Zaim

Zaim is Kemal’s close friend and a prominent figure in his old social circle, moving easily between business, flirtation, and intimate counsel. His importance lies not in a single decisive intervention but in the many ways he remains connected to Kemal: he tries to protect him from jealousy, brings news from the society Kemal has abandoned, challenges his self-isolation, and ultimately remembers him with love. Their friendship is tested by Kemal’s withdrawal and a business dispute, but Zaim’s later grief makes clear that the separation never erased their attachment.

Identity and Social Presence

Zaim is a successful businessman associated with Meltem soda, and a familiar presence among Istanbul’s wealthy social set. At a gathering, he joins a lively conversation about early consumer inventions and the bourgeois desire to own new appliances before anyone else. He settles into Mehmet’s vacated seat, finds his way into the conversation within minutes, and whispers to Nurcihan until she laughs. The episode captures his social ease: he does not need to dominate a room to become part of its current.

That ease also shades into flirtation. When Sibel asks about Inge, a German model, Zaim insists they were business associates rather than lovers and says he had taken her out to show her Istanbul by night. Later, he tells Kemal that he is unhappy with his reputation and would like to marry if he found someone as wonderful as Sibel. His praise is warm, but it also shows how readily he can turn personal matters into the language of charm and social performance.

Zaim’s business identity has a more vulnerable side. Meltem faces competition from Coca-Cola, whose distributors receive credit and free promotional materials. Zaim argues that younger consumers are drawn to the foreign brand, even when the Turkish drink is cheaper and healthier. The predicament gives his polished social presence a practical foundation: he is not only a man of parties and gossip, but also a businessman concerned with the survival and reputation of his product.

Loyalty to Kemal

Zaim’s friendship becomes especially visible when Kemal confides that Füsun’s dancing with Kenan is making him jealous. Kemal fears that Füsun is trying to provoke him, worries that she may fall for Kenan, and recognizes that Kenan could be a good husband for her. He asks Zaim to keep Füsun occupied and watch her movements, partly to stop his jealousy from overwhelming him and partly to prevent him from acting against Kenan at Satsat. Zaim listens without dismissing the confession. Kemal also tells him that the affair must soon end, while Füsun and her parents are due to leave because she has a university entrance exam the next day. Zaim is thus made a confidant of both Kemal’s possessiveness and his awareness that the relationship cannot continue as it is.

After Sibel returns, Zaim makes another effort to reach Kemal. At lunch at Fuaye Restaurant, he tells him that he has become sadder and more troubled and urges him to explain the life he has chosen. When Kemal challenges the suggestion that the concern is only Zaim’s, Zaim speaks for himself, Mehmet, Nurcihan, and Sibel. He invites Kemal to join their group on a trip to Uludağ, disclosing that Sibel wants him there but does not want him to know she asked. His willingness to carry a private message shows both his loyalty to Kemal and his continuing closeness to Sibel.

Zaim also tries to make reconciliation seem possible by recalling Kemal and Sibel’s engagement party, their life together at the yali, and the social approval their arrangement had received. He says Sibel is heartbroken and argues that Kemal should speak with her rather than leave her to face gossip without an explanation. The invitation is not merely an attempt to restore a couple: Zaim imagines Kemal returning to the familiar group, staying with him and Mehmet, and recovering the easy companionship of their younger years. Kemal, however, recognizes that he would be the object of their amusement and that Mehmet and Nurcihan are already a couple. Zaim denies wanting to joke at his expense and insists he would not let anyone else do so.

Messenger and Moral Counterweight

Once Kemal has broken with Sibel and avoided their mutual friends, Zaim becomes his principal source of news about that world. They meet at Fuaye Restaurant, Garaj, and other society restaurants, where their long conversations resemble business discussions in their seriousness. Zaim reports that his young girlfriend Ayşe is too immature for him to understand her troubles, that she has not fitted into the group, and that their physical relationship has gone no further than kissing. He also says he has no other girlfriend or current romantic interest. These accounts make Zaim a participant in the same social world he describes, not a detached observer of it.

His most sustained reports concern Mehmet and Nurcihan. Zaim tells Kemal that they meet daily, visit restaurants and clubs, and have developed an interest in old Ottoman music. Mehmet takes Nurcihan to gazinos, seeks out elderly singers who once performed on the radio, and accompanies her to the Sahaflar Market for old books and to flea markets for records. They go to Maksim and the Bebek Gazino to hear Müzeyyen Senar. Zaim explains that Mehmet is learning this musical world largely to impress Nurcihan, and that the pair’s shared enthusiasm has made a couple out of them. Later he reports that, despite their three-year courtship and plans to marry, they have not made love: Nurcihan insists on waiting until marriage, making light of premarital abstinence while presenting it as a basis for a peaceful marriage. Zaim’s gossip therefore carries more than social amusement; it reveals the changing values and intimate negotiations of Kemal’s former circle.

Zaim is also willing to criticize Kemal. He tells him that he should have taken Sibel to the Merhamet Apartments rather than meeting her secretly at the office, implying that Kemal’s choices helped bring about the separation. Years later, when Kemal’s visits to the Keskin home have become central to his life, Zaim’s reports about society help him feel that he is not missing much by staying away. At the same time, Zaim’s perspective marks the distance between Kemal’s private fixation and the ordinary changes unfolding among his friends.

Business Conflict and Estrangement

The friendship strains as Kemal’s work and private life pull him further from his old circle. Tekyay, managed by Kenan and established by Kemal’s brother Osman, becomes a competitor to Satsat. Its growth is helped by Turgay Bey’s decision to give it distribution rights for key products; Kenan also recruits Satsat managers with unusually high salaries. Zaim is not responsible for those moves, but the changing business landscape forms the backdrop to his later disagreement with Kemal about Meltem and its advertising.

When Meltem hires Papatya for an early-summer campaign directed by Feridun, Zaim and Kemal meet over lunch at Fuaye Restaurant to discuss the arrangement. Zaim explains that foreign competitors are extending credit and supplying free shop signs and promotional gifts, while Turkish-made soda is losing appeal among young consumers. He is anxious that Papatya’s conduct could damage the campaign, especially in the provinces, and mentions a rumor that she is involved with Füsun’s husband. Kemal dislikes Zaim’s possessive-sounding reference to Füsun and responds that he too drinks Coca-Cola on the rare occasions when he has soda. Zaim bristles at the suggestion that his Western-style advertising has not secured Meltem lasting prestige among rich urban consumers, yet he also tells Kemal that he understands his love for Füsun and considers it respectable.

The disagreement turns personal when Zaim says that Kemal’s friends did not abandon him; Kemal turned away from them by withdrawing into himself and taking no pleasure or interest in their world. Kemal’s isolation has brought him a sense of pursuing something deeper, but Zaim refuses to treat that choice as something done to Kemal by others. After a tense meal, they embrace and kiss each other on the cheeks at the door, like friends who understand that a long parting is beginning, and then walk away in opposite directions. Two weeks later, Mehmet tells Kemal that Zaim and Sibel have been a couple for some time and that he had assumed Kemal already knew. The revelation gives their separation a further personal consequence: Sibel has become part of Zaim’s life as Kemal remains outside his former circle.

Later Memory and Reconciliation

Even after the friendship has become difficult to resume, Zaim remains emotionally present in Kemal’s story. Following Füsun’s death, Kemal hopes to repair his relationship with Zaim and have him as a confidant again. That hope fades when he hears that Zaim and Sibel are happy together and expecting a child. Kemal also learns that Nurcihan and Sibel have fallen out, while Mehmet says that he no longer sees Zaim despite there being no ill feeling between the men. The old circle has changed in ways that make a return impossible for Kemal, who does not want others to see him as a broken man or his story reflected in their eyes.

The narrator later encounters Zaim and Sibel in the years after Kemal’s death. Zaim is now wealthier, Meltem soda has disappeared, and the company itself is thriving. He and Sibel receive the narrator at their house in the Bebek hills overlooking the Bosphorus, where they are careful that Kemal’s story not be presented from only one side. They recount meeting Kemal in Milan on April 11, half a day before his death. Seeing Sibel’s daughter Gül, who resembled her mother in her twenties and wore an old knitted stole of hers, Kemal mistook her for Sibel. Zaim and Sibel remember him as exhausted, disheveled, and deeply unhappy; the man they had known as charming and full of life seemed to them to have fallen apart.

Zaim speaks with evident feeling about how much he loved Kemal and how deeply he misses him. He asks whether Kemal really collected Füsun’s possessions and whether a museum will be created. When the narrator confirms the plan, Zaim and Sibel offer a donation through Meltem Enterprises. His question, half awed and half apprehensive, recognizes the scale of Kemal’s attachment, while the offer turns remembrance into practical support. Zaim’s final role is therefore neither simply that of a society friend nor that of a rival who moved on with Sibel: he remains a witness to Kemal’s life, able to mourn him and help carry his memory into the museum.