Taksim is one of the urban waypoints through which Kemal’s private history becomes entangled with Istanbul’s public life. It appears first in the routines surrounding his engagement to Sibel, then as part of the city of streets and crowds in which he searches for Füsun’s apparitions, and later as a place where military restrictions make even an ordinary drive subject to inspection. Across these episodes, Taksim is both a lived district and a point on Kemal’s increasingly emotional map of the city.

An urban waypoint in Kemal’s routine

On the day of his engagement party, Kemal went to Taksim after dealing with a champagne-and-whiskey supply crisis: a dealer had refused to release the bottles without cash. He ate a hamburger and ajran at the Atlantic, a childhood favorite, then visited his former barber, Cevat, in Beyoğlu. Cevat gave him a luxurious groom’s shave with imported foam and lotion. Kemal walked back to Nişantaşı and the Merhamet Apartments, where Füsun arrived at their usual time. The route makes Taksim part of a day divided between public preparations for Kemal’s future with Sibel and the private meeting he continued to have with Füsun.

The episode’s ordinary details sharpen the contrast at its center. The engagement party was imminent, and Kemal had just been groomed as a bridegroom, yet his established appointment with Füsun continued. Taksim belongs to the practical choreography of that day—the meal, the barber, the walk back—while the unresolved relationship waiting at the Merhamet Apartments exposes how little the formal engagement had settled in his emotional life.

A city mapped by absence

After losing contact with Füsun, Kemal tried to prevent reminders from overwhelming his daily life. He forbade himself from going to the Merhamet Apartments, waiting for her, or touching objects associated with her. When ordinary self-imposed limits failed, he devised a mental map of Nişantaşı with streets and locations classified by degrees of danger: some were absolutely forbidden, others permissible only in urgent circumstances and crossed quickly, while still others required caution. The map encoded places as risks to his emotional self-control.

The prohibited and cautionary routes included the Şanzelize Boutique, the Merhamet Apartments, Kuyulu Bostan Street, and paths associated with the journeys Kemal and Füsun had made. He also marked sites from their childhood and shared past. His system was an attempt to recover control by controlling movement, but the need to keep the map in mind made clear how thoroughly memory had taken possession of the city. Taksim becomes still more suggestive in this altered geography when Kemal later describes Istanbul as a galaxy of signs that remind him of Füsun.

Sightings, doubles, and the expanding map

In Beyoğlu, where Kemal spent more time because it offered fewer potential reminders, a reflection in a shop window and a girl skipping through a crowd revived his hope that he had seen Füsun. He returned for several days to pace between Ağa Mosque and the Palace Cinema, then watched passersby from a beer hall window. One photograph records what he calls Füsun’s white shadow in Taksim: an illusion that lasted only two minutes. The image preserves not a reunion but the brief duration of a mistaken recognition.

The apparitions multiplied across Istanbul. Kemal saw possible doubles at a club, on a ferry landing, in a cinema, at the Dolmabahçe Clock Tower, in Beşiktaş Market, and at an apartment window in Gümüşsuyu. A closer look usually revealed that the woman was not Füsun; on one occasion, the way the figure waved back was enough to make him leave in shame. Yet he could not give up the short-lived consolation these errors provided. He began frequenting places where he had seen the ghosts and adding them to his mental map. Taksim’s white shadow thus belongs to a pattern in which the city’s crowds repeatedly offer the possibility of recognition and then withdraw it.

The search also drew Kemal beyond the districts he knew best. When he imagined Füsun’s ghost in the poorer neighborhoods of Vefa, Zeyrek, Fatih, and Kocamustafapaşa, he drove through their narrow, uneven streets and lingered even after discovering that a distant figure was not her. A broken marble fountain, political slogans and threats scratched onto walls, and people gathered in coffeehouses became part of a neighborhood he experienced as enchanted by the possibility that Füsun might be nearby. His routes were no longer merely ways to get across Istanbul; longing shaped where he went, what he noticed, and how long he stayed.

Public life, catastrophe, and restriction

Taksim also appears in the period of political tension and military control. After an evening at the crowded gathering around the Independenta fire, Kemal left with Tayfun and Figen as the flames began to die down. They went to a newly opened bar in Taksim’s backstreets and drank until morning. The outing offered a temporary escape from society gossip, but it sat alongside Kemal’s hope that the catastrophe might bring him closer to Füsun and her family. The next evening, he visited the Keskin home expecting a new beginning; seeing Füsun’s wounded, hopeless expression shattered that optimism.

Under curfew, Taksim’s streets became a checkpoint landscape. On Sıraselviler Avenue, soldiers stopped Kemal and Çetin, checked their identity cards, and searched their Chevrolet while passersby watched. The search extended through the glove compartment and beneath the seats. A quince grater was taken away in an army truck, and Kemal waited in the car, anxious that it might be confiscated. As the car clock ticked and martial-law bulletins played on the radio, the approaching curfew turned a familiar urban journey into a constrained interval of waiting. The soldiers eventually returned the men’s identity cards and allowed them to go, but the grater remained out of Kemal’s possession.

A geography shaped by attention

Taksim’s significance lies less in a single defining event than in the way its different appearances register changes in Kemal’s experience. It is a convenient stop on the day of his engagement, a location attached to a fleeting image of Füsun, a gateway to nighttime social life, and part of a city where military authority can halt movement. These uses connect private memory to the routines and pressures of public space.

Kemal’s changing routes also reveal that the city is not a neutral backdrop. He tries to escape painful locations by prohibiting them, then returns to streets where a glimpse of Füsun might be possible, and finally encounters roads narrowed by curfew and search. The two-minute shadow in Taksim condenses this pattern: a public crowd briefly seems to restore the absent woman, but the sight cannot become a meeting. In Kemal’s recollection, the place remains marked by both the promise of seeing and the certainty of loss.