The Keskin family dines along the Bosphorus

The Keskin family dines along the Bosphorus in a recurring series of outings that gives Füsun and Kemal room for a tentative intimacy otherwise difficult to sustain inside the family home. Beginning in the summer of 1977, the dinners grow into a monthly custom shared with Füsun’s family and chauffeur; for Kemal, their restaurants, songs, and car rides become both moments of happiness and evidence of how deeply his attachment has spread beyond Füsun to her entire world.

From the Pelür to the family table

Kemal’s initiative grows out of visits to the Pelür, where he watches over Füsun and tries to shield her from the men who approach her. He and Feridun sometimes leave the bar with Füsun for a dinner excursion, accompanied by Çetin. Füsun may sulk at being drawn away from her film friends, but once in the car she enjoys the company. These evenings revive in Kemal the idea that going out to eat together might do them all good.

The arrangements also expose the limits on Kemal and Füsun’s relationship. They cannot simply go to a restaurant alone as lovers. Feridun is reluctant to leave his film circle, so Kemal enlists Nesibe to persuade him and Füsun to join a fish dinner at Urcan in Sariyer. In the summer of 1977, Tarık is persuaded to come as well. The outings expand from a maneuver to get Füsun away from the Pelür into a family occasion: the Keskin household, so often assembled around television indoors, goes out together with Çetin driving.

A custom of meals, music, and crowds

The first excursion described takes the group to Huzur, a modest restaurant chosen because it has a free table. Tarık likes its position beside the more flamboyant Mücevher Gazino, where the restaurant’s diners can hear the old Turkish songs without paying for a seat inside. When Kemal later suggests going into the gazino for a better view of the singers, Tarık rejects the expense and disparages the band, yet devotes the meal to following the music from next door. He corrects the singers loudly, finishes their lines, and, after his third glass of rakı, closes his eyes and sways with rapture.

The destination is part of a broader evening spectacle. At Tarabya, then a popular stretch of the Bosphorus, restaurants crowd the sidewalks while tombala sellers, mussel and almond vendors, photographers, ice-cream sellers, and musicians move among the tables. The outings are not secluded escapes: traffic passes close by, diners and drivers argue, neighboring tables answer drunken songs with applause and cries, and performers hurry between venues. The animated public scene gives the group a shared diversion and makes the intimacy between Füsun and Kemal less conspicuous.

The meals become a recurring pleasure rather than a one-off excursion. The summer outings to Bosphorus meyhanes quickly turn into a custom the family relishes; in the years that follow, they go at least once a month, in winter as well as summer, to restaurants or large gazinos. The habit is not uninterrupted bliss. Tension between Kemal and Füsun and anxiety that their film work will never begin can make the family’s pleasures feel joyless for months. Then, unexpectedly, they find themselves driving together again and recognize how glad they are to be in one another’s company.

Intimacy beneath the family’s gaze

Outside the house, the roles the group observes indoors loosen. Füsun sits beside Kemal in the car and at the restaurant, unlike at home. Their shoulders and limbs can touch among the surrounding tables without attracting notice. While Tarık listens to the music with his eyes shut and Nesibe watches the Bosphorus lights, Füsun and Kemal whisper about ordinary things—the food, the evening’s beauty, or Tarık’s endearing manner. Their conversation has the tentative quality of two young people learning how to flirt and form a relationship in the European fashion.

Füsun is also freer in this setting. Though ordinarily reluctant to smoke in front of her father, she smokes at the restaurants with the assurance of a European career woman. On one outing, she offers Kemal a taste of the dark meatballs on her plate; on another, she encourages him to sample her olives, whose pits he keeps. These small acts of sharing allow him to imagine them as a harmonious couple, and to feel that they look right together—not merely in a fantasy of his own, but in the visible ease of their companionship.

The evening crowds further soften the boundary between public outing and private romance. When the meal winds down into arguments over bills and singing at the tables, Füsun and Kemal press their arms, legs, and hands together more closely. Kemal sometimes asks a photographer to take their picture or a fortune-teller to read for them, imagining their marriage as he sits beside her. The closeness gives physical form to his hopes, while the presence of her parents and Feridun keeps those hopes unresolved. In one game of tombala, they lose and exchange the familiar phrase about being unlucky at cards; their shared embarrassment turns into elation, as if the moment itself has briefly made them partners.

The journey home and the meaning of the outings

The family’s togetherness continues on the drive back. Tarık usually starts the singing: he hums an old tune, asks for the radio when he cannot recall the words, and then begins a melody heard at the gazino. Sometimes the radio catches voices from distant countries; Tarık identifies one as Radio Moscow, and the family falls briefly silent before the singing resumes. Nesibe and Füsun join him, while Kemal tries to harmonize from the back seat. The car becomes an extension of the restaurant, carrying the evening’s music and shared mood through the dark along the Bosphorus road.

Kemal observes that Füsun seems the happiest during these meals and car rides, even though she continues to want time with her film friends at the Pelür. He therefore keeps relying on Nesibe to draw her into the family outings and sometimes finds other ways to bring Feridun along. He tolerates Feridun’s work with a cameraman at Lemon Films, including the chance for them to earn money, yet worries that if Feridun succeeds and moves away with Füsun, Kemal may lose the access these shared occasions provide.

The dinners matter to Kemal because their pleasure is both real and precarious. They allow him to sit beside Füsun without openly claiming her, and let the family’s ordinary pleasures—the music, food, drive, and conversation—briefly seem to reconcile desire with domestic belonging. Looking back, he describes these shared memories as something a novel or museum might carry beyond the individuals who first experienced them: the family outing becomes a way of making private happiness available to others. That remembered peace remains fragile, however. Elsewhere in his account, the sense of being outside time during visits with the Keskins is interrupted by news of the country’s slide toward civil war, and the streets around Çukurcuma become dangerous. The Bosphorus dinners therefore preserve not only Kemal and Füsun’s closeness but also a recurring pocket of ordinary life set against the anxieties gathering around it.