Eight Years of Shared Dinners

Eight Years of Shared Dinners is the long domestic interval in which Kemal visits Füsun and her family in Çukurcuma, turning supper, television, and the rituals of an ordinary household into both the structure of his days and the substance of his memory. Across 1,593 visits, the routine offers him recurring closeness to Füsun without resolving the distance between them; in retrospect, its smallest details become the moments his collection and story are meant to preserve.

The Visit and Its Measure

Kemal dates the first supper to Saturday, October 23, 1976, eleven days after Nesibe the seamstress gave him an open-ended welcome. His last night with Füsun and Nesibe was Sunday, August 26, 1984. The interval contained 2,864 days, or 409 weeks, during which he came to supper 1,593 times: an average of four visits a week. The count is exact, but the rhythm was not. Some weeks he appeared every day; at other times, anger and the resolve to forget Füsun kept him away. Yet he never stayed away for more than ten days, because the separation returned him to the depths of misery he remembered from autumn 1975.

The household came to expect him. The family kept a place for him at the table without needing to issue a formal invitation, and everyone could usually guess when he would arrive. That welcome did not make his presence emotionally simple: he sometimes worried that another visit would impose on them, while staying away meant enduring an evening without Füsun and fearing that his absence might offend the family. Because he could not openly state that seeing her was his reason for coming, they settled on the more comfortable description of his visits as sitting together.

In those early suppers, the family’s presence meant that Kemal and Füsun rarely had a chance to be alone. He tried to whisper that he had missed her; she answered through her eyes, appearing to receive his words warmly. The visits therefore held a distinctive tension: they offered repeated proximity but little freedom to act on it. Kemal’s private purpose remained unspoken within a shared family routine.

Clocks, Television, and Household Rhythm

A large German-made clock hung beside the door, housed in wood and glass, with a pendulum and chime. It belonged to an older domestic order in which such clocks had marked the passage of the hours, but by the mid-1970s television had taken over much of that role. The Keskin family’s clock continued to tick and chime, and someone still stood on a chair to wind it, even though it was rarely consulted as a practical timekeeper. For Kemal, its occasional chime in the corridor, heard during sleepless nights, could be comforting: a remnant of continuity within the household.

The television, by contrast, supplied the family’s working time. Each evening, shortly before TRT’s seven o’clock news, a large clock appeared on the screen. Füsun checked her wristwatch against it while Tarık Bey consulted one of the pocket watches he used over the years. Kemal watched Füsun concentrate on setting the time, tongue pressed to the inside of her cheek as she compared the display with her watch. When she had it right, she looked at him and smiled. A national broadcast schedule thus became, for Kemal, an intimate recurring scene: the public clock gave Füsun an occasion to meet his loving gaze.

Television also shaped the visits’ duration. Kemal spent much of each evening at the table watching whatever the household had on: films, quizzes, weather reports, sporting events, festivals, or political broadcasts. Füsun moved between the kitchen and dining area with plates and pots, sometimes passing in front of the screen; her parents might see an interruption, while Kemal experienced her as the focus of the room. He generally arrived around seven and left after the nightly closing ceremony, near midnight. Its four minutes of marching soldiers, a raised flag, and the national anthem made the end of broadcasting a shared signal that the evening had ended. He estimates that an average visit lasted about five hours, though some lasted longer.

The routine was made not only of programs and clocks but of intervals that seemed to contain almost nothing. The family might sit quietly, listen to a car clatter down the hill or rain strike the windows, comment on the heat, or watch Nesibe forget a cigarette in the ashtray and light another. Someone might add coal to the stove; Füsun might yawn, or Kemal might discreetly study her hand for fifteen or twenty seconds. Such repetitions gave the dinners their texture. Their apparent stillness concealed the intensity with which he attended to Füsun and the way each small recurrence could become distinct in memory.

Public Events and Private Time

Kemal distinguishes the time people share through clocks and calendars from the private time of moments that matter to them. The television clock and the family’s watches helped regulate relations with the outside world; they could not make the evening’s personal experience equivalent to official time. For Kemal, a smile from Füsun could make a single present moment feel sufficient for a lifetime, even as the measured sequence of days pointed toward aging and death. His visits were an attempt to gather enough happiness to carry forward, not a way to stop time itself.

The 1980 military coup exposed how vulnerable the household rhythm was to public authority. Martial law brought a ten o’clock curfew, forcing Kemal to leave at a quarter to ten, before his longing to remain had been satisfied. Çetin drove him through streets that were dark and quickly emptying. The political decree did not merely shorten the evening; it turned departure into a recurring deprivation, a loss measured against the extra time Kemal wished he could spend with Füsun. Elsewhere in the city, political violence—the killings, attacks on coffeehouses, bombings, and raids—made ordinary movement dangerous. Kemal regarded the unrest as a catastrophe ordinary people could only try to avoid, but the curfew carried that public crisis directly into his private schedule.

The household’s measured evenings also stand against the wider presence of death and historical change in Kemal’s memories. From the balcony of his childhood home in Teşvikiye, he and his brother had watched funeral processions leave Teşvikiye Mosque for Nişantaşı Square; as children, they imitated the bearers with bolsters, until public funerals became a kind of diversion. Much later, after his father’s death, familiar objects in the family home became vessels of a lost past. These experiences sharpen the contrast at the heart of the dinners: the clock traces continuity, but each familiar scene is finite and can only be recovered afterward as memory.

Objects, Memory, and the Museum

The suppers matter to Kemal not only as repeated encounters but as experiences preserved through objects. He took away things Füsun had touched, large and small, because he wanted to hold on to the happy moments gathered in the house. A porcelain saltshaker, a dog-shaped tape measure, a can opener resembling an instrument of torture, and a bottle of sunflower oil could each call back a particular evening. Over time, he found that the memories associated with individual objects expanded and merged; seeing the collection could summon the broader experience of sitting at the dinner table with Füsun and her family.

This effort to preserve the dinners changes as the collection grows. At first, Kemal depended on picking up the objects; later, he could look at them and remember the past they represented. After visiting museums in Paris, he also found that distance helped him see his obsession and his story more clearly than he could in Istanbul, where reminders of Füsun filled the city. The museum he imagined would make private attention legible to visitors: moving from case to case, they would see how closely he had watched Füsun’s hand, her hair, her gestures, and the objects she used at supper. In that design, the eight years of visits become more than a span to be counted. They become a carefully arranged record of ordinary life, preserving the quiet scenes through which Kemal understood his love.