Kemal’s Dinner Visits to Çukurcuma, 1976–1984

Kemal’s Dinner Visits to Çukurcuma, 1976–1984, transformed Kemal Basmacı’s longing for Füsun into an enduring domestic routine. Over nearly eight years, he returned to the Keskin family’s table 1,593 times, finding in its meals, television, silences, and familiar objects a private measure of time that he would later remember as happiness.

The Return to Çukurcuma

The visits began after Kemal had spent months trying to manage his separation from Füsun by avoiding places associated with her. He forbade himself from going to the Merhamet Apartments, where he had waited for her and touched objects that brought her to mind. Because earlier attempts at self-restraint had failed, he devised a mental map of Istanbul that marked forbidden streets in red, places passable only in urgent circumstances in orange, and routes requiring caution in yellow. The Şanzelize Boutique, the Merhamet Apartments, and Kuyulu Bostan Street, where Füsun and her family lived, became part of this geography of avoidance.

Avoidance did not quiet his memories. Füsun’s imagined or ghostly appearances in crowded places turned the city into a field of reminders, and Kemal began frequenting locations where he might see her apparition. When it appeared in poor districts such as Vefa, Zeyrek, Fatih, and Kocamustafapaşa, he lingered among their streets and coffeehouses, believing that if an image of Füsun had appeared there, she might be nearby. These searches brought him through neighborhoods marked by poverty and political intimidation, but his hope made their streets seem enchanted. His eventual dinners in Çukurcuma belonged to this larger effort to remain close to Füsun, even when direct intimacy was unavailable.

Kemal’s first supper visit took place on October 23, 1976, eleven days after Nesibe the seamstress had given him an open-ended welcome. His last night at the house was August 26, 1984. Between those dates lay 2,864 days and 409 weeks. According to his notes, he attended supper 1,593 times—an average of about four visits a week, though the rhythm varied considerably.

A Place at the Table

Some weeks Kemal saw the family every day; in others, he stayed away while trying to persuade himself that he could forget Füsun. Yet he never remained absent for more than ten days. After that interval, his misery returned to the intensity of the autumn of 1975, when his present regime of visits had yet to begin. The Keskin family, meanwhile, came to expect him and could often guess when he would arrive. They kept a place for him without needing to invite him formally.

That welcome did not remove his unease. When he felt disinclined to go, he worried that another visit would impose on the family; staying away, however, meant losing an evening with Füsun and risked giving offense. During his first visits, he was still adjusting to the household and to Füsun’s regular presence there. He hoped his look would convey that he had come to see her, while she greeted him with a smile that made his presence seem unremarkable. Because the two were rarely alone, their intimacy often had to pass in whispered expressions of how much he had missed her, or in looks that Kemal interpreted as a response.

The family found a tactful way to describe his regular attendance. Kemal was nominally a guest, but the word did not quite fit the circumstances; instead, the household referred to his coming as sitting with them. The euphemism made it possible for the routine to continue without stating openly that Füsun was the reason he came. Its regularity became a shared domestic fact even as its emotional meaning remained unspoken and changed over the years.

Kemal’s visits were long. He generally arrived around seven in the evening and left soon after the national closing ceremony on television, near midnight. He estimated that he spent an average of five hours at the house each time, although some evenings lasted longer. Füsun moved between the kitchen and dining area carrying plates and pots, passing in front of the television. While her parents watched a film, quiz show, weather report, or news broadcast, Kemal watched her; to him, she was not obstructing the screen but becoming the view itself. The household’s ordinary activity gave his attention a place to settle, even when he could not speak openly about its object.

Clocks, Television, and Private Time

The house contained two competing ways of keeping time. A large German-made wall clock hung by the door, its wooden and glass case enclosing a pendulum and chime. It testified to the continuity of the outside, official world, though television had largely taken over the practical task of marking the hours. The clock belonged to a wider history of Istanbul domestic life: once a fashionable sign of Westernized homes and later a fixture in middle-class houses, it had lost much of its authority as radios, wristwatches, and then television changed how people organized their days.

The Keskin family’s practical timekeeper was the television, which was almost always on. At seven each evening, an enormous clock appeared on the screen shortly before TRT began the news. Füsun checked her wristwatch while Tarık checked one of the pocket watches he used over the years. Kemal watched her concentrate on setting the time, tongue pressed against the inside of her cheek, and noticed that she knew he was watching. When her watch was adjusted, she looked at him and smiled. The small, repeated exchange joined the household’s public schedule to a private communication between the two of them.

The wall clock had a different, more intimate effect. Its chime could punctuate a conversation or prompt teasing between Tarık and Nesibe. At night, when Kemal had drunk heavily and woken in misery, he sometimes heard it strike from the corridor while he went to smoke in the sitting room. Rather than simply measuring the hour, the sound warmed him. In the house, the clock marked the persistence of the world outside, while television supplied the everyday schedule; for Kemal, both became woven into memories of being there with Füsun.

His account of the dinners distinguishes the measurable span of time from the moments that made it bearable. Eight years of visits could look like an absurdly long interval when counted in days, but Kemal recast the total as 1,593 nights at Füsun’s table. He remembered even the most difficult, hopeless, and humiliating evenings as happiness. The regular return did not end his longing; it changed the scale by which he judged it, making duration less important than the particular moments preserved within it.

The Texture of the Evenings

Many visits consisted not of dramatic disclosures but of shared routine. The family might sit in silence while Tarık glanced at a newspaper. A car could rattle down the hill and briefly still the room; rain could tap at the windows. Nesibe might forget a cigarette burning in an ashtray and light another in the kitchen, or offer to brew linden tea. Someone added coal to the stove. Television commercials sometimes advertised food the family was eating at the table, and distant explosions could break into the evening’s quiet.

Kemal’s attention made these ordinary gestures charged with feeling. He discreetly watched Füsun’s hand for fifteen or twenty seconds and felt his admiration grow. Her yawn could seem to him like a moment of withdrawal from the whole world. He might consider bringing her a bracelet on his next visit instead of a hair clip, or tell himself he should leave at once, only to remain. The domestic scene alternated between small acts of care, public broadcasts, pauses, and unspoken observation; its repetitions were precisely what allowed individual details to become memorable.

The length of the visits was also subject to political time. In September 1980, four years after the visits began, a military coup brought martial law and a ten o’clock curfew. Kemal had to leave at a quarter to ten, before he felt he had seen enough of Füsun. As Çetin drove him through dark, rapidly emptying streets, the restriction sharpened the pain of an evening cut short. The state’s curfew entered the household as a limit on private time: the routine continued, but its ending was imposed from outside.

Memory and the Meaning of Repetition

Over the years, Kemal associated familiar objects with particular evenings at the Keskin home. A porcelain saltshaker, a dog-shaped tape measure, a can opener resembling an instrument of torture, and a bottle of Batanay sunflower oil could each call up moments from the dinner table. As these memories accumulated, they seemed to expand and merge. Eventually, he no longer needed to pick up the objects kept at the Merhamet Apartments; seeing them could summon the remembered experience of sitting with Füsun and her family, much as individual cigarette butts recalled fragments of a larger past.

The visits therefore connected three forms of repetition: the family’s daily domestic rhythms, Kemal’s recurring return to the same table, and his later recovery of the evenings through memory and objects. What appeared from outside as an eight-year obsession became, in his retrospective account, a collection of distinct lived moments. The routine offered him neither a conventional resolution nor uninterrupted closeness. Instead, it gave his longing a setting, a schedule, and a store of particulars that he could revisit long after the dinners had ended.

The change in their circumstances eventually altered how Kemal and Füsun could meet. After the couple made a mutual decision to divorce, Kemal arranged for a lawyer to represent Füsun, and he could no longer visit her in Çukurcuma. They met every other day in Beyoğlu and went to the cinema. In the cool, dim theaters, they found seats at the back and held hands, as if they had all the time in the world. The dinners had made a domestic routine out of proximity; the cinema meetings carried their closeness into a different, more secluded space.