Mehmet

Mehmet is Kemal Basmacı’s trusted friend from Robert College and a recurring figure in Kemal’s account of friendship, courtship, and married life. He rejects his family’s conservative expectation that his mother choose a bride, then falls in love with Nurcihan after Kemal helps bring them together. Their eventual marriage and family life give Mehmet a path toward the intimacy he wanted, while his later efforts to draw Kemal back into social life make him a counterpoint to Kemal’s prolonged isolation and grief.

Background and Self-Determination

Mehmet comes from a family described as religious and conservative. His mother wears a headscarf and had tried for years to arrange a marriage for him with an educated Istanbul woman. Mehmet refused, preferring to marry someone of his own choosing, a woman he could take out and get to know. Kemal presents him as honest and decent, and as a trusted friend from their years at Robert College. His refusal is not a rejection of marriage: he wants marriage, but insists that choosing his partner should be his own decision.

That distinction shapes the account of his courtship. At a gathering, Sibel Hanım seats Nurcihan, her dear friend since lycée and a companion on a trip to France, next to Mehmet in hopes of starting a relationship. Kemal helps make the introduction, describing Mehmet to Berrin as trustworthy and explaining that he had not wanted his mother to select a wife for him. Berrin questions why a man who seems meek has struggled to begin a serious relationship with the modern women he has met. The exchange places Mehmet’s search within a social world where courtship is watched and evaluated, but the evidence does not reduce his difficulty to a single cause.

Matchmaking and Courtship

Mehmet is initially cautious about the introduction. After some coyness, he admits that he finds Nurcihan attractive and says he would welcome sitting beside her and courting her if she is serious. His hope depends on the prospect of a genuine relationship, not merely an encounter. When he and Nurcihan do become a couple, Kemal observes that Mehmet has fallen deeply in love for the first time in years with a woman he can marry. His happiness is conspicuous, but so is his fear that he might be deceived and that the relationship could end in humiliation. The narrator sees both feelings together: Mehmet’s joy does not erase his apprehension.

The new relationship also becomes part of Kemal’s own social and emotional calculations. During a bleak period at the yali, Sibel Hanım considers going to Paris with Nurcihan, who wants to shop and settle remaining matters before becoming formally engaged to Mehmet and then marrying him. Kemal encourages the trip while privately planning to search for Füsun during Sibel Hanım’s absence; he tells Sibel Hanım that they can resume their life together afterward. Mehmet’s courtship thus runs alongside the breakdown of Kemal’s engagement, though Mehmet himself is not responsible for that rupture.

When Kemal later cannot reach Nurcihan by telephone, he searches through shops in Nişantaşı for a working metered phone. After failing to get through to her, he reaches Mehmet from a florist’s phone and learns that Mehmet is at home with Nurcihan; they agree to meet Kemal at Fuaye. The small logistical episode records the couple together in the ordinary course of their courtship, while also showing Kemal relying on Mehmet as a close friend and intermediary in the group.

Marriage, Values, and Public Life

By the time the couple have been together for three years, Zaim reports that Mehmet and Nurcihan have not made love and are telling people that they intend to marry. This is reported through Zaim rather than established by an independent account. Nurcihan, who had had love affairs with French men while living in Paris, is described as determined to abstain before marriage. She makes light of the decision by saying that premarital abstinence, rather than wealth, is the foundation of a lasting and peaceful marriage in Muslim countries. Mehmet appears to appreciate the joke. The two share an outlook that draws on ancestral stories, Ottoman culture, old music, and the contentment associated with the old masters.

Their cultural interests do not make them seem devout or reactionary to their social circle. At parties they drink, sometimes excessively, but retain their manners and elegance. Mehmet speaks enthusiastically about the wines mentioned in classical Ottoman poetry as actual drinks rather than metaphors, recites lines by Nedim and Fuzuli, and raises his glass in a toast to the love of God while looking toward Nurcihan. The episode shows the couple combining inherited cultural references with a modern social life; neither their abstinence before marriage nor their interest in older traditions defines them entirely in the eyes of their peers.

Mehmet’s wedding also intersects with Kemal’s social world. Kemal tells another person that he is a good friend of Mehmet’s and had as much to do with introducing the couple as anyone. At the wedding at the Hilton Hotel, Istanbul, Papatya is expected to sing a Meltem jingle with the Silver Leaves, with the press in attendance. Two weeks later, Mehmet telephones Satsat to apologize for not having been able to invite Kemal. He also tells him that Zaim and Sibel Hanım have been a couple for some time, assuming that Kemal already knows. The call carries both a personal apology and news about the shifting relationships among their old friends.

Friendship and Changing Married Life

Mehmet and Nurcihan’s marriage develops beyond the idealized promise of their courtship. After Nurcihan has given birth and they have started a family, Mehmet tells Kemal that he loves and deeply respects her, but no longer finds her as attractive as he did before she gave birth. He describes a pattern in which a long romantic courtship, marriage, and family life are followed by a return to former habits. They sometimes go out together, leaving the children with his mother, but more often Mehmet goes alone to newer clubs and bars favored by wealthy people and advertisers. His account admits a change in desire without denying his love or respect for his wife; the relationship contains affection and dissatisfaction at once.

Mehmet continues to reach toward Kemal. At a chance meeting on a corner in Nişantaşı, the two arrange a meal on the Bosphorus. Mehmet updates his friend on their circle: he and Nurcihan have travelled to Uludağ with Tayfun and Figen; Faruk has faced financial trouble as inflation and dollar loans threaten his business; and although there is no ill feeling between Mehmet and Zaim, they no longer see one another. Mehmet explains that Sibel Hanım had been needling Nurcihan for adopting more traditionally Turkish tastes, including visits to music halls to hear classical singers. The account links the fading friendship between the men to tensions between the women, without suggesting that Mehmet and Zaim have become enemies.

On another evening, Nurcihan joins Mehmet and Kemal at a newly developed part of town beyond Etiler, where they eat food presented as American cuisine. She does not ask Kemal about his feelings after Füsun’s death, but tells him that she knows he will one day be happy. The reassurance meets a man who feels that happiness has become irretrievable. For Kemal, the changed restaurant and streets also sharpen his sense that his old shared memories no longer bind him to Nurcihan as they once did. Mehmet and Nurcihan therefore appear not as figures untouched by change, but as friends whose marriage, habits, and city continue to move while Kemal remains caught in loss.

Narrative Role

Mehmet’s role in the narrative extends from matchmaker’s beneficiary to one of Kemal’s remaining links with the lives of former friends. Kemal helps introduce him to Nurcihan, and later Mehmet’s marriage, family, and social invitations mark stages of a future Kemal cannot share in the same way. During his fixation on Füsun, Kemal imagines that marriage might eventually release him from obsessive thoughts and restore his old camaraderie; Mehmet’s ordinary, imperfect married life offers a concrete version of the social world to which Kemal hopes to return.

Yet Mehmet does not function simply as a picture of uncomplicated domestic happiness. His early fear of being deceived accompanies his first great joy in love, and his later admission about diminished attraction coexists with devotion and respect. Near the end of the supplied account, he is still trying to revive his friendship with Kemal by introducing him to new clubs, bars, and neighborhoods. That effort gives his character a quiet continuity: he once sought a companion he could choose for himself, and he remains a friend who tries to keep another man from being alone.