Belkıs

Belkıs is a society woman whose life and death expose the unequal pressures of class, marriage, and sexual respectability in Istanbul. After she dies in a traffic accident, Kemal recounts her history to Sibel: a romance across class lines, a life shaped by other people’s judgments, and a reputation alternately envied and denounced. The story’s competing accounts—from Kemal, Sibel, and Kemal’s mother—make Belkıs more than a subject of gossip: she becomes a measure of the social rules that govern how a woman’s choices are remembered.

Identity and Introduction

At the time of her death, Belkıs is thirty-two or thirty-three, according to Kemal’s estimate. She comes from a poor family, and after entering society she faces gossip about her mother’s headscarf. The detail places her social position under scrutiny even before her relationships become public knowledge: acceptance into an affluent milieu does not erase the class background by which others judge her.

Her death is prominent in the newspapers, though she herself has not read the coverage. At the dress shop where Füsun works, Şenay Hanım discusses the deceased woman throughout the morning, and customers come in to talk about the accident. Füsun says the shop will close at lunchtime the following day so she can attend the funeral. Her account complicates the public display of mourning: Belkıs had been a frequent customer, but she borrowed expensive dresses newly arrived from Italy and Paris for parties, then returned them, and drove hard bargains. Şenay Hanım complained about her privately but did not challenge her because Belkıs was well connected. The anecdote records both her access to fashionable society and the resentment that accompanied it.

Romance with Faris and Life in Istanbul

Kemal traces Belkıs’s first major romance to the late 1950s, when she was a lycée student. At celebrations marking May 19, she met Faris, the youngest son of the Kaptanoğlus, one of Istanbul’s wealthiest shipping families. Their relationship lasted for years. In Kemal’s account, the young couple’s attachment and decisions brought them into conflict with Faris’s family, which interpreted Belkıs’s intimate relationship with him as an attempt to secure marriage. The family opposed the match, while Faris lacked the resolve and independent means to defy them.

The family’s solution was to send Faris and Belkıs to Paris to live together out of sight, without marrying. Three years later, Faris died there; Kemal attributes his death uncertainly to drugs or despair. Belkıs returned to Istanbul rather than remaining abroad. Kemal describes her subsequent relationships with a succession of wealthy men, including Sabih the Bear and the eldest Demirbağ son. After several lovers were themselves recovering from other romances, society men gave her the flattering sobriquet the Consoling Angel and imagined having affairs with her. Her position in their social world was therefore not simply that of an outsider: she moved among eligible bachelors while remaining subject to the judgments that constrained her standing as a potential wife.

Reputation, Class, and Respectability

Kemal’s account draws a sharp distinction between men’s desire for Belkıs and their willingness to marry her. He tells Sibel that a wealthy family might have overlooked a woman’s sexual history if she had been rich herself, or if she had married Faris before the relationship challenged conventions of chastity. Belkıs, however, came from a poor family and did not organize her love life around the rules of respectability as Kemal describes them. The society women who had briefly envied her relationships turned against her, and a more degrading label replaced the earlier, admiring one.

Sibel responds by observing that none of the men had married Belkıs, and reads this as evidence that none had loved her enough to take that step. Kemal counters that men could fall deeply in love with women like her while still treating marriage as a separate decision. Their exchange makes the central contradiction plain: Belkıs’s relationships could attract admiration, fantasy, and envy, yet the same social world could withhold the recognition and security associated with marriage. Her story also echoes the broader account of premarital chastity in Istanbul: modernized surroundings did not necessarily remove older judgments, and women bore a heavier reputational burden than men.

Memory and Narrative Significance

Kemal’s portrait is not the only account of Belkıs. On the eve of his engagement, Kemal’s mother speaks of her with genuine sorrow, remembering time spent together in Uludağ years earlier. While Kemal’s father and the eldest Demirbağ son played poker, the two women stayed up late in the hotel’s rustic bar, drinking tea, knitting, and talking. Kemal’s mother remembers Belkıs as a good person who suffered first because of poverty and then because of men. Her recollection restores a private companionship that the public stories of lovers, clothes, and gossip leave out.

The difference between these accounts does not settle Belkıs’s character into a single verdict. Kemal admits that he found her repulsive, even while defending the possibility that her choices deserve respect; his mother remembers her tenderly, while Sibel questions the men who desired but did not marry her. Belkıs remains largely known through the judgments of others, but the contrasts among them reveal how her reputation was made. Her death gathers those judgments into a single occasion: newspaper attention, talk at the shop, a funeral, and memories of an earlier friendship. Through her, the narrative shows how class and sexual respectability shape not only a woman’s prospects but also the stories others tell about her after she is gone.