Tarık Bey

Tarık Bey, Füsun’s father, is a hospitable and perceptive presence in the Keskin household, where the recurring rituals of supper, television, and conversation help sustain a private world apart from the changes outside it. He treats Kemal Basmacı warmly over years of visits, yet Kemal later recognizes that Tarık Bey may also have understood and resented the history between him and Füsun. His death in 1984 ends that tacit arrangement and brings Kemal and Füsun together in grief.

Identity and First Encounters

When Kemal arrives at the family home in the rain carrying a tricycle and roses, Tarık Bey is waiting on the landing. Kemal remembers having met him at the engagement party a year earlier, though he had somehow imagined they had not embraced since an older family gathering. Time has altered Tarık Bey’s appearance without, in Kemal’s view, diminishing his handsomeness; it has made him less conspicuous. His welcome is courteous and familiar, setting a hospitable tone even as Kemal confronts the changed circumstances of Füsun’s household.

Tarık Bey invites Kemal to have raki and, when the gathering turns to the memory of Kemal’s father, confirms that Füsun had loved him dearly. He pours Kemal another glass and offers him cherries. These gestures place him in the role of host and family elder, attentive to the small conventions of receiving a guest. At the same time, Kemal is struggling with the presents he has brought and with the realization that his imagined reunion cannot proceed as he had planned. Tarık Bey’s ordinary welcome becomes part of a scene shaped by an unspoken tension between the past Kemal remembers and the present the family inhabits.

The Household’s Routines and Character

At home, Tarık Bey is closely associated with the old wall clock, whose erratic ticking and chimes become a recurring feature of family life. Sometimes someone winds it; sometimes it is left to stop. The family may go weeks without hearing it, then find its chime interrupting the television or a quiet evening. Tarık Bey regards the clock as a reminder that the house remains a home, rather than an instrument for keeping accurate time. His wife, Nesibe the seamstress, sometimes objects when it wakes her, and their exchanges about who wound it give their domestic life a familiar, teasing rhythm.

The clock’s irregular sound also reflects the household’s distinctive experience of time. The family’s practical reference is the television: each evening, just before TRT’s news, a large on-screen clock appears. Füsun checks her wristwatch while Tarık Bey consults one of the pocket watches he uses over the years. Kemal watches Füsun carefully adjust her time to the broadcast, a small shared ritual that makes him feel included in the world she and her family inhabit. Tarık Bey’s attachment to an old clock that does not reliably tell the time, alongside the family’s reliance on television, captures the household’s mixture of inherited habits and modern routines.

His humor can turn on an unexpected detail. When the family discusses how to arrange a pair of Chinese porcelain dogs on the television, Tarık Bey, who has seemed not to be listening, gives a precise suggestion: one should face the family, the other its companion. He explains that the figures can keep each other company while also watching over the household. The moment shows his quiet attentiveness and his instinct to imagine household objects as participants in family life, rather than mere decoration.

Tarık Bey’s part in the family’s evenings is also visible after supper. The household clears the dishes and stores leftover food; Nesibe brings out her knitting and joins the others in front of the television. She allows Kemal and Füsun to sit together in the back room, but does not leave them there for long before calling them back to watch a program. Tarık Bey’s presence, like the clock and television, belongs to the repeated structure of these evenings. For Kemal, their repetition gradually becomes more important than the programs themselves: the family’s familiar routines give him a temporary sense of continuity.

Hospitality, Music, and Life Beyond the House

On excursions along the Bosphorus, Tarık Bey’s public manner is more openly exuberant. The family’s first outing together takes them to Huzur Restaurant, where he favors a table near the Mücevher Gazino so that they can hear the songs without paying to enter. He complains about the performers’ singing, but follows the music closely, correcting lyrics and finishing lines ahead of the singers. After several glasses of raki, he closes his eyes and sways along with intense pleasure. His criticism and delight coexist: he mocks the music while giving it his full attention.

These outings change the family’s usual arrangement. Füsun sits beside Kemal in the car and at the restaurant, unlike at home, and their conversation takes on a tentative ease. Tarık Bey’s enjoyment of the songs and Nesibe’s attention to the surroundings create cover for the couple’s quiet exchanges. The trips therefore reveal another side of the household: outside its rooms, family members can relax some of the roles they maintain indoors, while Tarık Bey’s public absorption in music helps set the scene.

His Understanding of Kemal and Füsun

For years, Tarık Bey greets Kemal with warmth and treats him as a relative who has come to supper. Kemal respects this manner, but later wonders whether it was partly a deliberate performance. After a newspaper gossip column causes distress in the house, Tarık Bey again asks Füsun to bring raki for their guest. Kemal senses that the welcome no longer means that Tarık Bey is indifferent to the situation. Looking back, he believes Tarık Bey had probably inferred why he kept coming and that Nesibe had persuaded her husband it was better for the family to pretend not to know.

Kemal’s account of Tarık Bey’s private judgment remains an interpretation rather than a spoken confession. After his death, Kemal thinks that Tarık Bey must have known early on that he loved Füsun and may have considered him irresponsible and heartless. Kemal also connects Tarık Bey’s possible resentment to Füsun’s marriage to Feridun, which Kemal believes he had helped bring about despite Feridun’s lack of prospects. Yet Tarık Bey never openly displays such anger. Kemal admits that the older man may have resented him and forgiven him, or that Kemal himself may have chosen not to see the resentment. Their closeness is therefore real but compromised by a history they do not discuss.

Death and Retrospective Significance

On March 9, 1984, a neighbor tells Kemal that Tarık Bey has died. Kemal finds Füsun in her room, crying, and the two embrace. The loss is especially painful for her because she had not been home when her father died. That day, she had accompanied Nesibe to a house in Moda, where her mother was finishing an urgent sewing order. Tarık Bey had returned from a meeting of the Bank Victims’ Association complaining of chest pains; the doctor arrived too late to help and confirmed that he had died of a heart attack.

Tarık Bey had become involved with the association after the banker with whom he had invested went bankrupt and fled the country. The group sought a legal way to recover the savings lost by retirees and clerks, but its meetings often descended into arguments. Kemal recalls Tarık Bey describing members who fought among themselves and petitions that were delivered to ministries, banks, and newspapers. After some members threw rocks at banks and attacked clerks, Tarık Bey distanced himself from the organization. He later began attending again, and on the day he died, a dispute at a meeting had particularly angered him.

The following morning, Kemal looks at Tarık Bey’s body and considers the distance that had remained between them despite years at the same table. He recognizes that he had loved Tarık Bey partly because he was Füsun’s father and because their shared meals had made him familiar. He also revises his understanding of their roles: after the first years, Tarık Bey was no longer simply the head of the household receiving a guest, and Kemal was no longer simply a visitor. In Kemal’s stark retrospective phrase, they had become partners in crime, bound by mutual knowledge and silence. Tarık Bey’s significance lies in that double position: he sustains the domestic welcome that allows Kemal to remain near Füsun, while his unspoken judgment gives that welcome an unresolved moral edge.