“Forget Time”

“Forget Time” is both a phrase spoken inside the Keskin home and a way of understanding the years Kemal Basmacı spends there: not as a single stretch measured by clocks, but as repeated moments of closeness preserved in memory. The expression gathers the novel’s contrast between the family’s private domestic rhythm and the public schedules that continue outside it. Its paradox is that the household’s clock helps the family forget time precisely by reassuring them that nothing has changed.

The clock and the household’s private rhythm

The German-made wooden-and-glass wall clock hangs near the entrance of the Keskin home. Its pendulum and chime might seem to measure time, but the family treats it instead as a witness to continuity. Sometimes it is wound and ticks; sometimes it has stopped. Its chime may remain silent for months, sound only once at the half hour, or return after weeks of quiet. No one relies on it to learn the hour, yet its uncertain activity becomes a familiar subject of conversation and a sign of the home’s particular life.

The clock’s meaning emerges through the family’s repeated exchanges about whether it has been wound. Tarık Bey tells Nesibe the seamstress, “It reminds us that this house is a house.” Their disagreements are affectionate but not entirely weightless: Nesibe objects when the clock wakes her, while Tarık Bey resists stopping it. Füsun sometimes smiles at her father rather than intervening. A pendulum that can be stopped with a finger becomes a small domestic instrument of negotiation, and the clock’s occasional chiming gives the family’s silences a recognizable shape.

This private object also carries a history of changing habits. Wall clocks gained favor among Istanbul’s Westernized and middle-class households, but wristwatches, radios, and eventually television reduced their practical authority. In the Keskin home, the wall clock persists after it has ceased to govern daily schedules. Its stubborn presence makes it less a useful instrument than a reassurance that the household remains itself, even as the world beyond it changes.

Private time and official time

The family’s practical timekeeper is television. The set is usually on, and its schedule organizes the evening more effectively than the clock in the hall. Before the news, the enormous on-screen clock appears; Füsun checks her wristwatch while Tarık Bey consults one of the pocket watches he uses. Füsun carefully adjusts her watch to the broadcast time, then smiles at Kemal when she has it right. The gesture is at once part of the family’s routine and a quiet exchange between the two of them.

The television clock connects the household to what Kemal calls official time: the shared rhythms of the state and society, conveyed through broadcasts, the national anthem, flags, and the call to prayer. The family’s disordered domestic life briefly meets that larger public order when everyone watches the news clock or the end-of-broadcast ceremony. Yet the household also remains apart from it. The wall clock’s irregularity and the family’s recurring suppers create a local rhythm that does not simply follow the public one.

Kemal distinguishes forgetting time from forgetting clocks and calendars. Clocks and calendars regulate relations with other people; the deeper effort is to stop experiencing life only as a line running from one moment toward the next. Drawing on Aristotle’s distinction between Time and indivisible present moments, he presents time as the line that connects such moments. That line can be painful because it leads toward its end and makes mortality impossible to ignore. A happy moment, by contrast, can be held in memory without turning into a mere date on a calendar.

The years of suppers and their interruptions

The scale of Kemal’s visits makes the expression concrete. From October 23, 1976, to August 26, 1984, he goes to Çukurcuma for supper 1,593 times across 409 weeks and 2,864 days. He visits an average of four times a week, though the rhythm varies: sometimes he sees Füsun every day; sometimes he stays away in indignation, trying to convince himself that he can forget her. He never goes more than ten days without seeing her. The family keeps a place for him even when he is uncertain whether to come, and his visits acquire the euphemistic description of going to “sit.”

The evenings themselves resist exact measurement. Kemal generally arrives around seven and leaves after the television’s closing ceremony, around midnight, estimating that an ordinary visit lasts five hours. During much of that time, the family watches television, eats, talks, or sits quietly. Füsun passes between the kitchen and the dining area carrying plates and pots; while her parents watch the screen, Kemal watches her. A car passing outside, rain against the window, a cigarette left burning, or coal added to the stove can punctuate the evening. The repeated domestic details are not empty intervals between significant events: they are the experiences Kemal later gathers into the meaning of the years.

The repetition is not sealed off from history. In September 1980, four years into the visits, a military coup brings martial law and a ten o’clock curfew. Kemal must leave at a quarter to ten, driven through darkening, quickly emptied streets. The imposed deadline cuts short the private evening; he remembers the journey home as the pain of being denied enough time with Füsun. Here the contrast between official time and the household’s rhythm becomes a conflict in practice, as the state’s curfew dictates when their sitting must end.

Memory, objects, and the meaning of happiness

For Kemal, the evenings become more than a repeated schedule. He comes to understand that he visits not only to see Füsun but to spend time in the world whose air she breathes. The Keskin home’s broken and rusting clocks and watches seem to exist outside ordinary time, as if they have helped create a private time of their own. The objects Kemal takes from the house extend that world beyond the dinner table: a saltshaker, a dog-shaped tape measure, a can opener, or a bottle of sunflower oil can call back a particular evening. Seeing one object summons others, until the remembered scene of sitting with Füsun and her family returns as a whole.

This way of remembering connects “Forget Time” to Kemal’s larger account of happiness. In retrospect, he identifies an earlier moment with Füsun as the happiest of his life, while acknowledging that naming it as such means recognizing that it is past and will not return. He argues that mementos can preserve the colors, textures, images, and pleasures of a vanished moment. The same logic applies to the 1,593 suppers: even difficult, humiliating, or hopeless evenings can later be remembered as happiness because they belonged to the time he spent near Füsun.

The phrase therefore does not mean that clocks, history, or loss disappear. Television continues to mark the public evening; the coup imposes its curfew; and the clock’s stopped pendulum cannot abolish change. Rather, the phrase describes a temporary and fragile form of attention: a person can become absorbed in the present, while memory and collected objects later rescue its moments from the line of time that carries them toward loss. The museum Kemal imagines gives that private rhythm a visible form, assembling old possessions as evidence of a world that once felt continuous and still survives in recollection.