Love's Sorrow and Obsession

The novel depicts lovesickness as an affliction that increasingly organizes Kemal Basmacı’s body, attention, and choices after his separation from Füsun. His distress is not simply sadness at her absence: it persists despite attempts at treatment and distraction, attaches itself to ordinary signs and objects, and eventually absorbs other grief. Kemal’s retrospective account emphasizes the conflict between the reason that tells him his conduct is harmful and the passion that keeps him repeating it.

The Failure of Explanation

By the end of July, Sibel Hanım’s suggestion that Kemal consult a psychiatrist had become a condition of their relationship. Unwilling to lose her companionship, he agreed. At the appointment, however, he did not disclose that he had lost the woman he loved and felt profoundly alone. Instead, he described his inability to resume physical intimacy with his fiancée since their engagement. The distinction reveals how the suffering he could not name directly displaced itself into a problem he could present in the language of his current relationship.

Kemal expected the psychoanalyst to explain his loss of desire, but the doctor asked him what had caused it. Faced with the question, Kemal answered that perhaps he was afraid of life. The consultation yielded no account of his attachment to Füsun and no lasting help; the doctor’s parting encouragement did not persuade him to return. Years later, Kemal learned that the analyst remembered him only as one of many apparently healthy people who had visited out of curiosity, and had not known his painful story. The mismatch between Kemal’s private crisis and the doctor’s recollection underscores how little of the experience had become legible to anyone outside it.

Objects as Temporary Relief

Instead of telling Sibel Hanım what he was doing, Kemal returned to the Merhamet Apartments, where contact with things Füsun had touched served as an alternative treatment. He lay on the bed and held a glass paperweight she had received from him on June 2 but had not taken home, breathing in the trace he associated with her. The relief was immediate but temporary. Three days later he returned with a paint-splattered brush, touching it to his skin and mouth; again, the comfort lasted only for a time.

These visits took place every two or three days and lasted about two hours. Kemal concealed them from Sibel Hanım, and describes concealing them, in effect, from himself as well. At first he regarded the Merhamet Apartments’ contents not as a collection but as a patient’s medicines. An inherited turban case, a fez Füsun had worn playfully, and his mother’s discarded shoes, which Füsun had also tried on, each carried an association with her. The objects soothed him while keeping the source of his distress present. He recognized that he was becoming habituated, even addicted, to their consoling effect, and also knew that they were not helping him forget Füsun.

That double effect shaped his hope of recovery. Kemal wanted the objects because they reminded him of Füsun, yet also wanted to escape the apartment and the reminders it contained. He imagined that the rituals might make his pain manageable and allow him to return to a former life with Sibel Hanım, marry, and establish an ordinary family life. But those hopes did not hold. In September he made three more concealed visits and repeated the practice of lying on the bed and touching things Füsun had touched; he remained unable to forget her.

Obsession and the Search for Signs

By the beginning of August, Kemal understood that his precautions and diversions had not reduced his distress. When he was working or speaking on the telephone, he might not be consciously thinking of Füsun, but the pain in his stomach could turn into an obsessive thought that occupied his mind. Small hopes distracted him only briefly. He began attending to coded messages, newspaper horoscopes, and coincidences, including predictions in Son Posta and Hayat magazine that a reader would receive a sign from someone loved.

He devised private tests of his own. The sex of the next person through a doorway could seem to determine whether he would reunite with Füsun; the direction from which a red car approached could forecast whether news would come; even the number of steps in an overpass could promise a meeting or intensify his distress. At a ferry landing, he sometimes jumped ashore before the rope had been thrown, hoping that being first would bring him closer to seeing her. These practices did not establish a reliable way to learn anything about Füsun. They show instead how the need for hope turned arbitrary details into temporary verdicts on a future he could not control.

His account makes clear that this search for signs was not a settled belief in astrology. Kemal describes his need as urgent and his own system as personal: an uncertain world became a succession of tests that might briefly soothe him or make his waiting worse. The pattern extends the object rituals beyond the apartment. Both depend on assigning relief or foreboding to something immediately available, while neither changes his separation from Füsun.

Time, Partnership, and the Limits of Reason

Kemal’s suffering also altered the terms of his engagement. On some mornings he could imagine that relief in the Merhamet Apartments would restore his intimacy with Sibel Hanım and make marriage possible. At other times, he wondered whether she feared that he would continue to see Füsun even if he recovered. He could perceive contempt or emerging hatred in Sibel Hanım’s expression, and understood that his inability to be intimate with her was part of their strain. The hope of returning to married life therefore existed alongside his awareness that his attachment to Füsun threatened the relationship he was trying to preserve.

The passing of time brought no dependable healing. Sibel Hanım encouraged him through silent nights together, but both were daunted by the possibility that his pain would not simply diminish. Kemal sometimes tried to treat it as imagination or spiritual weakness, yet that explanation offered no escape. He continued to rely on swimming on his back as a way to master the distress, while acknowledging that he was deceiving himself. In his account, neither reassurance from another person nor the passage of time supplied the resolution he wanted.

The conflict between insight and action becomes especially clear after Kemal’s father dies. At the funeral, he feels the absence of Füsun and her family amid the people offering condolences. He leaves his relatives and goes to the Merhamet Apartments, where Füsun’s lead pencil and an unwashed teacup associated with her again console him. He understands that his father’s death and Füsun’s absence have become entangled, and reflects that love’s pain can be awakened by a loss as grave as a parent’s death or as ordinary as losing a key. Such insight does not redirect him: he recognizes that his passion is carrying him along a course his own reason considers wrong.

The Pain’s Expanding Reach

Kemal’s reflections present lovesickness as indivisible: once established, it can spread into other parts of life and take different losses as occasions for its return. Reason continues to warn him that his actions will heighten both his love and his pain, but the warning itself cannot outweigh the passion. During the first nine months after losing Füsun, he continues to hope that reason will eventually regain control; even the hope of one day living without pain helps him endure while also prolonging his attachment.

After the funeral, Kemal begins to understand why Füsun and her family did not attend. He suspects that they stayed away because of him and may be determined to escape him permanently. The prospect of never seeing Füsun again is too painful for him to sustain as a thought, so he seeks a way to preserve the possibility of seeing her soon. This ending of the episode returns the concept to its governing paradox: Kemal can identify the suffering, recognize its effects, and understand that his consolations have failed, yet each new loss renews his search for hope rather than releasing him from obsession.