Füsun’s Buren watch

Füsun’s Buren watch gathers the novel’s private history of love into an everyday object: given by Kemal on her twenty-fifth birthday, it becomes part of a supper-table ritual and a precise aid to his memories. Its practical role in marking the hour is inseparable from the time Kemal spent with Füsun and her family, which he later remembers not as empty waiting but as a succession of moments of happiness.

The Watch and Its Gift

Kemal recalls the Buren as a slender wristwatch that Füsun began wearing in April 1982. He had given it to her for her twenty-fifth birthday, when her parents were away and Feridun was not at home. After taking the watch from its box, Füsun kissed Kemal on the cheek behind the open kitchen door. The gift thus holds a private gesture between them as well as the later family scene in which she joyfully showed it to her parents. Both Tarık and Aunt Nesibe thanked Kemal, having by then accepted him as an eccentric member of the family.

The watch’s meaning rests on that sequence of moments rather than on its value alone: its presentation, Füsun’s kiss, and her parents’ response. For Kemal, seeing the watch calls these separate scenes back together. The object becomes a compact record of affection that was at once intimate and visible within the family.

A Supper-Table Ritual

The watch also belonged to a repeated evening scene. At seven o’clock, an enormous clock appeared on the television screen shortly before TRT’s news program began. Füsun would look at her wristwatch and adjust it to the time on the screen; Tarık checked one of his pocket watches alongside her. Kemal remembers watching Füsun squint, press her tongue against the inside of her cheek, and concentrate on setting the watch. Once she had the time right, she would look at him and smile, aware that he was observing her affectionately.

The small ritual joined public time to the household’s own rhythms. Television supplied the official hour, while Füsun’s watch made its adjustment personal: Kemal’s question about whether she had the time right became part of their exchange, answered by her warmer smile. The watch therefore marks not only an hour but a recurring form of closeness, enacted at the dinner table in the presence of her family.

Time Recollected as Happiness

Kemal eventually understands that his visits were not simply a way to see Füsun; they also let him inhabit the world in which she lived. He describes that household as possessing a kind of timelessness, set apart from the official time announced by television, radio, and the call to prayer. The Buren watch participated in both orders: it registered the clock’s public hour, yet Kemal remembers it through scenes that matter for their particular emotional texture.

The birthday watch makes this way of remembering especially clear. When Kemal sees it, he relives giving it to Füsun, her kiss behind the kitchen door, and her delight in showing it to her parents. He argues that life need not be measured only as a line of chronological time; its deepest moments can be treasured in sequence. In that altered measure, the eight years of suppers at the Keskin home become, in his reckoning, 1,593 happy nights—including evenings he had experienced at the time as difficult, hopeless, or humiliating.

An Object in Kemal’s Collection

Kemal’s account presents the watch as an object displayed for the reader, and its remembered scenes exemplify why he preserves things Füsun touched. Elsewhere, he admits that he began with belongings easy to pocket, such as matchboxes, cigarette butts, saltshakers, coffee cups, hairpins, and barrettes, before turning to larger household items and replacing some with new ones. The watch’s particular importance, however, comes not from a reported act of taking it but from the memories it gathers: a gift, a kiss, a family’s welcome, and the evening ritual of setting the hour.

In Kemal’s recollection, the Buren turns an ordinary measure of time into a vessel for lived time. It does not stop the years or restore the past; it makes particular moments available to be relived. The watch’s place in his collection thus connects the daily life of the Keskin household to his larger effort to preserve the happiness he found there.