Füsun’s cigarette stubs

Füsun’s cigarette stubs are among the most intimate and carefully interpreted objects in Kemal’s collection: over eight years of dinners at her family’s home, he saves 4,213, treating each as a material trace of her mood and of the moment in which she put it out. Their importance lies not simply in their association with Füsun, but in the way Kemal turns small, otherwise overlooked remnants into dated records of a shared life and, later, exhibits in his museum.

Collection and Intimacy

During his eight years of evening visits to the Keskin home, Kemal quietly pocketed Füsun’s discarded cigarette ends. At first he gathered objects that were easy to remove unnoticed, including matchboxes, saltshakers, coffee cups, hairpins, and barrettes. As his collecting grew, he began taking more noticeable belongings and replacing some with new ones. The cigarette stubs belong to this broader, initially concealed practice, but their scale and his sustained attention give them a distinctive place within it.

Kemal counts 4,213 stubs. He connects their appeal to the fact that each cigarette had touched Füsun’s lips, and that its filter might retain lipstick. This closeness gives the remnants a personal significance beyond their ordinary use and disposal. He also adopts Füsun’s preferred brand, Samsuns, after he begins dining with the family, giving up Marlboros. The cigarettes thus register not only what she left behind but a small alteration in his own habits as he tries to remain close to her.

Reading Mood in Form

Kemal distinguishes Füsun’s cigarettes by how she extinguished them, rather than by brand. When she was away, she smoked almost to the filter; during his visits, she often put them out earlier, as Sibel and her friends did with their American ultralights. He reads variations in this practice as expressive: a cigarette might be put out with impatience, anger, or a quick movement made while Füsun turned her attention elsewhere. These are Kemal’s interpretations of the traces, not statements by Füsun about what each one meant.

Back at the Merhamet Apartments, he examines the collected ends individually, imagining them as different shapes: bent figures, question marks, crayfish, ferry smokestacks, or signs of warning. At other times he regards them as fragments of Füsun herself. The range of his comparisons makes the objects more than a uniform accumulation. Each altered shape prompts a different reading, and Kemal’s attention moves between the material stub and the emotion he believes it preserves.

Dates and Remembered Scenes

In the museum, each of the 4,213 cigarette stubs is pinned with the date Kemal retrieved it. He argues that the dates and shapes make the display a record of Füsun’s feelings at particular moments, rather than a mass of interchangeable remnants. One example is a group of three stubs collected on May 17, 1981, when filming of Broken Lives began at the Peri Cinema. Their folded, compressed forms recall to Kemal Füsun’s silence that day and her effort to conceal that something was troubling her.

Other stubs draw meaning from scenes the two shared. Kemal remembers an evening when their eyes met as Füsun put out a cigarette; in his account, the encounter made the gesture and the shape of the butt register their mutual awareness of his presence as a suitor. A pair of crushed stubs, meanwhile, recalls a television screening of False Bliss, featuring Ekrem Güçlü, and a line in the film about the mistake of wanting more and trying to be happy. In these instances, the stubs preserve not an objective transcript of a scene but Kemal’s return to it through the object he kept.

Memory, Repetition, and the Museum

Kemal calls the cigarettes the objects that correspond most closely to Aristotle’s moments. Some evenings he took one stub away; on others, several. Later, at the Merhamet Apartments, he could handle them one at a time and recall moments from the past. Their repeated accumulation gives his private ritual a structure: each small remnant opens onto a scene, while the dated museum display arranges those separate returns into a visible record.

The cigarette stubs also belong to a larger collection of domestic objects that Kemal associates with particular dinners and household routines. Over time, he finds that merely seeing an object in the apartments can bring back the evening connected with it; separate memories begin to expand and merge until he can summon the experience of sitting at the table with Füsun and her family. In the museum, the stubs therefore stand both for specific moments and for the larger world of repeated visits from which those moments came. Their modest, disposable character contrasts with the care of their preservation: what would ordinarily disappear into household waste becomes, through collecting and recollection, a record of intimacy, longing, and everyday life.