April 11, 2007

April 11, 2007, marks Kemal’s unexpected encounter with Sibel and Zaim in Milan, roughly half a day before his death. Recounted to the narrator after Kemal’s funeral, the meeting brings the long private duration of his attachment into sharp contact with the public fact of his changed appearance: the man who had once seemed charming and full of life now looked exhausted, disheveled, and cut off from the world.

The encounter in Milan

On a three-day pleasure trip, Sibel and Zaim were walking through Milan with their daughters, Gül and Ebru, then twenty and eighteen. The family was eating cones of orange, strawberry, and melon ice cream, peering into shop windows, and laughing together. Kemal first noticed Gül, whose strong resemblance to her mother made him mistake her for Sibel. He approached and greeted her as though he had suddenly found the young woman he had known decades earlier.

The resemblance was heightened by Gül’s clothing: she happened to be wearing an old knitted stole that Sibel had worn in her twenties. The moment briefly collapsed the distance between past and present. Kemal’s recognition began with an echo of the earlier Sibel, while the family he encountered belonged to a later life that had continued without him.

The visible passage of time

Sibel remembered Kemal as so altered that, had he not approached them, she and Zaim might not have recognized him. He looked tired, unkempt, deeply unhappy, and old; a cigarette hung from his mouth. To Sibel, he seemed not merely aged but broken down and estranged from life. Zaim, too, was heartsick at the sight. Their response measured the change against the Kemal they had known: the man once engaged to Sibel at the Hilton, charming and exuberant, had vanished from view.

The narrator placed the Milan meeting against another measure of elapsed time: it came thirty-one years after Kemal’s last meal with Sibel and Zaim at Fuaye. The date therefore records more than a final chance meeting. It makes visible the gulf between a remembered social world and the worn man who appeared in Milan, recognized through a young woman’s resemblance to her mother.

A life measured by private time

The encounter’s force is sharpened by the extraordinary duration of Kemal’s earlier visits to Füsun and her family in Çukurcuma. From October 23, 1976, to August 26, 1984, he went to supper 1,593 times across 2,864 days—seven years and ten months. He averaged about four visits a week, though the rhythm varied: at times he saw the family every day, while at other times he stayed away in an effort to forget Füsun. Even then, more than ten days without seeing her became unbearable. The Keskin family came to expect him and kept a place for him at the table, while his unspoken purpose was to see Füsun.

These visits occupied a different time from the calendar’s count. Kemal usually arrived around seven in the evening and left after the television’s closing ceremony, around midnight; he estimated that an average visit lasted five hours. The household’s German-made wall clock, with its wooden and glass case, pendulum, and chime, stood as a reminder of the official world outside, but television had become the family’s practical timekeeper. At seven, the clock on the screen preceded the news on TRT. Füsun checked her wristwatch against it, as Tarık Bey checked one of his pocket watches, and she sometimes smiled at Kemal when she had set the time correctly. In this recurring supper ritual, the clock measured public time while their exchanged looks belonged to a more intimate one.

The rhythm was not insulated from history. After the September 1980 coup, martial law brought a ten o’clock curfew, forcing Kemal to leave by a quarter to ten. His hurried return through emptied streets cut short evenings that had previously stretched toward midnight. He remembered the curfew not only as a political restriction but as a deprivation of time with Füsun: even years later, news of military displeasure could recall the pain of being sent home before he had seen enough of her.

Memory mapped onto the city

Kemal also tried to govern time by controlling where he went. To stop himself from waiting for Füsun at the Merhamet Apartments or touching objects that recalled her, he devised a mental map of Istanbul and marked certain streets and places as forbidden. The Şanzelize Boutique, the Merhamet Apartments, Kuyulu Bostan Street, and nearby side streets became red zones he was not to enter. Orange areas were permissible only in necessity, while yellow streets required caution because they held especially dangerous associations. The route from Satsat to the Merhamet Apartments, and the road Füsun had taken home from the boutique, seemed mined with recollection.

Avoidance could not make the city forget her. Kemal began seeing imagined versions of Füsun in crowded places, knew they were not real, and nevertheless sought the brief consolation of those apparitions. He added their locations to his mental map until Istanbul became, in his perception, a network of signs that summoned her. When he searched poor neighborhoods such as Vefa, Zeyrek, Fatih, and Kocamustafapaşa, even streets marked by poverty and political threats could feel enchanted because he believed Füsun might be near. Against this accumulation of remembered routes and repeated evenings, April 11 in Milan stands as a stark encounter with chronological time: a chance recognition, a visible aging, and the final brief meeting before Kemal’s death.