Summer of 1976

Summer of 1976 is the season when Kemal Basmacı’s longing for Füsun begins to take the form of shared routines. From mid-June to early October, he goes with her and her husband, Feridun, to more than fifty films and joins them for meals around Istanbul. The season offers no simple romantic resolution: Kemal must keep his desire in check while finding a precarious happiness in proximity, and the fleeting pleasures of summer become, in memory, a way to measure time.

From pursuit to proximity

Before this summer, Kemal had tried to govern his grief by avoiding places connected with Füsun. He devised a mental map of Nişantaşı with forbidden streets and locations, including the Şanzelize Boutique and the Merhamet Apartments, and made other routes conditional on strict precautions. Elsewhere in Istanbul, imagined sightings of Füsun’s ghost drew him into crowded places and poor neighborhoods. The city became a network of signs that recalled her, even when he knew the figures he saw were not Füsun.

By the summer of 1976, the pattern had changed. Kemal could collect Füsun and Feridun in the Chevrolet and accompany them to restaurants and cinemas. The shift did not mean that his longing had ended: he remained elated to sit across from her while trying to maintain the coolness he thought necessary to win her back. But he now had regular occasions on which to see her, rather than only streets through which to search for her. The season’s intimacy was real and yet carefully limited by Füsun’s marriage and Kemal’s concealed hopes.

Restaurants and the film project

The Bosphorus restaurants gave these meetings a setting in which Kemal could listen to Feridun discuss Yeşilçam films and Turkish audiences while keeping his own doubts to himself. Feridun hoped to make a film that would advance Füsun’s acting prospects. Kemal was not committed to giving Turkish audiences an art film in the Western sense, and he discreetly complicated the project: when asked to read a screenplay, for example, he would redirect his enthusiasm toward a different story before the first script arrived.

The prospect of financing a film that might make Füsun a star was not, Kemal realized, beyond his means; he estimated that it would cost about half as much as a small apartment in Nişantaşı. His hesitation came from a different calculation. Seeing Füsun twice a week under the pretext of making a film already eased his pain, and he was afraid to wish for more. What might have looked like a business undertaking thus also served as a means of preserving access to her, while leaving the relationship unresolved.

After some meals, the outings continued to İstinye for chicken breast pudding with cinnamon or to Emirgân for walks and sweets by the dark Bosphorus. Kemal recalls these ordinary extensions of an evening as moments of profound happiness. Looking across the water, he could see the yali where he had spent the previous summer with Sibel; that remembered setting sharpened the contrast between his former life and his present attachment to Füsun. His emerging understanding was that happiness could consist in being close to the person one loved, without possessing that person.

Cinemas and the city in motion

From the middle of June through the beginning of October, the group sought out more than fifty summer films. Feridun found out where each film was showing through managers and distributors, wrote down the neighborhood, and directed the journey. The Chevrolet carried Kemal, Füsun, and Feridun through an Istanbul altered by rapid growth, fires, and new construction. Streets crowded with recent arrivals made them lose their way; they stopped repeatedly to ask directions and sometimes had to run to reach a cinema before its garden darkened.

The open-air theaters were not interchangeable backdrops. Their whitewashed walls stood among small factories, old wooden houses, and crowded apartment buildings; inside, large families, parents, children with soda, and solitary men watched melodramas and ate pumpkin seeds. Kemal’s memory joins the film on the screen to the audience and the surroundings. In later years, many cinema gardens would be gone, replaced by apartments, parking lots, or small football fields. The summer outings therefore preserve a cityscape as well as a courtship: the places are remembered as parts of a social world that would not remain intact.

A season becoming a measure of time

Kemal’s recollection gives summer its meaning after the fact. He argues that a person can identify a happiest moment only when life has taken its later shape; choosing a moment from the past also means recognizing that it cannot return. Mementos matter because they preserve the textures and images of an instant, sometimes more faithfully than the people who shared it. His account of summer 1976 follows the same logic: meals, films, streets, and views of the Bosphorus become distinct moments held against the knowledge of their passing.

The summer also leads into a longer domestic rhythm. Kemal’s first supper visit to Füsun’s family in Çukurcuma was on October 23, 1976, eleven days after Aunt Nesibe had welcomed him without setting a date for his return. His last such evening was August 26, 1984. Across that interval of seven years and ten months, his notes recorded 1,593 suppers over 409 weeks. The pattern was not exactly four visits every week: there were stretches of daily meetings and times when he stayed away, but more than ten days without seeing Füsun became unbearable. Summer’s outings thus stand at the threshold of a longer repetition, in which occasional happiness would be sought and renewed at the family table.

For Kemal, time is painful because it connects the present moments and also carries them toward an end. The visits to Çukurcuma and the small objects he took from the house were ways to preserve happiness for the future. In this retrospective account, summer 1976 is both a season of immediate pleasures and an early part of the collection of memories through which he tries to keep those pleasures present.