The eight-year period of Kemal’s visits

The eight-year period of Kemal’s visits was a sustained, carefully maintained presence in Füsun’s family home in Çukurcuma. Its familiar evenings allowed him to remain close to her while the household’s ordinary routines concealed the emotional imbalance between them; when Tarık Bey died, that arrangement became impossible to sustain in its old form.

A Longed-for Room and a Household Routine

For years, Kemal longed to enter the room where Füsun kept her dresses and belongings. His visits brought him into the domestic world around those objects, but his closeness to Füsun remained shaped by the household’s conventions and by Tarık Bey’s ability to behave as if nothing unusual were happening between them. The repeated visits were therefore both intimate and constrained: Kemal belonged to the routine without being openly recognized as Füsun’s partner.

The arrangement was not limited to private encounters. Kemal came to know the neighbors and acquaintances who visited the house, and serving them tea and coffee, clearing ashtrays, and finding pastries became familiar tasks. These acts gave him a place within the household’s social life, even as that place depended on an appearance of normality. Tarık Bey’s presence helped sustain that appearance; the unspoken understanding around Kemal and Füsun could persist because Tarık Bey was especially skilled at acting as if.

Tarık Bey’s Death Breaks the Pattern

The death of Tarık Bey brought Kemal and Füsun together in grief, but it also removed the person who had most effectively allowed their relationship to remain unspoken. On the night of the death, Kemal stayed in the house. He moved between the guests gathered downstairs and Füsun, who remained upstairs crying; he comforted her, stroked her hair, and brought her a clean handkerchief. With Tarık Bey’s body in the next room, Kemal and Füsun lay embracing side by side for the first time in nine years. The scene made their closeness unmistakable, even as Kemal felt ashamed of the happiness he sensed in the new life that might now await them.

In the days after the funeral, Kemal continued going to the house early each evening. Yet the old ease had vanished. Without Tarık Bey to sustain the practiced performance of not seeing, the family’s dinners and routines felt strained and exposed; neither Kemal nor the others could simply return to the comfortable, half-rehearsed pattern of the previous eight years. The visits continued, but the social fiction that had made them possible had begun to fail.

What the Years Concealed

Kemal’s later account identifies another condition that had helped him endure those years: his hope that Füsun and Feridun’s marriage had never been consummated. At the İnci Patisserie, Füsun insisted that she and Feridun had never made love and demanded that Kemal believe her. He recognized that he had secretly clung to the same possibility for eight years, because imagining a sexual life between them would have made his love unbearable. Even when Füsun asserted it, however, Kemal immediately doubted her. The hope mattered less as a fact he could verify than as a protection against jealousy.

The final meeting with Feridun brought that jealousy into view. Kemal had long regarded him as a friend, almost a brother, and had avoided anger toward him; now he recognized that Feridun’s married life with Füsun might have been happy, and that Kemal’s presence could have diminished that happiness. He decided not to see Feridun again. The eight-year period thus ends not in the uncomplicated fulfillment Kemal had imagined, but in a changed understanding of the relationships that had made his visits possible: the old routine had concealed both his longing and the cost it might have imposed on others.