Füsun visits Kemal at the Merhamet Apartments

Füsun visits Kemal at the Merhamet Apartments with the money for a counterfeit handbag, ending two afternoons of his waiting and beginning a brief encounter that is at once tender, coercive, and unresolved. The visit concentrates the story’s central tension in a small domestic space: Kemal tries to make Füsun stay, while she arrives intending to settle the matter and leave. Tea, the rain, an umbrella, and the apartment’s accumulated belongings give the meeting its intimate texture, but none can make her promise to return.

Setting and lead-up

On Wednesday, April 30, 1975, Kemal waits for Füsun at the Merhamet Apartments between two and four in the afternoon. She does not come. He returns the next day and waits again, still without seeing her. The empty hours leave him heartbroken and confused, but the apartment’s airless rooms also offer a strange form of relief. Among his mother’s old vases and dresses, discarded furniture, and his father’s amateur snapshots, Kemal recalls parts of his childhood and youth that he had forgotten. The objects seem to settle his nerves even as he waits for the person who has come to dominate his attention.

At lunch the following day, Kemal is with Abdülkerim, a friend from his army days and a Kayseri dealer for Satsat, at Hacı Arif’s Restaurant in Beyoğlu. He feels ashamed that he has spent two afternoons alone in the apartment waiting for Füsun, and resolves to forget her, the handbag, and the whole affair. Then, glancing at his watch, he imagines that she may be on her way to the apartment with the refund. He invents an excuse, rushes through his food, and hurries back. The emotional turn is immediate: his attempted renunciation lasts only until he thinks she might appear.

Arrival and the apartment

Twenty minutes after Kemal returns, someone rings the bell. Before opening the door, he remembers having dreamed the previous night that he had opened it to Füsun. She stands there with an umbrella, her hair dripping wet and a yellow pointille dress on. The arrival brings his imagined meeting into the actual room, but her purpose is practical: she has brought the money and says she does not want to disturb him or stay.

The envelope she carries bears the words Outstanding Achievement Course. Kemal does not take it. Instead, he takes her by the shoulder, pulls her inside, and shuts the door. He says that the rain is heavy, asks her to sit, and offers to make tea so she can warm herself. His hospitality is also a means of delaying her departure. While he is in the kitchen, Füsun looks over his mother’s furniture, antiques, dusty clocks, hatboxes, and accessories. Kemal explains that his mother bought things impulsively from fashionable shops, mansions and yali properties, antique dealers, and other places, then brought them to the apartment and forgot them. He opens trunks of mothball-scented clothes and brings out further remnants, including the tricycle that he and Füsun had ridden as children. The room’s stored objects connect their present encounter to a shared past, though the memories belong to Kemal’s account of the scene.

Tea, the kiss, and refusal

Füsun explains that the shopkeeper was annoyed when she learned Kemal had demanded his money back, but chose not to make a drama of it. She says the shopkeeper knew the handbag was fake and does not know that Füsun has come to see him. Having delivered the refund, she says she must leave. Kemal urges her to stay because she has not had her tea. When he brings it, he watches her blow on the surface and take careful, hurried sips. His feelings pull in opposing directions: admiration and shame, tenderness and joy.

Kemal reaches to caress her hair and moves his face toward hers. When she does not pull away, he gives her a quick, delicate kiss on the side of her lips. The narrative makes the imbalance of the moment explicit: Füsun is holding the hot cup in both hands and cannot defend herself; she blushes and appears angry and confused. She says she likes kissing, but that with Kemal it is out of the question. Asked whether she has kissed before, she answers that she has, but that nothing more happened. The exchange gives Kemal a disclosure about her experience while also setting a clear limit on what she will accept from him.

The departure and its aftermath

Füsun asks about Sibel, whom she describes as beautiful and charming, and asks when Kemal is to marry her. He says the engagement party is a month and a half away and offers her a parasol his mother brought back from Nice. Füsun refuses it as too odd to take back to the shop. When the rain has stopped, she is ready to leave, even if that means abandoning her own umbrella. Kemal panics at the thought that he may never see her again and asks her to come back just to drink tea. She tells him not to be angry, says she does not want to return, and promises not to tell anyone he kissed her. His final question about the umbrella cannot change her decision.

The encounter therefore ends not with a renewed relationship but with a refusal whose force Kemal immediately fears. The objects that punctuate the scene—the refund envelope, the tea, the borrowed parasol, the abandoned umbrella, and the childhood tricycle—belong to different registers of exchange and memory. Kemal tries to turn a repayment into a visit and a visit into continued closeness; Füsun insists on separating those things. The scene’s tenderness does not erase the pressure in his attempt to keep her inside or the vulnerability of the kiss.

Place in Kemal’s later recollection

The visit becomes part of a longer pattern in which Kemal’s relationship to places is shaped by the effort to manage his longing. Later, he forbids himself from going to the Merhamet Apartments and devises a mental map of prohibited streets, marking the apartment and other locations associated with Füsun as places to avoid. He treats the restrictions as an ascetic regimen intended to cure him, yet even the streets he allows himself to cross are charged with possible recollection. The apartment where objects once calmed him becomes one of the sites from which he tries to protect himself.

That effort does not free him from Füsun’s presence in the city. He begins to seek out places where he might see imagined versions of her, and Istanbul becomes, in his perception, a network of signs that remind him of her. In poorer neighborhoods, a glimpse of a supposed Füsun can lead him to linger among streets, coffeehouses, and residents, hoping that she or her family may be nearby. These later episodes show how far the brief visit’s unresolved ending reverberates: Kemal moves from waiting in one apartment to organizing his movements across the city around her absence. Much later, he and Füsun meet regularly in Beyoğlu cinemas, where they choose films, sit together in the dim theaters, and exchange news. That later closeness contrasts with her firm refusal to return to the apartment, without undoing the boundary she sets during this first visit.