The End-of-Summer Party at the Teşvikiye Apartment is the night when Kemal’s attempt to perform happiness as Sibel’s fiancé collides with the discovery that Füsun has vanished from her old home. Held in the empty family apartment just before Kemal’s parents return from their summer residence, the gathering begins as a familiar social ritual and descends into drunken disorder. Its final image, Sibel throwing a purple scarf from the sixth-floor balcony, becomes Kemal’s last happy memory of her.

Background: A city of reminders

By late summer, Kemal had tried to make a plan to forget Füsun. He forbade himself from going to the Merhamet Apartments to wait for her or touch things that recalled her, but his earlier prohibitions had proved easy to evade. He therefore redrew his private map of Istanbul: the Şanzelize Boutique, the Merhamet Apartments, Kuyulu Bostan Street, and other places associated with Füsun became restricted territory. Some streets were marked red and absolutely forbidden; others were orange, passable only in necessity, sobriety, and haste. Even ordinary routes had become dangerous because they carried memories of her.

Avoidance could not make the city emotionally neutral. Kemal began to see Füsun’s ghost in crowded places, and the brief consolation of these apparitions encouraged him to seek them out. The places where he most often imagined seeing her gradually joined his mental map, turning Istanbul into a network of signs pointing back to her. Later, while searching poorer districts such as Vefa, Zeyrek, Fatih, and Kocamustafapaşa, he found that even an apparition he knew was false could keep him in a neighborhood, waiting irrationally for the real Füsun. The party takes place against this expanding geography of longing: Kemal is expected to host friends in his own home while his attention remains fixed elsewhere.

The empty house and the return to the party

As preparations proceeded, Kemal repeatedly called Füsun’s family home, where the telephone had rung unanswered for several days. On the day of the party, the line was disconnected. He left without explanation and went to Kuyulu Bostan Street, crossing areas he had marked off in orange. The curtains had been removed, and no one answered the bell or his knocks. The building janitor’s wife told him that the residents of number three had moved.

Kemal returned to the Merhamet Apartments and took consolation in newly recovered objects from the empty apartment, caressing and looking at things Füsun had touched. Only much later did he go to Teşvikiye to help Sibel prepare. He did not explain his absence when she said she had tried calling the office about the champagne. In his room, he felt that he had sacrificed his self-respect by dreaming of Füsun and seeking comfort in her belongings. He also believed he could not plausibly act as the cheerful, healthy host that the party required. The gathering thus begins under a double strain: Sibel has invested herself in making it succeed, while Kemal has just learned that the household he has been trying to reach has disappeared.

A performance of festivity

At seven in the evening, Kemal welcomed the first guests to a bar stocked with foreign liquor bought under the counter from city delicatessens. He played music, including the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper and Simon and Garfunkel, and danced and laughed with Sibel and Nurcihan. Nurcihan had chosen Mehmet over Zaim, who appeared not to mind. Sibel, however, was troubled by her suspicion that Nurcihan had slept with Zaim; Kemal noticed her concern but did not try to understand it.

For a time, the scene offers a striking contrast to his private distress. A north wind cooled the summer night, rustling the plane trees in the courtyard of Teşvikiye Mosque. Swallows swooped above the mosque dome and the rooftops, while television lights appeared in the homes of residents who had stayed in the city. Kemal watched a bored girl on a balcony and, later, an unhappy father looking down at the avenue. Their listlessness seemed to mirror his own. He feared that he would never forget Füsun, and drank heavily as guests came and went from the balcony.

Later, Sibel told him he was being rude and asked him inside. They embraced and danced in the dim sitting room, where the reduced light made the apartment of Kemal’s childhood seem like another place. He clung to Sibel more desperately as he imagined a whole world being taken from him. His misery and drinking had affected her too; she was unsteady as they danced. To the other guests, their embrace looked romantic, but Kemal remembered it as a desperate effort by two people to hold together a relationship already under strain.

Disorder at dawn and the last happy memory

As the night advanced under the influence of alcohol, the party got out of hand. Glasses and bottles broke; records were destroyed; some couples kissed openly or went into bedrooms, where they might have been making love or simply passing out. Kemal saw the rich young guests behaving as if they feared that their youth and hopes of modernity were about to end. He contrasted this scene with the more anarchic parties of eight or ten years earlier, when friends had rummaged through his parents’ cupboards and broken expensive kitchen appliances, imagining their destruction as political rebellion. Only two members of that earlier crowd later became seriously involved in politics; one was tortured after the 1971 coup and imprisoned until the 1974 amnesty. The party’s disorder therefore carries the memory of an earlier, more openly rebellious youth, now reduced to a drunken performance.

The search for swimsuits and discussion of going to Kilyos continued until first light. Kemal knew that drink, sleeplessness, and anguish about Füsun would overwhelm him at the beach, so he stayed behind while the others prepared to leave. From his mother’s balcony, he watched Zaim with his new girlfriend, Nurcihan and Mehmet, and other guests carouse in the street around a shiny red plastic ball. As the morning prayergoers walked toward Teşvikiye Mosque, Mehmet’s car pulled away, reversed, and stopped. Nurcihan had left her silk scarf behind. Sibel ran inside, brought it out, and threw it down from the sixth floor. Kemal remembered watching the purple scarf sway, open, close, and twist as it descended. The gesture closes the night not with a reconciliation or a declaration, but with an ordinary act of care; for Kemal, it remains the last happy memory of Sibel, even as his attachment to Füsun has helped make their shared happiness precarious.