Turgay Bey

Turgay Bey is a textile mogul whose roles as businessman, former lover of Füsun, and later partner of Osman bring Kemal’s private jealousy into collision with his family’s commercial world. To Kemal, Turgay is at once a source of possible news about Füsun, a reminder of her earlier vulnerability, and a man who has returned without apparent difficulty to business and bourgeois life. That contrast makes him more than a rival: he becomes a measure of the distance between Kemal’s fixation and the ordinary forward movement of everyone around him.

Identity and Business Standing

Turgay Bey is established as a successful industrialist and a partner in ventures with Kemal’s family. His textile operation is large: Kemal sees hundreds of girls working at giant looms, along with modern offices and cafeterias described as hygienic. Turgay’s custom of wanting visitors to eat with the workers gives the factory a practical routine of its own, even as Kemal studies its rooms for traces of Füsun rather than attending solely to business.

His standing is not confined to his factory. A major bedsheet contract, jointly bid for and won by the two businesses, makes the engagement-party dispute an immediate commercial problem. Later, Turgay’s control of distribution rights for key products gives his choices substantial influence over competition in the textile trade. The story thus presents him both as an individual in Kemal’s emotional history and as a powerful participant in a network of contracts, firms, and family alliances.

Füsun and Kemal’s Jealousy

Turgay’s earlier relationship with Füsun is disclosed through Kemal’s memories of what she told him. In Turgay’s Mustang, Kemal recalls her account of kissing and sexual contact in the car, and of Turgay groping her before she had turned eighteen. The remembered car interior—the gauges and rearview mirror—makes the past physically present to Kemal during a meeting that is ostensibly about business. Füsun’s absence is what gives Turgay’s ordinary possessions and surroundings their force: the Mustang becomes a site in which Kemal repeatedly imagines the intimacy he did not share with her.

Kemal’s response is not simply resentment that Turgay had been Füsun’s lover before him. During the confrontation that follows, Kemal recognizes a more painful source of jealousy: Turgay seems to have put the affair behind him and returned to his normal bourgeois life. The distinction exposes the imbalance between the two men. Turgay can be associated with Füsun’s past without appearing trapped in it, whereas Kemal’s longing makes even a factory visit or a business lunch feel like an opportunity to search for news of her.

The Engagement-Party Dispute

The immediate occasion for their renewed contact is a snub. After learning that Turgay feels injured at not being invited to Kemal’s engagement party, Osman blames Kemal for removing Turgay’s name from the guest list. Turgay then threatens to withdraw from the bedsheet contract the partners had jointly won. Kemal promises to put matters right and travels to Turgay’s factory, telling himself that the visit is for business even as the prospect of speaking with someone connected to Füsun lifts his spirits.

Turgay accepts Kemal’s apology and is willing to set aside the slight. At the factory, Kemal steers their encounter away from the customary lunch with the workers because he wants a private opportunity to discuss what he calls important matters. They go to a fish restaurant in Bakırköy. There, after drinking, Kemal abandons the business pretext and accuses Turgay of breaking Füsun’s heart, treating her badly, and offering her money. He invokes her as a close relation on his mother’s side, presenting the engagement-party exclusion as understandable in light of the family offense.

Turgay’s reaction is one of sincere-seeming shock and shame. He says he did not know Füsun was related to Kemal and accepts that the family had grounds to exclude him; he even asks whether the partnership should end. His response unsettles the story’s account of rivalry: the man Kemal has been imagining as a knowing antagonist appears not to have understood the family connection or the personal meaning of the snub. Kemal’s confrontation reveals his own motive more decisively than it establishes Turgay’s intentions. He had gone to settle a contract, but the business meeting becomes an attempt to prosecute the past on Füsun’s behalf and to test whether Turgay might know anything of her.

Later Alliances and Narrative Role

The personal quarrel does not permanently disrupt Turgay’s relations with Kemal’s family. By the time Tekyay has become a competitor to Satsat, Turgay has granted it distribution rights for some of his key products. The account connects the company’s success to those rights rather than to Kenan and Osman’s management. At the same time, Turgay has forgotten the engagement-party slight: he and his family are again on good terms with Osman and his family, sharing travel magazines, skiing on Uludağ in winter, and taking shopping trips to Paris and London in spring.

This reconciliation has a painful commercial consequence for Kemal. Tekyay uses aggressive tactics, and Kenan persuades managers whom Kemal had brought into Satsat, as well as two long-serving employees, to defect with substantially higher salaries. Kemal complains to his mother that Osman is competing with the business their father founded, but she declines to take sides between her sons. In Kemal’s account, Turgay’s alliance with Osman helps turn a former personal grievance into part of the wider deterioration of Kemal’s position at the family firm.

Later, Kemal describes Osman as having set up a new firm with Turgay and says that his brother has done Satsat in. He refuses Zaim’s suggestion that he become involved in business with Osman, insisting that he would not object if Zaim chose to work with his brother. Turgay’s place in the narrative has therefore shifted again: from the remembered lover who provokes Kemal’s jealousy, to the apologetic partner at a tense lunch, and finally to an ally in the commercial world from which Kemal increasingly distances himself. The contrast between Turgay’s restored family and business ties and Kemal’s estrangement gives his character a particular significance. He embodies a life that can absorb a personal slight, resume its social rituals, and continue making profitable arrangements, while Kemal experiences the same entanglements as inseparable from loss.