Kemal visits Füsun’s home out of jealousy

Kemal Basmacı’s jealous visit to the vicinity of Füsun’s home is an episode of watching rather than confrontation: unable to call her, he walks toward her house and stops at a distance, looking up at its lit windows. A cheap baby doll remains in his hand as he tries to reconcile longing for their next meeting with the fear that Füsun might be with someone else. The scene gives jealousy a physical course, from a burning sense of remorse to a pounding heart, and later becomes an image Kemal seeks to preserve in the Museum of Innocence.

The Doll and the Unmade Call

After leaving his parents outside their apartment following an evening out, Kemal feels like walking. His route takes him past Alaaddin’s shop, a place tied to childhood: his mother had brought him and his brother there for inexpensive Turkish toys, sweets, comics, and other small purchases. The shop is closing, but Alaaddin welcomes him inside while gathering the newspapers he will exchange for the new delivery in the morning. Kemal browses and chooses a cheap baby doll for Füsun.

The purchase gives his restlessness a practical shape. He calculates that fifteen hours will pass before he can give Füsun the present, embrace her, and put his jealous thoughts aside. Yet the prospect of that coming meeting does not settle him. For the first time, he feels pain at being unable to telephone her. The doll stands between present separation and anticipated closeness: it is a gift meant for their next encounter, but carrying it cannot bring that encounter forward or answer what she is doing now.

The Walk to Kuyulu Bostan Street

Instead of going home, Kemal continues in the opposite direction. The feeling inside him is described as a burning sensation and as remorse, while a weakened but still active rational voice warns him that Füsun’s father may answer the door and that a visit could have scandalous consequences. Kemal does not go to the house. He walks only far enough to see it in the distance, taking a position from which he can look toward the second-floor windows reached by the chestnut tree.

The approach is therefore governed by a limit he recognizes but does not entirely obey. He does not knock or speak to Füsun; he seeks the sight of the house and its windows while remaining beyond the threshold. Even that distant view makes his heart pound. The familiar route past a coffeehouse where his friends once played cards and listened to the radio, and a schoolyard where they played football, places the present desire alongside recollected places from youth. The journey moves through streets marked by earlier life but ends in observation, not reunion.

Jealousy at the Windows

Kemal later identifies jealousy as one of the reasons for coming. He wants a glimpse of Füsun and imagines the possibility of speaking to or kissing her, but he also wants to establish that she is not spending the evening with someone else. His suspicion grows from the fact that she has now experienced sex with him and from his awareness of other admirers she had mentioned. He fears that the pleasure she appeared to find in lovemaking might lead her to explore it with another man.

The scene makes this fear especially intimate: Kemal remembers Füsun giving herself over to pleasure with an openness he had rarely observed in a woman. That remembered intimacy does not reassure him; it sharpens his sense of what he could lose. His observation of the illuminated windows cannot tell him who is inside or what Füsun is doing. The house remains distant, and the sight offers no confirmation. Jealousy thus works through uncertainty: he watches because he cannot ask, and what he sees intensifies the feeling without resolving its cause.

The Image and the Morning After

Kemal later commissions a painting of the view for the Museum of Innocence, supplying the artist with details of the orange lamplight inside Füsun’s apartment, the chestnut tree shimmering in moonlight, and the dark-blue sky above the rooftops and chimneys of Nişantaşı. The painting records the arrangement of the scene, but Kemal wonders whether it can convey the jealousy he felt while looking at it. His question marks the difference between preserving a view and preserving the intensity with which it was experienced. The house and tree can be rendered; the unsettled feeling that brought him there is harder to make visible.

The following morning, on the way to work, Kemal measures the jealousy he could not banish and fears that he may be besotted. An image of Inge, the model on an apartment building, appears to warn him to be careful as she drinks from a Meltem bottle. He considers making a joke of his secret to friends including Zaim, Mehmet, and Hilmi, but doubts they would sympathize: they like Sibel and find her attractive. He expects mockery to fail as a disguise once his longing for Füsun becomes sincere and unmistakable.

Kemal concludes that he cannot master his desire for Füsun without endangering the happy marriage he still wants. For now, he decides to leave matters as they are, avoid panic, and make the most of what life has given him. The night’s walk has not changed his outward situation: he has neither contacted Füsun nor crossed into her home. But the doll, the distant windows, and the commissioned painting give the jealousy distinct forms—as a postponed gift, a view watched from afar, and a memory that he tries to turn into an object.