Kemal returns to Çukurcuma and entrusts Nesibe with the earrings

Kemal’s return to Çukurcuma on October 12, 1976, converts a promise made during separation into a tentative appeal for reconciliation. Carrying Father’s pearl earrings, he gives them to Nesibe the seamstress for Füsun and asks for help repairing the heartbreak he believes he caused. The encounter does not reunite the couple: Füsun is away, and the exchange takes place through her mother. Its significance lies in the movement from private anger and imagined grievance toward a concrete act of patience, apology, and renewed access to the Keskin home.

From offended silence to a decision

The visit follows five days in which Kemal has not called Füsun or her family. At first, he sustains his silence with fantasies of Füsun feeling contrite and asking forgiveness. In these imagined conversations, he blames her until he has convinced himself that his own anger is justified. The fantasies briefly let him inhabit the role of the wronged party, but they do not ease his longing.

Instead, the days apart revive the anguish that had held him for a year. Kemal fears that a mistake could cost him the chance to see Füsun again, and recognizes that displaying his pique would not protect him or punish her effectively: it would leave him suffering alone. In this reversal, anger ceases to function as leverage and becomes another form of self-injury. He reaches the practical conclusion that he needs to see Füsun several times a week, never fewer than twice, if he is to regain equilibrium and avoid falling back into the despair of separation.

That decision recalls a specific commitment. In a letter sent through Ceyda, Kemal had promised to bring Füsun his father’s pearl earrings. The earrings therefore carry more than the value of a gift: bringing them is a way to keep his word and reopen communication without demanding that Füsun meet him immediately. The object turns his desire to repair the relationship into an action he can undertake, even while he remains uncertain how she will receive him.

The October visit

Kemal carries the earrings in the box his father gave him when he goes to Beyoğlu for lunch. At Hacı Salih, he admits to himself that the visit to Çukurcuma is deliberate, although he frames it as a possible stop to spend half an hour with Nesibe. The nearby Palace Cinema offers another possible destination: its next screening is due to begin at 1:45, and he could go there instead. But at 1:40 he has paid and is already walking down Çukurcuma Hill. The narrow margin between those times gives the choice a concrete shape: the cinema remains an available retreat, but he turns toward Füsun’s home.

Nesibe answers the door. Kemal initially says that he need not come upstairs and presents the box as a gift from his father for Füsun, something he is dropping off while passing by. His explanation understates the purpose of the visit, but Nesibe asks him in for coffee because she has things to tell him before Füsun returns. He accepts, and the encounter becomes a private conversation rather than a simple delivery.

The home’s ordinary activity provides the setting for this exchange. Nesibe’s scissors and cut cloth are spread around the room because she is rushing to make an evening gown; she explains that the customers insisted and that Füsun is helping. Lemon, the canary, moves about in his cage. These details place Kemal among the household’s routines while Füsun herself remains absent. He has returned to the family home, but access to her still depends on timing, her mother’s willingness to speak, and the unresolved circumstances that separate them.

Nesibe’s account of the marriage

Nesibe tells Kemal that Füsun suffered deeply and that her heart was badly broken. Her advice is for him to be patient with Füsun’s moods and indulge her. The counsel addresses the immediate obstacle between them not as a dispute to win, but as hurt that requires forbearance. Kemal accepts the advice, although the narration makes clear that he is responding as if he already understands the pain Nesibe describes.

Nesibe also explains the family’s thinking about Füsun’s marriage to Feridun. She acknowledges that Feridun has limited prospects and cannot provide Füsun with a prosperous life, but emphasizes that he is her husband, honest and well-meaning, and hopes to make her a film star. The family considered marriage to him preferable to a match with a wealthy older man who might treat Füsun as diminished by the loss of her premarital respectability. Feridun, they hoped, could introduce her to people in the film industry, while Kemal could protect her.

This account makes the marriage both a family response to Füsun’s vulnerable position and a possible route toward her ambitions. Nesibe predicts that Füsun may eventually recognize Feridun’s ineptitude and leave him, but presents that possibility as a future judgment, not an established outcome. Her confidence that Kemal can support Füsun also gives his return a role within the family’s arrangements: he is asked to help, even though his own wish is to win Füsun back.

Nesibe further tells him that Füsun was affected by the news that he had ended his engagement to Sibel and was sorry to hear how much he had suffered. Kemal’s broken engagement is thus known within Füsun’s family and forms part of the context for this conversation. Yet Nesibe’s disclosure does not settle what Füsun herself wants now. The proposed path forward remains indirect: Kemal is to stay at her side and bolster her confidence while the marriage continues.

Entrusting the earrings and leaving

Kemal states that he wants to repair the damage and the heartbreak he caused, then hands Nesibe the box containing Father’s pearl earrings for Füsun. His request that Nesibe help him win Füsun back accompanies the handover, making clear that the gift is part of a larger appeal rather than an isolated courtesy. Nesibe accepts the box. The exchange fulfills the promise Kemal had made through Ceyda, but the evidence does not show Füsun receiving it during this visit or responding to it.

Before leaving, Kemal raises another object connected to their past: the earring he says he brought back on his first visit to the house, but which never reached Füsun. He asks Nesibe whether she knows what happened to it. This question distinguishes the new gift from an earlier, unresolved failure of delivery. The earrings now in the box are successfully entrusted to Füsun’s mother; the fate of the earlier earring remains uncertain in the encounter.

Nesibe signals that Kemal should leave before Füsun returns, and he departs at once. The visit therefore does not become a meeting between the former lovers, nor does it establish a reconciliation. Its change is smaller but decisive for Kemal: as he walks back up Çukurcuma Hill toward Beyoğlu, he feels freed from both his injured indignation and his cultivated pique. He has exchanged a period of self-punishing silence for a kept promise and a place, however provisional, within the family’s orbit. The ending records relief rather than resolution, leaving Füsun’s response and the consequences of the gift open.