Kemal’s obsessive love for Füsun

The affair and the attempt at self-control

During the secret meetings, Kemal experiences pleasure intensely but does not yet understand what it means to him. He embraces Füsun and draws hope from her scent, yet believes that continuing his accustomed, happy life requires that he not love her. He tries to resist becoming her friend or taking too much interest in her problems, jokes, and humanity. Their time together is already intimate: after math lessons they make love, then dress quickly and leave. Kemal suspects that Füsun, too, may be guarding herself against being carried away by her feelings, but this remains his impression rather than something he knows.

In retrospect, he identifies the desire to relive these shared moments as the fire at the heart of his story. At first, however, he fails to recognize the experience as it unfolds. His rationalizing stance lets him treat the affair as an addition to the life he intends to preserve, rather than as a change that will unsettle it. The gap between his efforts at restraint and the importance he later gives those moments becomes one of the defining tensions of his attachment.

The intimacy is recalled not only through sexual images but through the physical circumstances around it. Dust, chill, and soiled sheets, the traffic and construction noise, street vendors’ cries, and ship whistles heard from as far as Dolmabahçe or Beşiktaş place their lovemaking in ordinary Istanbul life rather than in a private dream. The lovers even try to guess what kind of ship is passing, with the curiosity of children. Kemal later locates happiness in the real world around them and in Füsun’s bodily imperfections, including her freckles, pimples, hairs, and boils. The attachment he remembers is thus bound to particular settings and unidealized details, not simply to an abstract image of romance.

Jealousy and the failure of rationalization

Füsun’s accounts of men who had kissed her, including Turgay Bey, expose the possessiveness developing beneath Kemal’s self-control. He reasons that his jealousy is temporary and explains his particular response to Turgay by their shared social world in Nişantaşı. For a time, he even feels contempt for men who had not persuaded Füsun to go further. Yet after learning that she had not been eighteen when she kissed one of them, Kemal finds himself making love with a harsher urge to master her. He is surprised by his own behavior: desire has shifted into an attempt at possession.

One night, after drinking, Kemal walks toward the Keskin home carrying a baby-doll present. He stops at a distance, looking toward the second-floor windows reached by a chestnut tree. He admits to himself that he has come both to see or speak with Füsun and to make sure she is not spending the evening with someone else. The possibility that, having gone further with him, she might now explore intimacy with another admirer feeds his jealousy. The scene makes clear that his visits and gifts are not uncomplicated gestures of affection: they also carry the wish to monitor her and to secure a privileged place in her life.

The next morning, Kemal fears that he may be besotted. He considers telling Zaim, Mehmet, or Hilmi about the secret, but doubts that friends who like Sibel would sympathize. He also anticipates that joking about Füsun would collapse into a sincere confession. Rather than risk the happy marriage he still wants, he decides to leave matters as they are and try to make the most of the life he has. This choice does not resolve the conflict; it preserves the double life in which his desire for Füsun and his planned future with Sibel remain side by side.

Happiness through proximity

Kemal’s account of love shifts between physical presence and painful separation. He identifies love with being beside Füsun as they travel along roads and sidewalks, visit rooms and gardens, or sit together in tea gardens, restaurants, and at dinner tables. When she asks what love becomes when he cannot see her, he describes it as a terrible obsession, an illness. The contrast is central to the state: proximity can make ordinary shared time feel sufficient, while absence intensifies the attachment into suffering.

During the summer when he attends films with Füsun and her family, small physical contacts assume extraordinary weight. At the Arnavutköy Çampark Cinema, their arms remain pressed together while they watch Little Lady. Kemal becomes so elated that he pays little attention to his bodily reaction and must cover his lap with his pullover when the lights come up. The scene is not a declaration or a change in their outward relationship; its force lies in the difference between a slight touch and the overwhelming happiness he experiences through it.

The surrounding films and their audiences also shape how he understands the feeling. A melodrama about sacrifice prompts him to wonder whether he could accept misery and humiliation if doing what was necessary helped Füsun become an actress. In the shared silence of the audience, he imagines learning to accept defeat gracefully. Yet at other screenings, jealousy can darken the pleasures of sitting beside her. In a conversation after one film, Füsun cautions that life is not as simple as the stories on screen and says that a film about life and agony should be sincere. Kemal, by contrast, says that he has been happy that summer and that the films have taught him how. Their exchange reveals both the consolation he draws from proximity and the distance between his idealizing account and Füsun’s insistence on sincerity.

The Keskin home, time, and collected objects

After the separation, Kemal’s attachment takes the durable form of regular visits to Füsun and her family. From his first supper in Çukurcuma on October 23, 1976, to his last night there on August 26, 1984, 2,864 days pass. He records 1,593 suppers over 409 weeks, an average of roughly four visits per week. The rhythm is not perfectly steady: sometimes he sees the family every day; sometimes he stays away in indignation, trying to convince himself he can forget Füsun. But he never remains absent for more than ten days, because longer separation brings back the misery of autumn 1975. The Keskin family comes to expect him and keeps a place for him without needing to issue a formal invitation.

Kemal later interprets those years through a distinction between clock time and the moments that give life meaning. He argues that remembering time as a line connecting one present to the next brings awareness of its ending and of death. A moment, by contrast, can contain enough happiness to last a lifetime. He says that he went to the Keskin home hoping to gather enough happiness to sustain him, and that he took away objects Füsun had touched to preserve those moments. The mechanism is visible in his recollection of the Buren watch he gave her for her twenty-fifth birthday in April 1982: it calls back her private kiss behind the kitchen door, her delighted presentation of the watch to her parents, and their thanks to him. A single object links an intimate exchange to a family scene in which he is treated as an eccentric member of the household.

For Kemal, the 1,593 suppers therefore become more than a count of repeated visits. Even the difficult, hopeless, and humiliating evenings are eventually remembered as happiness. This retrospective transformation does not erase the jealousy, uncertainty, or unequal circumstances that shaped the visits. Instead, it shows how the attachment converts duration into a collection of particular moments—and how collecting objects becomes part of Kemal’s effort to keep those moments available to memory.

Loss, memory, and the museum

After Tarık Bey dies, Kemal remains in the Çukurcuma home with the grieving Füsun, comforting her and helping serve the visitors. As he mourns her father, he also feels a powerful will to live and happiness at the thought of a new life awaiting him, a response that makes him ashamed. The mixture of grief, hope, and guilt shows that his devotion is not only longing for an unattainable past: he still imagines a future with Füsun.

That future ends after the car accident. Following a month in intensive care and six weeks before physical therapy begins, Kemal starts learning to walk again. He thinks constantly of Füsun, but his thoughts no longer concern a future with her or the desire he once felt. She becomes a dream of the past, and his suffering changes from the pain of wanting her to self-pity over what has been lost. It is at this point, suspended between fact and remembrance, that the idea of a museum first occurs to him.

In the first months after leaving hospital, he returns to the Merhamet Apartments, sits on the bed, smokes, and looks at the surrounding objects. He feels that telling his story might ease his pain, but recognizes that doing so would require bringing his entire collection into the open. The museum project thus develops from the same habit that sustained his attachment during the years of visits: preserving material traces of a life with Füsun. His obsessive love changes its form, from the effort to remain near her, to the keeping of objects, and finally to the narration and display through which he tries to give loss a lasting shape.