Kemal begins his regular dinners at the Keskin home

Kemal begins his regular dinners at the Keskin home after a period in which he tried to manage his separation from Füsun by avoiding the places that reminded him of her. The dinners, which continued for nearly eight years, made his longing part of a domestic routine: the family kept a place for him, the television and wall clock marked the evenings, and the possibility of seeing Füsun shaped how he experienced time. His visits were at once a sustained personal attachment and a quiet arrangement whose real purpose could not be spoken openly.

From Avoidance to the Keskin Home

After the separation, Kemal forbade himself from visiting the Merhamet Apartments, waiting for Füsun, or touching objects associated with her. Earlier attempts at restraint had failed; he could evade them, for instance, by setting out to buy Sibel flowers near the Şanzelize Boutique. He responded by imposing a more drastic discipline, removing familiar streets from the mental map through which he moved around Istanbul.

His map divided the city by degrees of danger. The Şanzelize Boutique, the Merhamet Apartments, the police station, and the corner where Alaaddin had his shop were among the red zones he was absolutely forbidden to enter. Kuyulu Bostan Street, where Füsun and her family lived, was also prohibited. Orange streets were permitted only in necessity, when he was sober and could cross them quickly without stopping; even his home and Teşvikiye Mosque belonged to this category. Yellow routes were also hazardous, especially the road from Satsat to the Merhamet Apartments and the route Füsun had taken from the boutique to her home. These streets were not merely locations on a map: they held memories capable of turning a walk into an ordeal.

The discipline could not prevent Füsun’s imagined appearances. Kemal began to frequent crowded places where he might glimpse her ghost, then added those locations to his mental map of the city. He saw her in cinemas and markets, by the Dolmabahçe Clock Tower, and at a third-floor window in Gümüşsuyu; he knew these apparitions were not Füsun, though their brief consolation drew him back. In the poorer neighborhoods of Vefa, Zeyrek, Fatih, and Kocamustafapaşa, he searched the streets on foot and by car, sometimes stopping when a figure in the distance resembled her. Even when an apparition proved false, he lingered, reasoning that the real Füsun might be nearby. This search led him to inhabit the streets and coffeehouses more patiently, among their residents, as though living more like Füsun’s family might bring him nearer to them.

The Visits and Their Unspoken Purpose

Kemal’s first supper visit to Çukurcuma took place on Saturday, October 23, 1976, eleven days after Nesibe had offered him an open-ended welcome. His last evening there with Füsun and Nesibe was Sunday, August 26, 1984. Across 2,864 days and 409 weeks, he visited 1,593 times—an average of roughly four suppers a week. The pattern was not regular in the sense of an unchanging schedule: some weeks he came every day, while at other times he stayed away in indignation, trying to persuade himself that he could forget Füsun. But he never remained away for more than ten days. Longer absences brought back the depths of misery he had experienced in the autumn of 1975.

The Keskin family came to expect him. They did not need to issue a formal invitation because they kept a place for him at the table, and could often guess when he would arrive. That welcome did not remove his uncertainty. He worried that another visit might impose on the family, but feared that staying away would mean losing an evening with Füsun or causing offense. During his early visits, he was still adjusting to the house and its routines. He hoped Füsun would understand from the way he looked into her eyes that his presence meant he had come for her. She smiled as if his being there were ordinary, and he took that ease as reassurance. Since they were rarely alone, he used brief opportunities to whisper that he had missed her; she seemed to answer through her eyes, but greater intimacy was not possible.

Their reason for gathering remained unspoken. Kemal was there to see Füsun, and assumed that she and her parents were pleased by his presence, but the family needed an expression that made the arrangement easier to acknowledge. They settled on the ordinary idea of sitting together. Nesibe used it when welcoming him and, at the end of an evening, invited him to return the next day to sit with them again. The word allowed the family’s shared activity—visiting, eating, talking, watching television, or falling silent—to include Kemal’s private purpose without naming it. He valued the phrase as a description of companionship, not idleness: it gave a socially familiar shape to his desire simply to be in the same place as Füsun.

Domestic Time: Clock, Television, and Table

The Keskin home held two different measures of time. A German-made wooden wall clock, enclosed in glass and fitted with a pendulum and chime, stood beside the door as a reminder of continuity and the outside world. Yet television had taken over much of the clock’s practical role. It organized attention and domestic life more effectively than the old timepiece, even as the clock continued ticking and was occasionally wound. On nights when Kemal had drunk heavily and woke in misery, hearing it chime in the corridor could warm him.

The television provided a more immediate household schedule. Each evening, just before the news began on TRT at seven, an enormous clock appeared on the screen. Füsun checked her wristwatch against it, while Tarık Bey consulted one of his pocket watches. Kemal watched Füsun concentrate on setting the time, pressing her tongue against the inside of her cheek as she did so; when she had adjusted her watch, she looked at him and smiled. The recurring gesture made the public broadcast into a private exchange between them. The family used the television to keep time, but for Kemal its more intimate measure was the moment when Füsun looked back at him.

The evening’s duration was governed less by a planned departure than by the broadcast schedule. Kemal usually arrived around seven and left after the closing ceremony, near midnight. He estimated that each of his visits lasted about five hours, though shame made him tell himself he had gone home earlier. The ceremony—soldiers marching, a flag being raised, and the national anthem playing—made the end of the broadcast legible as the end of an evening. In September 1980, the military coup and the ten o’clock curfew abruptly imposed a different limit. Kemal had to leave at a quarter to ten, and the drive away through dark, rapidly emptying streets intensified his sense that he had not seen enough of Füsun. A political restriction entered the household as a personal deprivation, shortening the time he could spend with her.

Repetition, Objects, and Change

The visits accumulated through small, recurrent details rather than through a sequence of dramatic encounters. At the table, Kemal watched television while Füsun carried dishes between the kitchen and dining area; to him, her passing in front of the screen could become the evening’s central spectacle. Sometimes the family talked, ate, and drank raki; sometimes they sat quietly while a car rattled down the hill or rain tapped the windows. Nesibe might leave one cigarette burning and light another, or offer to brew linden tea. Füsun might add coal to the stove or yawn, and Kemal might discreetly watch her hand. These ordinary actions gave the years their texture, while their repetition allowed him to remain near her without openly changing the terms of the relationship.

The room itself was part of that remembered structure. A model of the Çukurcuma apartment marked Kemal’s place at the dinner table, across from the television and beside the kitchen. Behind him stood a buffet filled with crystal glasses, porcelain, silver sugar bowls, liqueur sets, unused coffee cups, a clock, and other familiar household ornaments. In the Merhamet Apartments, he had once collected objects associated with Füsun and their earlier moments together. As time passed, seeing an object could call up a particular evening at the Keskin table; individual recollections seemed to merge into the broader experience of sitting with Füsun and her family. The dinner visits thus became not only a repeated social practice but also the material and temporal basis of Kemal’s memory.

The arrangement changed when Kemal could no longer visit Füsun in Çukurcuma. During the divorce process, he arranged a lawyer to represent her, and the two began meeting every other day in Beyoğlu to see films. In the cool, dim cinemas, they chose seats toward the back and held hands; their intimacy, formerly confined to glances and whispered words around the family table, could take a more direct form. The earlier suppers had not resolved the distance between them. Instead, they had sustained an attachment through a carefully repeated domestic custom, until a change in circumstance moved their meetings elsewhere. Their defining achievement was also their limit: Kemal could return, sit, watch, and remember, but the routine could not make the unspoken relationship into an openly shared life.