May 3, 1975

May 3, 1975, is the date of Füsun and Kemal’s first sexual encounter, a decisive turn in their relationship that begins not with a planned rendezvous but with an errand. Füsun came to the Merhamet Apartments to collect her umbrella; Kemal had not gone there expecting to see her. Years later, his account makes the encounter both a sudden change in their intimacy and the beginning of a wider reflection on how memory gives time its shape.

The Unexpected Encounter

The previous day’s meeting remained in Kemal’s thoughts as he returned to the apartment. He wanted to relive it in solitude, handle Füsun’s teacups, put his mother’s belongings in order, and look down into the back garden. As he tidied the room, he found a photograph his father had taken of the bed, window, and garden. The view reminded him how little the place had changed. When the bell rang, he first thought his mother had arrived; instead, Füsun appeared to retrieve her umbrella.

The ordinary purpose of her visit contrasts with what followed. On that afternoon, at half past two, Füsun made love for the first time in her life. Kemal’s later narration emphasizes that he had not come in hope of seeing her, and that the possibility had not occurred to him. The date thus marks an intimacy that arrives without the anticipation of a scheduled meeting, even as the apartment’s familiar objects and atmosphere had drawn him back to their shared past.

Objects and the Persistence of the Room

Before Füsun arrived, Kemal had been thinking about the things bound up with their childhoods and family homes: common childhood possessions, his mother’s antiques, old clocks, and a tricycle. He also recalls the dim apartment, its dusty, decaying smell, and the garden below. These details frame the encounter through material memory. Kemal’s attention is on objects that let him revisit what has happened, while the photograph of the bed and garden makes the room’s continuity visible: it appears almost unchanged across the years separating the remembered scene from his later telling.

The umbrella gives Füsun’s arrival a practical explanation, but the objects around it carry the scene beyond the errand. Her teacups and the belongings Kemal tidies connect his private recollection to the domestic space they occupy. The encounter becomes a point at which an ordinary room, already thick with associations, acquires a new memory.

Private Time and the Household Clock

The date’s significance is sharpened by the novel’s later account of time in Füsun’s family home. Kemal describes the Keskin family’s large, German-made wall clock as a reminder of continuity and of the official world outside, rather than simply a device for measuring hours. As television took over the work of marking the day, the clock lost practical importance, though the family continued to wind it. Its intermittent chimes could still comfort Kemal on nights when he woke from drinking and grief-stricken thoughts of Füsun.

The television, by contrast, provided the household’s working measure of time. At seven each evening, Füsun and Tarık checked their watches against the large clock shown before the news on Turkey’s only television station. Füsun’s careful adjustment of her watch, and her knowing smile when Kemal watched, made this routine a small shared ritual. The contrast between the old wall clock and the television sets the family’s domestic rhythms against public time, a distinction that lends the earlier date a larger frame: a moment of private intimacy later becomes part of a story organized around remembered days and repeated evenings.

From a Date to a Repeated Life

Kemal’s visits to the Keskin home eventually gave that distinction between private and public time a measurable form. From October 23, 1976, to August 26, 1984, he went to supper 1,593 times over 2,864 days, an average of four visits a week. He sometimes saw the family every day and sometimes stayed away, but never went more than ten days without seeing Füsun. Their dinners settled into a routine in which the family kept him a place at the table and his presence came to be expected.

The visits followed the household’s evening schedule: Kemal usually arrived around seven and often left near midnight, after the television’s closing ceremony. The curfew imposed after the September 1980 military coup shortened those evenings, forcing him to leave before ten and intensifying his sense that he had not seen enough of Füsun. In this later pattern, the date of their first intimacy stands apart from the thousands of hours that followed, yet also anticipates the novel’s central temporal tension: a life may be counted by calendars and clocks, while its felt duration gathers around particular people, rooms, and recurring gestures.