Summer 1975

Summer 1975 is the season when Kemal Basmacı’s separation from Füsun becomes a private ordeal concealed beneath the social life of his engagement to Sibel. He continues to attend parties and summer gatherings, but his attention is drawn elsewhere: a chance encounter, a remembered beach, or a stranger’s gesture can reopen the absence. The season makes longing not an interruption of ordinary life but the force that reorganizes how Kemal sees it.

An Engagement Beneath the Surface

After the engagement, Kemal still cannot make love to Sibel. He explains the distance by invoking his embarrassment that people at Satsat know about their earlier meetings in the manager’s office. Sibel understands his condition as an unnamed form of premarital panic or melancholy, and treats him with care; Kemal responds by taking her to unfamiliar restaurants and introducing her to new friends. Their continued attendance at parties and Bosphorus restaurants presents a plausible social surface, but it does not restore their intimacy.

At these gatherings, Kemal watches the life around him with a changed sense of happiness. Once it had seemed like a birthright; now he regards it as a fragile state that only the fortunate, perceptive, and cautious can achieve and sustain. Even his participation in the group’s amusement at Nurcihan’s divided attentions to Mehmet and Zaim is shadowed by what he has lost. His outward laughter does not mean his private anguish is receding.

Jealousy and the Search for Füsun

One night at the newly opened Mehtap, Kemal stands alone at the bar beside a pier extending over the Bosphorus, drinking Gazel red wine while Sibel and their companions talk at the table. Seeing Turgay Bey, whose former connection with Füsun makes him a focus of jealousy, sends Kemal’s heart racing as if Füsun herself had appeared. The encounter shows how little separates his public composure from the possessive pain beneath it: even the sight of another man can make her absence feel immediate.

Kemal also begins to see Füsun’s ghost in Istanbul. At the Dolmabahçe Clock Tower, in Beşiktaş Market, or at a third-floor window in Gümüşsuyu, a woman briefly resembles her. A wave from the figure at the window briefly sustains his hope, but its manner reveals that the woman is not Füsun; Kemal walks away ashamed. He nevertheless returns to crowded places where these apparitions have appeared, accepting their short-lived consolation. The city becomes, in his imagination, a constellation of signs associated with her.

The sightings shape his movements. He wanders slowly, looking into the distance, because that is how he has encountered her imagined figure. At clubs and parties with Sibel, after drinking too much raki, he sees Füsun in different clothes and has to remind himself that he is engaged and that following a mirage could endanger the one relationship still present in his life. His search is therefore both compulsive and checked: he follows the possibility of seeing her while trying to preserve the commitment that remains.

Beaches, Shame, and Regret

On summer afternoons at Kilyos and Şile, heat and fatigue lower Kemal’s guard. Among the young women in swimsuits, he repeatedly thinks he has seen Füsun. The beach scenes also widen his private longing into an observation about public embarrassment: decades after Atatürk’s revolution and the founding of the Republic, Turkish beachgoers still appear self-conscious in bathing suits. Kemal reads Füsun’s fragility against this broader bashfulness, linking the particular woman he misses to a social discomfort he sees around him.

In the sharpest moments of longing, he leaves Sibel to play ball in the sea with Zaim and lies apart on the sand. When a girl runs toward him, he inevitably hopes she is Füsun. The hope turns into self-reproach: he remembers that he never brought Füsun to Kilyos, though he believes she would have wanted to go, and recognizes too late the value of what he had been given. Unable to permit himself to cry because he feels guilty, he buries his head in the sand. Summer’s open, crowded landscape offers no escape from absence; it gives Kemal more occasions to mistake a stranger for the person he wants.

Private Time and What Follows

The later structure of Kemal’s visits to the Keskin household gives this summer’s anguish a longer measure. His regular suppers in Çukurcuma began on October 23, 1976, and his last such evening was August 26, 1984: 2,864 days apart, with 1,593 visits recorded across seven years and ten months. Those later repetitions are not part of the summer itself, but they show how the unsettled waiting of 1975 eventually became a routine organized around seeing Füsun.

At the Keskin home, official time is represented by a German-made wall clock with a pendulum and chime, while television becomes the family’s practical timekeeper. At seven each evening, Füsun checks her wristwatch against the enormous clock shown before the national news, and Kemal watches her do so. His later recollection dwells on this small, repeated gesture rather than only on dramatic events: the shared clock makes a private exchange possible within an ordinary supper. In 1980, martial-law curfews force him to leave before ten, cutting those visits short. Against these later measures of hours and years, Summer 1975 stands as the season when Kemal’s longing first turns public schedules, social encounters, and the geography of Istanbul into reminders of Füsun.