Yıldız Park

Yıldız Park is the Istanbul setting where Kemal and Füsun’s first sustained time alone together in eight years unfolds through driving lessons. What begins as practice for Füsun’s license becomes a repeated, carefully bounded encounter: stalled engines and driving errors give way to silences, shared outings, and moments of physical closeness. The park’s layered history and spacious grounds frame an intimacy that neither of them treats as simple or carefree.

Setting and Historical Layers

The gardens and villas of Yıldız Park carry the memory of Ottoman seclusion. Sultan Abdülhamit had once withdrawn there from the world, governing the Ottoman state from the grounds and playing with a miniature ship in the great pool. The Young Turks had even planned to blow him up with that ship. After the founding of the Republic, the grounds became a public park, used by wealthy families taking leisurely drives and by student drivers learning to handle cars.

That transformation gives the park its double character in Kemal’s account. It is a former refuge of political power that has become a public landscape for ordinary recreation and practice. Its trees and open spaces also shelter couples who have nowhere else to go. When Kemal and Füsun see such couples embracing behind the trees, they fall silent; the park’s possibilities for privacy are visible to them, but their own relationship remains constrained by caution.

The Lessons Begin

On April 15, three days after celebrating Füsun’s twenty-sixth birthday with a chocolate cake from Divan, Kemal picks her up in the Family 1956 Chevrolet near Firuzağa Mosque. At Füsun’s request, he does not collect her at her home in Çukurcuma, but at a corner farther up the hill, away from the neighborhood’s curious eyes. It is their first outing alone in eight years. Kemal feels tense and excited, yet describes the encounter as if he were meeting a young woman newly matched to him by others, rather than reuniting with someone he had waited for through years of longing.

Füsun wears the same print dress, patterned with orange roses and green leaves on white, to each lesson. The dress becomes part of the park’s recurring scene: by the end of practice it is damp with perspiration. Three years later, Kemal will find it in her chest of drawers and smell its sleeves and front, trying to recover the tense, dizzying lessons. In his recollection, the clothing preserves not only her appearance but also the physical atmosphere of their time together.

Füsun has memorized the traffic regulations and steers competently, but the clutch repeatedly defeats her. She approaches the intersection carefully, then releases it too quickly; the Chevrolet lurches, grinds, or stalls. Kemal’s anxious instructions can make matters worse: when she panics, she may press the accelerator or brake instead, and the car rocks before stopping. Her frustration is visible in her flushed, sweating face and in the occasions when she declares that she will never learn, leaves the car, and walks away smoking. Once, when she has gone some distance from the vehicle, two men who think she is alone quickly approach her, revealing the vulnerability that accompanies even this ordinary attempt at independent mobility.

A Repeated, Uneasy Intimacy

The lessons last no more than two hours, though Kemal experiences them as seemingly endless. He reads Füsun’s distress at the wheel through his own fear that she is rejecting more than the license: each outburst seems capable of brushing aside the future happiness he hopes they might share. Yet the park’s quiet and the stalled car also create intervals in which they are simply together. When the engine falls silent, they notice the stillness around them and listen to an insect beginning its spring flight. Kemal remembers the moment as an affirmation of the wonder of being alive in an Istanbul park on a spring day.

The car’s confined space intensifies the awkwardness between them. Kemal leans over to demonstrate a gear change, and his hand brushes Füsun’s hand, arm, or thigh. He interprets these contacts as evidence that their souls have joined before any new physical union, but the scene remains charged with his desire and her hesitancy. At the end of a lesson, silence has become their default. He sometimes suggests driving to Emirgân for tea, and Füsun agrees quietly. The outings extend the lessons without resolving the uncertainty between them.

Their closeness is also measured against the couples they encounter in the park. The sight of people kissing behind the old plane and chestnut trees does not prompt Kemal and Füsun to imitate them; it draws them into silence. Kemal understands that Füsun does not want to risk greater intimacy before marriage, and he tries to restrain his own desire. In this way, Yıldız Park is not simply a romantic refuge. It is also a place where the couple’s boundaries, and the tension between longing and social respectability, remain present.

Practice, Corruption, and Changed Purpose

Füsun passes the written examination with a perfect score but fails her first road test. An examiner stops her after she turns around to ask what he has said about the mirrors; the regulations forbid drivers to look behind while driving. The committee’s response humiliates her, and the test exposes a licensing system whose formal rules are entangled with corruption. Applicants are urged toward expensive driving schools connected to examiners and police, or offered the prospect of buying a license outright. A specially modified Ford, with a hole in the floor and a hidden guide behind the sun visor, helps candidates perform the prescribed parking maneuver.

Füsun refuses to pay or to enrich the policemen who failed her. Instead, she and Kemal continue practicing at Yıldız Park. The lessons thus become more than preparation for an exam: her refusal sets a limit on what she will accept, while the park gives the pair a place to continue meeting. After practice, when the sun is low, they go to Emirgân for coffee and soda beside the Bosphorus or to a Rumelihisarı coffeehouse for tea from a samovar. These excursions ease the frustration of the test, though Kemal cautions against interpreting them as the carefree conduct of lovers.

Füsun fails her next road test as well. By then, Kemal says, the license has become an excuse to go to a restaurant or the beach. They sometimes rent a rowboat near the Bebek ferry station and row beyond the jellyfish and oil slicks, where the bay meets the currents. One holds the boat while the other swims; Kemal especially cherishes the chance to hold Füsun’s hand. They continue the lessons through the end of summer, even as the practical goal recedes behind the value of their shared time.

The Park in Retrospect

The account of Yıldız Park belongs to a broader pattern in which Kemal’s relationship with Füsun is experienced through repeated routes, places, and remembered details. Here, repetition takes the form of returning to the learner’s lane, watching the Chevrolet stall, and driving out for tea after practice. The same routine brings renewed closeness but does not erase the years of separation or the couple’s hesitations about intimacy.

The park’s change from imperial retreat to public grounds parallels the different uses Kemal and Füsun make of it: a setting for driving instruction, a discreet place to be together, and a route toward small excursions beyond the car. Even the surrounding landscape changes in memory. When Kemal later revisits the site of the driving test, hills that had once seemed ugly, bald, and strewn with garbage have become luxury housing estates with swimming pools. Yıldız Park and its environs therefore preserve both an intimate history and the visible transformation of Istanbul, while Kemal’s recollections make the lessons endure as a distinct chapter in the couple’s long, cautious return to one another.