The 44 days in 1975

The 44 days in 1975 were the brief period when Kemal and Füsun made love, a compact beginning that became a lasting measure of intimacy for Kemal. Nine years later, the interval returned both as a catalogue of bodily memories and as a past whose meaning Füsun sought to redefine before they married.

The remembered forty-four days

Kemal recalls the period through particular gestures rather than a general account of the romance. He remembers Füsun’s moans and the tenderness in her face, her frown when he took her by the waist and reversed their positions, and the way her lips opened like a flower when they kissed. He also remembers their bodies fitting together as if they were parts of one instrument. These details made the brief affair a durable physical memory, one he longed to experience again.

The memory had limits: during those forty-four days, Kemal and Füsun had never spent a night together in the same bed. That absence gave their later night together a quality of discovery as well as return. Some familiar gestures revived the earlier intimacy; other particulars, which Kemal had forgotten and could not have anticipated, surprised him. The difference between what he had preserved in memory and what he encountered again kept the past from being a complete script for the present.

The past reconsidered at their reunion

At their reunion, Füsun insisted that her marriage to Feridun had never been consummated and described herself, in that respect, as a virgin. She said that Kemal would be the only man in her life and asked him to draw a veil over the period before their renewed relationship, so that they could regard themselves as having just met. Her account makes the forty-four days both indispensable to Kemal’s memories and something she proposes to set aside as they contemplate marriage.

The language of a two-month interval receives a precise correction from Kemal: it was a month and a half, less two days. That qualification narrows the time Füsun wants them to cover over, while showing how carefully Kemal distinguishes the remembered past even as he agrees to her terms. Their exchange does not erase the earlier intimacy; it establishes how they will speak about it as they try to begin again.

Memory and difference

When Kemal and Füsun make love again, he mentally sorts the experience into what he recognizes from 1975, what he had forgotten, and what seems new. The familiar motions offer the pleasure of recognition, while forgotten details—such as Füsun taking his wrist with two fingers—restore an earthy specificity that years of imagining could not supply. For Kemal, the return is therefore neither simple repetition nor the fulfillment of an unchanged fantasy.

Some of Füsun’s unfamiliar habits trouble him: she digs her fingernails into him, withdraws into thought at moments of intensity, sometimes goes limp, or bites his arm or shoulder. He wonders whether this is a different Füsun, and feels jealousy as well as surprise. Set against the tenderness he remembers from the forty-four days, these changes expose the distance between a loved person and the version of her preserved in memory. The interval’s significance lies not only in the intimacy it began, but also in the way its remembered details shape—and fail to control—the couple’s later attempt to start anew.