Mümtaz’s Confession to Kemal

Mümtaz’s confession to Kemal discloses a decades-old affair, a loss he kept hidden from his family, and the remorse that remained after he learned the woman had died. Told just as Kemal is about to become engaged to Sibel, the account joins private history to a practical inheritance: the pearl earrings Mümtaz never gave his former lover, and his insistence that his son treat women well while there is still time to do so.

The Affair and Its Conditions

Mümtaz begins by asking Kemal not to repeat the story to his brother, whom he believes would be too stern to understand. Over small sips of rakı, he recounts first meeting the unnamed woman on a snowy day in January 1958. She worked at Satsat, the business he had only recently started. Their connection began as a working relationship and became a serious emotional attachment despite their twenty-seven-year age difference; by Kemal’s calculation, his father was about forty-seven when the relationship deepened.

After about a year, Mümtaz made her leave Satsat and, at his request, she did not seek another job. He arranged an apartment for her in Beşiktaş, where she lived apart from him while hoping they would eventually marry. Mümtaz admits that she wanted marriage and that he kept her waiting for years. He could not imagine life without her, and separation brought him intense suffering, but he could not bring himself to leave Kemal’s mother and his sons. The relationship therefore depended on a promise of a shared future that Mümtaz considered but never chose.

Separation and the Hidden Loss

The woman eventually demanded a decision. She told Mümtaz that an engineer had proposed and that she would accept if he did not decide soon. He assumed she was bluffing, reasoning that he was the first man she had been with and that she could not truly want someone else. Even when doubt made him panic, he remained unable to act and tried not to think about the choice before him.

After a summer trip to İzmir, Mümtaz heard that she had married. He could not believe it and continued to interpret the news as an attempt to draw his attention and make him suffer. She refused his efforts to meet or speak with her, did not answer the telephone, sold the apartment he had bought for her, and moved somewhere he could not find her. For four years, he knew nothing about her life. He was afraid to ask anyone for information, yet the uncertainty itself became a source of torment: he imagined her moving through the same city and encountering the same newspapers and television programs while remaining beyond his reach.

Eventually, curiosity overcame that fear. Mümtaz telephoned her mother, who knew about him but did not recognize his voice. He falsely introduced himself as the husband of one of her daughter’s lycée classmates and claimed that his ill wife would be cheered by a hospital visit. Her mother answered that her daughter was dead and began to cry. She had died of cancer. Mümtaz hung up so that he would not cry as well. He then recognized that the story of the engineer marriage had not been true: the woman had never married an engineer. The delayed revelation replaced years of speculation with an irreversible loss, while leaving Mümtaz to reckon with a future he had once declined to choose.

Confession as Family Counsel

As Mümtaz tells the story, Kemal senses that speaking of it has brought his father some relief, although this apparent closure displeases him. He feels helpless at the sight of tears forming in Mümtaz’s eyes; he understands the pain, but also feels anger, and says his thoughts become muddled as he confronts the family’s unspoken taboos. His father’s account does not arrive as an abstract lesson: it places Kemal, newly approaching engagement, in the position of hearing what his father had concealed from his wife and sons.

Mümtaz describes his present feeling as remorse. He regrets not having complimented the woman enough and wishes he could tell her repeatedly how charming and precious she was. In his recollection, she was kind-hearted, sensitive, clever, modest, and enchanting, never demanding gifts or flattery and never treating her beauty as an achievement for which she should receive special credit. His suffering, he explains, comes not only from losing her but from knowing that he did not treat her as she deserved. He directs Kemal to apply that knowledge in the present rather than waiting until the chance has passed.

The Pearl Earrings and Their Afterlife

Mümtaz gives the lesson a physical form by taking a faded, velvet-covered jewel box from his pocket. He had bought the pearls during the family’s trip to the İzmir Fair, hoping to appease the woman and obtain her forgiveness, but fate kept him from giving them to her. He had hidden the earrings for years and did not want Kemal’s mother to find them after his death. He now gives them to Kemal, suggesting that they would suit Sibel.

Kemal objects to the implication that Sibel is his mistress: she is to be his wife. Mümtaz tells him not to disclose the earrings’ history, so Sibel will not know their original purpose. Instead, her wearing them will remind Kemal of his father and of the warning attached to the gift. The earrings thus pass between women without passing on the story that gave them their meaning. For Mümtaz they embody a failed attempt at reconciliation; for Kemal they become a concealed reminder to avoid the neglect and delay his father now regrets. The confession ends by making remembrance an obligation: the past cannot be repaired, but its lesson can still shape how Kemal treats the woman he is about to marry.