Kemal and Mümtaz’s relationship

Kemal and Mümtaz’s relationship is defined by physical affection, quiet counsel, and a grief that makes their shared past newly tangible. Mümtaz appears not as a distant patriarch but as a father whose familiar gestures and possessions have shaped Kemal’s childhood. After his death, Kemal’s attention turns to those details: a pajama collar, a slipper, a remembered touch, and objects kept in the family home become traces of a bond that words alone cannot contain.

A Father’s Counsel in the Night

When Kemal cannot sleep, he discovers that Mümtaz is lying on the other chaise longue in the darkness. Kemal admits, guiltily, that he has been having trouble lately. His father answers softly that the pain will pass and that Kemal is still young; regrets, he warns, can keep a person awake into old age, counting the stars until dawn. The advice is gentle rather than reproachful, but it gives their exchange a sober reach beyond that night: Mümtaz speaks from the perspective of a life in which actions may persist as regrets.

Kemal’s reply is brief, and the exchange soon gives way to the possibility of sleep. What remains is not a dramatic reconciliation but a small act of reassurance between father and son. The remembered scene also returns through objects: Kemal displays the collar of Mümtaz’s pajamas and one of his slippers, saying that their sight makes him sad. Domestic things carry the emotional force of the encounter after its speakers are gone. The pajamas are both what Mümtaz wore while offering comfort and what Kemal can later preserve as a material reminder of him.

Childhood Affection and Resemblance

At Mümtaz’s death, Kemal recognizes the father he knew in the details of his body. He remembers hands that had stroked his hair, back, and arms thousands of times when he was a child, making him happy. The memory is specific and reciprocal in its meaning: the hands are not simply part of a dead body but the same hands through which paternal tenderness had repeatedly been expressed. Now their whiteness frightens Kemal, and he cannot bring himself to kiss them. The familiar body has become at once recognizable and unbearable.

A small physical resemblance brings childhood closeness into the scene of mourning. As Kemal tries to pull back the blanket, Mümtaz’s left foot emerges, and Kemal looks at his father’s big toe, which is identical to his own. A friend had first noticed the likeness twelve years earlier, when father and son were sitting in swimsuits on the shore at Suadiye, and had turned it into a recurring joke whenever he saw them together. The remembered teasing makes their resemblance part of a shared family history: even an unremarkable feature of the body had become a point of recognition between them and a familiar subject in their circle.

Death and the Return Home

Mümtaz dies of heart failure a few minutes after seven, as the morning prayers are being sung. His death transforms the family home into a place of immediate absence. Kemal’s mother, who had first thought that her husband was still asleep beside her, sits opposite Mümtaz’s empty chair and sometimes gestures toward it while crying. When Kemal arrives, they embrace without speaking. Their silence registers a loss that neither needs to explain to the other.

Seeing Mümtaz on the walnut bed he had shared with Kemal’s mother for almost forty years, Kemal is struck by the expression of panic on his father’s face. The scene does not offer a peaceful image of death; it leaves the son confronting the fear fixed in the face of someone whose hands and body had once meant comfort. Kemal locks the bedroom door, intending to cry over Füsun while thinking about his father, but the tears do not come. Instead, he looks again at the room of his childhood, with its familiar smells and objects, and feels as if the center of his life has dissolved. His grief for his father and his continuing pain over Füsun occupy the same moment, although he cannot release either through crying.

Objects as Inheritance and Memory

After Mümtaz dies, Kemal opens his father’s cupboard and bedside table. He sees old ties and belts, shoes still occasionally polished, medicines, crossword puzzles, folded newspapers, reading glasses, and a much-loved photograph from his father’s army days. He takes Mümtaz’s false teeth from their glass, wraps them in his handkerchief, and puts them in his pocket; then he returns to his mother and tells her what he has taken. This is a concrete, peculiar form of keeping: the son chooses an intimate object that had belonged to his father and carries it away from the room.

The surrounding belongings also change in meaning. Kemal touches things that hold early memories and studies old phone bills, telegrams, aspirin, and medicine among the cedar scent and the sugary smell of cough syrup. Their value comes not from rarity but from their place in the everyday life that has ended. Even the ordinary view down Teşvikiye Avenue becomes an irreplaceable memento. The relationship thus persists through Kemal’s close attention to household objects and familiar scenes: after Mümtaz is gone, ordinary surroundings seem to preserve parts of the shared world.

The Afterlife of Their Bond

The objects Kemal keeps do not resolve his grief; they make its presence visible. He takes his father’s chair, watches the body in its pajamas, and repeatedly returns to the bedroom and its drawers. His attention moves between the intimacy of childhood—his father’s touch, the matching toes—and the irreversibility of death. The movement between these times is central to the relationship as remembered: the dead father is present in the son’s recollection, but each familiar detail also confirms that the life in which those details belonged has ended.

Mümtaz’s unfinished bottle of Yeni Rakı offers another final connection. After the guests have left, Kemal drinks what his father had left from the last night of his life. The act links the son to a recent, ordinary moment in his father’s household, while making the bottle a remnant of the last evening they could share. Together with the pajamas, false teeth, and remembered hands, it shows the form their relationship takes after death: affection survives as recollection and as the physical traces Kemal gathers, touches, and carries with him.