Kemal’s first visit to Füsun’s home in Çukurcuma

Kemal’s first visit to Füsun’s home in Çukurcuma turns an imagined marriage proposal into a painful encounter with the life she has made without him. On May 19, 1976, after 339 days apart, he arrives carrying a child’s tricycle and red roses, believing he can begin again with her. He instead learns that she married Feridun five months earlier. The visit’s reversal does not extinguish Kemal’s longing: it redirects it into glances, remembered happiness, and the objects he takes from the house.

The Journey and the Proposal Kemal Imagines

On Wednesday, May 19, at half past seven, Kemal sets out for Füsun’s family home in Çukurcuma. He tells Çetin Efendi only that they are returning a child’s tricycle to Aunt Nesibe. At the Merhamet Apartments, he collects the tricycle and the pearl earrings his father had given him. Rain pours over the streets, a weather he had not imagined in any of his dreams of reunion. Yet he feels unexpectedly peaceful, even grateful for the 339 days of suffering since he last saw Füsun at the Hilton Hotel, Istanbul; he understands the ordeal as having led him to this possible happy ending.

On Sıraselviler Avenue, he orders a large bouquet of red roses. He has already drunk half a glass of rakı to steady himself, and considers whether to stop for another as impatience overtakes him. Passing the rain-shrouded Çukurcuma Hamam, he thinks that Füsun’s long absence has taught him a lesson: he is ready to do whatever she wants rather than risk losing her again. Once they are together, he intends to ask her to marry him.

The proposal has been rehearsed in his imagination as carefully as the journey. He will return the tricycle, joke with the family, drink coffee, and then ask Füsun’s father for his daughter’s hand. He expects the family to laugh about the tricycle as an excuse and believes they can discuss the engagement and wedding later. His imagined reunion treats the preceding pain as something they will eventually be able to leave unspoken. The rain-soaked arrival thus begins with a future Kemal has already pictured, but not with any knowledge of Füsun’s circumstances.

The Unexpected Introduction

At the old building, rain obscures the structure as Kemal knocks. Aunt Nesibe answers, pleased by the roses and impressed by Çetin Efendi waiting outside with an umbrella. Kemal notices unease in her expression but climbs the stairs, reading each step as movement toward Füsun. Her father greets him on the landing. In the doorway, Kemal first mistakes the dark-haired woman behind him for Füsun’s sister, then recognizes Füsun herself. Her jet-black hair makes her seem startlingly changed. Kemal had planned to hand her the flowers and embrace her, but her discomfort tells him that she does not want him to touch her.

The decisive news comes when Füsun introduces him to her husband, Feridun, as her cousin. She says that they married five months earlier. Kemal initially struggles to take Feridun in as a real person, then conceals his shock with a welcoming greeting and a joking remark about the tricycle. Füsun’s mother explains that the family had wanted Kemal at the wedding but had heard his father was ill. At her mother’s urging, Füsun takes the roses to find a vase. For Kemal, her brief closeness is intensely physical: he registers her blush, lips, skin, neck, and the fragrance of her exposed bosom. The moment offers him proximity, but the marriage makes clear that it is not the intimacy he had imagined.

Dinner, Glances, and a New Understanding

Füsun’s father offers rakı, and Kemal drinks two servings on an empty stomach, hoping they will take effect quickly. He talks about the tricycle and childhood memories before dinner, but recognizes that marriage prevents him from displaying the brotherly closeness he had hoped the gift might invite. Füsun sits across from him and avoids his eyes. He performs the role of a well-meaning, wealthy cousin visiting a poorer relation, while trying to appear as though he has no special interest in her. Even his attempt to ask when the couple expect children is directed first to Feridun, as if the performance could keep his actual feelings hidden.

Later, as the rain rumbles, Füsun moves from the window and sits across from Kemal in silence. She quietly apologizes for not having been able to attend his father’s funeral. Her apology supplies a tenderness that the earlier strained politeness had withheld, and their exchanged glances become more meaningful to Kemal than direct explanation. He feels that they are made for one another and would endure further torment for the happiness of being close to her, even though she is married. The scene keeps its contradiction intact: their shared understanding feels real to him, but it does not undo her marriage or restore the future he had planned.

The Bathroom and the Objects of Consolation

When Kemal closes the bathroom door on the top floor, he decides that his life is no longer under his own control and that his connection to Füsun has shaped it beyond free will. He can bear that conclusion, he thinks, only by accepting it. On the small tray beside the mirror are the toothbrushes of Füsun, Aunt Nesibe, and Uncle Tarık, along with shaving things and Füsun’s lipstick. Kemal picks up the lipstick, smells it, and puts it in his pocket. He smells the towels but finds none of the remembered scent: clean ones have been laid out in anticipation of his visit. Looking for another object to sustain him through the difficult days ahead, he sees his own face in the mirror and feels a rift between his defeated body and an inward world organized around desire, touch, and love.

An old Turkish song reaches him through the half-open window, between the sound of rain and the water pipes. Its voice, accompanied by the lute and kanun, links the present visit with his childhood and his grandmother’s happiness at hearing such music. In this moment, Kemal experiences the world as a unity made perceptible by love. The mirror, a plate of cherries, the bathroom bolt, and Füsun’s hairpin become part of that apprehension; he pockets the hairpin as well. He places Füsun’s lost earring where the lipstick had been, and the song turns his thoughts to old Istanbul, aging couples, and lovers undone by passion. He also recognizes that Füsun had reason to marry after he became engaged to another woman. The visit therefore ends, in Kemal’s account, not in a proposal or resolution but in a changed way of seeing: he imagines that love lets him understand Füsun from within, while the small objects he carries away preserve a material connection to the life he cannot claim.