“Unlucky at Cards, Lucky at Love”

“Unlucky at Cards, Lucky at Love” is a familiar saying in Kemal’s account of the family gatherings he shares with Füsun. Repeated over cards and New Year’s lottery tickets, it becomes more than a proverb: a way to turn chance into consolation, and, for Kemal and Füsun, a tentative language for affection. Its comic assurance that romantic fortune compensates for losses at play carries a sharper irony in a relationship whose happiness is real but precarious.

The Saying at the Family Table

The phrase belongs to a domestic routine shared by the Basmacı and Keskin households. Kemal recalls it being repeated especially when Tarık played cards with guests. On New Year’s Eve, the saying attached itself to another game of chance: the lottery tickets that Nesibe the seamstress bought for the grand drawing on December 31, among the presents for the Keskin family’s tombala gathering. The small rituals joined card playing, a family celebration, and the national lottery in one familiar vocabulary of luck.

Füsun won the lottery ticket at the Keskin table every year from 1977 through 1984. Winning the ticket, however, never meant winning money. When the drawing was announced on radio and television, she did not win a prize—not even a refund. The recurring mismatch gives the proverb a concrete setup: Füsun repeatedly receives the chance to be lucky, then repeatedly loses. The saying promises that another kind of fortune may balance the account, but the ticket itself offers no such proof.

The 1981 Exchange

On New Year’s Eve in 1981, the family watched the live broadcast of the grand drawing, supervised by the First Notary Public of Ankara. Once it was clear that Füsun had won nothing, Kemal, drunk and thoughtless, repeated the saying that everyone used compulsively. He framed it as a flirtatious consolation, adopting the manner of an English gentleman hero they had watched on television: “Seeing as you’ve lost the lottery, Miss Füsun,” he said, “you are bound to be a winner at love!”

Füsun answered without missing a beat: “I have no doubt about that, Kemal Bey!” Her reply, delivered in the manner of the clever, elegant heroines of the same films, meets his performance with one of her own. The exchange is playful, but its intimacy is not incidental. In a crowded family setting, the proverb lets Kemal address Füsun’s romantic prospects while presenting his remark as a familiar joke; her confident answer acknowledges the opening without turning it into a public declaration. Their shared fluency in the saying briefly makes the couple’s private understanding legible through the language of a household ritual.

A Joke Outside the House

The same phrase resurfaces during the family’s Bosphorus excursions from their home in Çukurcuma. Away from the house, Kemal and Füsun could sit beside each other in the car and at restaurants, and speak softly amid the surrounding noise. On one outing they bought a lottery ticket from a seller and won nothing. They glanced at each other and both began, “Unlucky at cards …” Their mutual recognition of the joke brought on embarrassment, then elation.

That quick change of feeling reveals what the proverb does between them. Its public form is a well-worn saying about cards and love; its private force comes from the fact that they know why it matters to each other. At the family home, their closeness must remain guarded within ordinary visits and shared meals. On the outings, sitting together and exchanging a familiar line can feel like a small release from those roles. The joke does not change their circumstances, but saying it together briefly makes the happiness of being close more visible to them.

Meaning and Irony

The proverb treats romantic happiness as compensation for losses elsewhere, as if luck could be redistributed between separate parts of life. The repeated lottery failures make that promise comic, while the exchanges between Kemal and Füsun give it emotional weight. Kemal’s 1981 remark is both an established family formula and a personal overture; Füsun’s quick reply is at once performance and answer. On the Bosphorus, the unfinished version of the line is enough: each recognizes the thought before it is completed.

The saying therefore works less as a prediction than as a shared, borrowed language for hope. It can turn an ordinary disappointment into flirtation and allow affection to surface without being plainly announced. Yet the narrator’s retrospective account also preserves the gap between the proverb’s neat balance and the lovers’ more complicated experience. Losing at the lottery does not guarantee success in love. What the phrase can offer, in those brief scenes, is a moment of closeness: a joke repeated at the table or carried into the noisy world beyond it.