“The true collector’s only home is his own museum.”

“The true collector’s only home is his own museum.” For Kemal Basmacı, the expression names both a conclusion reached through years of collecting and a condition he eventually makes literal: after building a museum from the objects bound to his love for Füsun, he sleeps there among them. The museum is not simply a storehouse for the past. It becomes a home in which private memory can be kept, revisited, and shown to others.

Grief and the need for objects

Kemal’s collecting grows from the pain of recognizing happiness only in retrospect. Looking back, he identifies his first sexual encounter with Füsun as the happiest moment of his life, while acknowledging that naming it as such means admitting it is past and will never return. He believes the pain can be borne through possession of something belonging to that instant: mementos, he says, preserve its colors, textures, images, and delights. During that encounter, Füsun’s earring falls onto the blue sheet. Kemal has failed to notice the earring, and later regards that failure as one of the reasons for his obsessive search for atonement and preservation.

His attachment to objects is also a response to time and loss. The objects Füsun touched become a material line linking moments that would otherwise vanish; keeping them is his way of preserving happiness for a future in which he expects to need it. This does not make the past return. Rather, the collection gives his grief a form he can approach, while reminding him that a remembered life has ended.

Museums as refuge and model

Kemal’s idea of a collector’s home takes shape through visits to museums. On a trip to Paris, he realizes that distance from Istanbul lets him see both Füsun and his own obsession from outside it. The quieter museums he visits offer consolation: their rooms feel like a separate realm within the city, suspended from its crowded streets and ordinary time. Later, visits to museums including Sir John Soane’s Museum and the Museu Frederic Marès help him imagine displaying Füsun’s belongings. At the latter, a collection of personal accessories makes the possibilities of such an exhibition especially clear to him.

During a tour of America lasting more than five months, Kemal visits 273 museums. His longing for Füsun nearly makes him abandon the trip, but he continues, then decides to return to Istanbul after seeing the wreck of the car in which Jayne Mansfield was killed. The damaged car concentrates the power of objects to hold painful histories. By the end of the journey, Kemal has concluded that the true collector’s only home is his own museum: a collector’s deepest attachment is not fulfilled by travel from one institution to another, but by making a place for the collection that carries his own life.

Making a museum into a home

Kemal brings his collection to the converted house where the Keskin family had lived. He places the bedframe, mattress, and blue sheet from his encounter with Füsun in the attic. The space that had once been a dark, damp attic is remade as a clean room open to the stars through a skylight. Kemal uses a new entrance on Dalgıç Street, climbs the staircase, and falls asleep on the bed among the objects that make Füsun’s presence palpable to him.

The arrangement reverses the usual movement from house to museum. Some collectors turn their own dwellings into museums; Kemal turns another family’s house into one, then uses his bed and presence to make it a home again. Especially in spring and summer, he spends nights in the attic, where he can be in the company of the whole collection. His mother worries about this arrangement, but accepts it as the way he can endure losing Füsun. The museum is thus both public display and private shelter, holding together his role as collector and his need for a place to live with memory.

A public meaning for private memory

Kemal’s maxim also becomes an argument about how a museum should treat the lives represented by its objects. He wants the guards to explain the history of his collection, his love for Füsun, and the meanings invested in her possessions with dignity. In his conception, their task is not merely to protect exhibits or police visitors; the museum should invite humility and reverence. Yet he also wants it to remain open to lovers who need a place to kiss, refusing to make solemnity a reason to exclude ordinary intimacy.

The collection’s design is meant to let visitors see all its display cases from wherever they stand. Kemal believes that seeing the objects and the story together can make visitors lose their sense of time, and he calls this loss a consolation. He also asks that the novel include a map of Istanbul’s streets and a ticket allowing first-time admission, so readers can carry the story into the city and then enter the museum. Through these plans, his private home becomes a public memory-place: the objects that once marked an intimate and painful past are arranged for others to encounter, while the museum gives Kemal a home in which that past can remain present.