

He begins to value the neighborhoods in their own right: their tired women in headscarves, young men watching an unfamiliar visitor, old people and unemployed men reading newspapers in coal-smoky coffeehouses. He resolves to spend more time walking and drinking tea there, and to live more like the people among whom he hopes to find Füsun. His habits in Nişantaşı and Bebek lose their hold. He stops seeking out the newest restaurants and society amusements, and becomes tired of evenings spent with Mehmet discussing what their absent partners might be buying in Paris. Sibel’s calls can leave him panicked because he has nothing to say; although he sometimes wants the comfort of her embrace, guilt over his duplicity makes her absence a relief. He regrets both becoming engaged to her and failing to end the engagement before it became harder to break.

The search is also a form of wandering without a fixed destination. Kemal walks slowly, looking into the distance because that is how the apparitions have appeared. In other settings, especially clubs and parties with Sibel, too much raki can bring another vision of Füsun, dressed in changing outfits. He has to remind himself that he is engaged and that following a mirage would imperil the one relationship still present in his life. On summer afternoons at Kilyos and Şile, heat and fatigue leave him less guarded; he imagines Füsun among the young women on the beaches. These false sightings deepen the sense that the city’s ordinary spaces have been reorganized around her absence.

The Fatih Hotel Interlude

In mid-January, two weeks before Sibel is due back from Paris, Kemal packs his bags and leaves the yali for a hotel between Fatih and Karagümrük. The decision follows a day spent exploring streets and shops, looking through the windows of neglected stone houses and unpainted wooden houses left behind by Greeks who had fled the city. When rain drives him indoors, he enters a hotel; later, unable to wait until he has crossed the Golden Horn for a drink, he goes to a beer hall, drinks vodka followed by beer, and becomes so drunk that he cannot remember where he parked his car. He walks through the dark, muddy streets thinking about Füsun and his life, eventually finding his way back to the Fatih Hotel and taking a room.

For the first time in months, he sleeps soundly. Sunny memories from childhood and early youth sometimes enter his dreams toward morning, and he wakes with a shudder, wishing to return to sleep and to the dream. After that first restful night, he goes back to the yali to collect his clothes, including his woolen winter socks, and moves into the hotel rather than returning home to his parents’ anxious questions. He continues to go to Satsat early, but leaves the office early to return to the streets. At lunch he visits the Merhamet Apartments, where Füsun’s things offer distraction and consolation; each day he recalls more objects and cherishes them anew.

His evenings follow a pattern of drinking and walking through Fatih, Karagümrük, and Balat. He peers through parted curtains at families eating, repeatedly imagining Füsun among them. The thought does not establish that she is there; it gives him fresh comfort while the search remains unresolved. He also comes to feel that his happiness may have less to do with the chance of finding her than with what the neighborhoods disclose. Empty lots, muddy cobblestones, rubbish bins, children playing with a half-inflated football beneath streetlamps, yellow light behind drawn curtains, blue chimney smoke, and television glow seem to restore a simplicity lost amid his father’s expanding business and the expectation that wealth requires an elegant European life. At the time, Kemal thinks these days painful. Only much later does he understand that the Fatih Hotel period and the search itself were full of happiness.

City, Memory, and Later Encounters

The move and the search do not bring an immediate reunion. They instead make Kemal’s experience of Istanbul inseparable from the acts of avoiding, traversing, and watching its streets. His map first attempts to control memory by dividing the city into prohibited and conditionally passable zones; the apparitions and the search then undo that control, making neighborhoods outside his former routines places of attention and attachment. The pursuit gives his longing a daily form even when every practical route to Füsun’s address has failed.

Later, after the pair have resumed meeting, the city provides a different kind of shared space. Kemal and Füsun meet in Galatasaray, choose among cinema posters, and enter the cool, dim theaters of Beyoğlu. In the mostly empty seats they find a secluded place to hold hands and watch films at leisure. On one occasion, as a summer screening begins, Füsun’s hand lands on Kemal’s lap before he can begin his habitual search for it, and his hand closes around hers. This later, mutual gesture contrasts with the earlier streets where he searched for a ghost: the same city that had served as a field of absence can also hold a quiet encounter between the two of them. The Fatih Hotel episode remains significant not because the search succeeds at once, but because the paths taken in pursuit of Füsun become, in memory, an unexpected source of consolation and happiness.