May 19, 1976

May 19, 1976, marks Kemal Basmacı’s return to Füsun’s family home in Çukurcuma after 339 days without seeing her. The invitation turned a date on a short letter into the threshold of a hoped-for future: Kemal arrived carrying objects to return and gifts to offer, convinced that the long separation had taught him to accept whatever Füsun wanted. He intended to ask her to marry him, although the account of this day establishes his intention rather than the outcome of the proposed conversation.

The invitation and the date

In mid-May, at his office, Kemal found a brief letter from Füsun among the correspondence. She and her family invited him to supper on May 19 and gave their address as Dalgıç Street, No. 24, in Çukurcuma. Their telephone line was not yet connected, so the letter asked him to send Çetin Efendi if he could not come. The letter itself was undated; its Galatasaray Post Office postmark showed that it had been sent on May 10.

The invitation arrived more than two days before the meal, but Kemal restrained himself from going straight to the address. He told himself that if he hoped to marry Füsun and bind their lives together, he must not appear too eager. The delay thus became part of his attempt to manage the reunion: longing pressed him forward, while his imagined future demanded caution.

Setting out for Çukurcuma

On Wednesday, May 19, at half past seven in the evening, Kemal set out for the Keskin family home in heavy rain. He told Çetin Efendi that they were going to return a child’s tricycle to Nesibe, concealing the larger purpose of the visit. At the Merhamet Apartments, he collected the tricycle and the pearl earrings his father had given him, then continued toward Çukurcuma, soaked by the downpour.

Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the reunion he had imagined through 339 days of separation, Kemal felt an unexpected peace. He regarded even the pain of those months as having led to this apparent happy ending, and blamed neither Füsun nor anyone else. Before arriving, he stopped on Sıraselviler Avenue for a large bouquet of red roses and had already drunk half a glass of liquor to calm himself. As he passed Çukurcuma Hamam, he understood the separation as a lesson in surrender: Füsun had prevailed, and he was ready to do what she wished rather than risk losing her again.

A hoped-for marriage and a longer chronology

The chapter’s title, “I Was Going to Ask Her to Marry Me,” makes the day’s decisive significance clear while preserving an important distinction: the narrative records Kemal’s plan to propose, not that he actually made the proposal on May 19. He set out believing a shared life lay before him, but the evidence for this date stops at his anticipation of asking once the excitement had settled and he was sure Füsun was beside him.

May 19 also precedes the regular supper visits that structure the years that follow. Kemal dates his first visit under the family’s open-ended welcome to October 23, 1976, and his last supper there with Füsun and Nesibe to August 26, 1984. Across those 2,864 days, he records 1,593 visits, averaging four a week, though the intervals varied: sometimes he saw the family every day, and at other times he stayed away in indignation, never managing more than ten days without seeing Füsun. The May reunion therefore stands at the emotional beginning of a period whose settled routine would start months later.

Private time and public time

The later account of those visits sets Kemal’s intimate chronology against the household’s ordinary ways of marking time. A German-made wooden-and-glass wall clock, with pendulum and chime, remained in the Keskin home as a witness to the outside world, even as television increasingly took over the practical work of telling time. At seven each evening, the clock displayed on the television screen before the news prompted Füsun and her father, Tarık Bey, to check or adjust their watches. Kemal remembered watching Füsun concentrate on setting hers, then smile at him when she had the time right.

Television also shaped the length and rhythm of the visits: Kemal usually arrived around seven and stayed until shortly after the national closing ceremony around midnight, about five hours at a time. In September 1980, martial law and a ten o’clock curfew forced him to leave at a quarter to ten, interrupting the private routine that had grown around the suppers. Against this longer pattern, May 19 is both a singular reunion date and the beginning of a story in which shared meals, recurring hours, and the constraints of public time would measure Kemal’s continuing access to Füsun.