The narrator decides to tell the story as Kemal recounted it

The narrator’s decision to tell the story as Kemal recounted it becomes a choice about whose version of the past will shape the book. Faced with Sibel and Zaim’s account of a happier, more conventional life, and with requests to omit humiliating memories, he recognizes that testimony is not neutral: people want to protect their reputations, relationships, and families. He nevertheless chooses Kemal’s telling over the judgments of those who would revise it.

A competing account of happiness

After a silence at Sibel and Zaim’s home, the narrator understands that they want readers to know how much happier their life together was than the story he is writing, and how beautiful and normal that life seemed to them. Their account offers a direct challenge to Kemal’s remembered history—not simply a correction of events, but a different standard by which a life should be understood.

Sibel then explains that, after Kemal confessed at the end of the summer of 1975 that he was deeply smitten with the late Füsun, she pitied her fiancé and tried to nurse him back to health. She says that she and Zaim moved to their Anadoluhisarı yali for a month; the narrator corrects the duration as three months. Sibel asks him not to include those days, describing them as humiliating and connecting the gossip about them to the loss of her friendship with Nurcihan. She also says that young people no longer worry about virginity, a claim the narrator explicitly identifies as untrue. Her request exposes the social costs attached to the episode even as it asks the book to conceal it.

Choosing Kemal’s telling

The narrator leaves the visit feeling both content and guilty about his solitary life, and briefly imagines that Kemal, if alive, might have resumed his relationship with Sibel and Zaim. But the narrator does not take the couple’s preferred account as a replacement for Kemal’s. That night, he resolves that it is pointless to ask others to supply the story: he does not want to tell Kemal’s life as other people saw it, but as Kemal told it to him.

The decision does not mean that other people have nothing to reveal. Rather, the narrator distinguishes their testimony from the particular account he has undertaken to preserve. Some invitations come from people who fear the book and want to receive him in their homes before it is written. At a quick supper, Osman urges him not to write it, warning that it could cause heartbreak and gossip and make Basmacı Holding a laughingstock. The narrator leaves with a marble from Kemal’s childhood, given to him by Berrin Hanım in the kitchen without her husband’s knowledge: even an encounter shaped by objection and discretion supplies a material trace of the life being recounted.

Evidence, memory, and the museum

The narrator’s commitment is reinforced by a visit to Milan. At the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum, he learns that Kemal had visited regularly and had been upset to find the institution in disrepair, with part of it rented as a boutique for the designer Jenny Colon in an effort to raise funds. The museum’s guards are moved by the news of Kemal’s death, and its directors confirm that a Turkish gentleman came to see them every few years. This discovery gives the narrator a concrete reason to trust the importance Kemal attached to the museum, without turning the book into a collection of other people’s gossip.

The narrator says that this is enough to convince him he need not hear more gossip to finish the book. He would still have wished to see Füsun and hear her, but instead accepts invitations from people anxious about what he may write, partly for company and a shared meal. The distinction is central to his method: he does not claim that Kemal’s account is the only possible version, but chooses it as the account he has been asked to carry forward.

The limits of the narrator’s choice

The decision settles the book’s narrative allegiance, not every uncertainty surrounding the past. Sibel’s request makes clear that including a remembered episode can reopen old humiliation and private conflict; the narrator’s choice preserves Kemal’s account while acknowledging that other people may experience its telling as an injury. The story is therefore shaped both by what Kemal told and by the pressure exerted by those who ask the narrator to leave certain things unsaid.

His resolve is also personal rather than detached. After meeting Sibel and Zaim, he imagines Kemal sharing his mixed feeling of contentment and guilt; after investigating Kemal’s Milan visits, he finds confirmation in the responses of people who remember him. The narrator proceeds not because every witness agrees, but because he has decided whose story he is responsible for telling.