May 26, 1975

May 26, 1975, is the date Kemal Basmacı retrospectively identifies as the happiest moment of his life: an afternoon of intimate happiness with Füsun that he did not recognize as such while it was happening. The scene’s decisive object is an earring that falls unnoticed onto the bed. Its accidental loss links the couple’s private moment to Kemal’s later effort to preserve the past through things that belonged to it.

Date and Setting

The encounter takes place on a Monday afternoon, at about a quarter to three. Outside, Istanbul is warm beneath a spring sky; people still wearing winter clothes perspire in the streets, while the interiors and the shade of linden and chestnut trees remain cool. In the second-floor apartment’s back bedroom, a breeze from the balcony lifts and lowers the tulle curtains. From the bed, Kemal and Füsun can see boys playing football in the garden below.

The details establish a small, enclosed world rather than a grand occasion. The cool mattress and moving curtains temper the heat outside, while the boys’ noisy game continues below. The couple’s happiness seems to suspend the ordinary pressures of time and guilt, but it exists within this precise place and afternoon—circumstances whose full importance Kemal will understand only later.

The Encounter

Kemal recalls that he and Füsun make love for a long time, until they are both out of breath. He kisses her shoulders, enters her from behind, and bites her neck and left ear. Their intimacy is conveyed through bodily closeness and shared attention rather than conversation. When they notice that the boys below are voicing the same indecencies the couple has been enacting, they stop and look into each other’s eyes, smiling.

The happiness of the moment is not simply Kemal’s later label for it: in the scene, he remembers a profound peace that seemed to loosen the hold of time and guilt. Yet he also stresses the gap between living an instant and knowing what it will mean. At the time, he does not recognize the afternoon as a peak that will later stand apart from everything else.

The Earring and the Memory

During the encounter, Füsun’s earring comes loose. In the initial recollection, Kemal imagines it hovering before it falls; in his more exact account, it lands on the blue sheet while he is biting her left ear. He has not noticed its shape, and neither of them pays attention to its fall. Their absorption in one another makes the earring’s departure from Füsun’s ear incidental to the experience, even as its presence on the sheet gives the memory a concrete surviving detail.

Kemal later emphasizes that the earring remains nestled in the folds of the sheet when the time comes for the couple to part. The contrast is central to the date’s afterlife: the lovers leave the moment without knowing what has fallen, while the object stays behind as an unrecognized trace of their intimacy. In Kemal’s account, mementos can preserve the colors, textures, images, and pleasures of a vanished instant with a fidelity that human recollection alone cannot provide.

Retrospective Significance

Kemal’s designation of the afternoon as his happiest moment is made from a later point in life, when he can look back and give the moment a final shape. He reflects that people rarely know, while they are experiencing happiness, that they have reached their happiest instant; even a person who believes the present is golden may still expect a happier future. Recognizing a moment as unsurpassable therefore changes it: the recognition confirms that it belongs to the past and will not return.

The date joins happiness to loss without making them the same thing. The remembered encounter is intensely joyful, but its later significance depends on its irretrievability and on the earring that survives it as a physical trace. Kemal’s account turns a private afternoon into both a scene of fulfilled intimacy and the beginning of a larger meditation on how objects can make the past present to a grieving memory.