“Füsun Hanım needs a report from the ear, nose, and throat specialist to take to the office of drivers licensing,” I’d say. “We were sent here from Beşiktaş.”

“The doctor isn’t in yet,” the orderly in charge would say. Opening the file in our hands, he would glance quickly at the documents inside and say, “Please sign in and take a number.” When we noticed how long the line of patients was, he would add: “Everyone is waiting in line. There’s no one who doesn’t wait.”

Once I spied an opportunity to grease the orderly’s palm, but Füsun objected, saying, “No, we’re going to do this like everyone else.”

As we waited in line, chatting with patients and clerks, everyone assumed I was her husband, and this pleased me. I did not see the mistake as reflecting the assumption that a woman would never go to a hospital with a man who wasn’t her husband, but as proof that our growing intimacy was now clear to all. Once we went for a stroll in the backstreets of Cerrahpaşa, while waiting for our number to be called at the University’s Çapa Hospital, and at some moment I had lost Füsun, whereupon a window in a ramshackle wooden house opened, and a headscarf-wearing auntie informed me that “your wife” had stepped into the grocery story around the corner. We attracted some notice in these backstreet neighborhoods, but no alarm. A few children might follow us; some adults mistook us for tourists who’d lost their way. Sometimes a smitten youth might shadow us, just to admire Füsun from afar, but when a few streets farther on I would catch his gaze, he would politely retreat. Heads were often to be seen poking out of doors and windows, the women asking Füsun whom we were seeking or what address, and the men asking me. Once, seeing Füsun about to eat a plum she’d bought from a street vendor, an old woman reached out, crying, “Wait a minute, my girl. Let me wash that for you first!” The woman washed our plums in her stone-paved kitchen on the ground floor, made us coffee, and asked us what we were doing in the area; when I said that my wife and I were searching for a beautiful wooden house to live in, the old woman relayed this information to all the neighbors.

All the while, our laborious driving lessons in Yıldız Park continued, and we were also preparing for the written exam. If we were sitting in a tea garden with some time to kill, Füsun would sometimes take a booklet from her bag with a title like Driving Made Easy or Driving Exam Questions Complete with Answers, and, smiling mischievously, she would quiz me.

“What is a road?”

“I give up.”

“The lanes and zones open to traffic for public use,” Füsun would say, reciting half from memory and reading the rest. “All right then, what is traffic?”

“Traffic refers to the presence and movement of pedestrians and animals-”

“There is no ‘and,’” Füsun would say. “Traffic refers to the presence and movement of pedestrians, animals, vehicular machinery, and tractors with tires on roads.”

I enjoyed these question-and-answer exchanges, which caused us to reminisce about middle school, and the curriculum, which relied so heavily on memorization, and our report cards, which included marks for “comportment,” and soon I would find myself asking her a question.

“What is love?”

“I don’t know.”

“Love is the name given to the bond Kemal feels with Füsun whenever they travel along highways or sidewalks; visit houses, gardens, or rooms; or whenever he watches her sitting in tea gardens and restaurants, and at dinner tables.”

“Hmmm… that’s a lovely answer,” Füsun would say. “But isn’t love what you feel when you can’t see me?”

“Under those circumstances, it becomes a terrible obsession, an illness.”

“What has this got to do with the driving examination?” Füsun would say. Then she would behave as if this sort of dalliance could not be allowed to go on if a couple was unmarried, and I would take care not to make any more such jokes for the rest of the day.

The written exam took place in Beşiktaş, in a small palace where Numan Efendi, one of Abdülhamit’s crazy princes, had listened to harem girls play the ud as he whiled away the hours doing impressionist paintings of the Bosphorus. After the founding of the Republic the building had been converted by the state into offices that were never properly heated, and as I waited at the entrance, I regretfully remembered, as I had countless times, that I should have waited outside the Taşkışla Building, where she had taken her university entrance exam eight years earlier. Had I broken off the engagement to Sibel and sent my mother to ask for Füsun’s hand, we could have had three children by now. But there would still be time for three children, or even more, once we’d married. I was so sure of this that when Füsun came out of the exam looking elated, and announcing, “I answered all the questions!” I was on the verge of informing her how many children we would have, but I held back, mindful of how, in the evenings, we were still sitting, quite solemnly, at the family table, watching television as we ate.

Füsun passed the written exam with a perfect score, but she failed her first road test miserably. They flunked everyone on the first attempt, just to emphasize what a serious business it was to operate an automobile, but we were unprepared for how it turned out. Füsun got into the Chevrolet with the three-man examination committee, and though she had successfully started up the car and put it into motion, she had not gone far before a deep-voiced examiner in the backseat declared, “You didn’t look in the mirrors!” and when Füsun turned around to ask, “What did you say?” they instructed her to stop the car at once and get out. Drivers, the regulations clearly stated, were never to look behind them while they were driving. The examiners bolted from the Chevrolet, as if truly frightened to be in a car with such a reckless driver, a degrading show that Füsun found demoralizing.

They scheduled her for a retake four weeks later, at the end of July. Those familiar with the modus operandi of the drivers licensing agency could only laugh to see us so downcast and humiliated, and they lectured us amicably about bribes and how we might go about procuring a license at a particular shantytown teahouse (with four pictures of Atatürk and a clock on its walls) that was frequented by everyone in Istanbul who had a hand in the drivers licensing business. If we were to enroll in one of the pricey driving schools where retired traffic policemen taught (and attendance wasn’t compulsory), we were certain to pass, because the examination committee and many policemen were partners in that business.

Paying for this course also afforded one the privilege of taking the test in an old Ford specially modified for the purpose: This vehicle had a huge hole in the floor next to the driver’s seat, so that when the driving candidate was called upon to park in a tight space, he could see the colored markings on the road; and if he would but refer to the written guide hidden behind the sun visor, he would know which colored marking indicated that he should turn the wheel as far as it could go to the left, and exactly when he should go into reverse, so as to park the car flawlessly. It was also possible, for a larger sum, to avoid enrolling in a school altogether, a custom which I, as a businessman, knew only too well was sometimes unavoidable. But as Füsun was adamantly opposed to the smallest enrichment of the policemen who had callously failed her, we continued our lessons at Yıldız Park.

The examination guide contained hundreds of minor regulations of which a driver needed to show awareness on the road. It was not enough to operate the car properly in the presence of the examining committee; one also had to demonstrate, sometimes by exaggerated gestures, mastery of these regulations-for instance, looking into the rearview mirror as required counted for nothing unless you also showed consciousness of doing so by gripping the mirror. A fatherly policeman with long experience of the licensing process explained this to Füsun in a most affable way, saying, “My girl, it’s not enough to drive a car during your exam. You also have to look as if you’re driving. The first you do for your own benefit, and the second for the benefit of the state.”