Kemal teaches Füsun to drive

Kemal teaches Füsun to drive during their tentative reunion in 1983, turning a practical goal into a test of renewed closeness. Their lessons begin after an eight-year separation and lead them through Istanbul to obtain the documents required for Füsun’s driving examination. For Kemal, the car is at once a learner’s vehicle and a private space in which hope, nervousness, and old longing return.

The proposal and the second chance

Kemal offers to teach Füsun after asking why she had been jealous of his driving. She explains that driving made her seem powerful and free. He responds by promising that, with two weeks of instruction, she could learn enough to earn her license and drive comfortably around Istanbul. To make the offer reassuring, he claims that Çetin taught him to drive at her age, although the narrator acknowledges that this was untrue. His confidence is part encouragement and part performance: he presents the task as manageable when both understand that the lessons carry emotional stakes beyond the examination.

Füsun initially rejects the idea as impossible, then agrees. In April 1983, after five weeks of indecision, feigned reluctance, and silence, they begin preparing for the licensing examination. Kemal treats the agreement as a second chance, one that he believes will not be followed by a third. He is jubilant and hopes that their time together will make him calmer and more confident. The prospect of instruction therefore becomes a fragile promise: a recurring arrangement that might restore intimacy, but could also expose how uncertain their relationship remains.

The first lesson

On April 15, three days after celebrating Füsun’s twenty-sixth birthday with a chocolate cake from Divan, Kemal picks her up in a Chevrolet near Firuzağa Mosque. At her request, he does not collect her outside the family home in the Çukurcuma neighborhood; instead, they meet at a corner farther uphill, away from the neighborhood’s curious eyes. The choice of meeting place makes the lesson possible while acknowledging that their private time is still subject to public observation.

It is the first time in eight years that they have gone out alone together. Kemal is too tense and excited to experience the occasion simply as the long-awaited return of a past love. Instead, he feels as if he is meeting a young woman newly presented to him as a suitable match. That estrangement within recognition gives the lesson its peculiar emotional charge: Füsun is familiar, yet the pair must approach one another again.

Füsun wears the same orange-rose print dress to each lesson. Kemal later remembers it as part of the lessons’ repeated routine, and, three years afterward, finds it in her chest of drawers. The dress becomes a tangible link to those afternoons, when practical instruction and emotional tension were inseparable. During the first drives in Yıldız Park, Füsun has studied the traffic rules and handles the steering carefully, but struggles with the clutch. Stalling, shifting gears, and approaching the curb become recurring difficulties. Kemal tries to instruct and reassure her, while her mistakes make her anxious and angry. The lessons are not effortless scenes of romantic ease: they require patience, and their closeness is sharpened by the strain of learning together.

Driving through Istanbul

Their outings extend beyond the learner’s route. After lessons, they sometimes drive along the Bosphorus road, park beside the sea, and drink tea in the car. Kemal experiences these pauses as moments of happiness, though Füsun often remains silent or talks about driving. When the windows fog, he sometimes tries to touch or kiss her; she politely rebuffs him, consistent with her reluctance to be physically intimate before marriage. Her refusal does not turn the meeting into an argument, and Kemal is glad that she is not angry. The lessons thus renew their companionship without removing the limits Füsun has placed on it.

In June, they travel around Istanbul to assemble the documents required for the test. Emergency measures send applicants to Kasımpaşa Military Hospital, where they wait in a long queue and eventually obtain a report on Füsun’s nervous system and reflexes. At Taksim First Aid Hospital, a four-hour wait ends with the discovery that the doctor has gone home. When an ear, nose, and throat specialist is unavailable at another stage, they are sent toward Haydarpaşa and pass the time throwing simits to seagulls from the Kadıköy ferry. They submit their papers at Istanbul University’s Çapa Hospital and walk through streets near the Fatih Hotel, a place Kemal associates with earlier anguish and the news of his father’s death. In this new period, the hotel seems to belong to another city.

The documents accumulate in a folder marked by tea, coffee, ink, and oil. Each successful errand is followed by a meal at a modest neighborhood restaurant. Füsun smokes openly, shares Kemal’s cigarette to light her own, and watches the people and activity around them. The administrative burden gives them a reason to explore neighborhoods together, while the city itself supplies small diversions between appointments. What might have been merely a sequence of bureaucratic delays becomes, for Kemal, a way of discovering an unfamiliar side of Füsun and of becoming reacquainted with her through shared experience.

Intimacy, memory, and the city

The driving lessons reverse Kemal’s earlier experience of Istanbul as a map of places to avoid. During his separation from Füsun, he had forbidden himself to visit the Merhamet Apartments or linger among streets associated with her, marking the Şanzelize Boutique, Kuyulu Bostan Street, and other locations as restricted zones on a mental map. Even apparent sightings of Füsun in public places were ghosts of his imagination, yet he sought them out until the city became a network of reminders. Later, while searching poor neighborhoods for her, he found himself lingering in streets and coffeehouses where he imagined she might appear. These earlier patterns make the lessons’ movement through Istanbul significant: the city is no longer only a trap of painful recollection but a place the two can encounter together.

Their errands also expose them to hardship beyond their own relationship. Long hospital queues, elderly people waiting for care, and the disorder of the city bring Kemal and Füsun into contact with lives more difficult than their own. He feels that these encounters draw them closer and make their private troubles seem less overwhelming. The shared journeys shift the lessons from private tutoring to a broader experience of seeing the city side by side.

The account later places their renewed companionship in the quieter setting of the Beyoğlu cinemas. After Kemal arranges legal representation for Füsun in the couple’s mutually agreed divorce, they meet there regularly and sit together in the cool, dim theaters. During one film, Füsun’s hand finds Kemal’s lap before his reaches for hers. That later gesture echoes what the driving lessons had begun: not a resolution of every obstacle, but a return to shared time, tentative physical closeness, and a life organized around repeated journeys through Istanbul.