Füsun’s struggle to obtain a driver’s license

Füsun’s struggle to obtain a driver’s license is both a drawn-out practical ordeal and a close-up of how official rules are administered in everyday life. She studies successfully and learns to handle a car, yet repeated failures keep the license out of reach. The tests expose a system in which performance alone does not guarantee success, while Füsun’s refusal to bribe the officials makes her persistence a matter of principle as well as mobility.

The written exam and first road test

Füsun passes the written examination with a perfect score. The contrast with what follows is sharp: the road test is not simply a measure of her knowledge, but an encounter with examiners who control the terms of success. On her first attempt, she starts the 1956 Chevrolet and gets it moving. An examiner then accuses her of failing to look in the mirrors. When she turns to ask what he means, the committee orders her to stop and get out. The narrator points to the contradiction in the stated regulations: drivers are not supposed to look behind while driving, even as examiners expect them to demonstrate awareness of the mirrors. The test ends before Füsun has gone far, and the examiners’ abrupt exit from the car makes the rebuke a public humiliation as well as a failure.

The narrator explains that applicants were routinely failed on their first attempt to make clear that operating a car was serious business. Whatever the official rationale, the experience leaves Füsun demoralized and the couple unprepared for how the process works. Her perfect written score cannot protect her from the discretion exercised during the road test; the divide between knowing the rules and satisfying the people who enforce them becomes central to the struggle.

The licensing system and refusal to bribe

After the first failure, people familiar with the licensing agency treat the narrator and Füsun’s disappointment as naïve. They explain that a license could be procured through a particular teahouse frequented by people involved in the business. Another route was to enroll in an expensive driving school, where retired traffic policemen taught; attendance was not required, but the arrangement was said to ensure success because examiners and policemen were partners in the business. For a larger payment, applicants could bypass the school altogether. The narrator, a businessman, recognizes this kind of arrangement as a familiar feature of transactions conducted under official permission.

The driving school’s test car makes the system’s logic unusually visible. It was an old Ford modified with a large hole in the floor beside the driver’s seat, allowing the candidate to see colored markings on the road while parking. A guide hidden behind the sun visor explained how each marking indicated when to turn the wheel fully left and when to reverse. Success thus depended not only on driving but on access to a vehicle and instructions designed to make the test manageable. The preparation offered the appearance of assessment while providing a practical route around its demands.

Füsun refuses even the smallest payment to the policemen who have failed her. Rather than use the available shortcuts, she and the narrator continue their lessons at Yıldız Park. The book’s wider account of state permissions—from the two-stage review of screenplays to the agents and bribery surrounding film approval—places the licensing process within a recurring pattern: official procedures invite informal intermediaries, and citizens must decide whether to navigate, pay, or resist. Füsun’s refusal is specific and consequential; it leaves her exposed to further testing, but preserves her insistence on earning the license without enriching the officials.

Repeated failures and continued lessons

A month after her first attempt, Füsun fails again. This time the examiners require her to reverse uphill into an imaginary parking space. The Chevrolet trembles and judders, and she is again ordered out. The narrator watches from a distance among retired policemen, applicants, letter writers, teaboys, and onlookers. One spectator recognizes the examiner taking over the wheel and remarks that Füsun has been failed; others laugh. Their reaction makes clear that the outcome is not private or surprising to those gathered around the licensing business. Füsun, by contrast, is too upset to speak on the drive home.

The lessons continue, and she soon learns to drive well by taking the car to and from practice and sometimes into the city. Driving competence, however, does not translate into a passing result. She fails again in early August, then makes another attempt at the end of the summer with the same examiners and fails once more. The narrator connects her renewed anger to an earlier experience: her expression recalls the one she wore when describing men who had pawed and molested her. Her complaint about prejudice against women drivers therefore carries the weight of a broader vulnerability, not just irritation at an unfair exam.

The failures also shape the rhythm of the couple’s time together. After lessons, they sometimes go for coffee and soda by the Bosphorus or tea at a coffeehouse, where passing tankers and ferries become the view during long silences. At other times, they practice at Yıldız Park until the sun is low. These outings do not erase the humiliation of the tests, but they give the repeated lessons a shared routine. When the summer ends, the beaches close with the first rains, and neither Füsun nor the narrator is eager to return to the park. The pause marks the accumulated strain of a process that has extended well beyond the mechanics of driving.

Passing without payment

Füsun fails three more times before finally passing the road test in early 1984. By then, the examiners have tired of her and understand that she will not pay a bribe. The outcome is therefore not presented as a sudden triumph of driving skill alone: she had become capable behind the wheel earlier, but the license arrives only after a long sequence of tests and refusals. Her persistence outlasts the pressure to purchase an easier route through the system.

That night, the narrator celebrates by taking Füsun, Nesibe, and Tarık to the Bebek Maksim Nightclub to hear Müzeyyen Senar sing old Turkish songs. The celebration gives the license a family setting and marks the end of a struggle that had repeatedly spilled into their shared time. In the wider arc of Füsun and the narrator’s relationship, the lessons have been a sustained activity through which they spend time together, but the episode does not turn their connection into carefree romance: its recurring embarrassment, silences, and practical frustrations remain part of their story. The license matters as an achievement, while the terms on which Füsun obtains it give the achievement its particular force.