Jealousy

Jealousy in Kemal’s account is not simply resentment of a rival: it is the feeling that makes him recognize how deeply Füsun occupies his thoughts, while also exposing a possessive impulse he cannot comfortably admit. The stories she tells about other men turn desire into comparison. Kemal tries to treat that comparison as a passing disturbance, but his body and actions increasingly contradict his explanations. His jealousy culminates in a nighttime vigil near Füsun’s home, where longing, fear, and the wish to monitor her become difficult to separate.

The Story of Turgay Bey

The immediate provocation comes when Kemal asks Füsun whether she has ever felt anything like the intensity they share. She answers that she has not, then recalls a man who had been obsessively in love with her: Turgay Bey, a wealthy textile businessman, married with a family, and a business associate and family friend of Kemal’s father, brother, and Kemal himself. Füsun’s account makes the rival unusually close to home. Kemal knows Turgay Bey as a conspicuously healthy-looking, handsome man strolling through Nişantaşı with his wife and children, apparently content in family life. The contrast between that public image and the secret courtship unsettles Kemal more than an anonymous admirer could have.

Turgay Bey used his visits to the Şanzelize Boutique to pursue Füsun. Because Şenay Hanım understood his intentions and encouraged Füsun not to disappoint a generous customer, Füsun accepted presents and eventually agreed to meet him out of curiosity. They kissed in his Mustang at places by the Dolmabahçe Clock Tower and near the Sports Arena. On a snowy outing to Bebek, followed by a stop in Ortaköy, Turgay Bey drank too much and pressed Füsun to go to his room in Şişli. When she refused, he offered to buy her anything; later, while driving through empty lots and backstreets, he tried to force himself on her. Füsun stopped meeting him in the car, but his daily visits and gifts continued. Her account therefore gives Kemal not only a rival’s name and history but a disturbing mixture of affection, pressure, money, and coercion.

Kemal notices that his envy changes when Füsun names the man. Before that disclosure, he can smile at the predicament of a besotted admirer and suppress his jealousy. Once he recognizes Turgay Bey as a familiar figure from his own family and business world, envy floods him. His response reveals how little distance he can maintain between the social respect he had accorded Turgay Bey and the intimate rival Füsun describes. The man’s wealth, marriage, car, and public respectability become details in a private reckoning.

From Envy to Possessiveness

Kemal tries to contain the feeling by reasoning about it. He considers whether keeping Füsun constantly in mind is evidence that he is falling in love, but his rational self instead attributes his preoccupation to the other men in her stories. He briefly decides that jealousy may be a more conclusive sign of love, then argues that it is only temporary. After a day or two, he says, he can absorb the list of Füsun’s former admirers and even feel contempt for those who did not persuade her to go further. That composure does not last: during sex with Füsun, he experiences an urge to master her and applies greater force than he expects of himself. The jealousy he had treated as an idea becomes a physical change in his behavior.

Füsun’s account also includes her age and the circumstances of her earlier encounters. When Kemal asks why she had not gone further with Turgay Bey, she explains that she was not yet eighteen; she had turned eighteen two weeks before meeting Kemal at the shop, on April 12. This detail places her earlier courtship within a period when she was still underage, while the forceful episode makes clear that Turgay Bey’s persistence was not simply romantic devotion. Kemal’s jealousy, however, focuses on the fact that she had kissed and met other men. His account thus sets the threat he feels beside the unequal pressure Füsun describes, without making the two experiences equivalent.

The Nighttime Vigil

Another evening, after leaving his parents, Kemal stops at Alaaddin’s shop and buys a cheap baby doll for Füsun. He calculates that he must wait fifteen hours before he can give it to her and embrace her; for the first time, he feels pain at being unable to telephone her. The present he has chosen promises a future moment of closeness, but it cannot relieve the immediate absence. Instead of going home, he walks toward Kuyulu Bostan Street, passing a coffeehouse and the schoolyard associated with his childhood.

His rational mind warns that Füsun’s father might answer the door and that a visit could cause a scandal. Kemal nevertheless walks far enough to see the house and its lit windows, including the second-floor windows reached by the chestnut tree. He understands that he has come partly in hope of seeing or speaking to Füsun, and partly to find out whether she is with someone else. Because she has now experienced lovemaking, he imagines she may be curious about doing so with one of the other admirers she had named. The sight of the windows makes his heart pound; he remains outside, unable to remember how long he watches, and eventually goes home with the doll still in his hand.

What feeds his jealousy, by his own account, is his memory of Füsun giving herself over to sexual pleasure with an enthusiasm he had rarely seen in a woman. That recollection combines admiration with fear: the very capacity for pleasure that makes their intimacy vivid also makes him imagine her experiencing it with someone else. The episode is therefore less an encounter with a rival than a scene of surveillance and projection. Füsun is inside a home whose lights Kemal can see, but he cannot know what she is doing; the distance sharpens rather than settles his suspicions.

Rationalization and Narrative Function

The next morning Kemal measures the jealousy he could not banish and fears that he is becoming besotted. He considers telling Zaim, Mehmet, or Hilmi the Bastard about his secret, perhaps disguising it as a joke, but doubts they would sympathize: his friends like Sibel and find her attractive. He anticipates that mockery would collapse into a sincere confession of longing and expose how undone he feels. Instead, he decides that he must not panic or risk the happy marriage he still wants, and that for now he should leave matters as they are.

Kemal also frames his earlier discussion of Istanbul’s young men and their assumptions about women as a way to cool down after Füsun’s stories, especially the one about Turgay Bey. That self-conscious detour shows the work of rationalization: he turns personal pain into an apparently detached account of social behavior, then admits that the account was serving his own emotional needs. He explains his jealousy as natural because Turgay Bey is a prominent industrialist who lives, as he does, in Nişantaşı, and predicts that it will pass. Yet the doll, the walk toward Füsun’s house, and the decision not to confide in his friends all give the feeling a more durable shape. Jealousy marks the widening gap between Kemal’s wish to preserve his existing life and the desire for Füsun that is already taking control of his attention.