Kemal’s compulsive collecting habit

Kemal’s compulsive collecting habit transforms ordinary objects from the Keskin Family Home into a private archive of his love for Füsun. He takes what she has touched not chiefly to possess valuable things, but to recover the moments attached to them. Over years of visits, the practice grows from discreet keepsakes into a collection that helps him remember, delays his departure from the family’s table, and eventually becomes a way of imagining time itself.

Origins and Purpose

Kemal’s collecting intensifies after 1979, as he moves among his home, office, the Merhamet Apartments, and Füsun’s family home. At the apartments he looks over the steadily growing collection, sometimes seeing it as a record of happy hours, sometimes as the precious debris of turmoil within him. He is ashamed of the objects and worries that someone may discover them, or that they will eventually fill the rooms from floor to ceiling. Yet he does not begin taking things with a plan to build a collection. His immediate aim is to be returned to the past.

That aim is bound up with an expectation that keeps the collecting from seeming, to Kemal, like a permanent arrangement. For much of the eight years he visits the family, he believes that only a few more months—six at most—will pass before he persuades Füsun to marry him. The objects therefore serve both as recollections of time spent with her and as a provisional substitute for the future he imagines. Their accumulation records the widening distance between that expectation and the life he is actually living.

Kemal’s account also links the objects to the pain of retrospect. A happiest moment can be identified only after life has taken shape, when the moment is already irretrievable. Possessing something from it can make that loss bearable: mementos, he reflects, preserve a moment’s colors, textures, images, and pleasures with a fidelity that even its human companions may not match. In this sense, collecting is not simply an appetite for things. It is his attempt to keep a past moment available after time has carried it away.

Escalation at the Family Home

The practice becomes increasingly regular and extensive. Kemal sees Füsun three or four times a week and, alongside those visits, takes objects from her home—usually three or four at a time, sometimes six or seven, and during the most miserable periods as many as ten to fifteen. At first he favors things easy to remove without notice, including matchboxes, cigarette butts, saltshakers, coffee cups, hairpins, and barrettes. He later turns to larger items such as ashtrays, cups, and slippers, replacing some with new ones so their disappearance will not be apparent.

Small objects acquire an intimacy out of proportion to their practical use. Kemal takes a colored porcelain thimble and an orange pastel pencil Füsun had recently handled. He imagines that her touch remains with the matchboxes, and holding one at the Merhamet Apartments brings back the pleasure of sitting at the table and looking at her. Taking an object also gives him a sense of having secured a small part of the beloved he cannot claim in the way he desires. The collection thus joins recollection to possession: each item recalls a shared scene, but its removal also briefly consoles him for not having won the life he wants with Füsun.

As time passes, Kemal’s mental image of Füsun spreads across the whole household. Her parents, the dining table, stove, coal carrier, porcelain dogs on the television, cologne bottles, cigarettes, rakı glasses, and bowls of sweets all become merged with that image. Objects no longer function only as souvenirs of isolated occasions; they seem elemental to the occasions themselves. A saltshaker taken after Füsun uses it at dinner becomes a tangible link to her habitual gestures and gives Kemal strength to leave when the evening ends. After the summer of 1979, he describes an object in his pocket as the key that enables him to rise from his chair and go.

The Dogs and the Changing Practice

The porcelain dogs make the growing visibility of Kemal’s collecting especially clear. The family notices that the figures on the television change, and Nesibe the seamstress and Füsun appear to have guessed—or to know—that Kemal is taking things. He has no wish to share his collection and remains ashamed of hoarding. At one point, he explains the absence of a dog by saying that Fatma Hanım dropped and broke it, then brings a replacement he claims to have found in the Spice Bazaar. The explanation allows him to remove an object while returning another to the family home.

A later disappearance takes eleven months to register. Kemal connects the family’s eventual attention to the atmosphere following the coup, when people felt they ought to put their houses in order. He also considers how the television had replaced the radio as the focus of family attention: dogs once placed above radios had migrated to television sets, but with everyone looking at the screen, the small figures themselves went unnoticed. Two days after one evening’s visit, he brings two porcelain dogs from Beyoğlu, presenting them as a pair suited to the television. For more than a year he resists taking them. By 1982, however, he has begun leaving money discreetly or bringing an expensive replacement the following day. The taking continues, but now includes an effort to compensate for what is removed. Other objects shaped like dogs, including pincushions and tape measures, also appear on the television over the years.

Cigarette Stubs and the Collection as Memory

The cigarette stubs form the most numerous and intimate part of the collection. During eight years of suppers, Kemal gathers 4,213 of Füsun’s cigarette butts. Their marks and shapes recall particular moments, including evenings when their eyes meet and both are reminded of the feeling between them. The collection preserves not only the fact that Füsun smoked, but also the distinct circumstances in which a cigarette was put out. Kemal associates the stubs with moments of anguish or bliss and finds that, among all the objects he takes, they correspond most closely to the separate moments that make up a life.

His habits even extend to imitation. Füsun smokes Samsuns, and Kemal gives up Marlboros soon after he begins dining at the Keskin Family Home. He adopts her habit of rolling a cigarette between his fingers before lighting it, a small repeated gesture that sometimes brings their eyes together. The collecting and the imitation are parallel forms of closeness: one preserves what Füsun leaves behind; the other carries one of her ordinary actions into Kemal’s own routine.

Eventually he no longer needs to pick up the objects individually. Seeing them at the Merhamet Apartments is enough to summon the shared evenings. A porcelain saltshaker, a dog-shaped tape measure, a can opener, or a bottle of sunflower oil can each recall a particular moment; as years pass, those moments expand and merge. Looking across the gathered things becomes a means of reconstructing the larger reality of sitting at dinner with Füsun and her family. Kemal describes the collection as a chain linking objects that carry moments within them, while also recognizing that any such line ultimately ends in death.

From Private Consolation to a Museum

The collection’s meaning changes as its scale and duration become harder to separate from Kemal’s life. What began as a private way to revisit the past comes to fill rooms with material evidence of his attachment. The objects hold personal memories, but their ordinary character also ties those memories to the repeated routines of a family home: meals, television, cigarettes, household tools, and small acts of attention. In this way, the collection preserves not just a romance but the daily setting in which Kemal experienced it.

Kemal later finds a wider frame for this practice during a journey to Paris. Away from Istanbul and its reminders of Füsun, he can view both her and his own obsession from a distance. Wandering through small, little-visited museums, he finds consolation in collections that make a separate realm within the city. That experience connects his private hoard to the Museum of Innocence: objects gathered to preserve a personal past can be arranged as a museum and offered to another person’s view. The collecting remains rooted in grief and longing, but it also becomes the material basis for a lasting account of moments that would otherwise have disappeared.