Kemal’s excessive drinking

Kemal’s excessive drinking is a recurring response to the pain of loving and missing Füsun, not simply a feature of his social life. Rakı, whiskey, wine, vodka, and beer appear in different settings as he tries to quiet his thoughts, pass through long nights, or keep company after his engagement to Sibel begins to fail. The pattern offers moments of relief, but its consequences accumulate: Kemal becomes less able to conceal his misery, his relationship with Sibel grows more desolate, and even ordinary outings can end in danger.

Insomnia and private rituals

The drinking is especially pronounced at night, when Kemal’s pain wakes him and prevents him from returning to sleep. He uses rakı and follows it with whiskey or wine, hoping to turn down the mental noise that keeps him awake. The image of a relentlessly blaring radio makes his aim plain: alcohol is an attempted silencing of thought, not a resolution of what troubles him. In the same sleepless hours, he consults chance for reassurance, using his mother’s old cards for solitaire and throwing his father’s dice again and again while promising himself that each throw will be the last. Drinking and divination thus share a purpose: both hold out a brief, uncertain reprieve from waiting for news of Füsun.

At the summer house in Suadiye, Kemal wakes hours before dawn and cannot get back to sleep. He slips onto the terrace overlooking the sea and lies on a chaise longue, looking toward the lights of the Princes’ Islands. His father is there in the darkness on another chaise longue. The scene places Kemal’s sleeplessness within the family home, but the habit described elsewhere is solitary in its function: alcohol is one of the means by which he tries to quiet the distress he cannot otherwise put aside.

Drinking in company, misery in view

At the end-of-summer party in the Teşvikiye apartment, Kemal initially performs the role expected of him as host. He offers guests drinks from a bar stocked with foreign liquor bought under the counter from delicatessens, plays music, and dances with Sibel and Nurcihan. The lively party, however, does not dispel his preoccupation. Watching apartment balconies and the lights of television sets, he reads other people’s listlessness as a reflection of his own feelings and fears that he will never forget Füsun. He drinks heavily as the evening goes on.

The dancing with Sibel gives the drinking a relational consequence. Their embrace looks romantic to the other guests, but Kemal understands it as a desperate attempt to hold on while imagining that a whole world is being taken from him. His misery, and his drinking habits, have also affected Sibel; she is unsteady as they dance. As alcohol takes hold of the party, glasses and bottles break, records are destroyed, and some guests kiss openly or disappear into bedrooms. The party’s conspicuous disorder contrasts with the modern, cheerful social performance Kemal is expected to sustain. His drinking accompanies that performance without making it credible to him.

With the arrival of autumn, his apathy becomes harder to hide. The yali grows cold and damp, its summer visitors leave, and Kemal senses that Sibel may no longer tolerate his misery or his drinking. Their few moments of physical closeness are described as acts of companionship and compassion rather than proof that he has forgotten Füsun. The seasonal retreat therefore sharpens a conflict that alcohol cannot settle: remaining with Sibel through winter would require him to convince her, sexually, that his attachment to Füsun was over.

Escalation and immediate risks

During an all-night outing at Fuaye Restaurant, rakı seems to change Kemal’s obsession from a steady ache into something intermittent. He and Sibel dance, and he asks her, with the ardor of a teenage lover, to promise that she will never leave him. The episode shows both the temporary softening alcohol provides and its limits: the night does not restore security to their relationship. At daybreak, despite a friend’s pleas, Kemal insists on driving. When Sibel sees him drifting across the road, she screams, and they take a car ferry instead. They fall asleep in the car as the ferry nears Üsküdar, blocking food trucks and buses until a sailor pounds on the window to wake them. They reach the yali without further incident and, as after other nights out, fall asleep holding one another. The return to an intimate routine follows a night in which Kemal’s drinking has made even getting home unsafe.

After leaving the yali, Kemal drinks vodka chased with beer in a beer hall near the Fatih Hotel. Before nine o’clock he is paralytic, and when he goes outside he cannot remember where he parked his car. He walks for a long time through rainy, dark streets, thinking about Füsun and his life rather than the car. In that state, the painful dreams of Füsun still bring him happiness. He eventually returns to the hotel and sleeps soundly there for the first time in months. This relief does not turn the episode into a cure: the same passage presents intoxication, disorientation, longing, and the unexpected comfort of sleep together.

After the separation

After separating from Sibel, Kemal withdraws from much of their shared circle. He briefly goes out with friends who visit expensive brothels or hotel lobbies, but he is not really seeking pleasure; he hopes for a cure for his illness, while his love for Füsun claims more of his attention. When company cannot make him forget his troubles, he spends most evenings at home beside his mother, with a glass of rakı, watching the single state-controlled television channel.

The domestic scene establishes how the habit persists after the engagement ends. His mother criticizes what is on television and tells him not to drink so much, as she had once told his father. She then falls asleep in her chair, leaving Kemal and Fatma Hanım to whisper about the program. The glass of rakı belongs to an evening pattern of bereavement, television, and quiet company, rather than to a night of celebration. Across these settings, drinking repeatedly offers Kemal a way to endure the present, but it never frees him from the attachment organizing that present. Its recurrent promise of relief is shadowed by sleeplessness, impaired judgment, and a deepening retreat into private grief.