Kemal and Füsun’s Driving Lessons begin in April 1983, when a long-delayed plan to obtain a driver’s license becomes a test of the couple’s renewed closeness. Their first outings alone together in eight years combine instruction, errands, and the tentative work of becoming acquainted again. The lessons are practical on the surface, but each drive carries the strain of a second chance: Kemal fears that their relationship, like the examination itself, may not withstand another failure.

Background and Stakes

After five weeks of indecision, feigned reluctance, and silence, Füsun agrees to prepare for the licensing examination with Kemal. He understands that the undertaking means more than acquiring a license. Their intimacy is being tested again in a setting where he is her instructor, and he believes there will be no third chance if this one fails. Her eventual agreement makes him hopeful, though his anticipation is accompanied by anxiety.

On April 15, three days after they celebrate Füsun’s twenty-sixth birthday, Kemal collects her in the 1956 Chevrolet near Firuzağa Mosque. At her request, he does not pick her up outside her home in Çukurcuma, but at a nearby corner, away from the neighborhood’s curious attention. The precautions establish a boundary around their private time even as they begin to share ordinary activities again. Kemal remembers the occasion not as a continuation of their past but, in his unsettled state, almost as a first meeting with someone newly presented as a suitable match.

Lessons in Yıldız Park

The lessons take place in Yıldız Park, where the stopped car and the need to practice create pauses that are as important to Kemal as the driving itself. Füsun’s errors—handling the gears, starting the car, or controlling it near the curb—can make him panic. He invests each mistake with consequences beyond the immediate task, reading it as a possible threat to their future happiness. The lesson thus sets practical instruction against emotional overinterpretation: the car must be controlled, while Kemal struggles to control his hope.

A lesson lasts at most two hours, though Kemal experiences it as seemingly unending. When it is over, the pair often fall quiet. They may then drive to Emirgân for tea, or sit in the car by the Bosphorus, with Füsun speaking little or returning the conversation to driving. Kemal’s happiness is intense, but the time together remains tentative rather than openly romantic. When he tries to turn a pause into an opportunity for greater physical closeness, Füsun politely draws a limit. Her good humor afterward reassures him, and he takes comfort even in being refused; restraint is part of the fragile arrangement they are trying to sustain.

The City as Classroom

In June, the practical work expands into a tour of Istanbul’s institutions. Kemal and Füsun gather the documents required for the examination, carrying a folder that accumulates stains from tea, coffee, ink, and oil. At Kasımpaşa Military Hospital, applicants wait for hours to obtain a medical report. At Taksim First Aid Hospital, they queue only to discover that the doctor has gone home. When a specialist they need is away, they are sent toward Haydarpaşa; while waiting, they throw simits to seagulls from the Kadıköy ferry. At Istanbul University’s Çapa Hospital, they submit their papers and walk through nearby streets, passing the Fatih Hotel, a place Kemal associates with earlier anguish and his father’s death. In the present, it seems to belong to another city.

The repeated errands change the character of their time together. Each new document is a small success to celebrate at a simple neighborhood restaurant. Füsun smokes openly and watches people and street life with alert curiosity. They stop to look at children playing football, street vendors, passersby, and whatever else draws a crowd. Kemal values the journeys not only because they advance the application, but because they let him discover unfamiliar parts of Istanbul and unfamiliar aspects of Füsun. The city’s queues, hospitals, and crowded transport expose them to hardship beyond their private troubles; moving among other people brings Kemal a sense of humility and consolation.

Examination and Refusal of Shortcuts

Füsun passes the written examination with a perfect score, but her first road test goes badly. She has started the Chevrolet and begun driving when an examiner accuses her of failing to check the mirrors. When she turns to ask what he means, the committee orders her to stop and leave the car. The regulations prohibit looking behind while driving, and the examiners treat her response as a reason to end the test. The failure leaves her demoralized, and she is told to return four weeks later.

The experience also exposes the distance between official procedure and the licensing system as applicants encounter it. People familiar with the process explain that the first attempt is routinely failed and advise the couple about bribes, expensive driving schools, and examination committees linked to those schools. One paid course provides access to a specially modified Ford, equipped to make a difficult parking maneuver easier; a larger payment can bypass the school altogether. These workarounds turn a test of driving into a test of access to informal arrangements.

Füsun refuses to enrich the policemen who failed her, even by the smallest amount. Kemal, a businessman accustomed to recognizing how unofficial payments can become embedded in a process, does not make that choice for her. They continue practicing in Yıldız Park instead. The refusal makes their progress slower, but it preserves Füsun’s terms for pursuing the license. A policeman experienced in the system explains that candidates must not only operate a car correctly but visibly demonstrate compliance, even with exaggerated gestures. The examination therefore measures both driving and the performance of obedience to the state.

Significance

The driving lessons make an ordinary administrative goal carry unusual emotional weight. Kemal repeatedly treats practical setbacks as signs about the couple’s future, while Füsun’s patience and refusal of bribery keep the work grounded in choices she makes for herself. Their shared trips offer a less enclosed form of intimacy than their earlier private history: they wait in public offices, travel through unfamiliar neighborhoods, and observe the lives around them. In the movement between stalled engines, accumulated paperwork, failed tests, and small celebrations, the episode presents reconciliation not as a single declaration but as time spent together under imperfect conditions.