The red- and orange-zone prohibitions

The red- and orange-zone prohibitions are Kemal’s private rules for avoiding places that intensify his longing for Füsun. Rather than a public restriction, the color-coded map is an ascetic regimen meant to keep him away from reminders of their affair; its repeated breaches show how little the city can be separated from the life he is trying to forget.

A Self-Imposed Map of Avoidance

Kemal creates the restrictions after deciding that ordinary attempts to stop visiting the Merhamet Apartments and touching objects that recall Füsun have failed. He therefore removes streets and locations from his mental map, treating avoidance as a necessary condition for returning to daily life. The map makes his distress spatial: familiar routes become hazards to be managed, and the hope of recovery takes the form of obeying boundaries he has drawn for himself.

The red zone marks places he is absolutely forbidden to enter. It includes the Şanzelize Boutique near the crossing of Teşvikiye Avenue and Valikonağı Avenue, the Merhamet Apartments on Teşvikiye Avenue, the police station, and Kuyulu Bostan Street, where Füsun and her family live. The prohibition extends to the side streets leading off the main roads. Even the older name Emlak Avenue remains on his map, although later official names include Abdi İpekçi Avenue and Celâl Salik Street.

Orange is a conditional, not a safe, zone. Kemal permits himself to cross it only in absolute necessity, while sober, at a gallop, and in less than a minute, without lingering. His home and Teşvikiye Mosque are orange because prolonged exposure could inflame his suffering. Yellow streets require caution rather than total avoidance: they include his accustomed route from Satsat to the Merhamet Apartments and the road Füsun took daily from the boutique to her home. In his imagination, even these ordinary journeys are strewn with snares of recollection.

The City Keeps Expanding the Restrictions

The map cannot remain a fixed list of forbidden addresses. Kemal also marks places bound to earlier memories of Füsun, including the empty lot where lambs were sacrificed when they were children and a corner of the mosque courtyard where he once watched her from afar. The restrictions thus reach beyond the sites of their affair into the shared geography of childhood and unfulfilled watching.

They expand again when Kemal begins seeing Füsun’s ghost in crowded public places. He knows these apparitions are products of his imagination, but their brief consolation makes him return to places where they might appear. He eventually marks those locations on his mental map too, and the places where the ghosts appear most often become places where he is regularly found. Istanbul changes from a set of routes to avoid into a galaxy of signs that recall Füsun. The rule meant to limit exposure to memory ends up recording memory’s spread across the city.

Enforcement, Evasion, and Sibel’s Help

The prohibitions demand constant effort, and Kemal’s apparent progress proves fragile. After evading a psychoanalyst, he persuades himself that he is strong enough to walk along streets marked red. Passing Alaaddin’s shop and childhood shopping streets initially makes him feel that his illness is abating. But seeing the Şanzelize Boutique from a distance unsettles him. Believing for an instant that Füsun is inside, he rushes toward it, only to discover that the woman he saw is an apparition. The episode exposes the pain beneath his confidence and renews his conviction that his attempts to distract himself have betrayed his attachment to Füsun.

Sibel helps turn the map from a private mental discipline into a shared plan. At breakfast, after the engagement-party aftermath, she recognizes the depth of Kemal’s pain and offers to rescue him from what she regards as an obsession. They agree to leave the house and stay away from Nişantaşı and its streets for a long while; the red- and orange-zone prohibitions then come fully into force. With Sibel’s parents away for the winter, Kemal moves with her to the yali in Anadoluhisarı, hoping that a change of place and habit will help him recover.

That arrangement does not hold. By November, the cold and discomfort of the yali, together with the pull of city parties, cinemas, and familiar haunts, give the couple reasons to return to Beyoğlu and even Nişantaşı. One evening they stop at Fuaye Restaurant, where Kemal’s mood drops amid the familiar society and conversation. Later, while in Nişantaşı on an errand to find a working phone, he decides that he might as well visit the nearby Merhamet Apartments. Carrying the key, he enters, washes his face and hands, removes his jacket, and spends a happy hour sitting on the bed where he had made love to Füsun forty-four times, caressing objects associated with her. The visit is a direct breach of the rule—and an instance of the comfort the rule was designed to deny him.

Avoidance Becomes Another Form of Attachment

The map’s contradictions reveal its double function. It is an attempt to control pain through distance, but every boundary identifies another place that matters; the more completely Kemal tries to avoid Füsun, the more thoroughly her memory organizes his movements. Even his search for her through the old neighborhoods of Vefa, Zeyrek, Fatih, and Kocamustafaşa turns wandering into a form of waiting. When an apparition proves false, he stays in the neighborhood, reasoning irrationally that the real Füsun must be nearby. Streets that might otherwise repel him become enchanted because he imagines her close at hand.

Later, when Kemal and Füsun meet in Beyoğlu after her marriage to Feridun has ended, they choose cinemas together and sit in the cool, dim theaters, holding hands as if they had all the time in the world. This later movement through the city differs from the earlier map of prohibitions: places associated with longing can again become settings for shared time. The account does not present the color-coded regimen as a lasting cure. Instead, it shows how Kemal’s rules mark a stage in his struggle, while the city continues to register changes in his relationship to Füsun—from avoidance, to solitary pursuit, to renewed closeness.