Kemal’s compulsive collecting of Füsun’s belongings

Kemal’s compulsive collecting of Füsun’s belongings is both an improvised response to separation and a practice through which he gives physical form to memory. He seeks objects she touched for the temporary comfort they provide, but each object also recalls the happiness he can no longer recover directly. The habit grows from a hidden personal ritual into a collection organized around the moments of a relationship, exposing the paradox at its center: its objects soothe his longing by keeping Füsun present, while ensuring that her absence remains continually before him.

Objects as a Private Remedy

In the early phase of his separation from Füsun, Kemal returns every few days to the bed in the Merhamet Apartments and handles possessions that bear traces of her presence. A glass paperweight she had touched becomes an immediate source of consolation. He remembers that he gave it to her on June 2 and that she left it at the apartment rather than take it home, avoiding suspicion from her mother. The object matters not for its practical use but because it belonged to a specific exchange and remained in the place where their relationship had unfolded.

The relief does not last. A day and a half after one visit, Kemal’s suffering returns; three days later he comes back and takes up a paintbrush Füsun had handled. He recognizes that he is becoming accustomed, even addicted, to objects that ease his distress, without mistaking this relief for recovery or for forgetting her. The visits are two hours long and recur every two or three days, hidden from Sibel and, in Kemal’s account, partly hidden from himself. He describes them as a kind of treatment, but the repeated need to return shows how limited its effects are.

At first, he does not see himself as a collector. He approaches the things in the apartment as a patient might take stock of remedies: the old turban case inherited from his grandfather, a fez Füsun had worn while clowning, and his mother’s discarded shoes, which Füsun had also tried on. Their value comes from contact and association. Kemal wants objects that recall her, yet also longs to escape the apartment and the reminders it contains, hoping that the comfort they offer means he is beginning to recover.

Repetition and Expansion

That hope repeatedly collapses. When the familiar anguish returns, Kemal goes back to the apartment and searches among small, ordinary things: a teacup, a forgotten hair clip, a ruler, a comb, an eraser, or a ballpoint pen. He also rummages through objects his mother has put away, believing Füsun touched or played with them. Finding one of these things brings back the memories associated with it, and the collection grows through the recurrence of this search-and-recall process. The objects do not simply stand for Füsun in the abstract; each points toward a particular shared moment or familiar presence.

The pattern continues even when Kemal discovers that Füsun’s family has moved and that he has lost the hope of reaching her by going to their former home. He returns to the Merhamet Apartments with newly recovered objects. Handling and looking at them gives him relief, as if they could serve as an analgesic for the shock of losing that possible route back to her. The change in circumstance intensifies the established ritual: when direct access to Füsun becomes less imaginable, the objects become more important as tangible links to her.

Collecting Outside the Apartment

As Kemal begins meeting Füsun at meals, the collection extends beyond the private store of objects in the Merhamet Apartments. The meetings bring him temporary happiness, but he comes to anticipate the pain that will follow when they part. He therefore takes small things from the table as reminders of the time they have spent together, and as a source of comfort for the days when he is alone. The habit joins the pleasure of the meeting to the foreknowledge of its ending.

The items retain the circumstances of their acquisition. At Aleko’s Place in Yeniköy, Füsun plays with a small tin spoon while Kemal talks football with her husband, Feridun; Kemal later keeps the spoon. On another evening, she holds a saltshaker as a Soviet tanker passes outside the window and shakes the bottles and glasses on the table. At Zeynel in İstinye, Kemal retrieves a half-eaten ice-cream cone she has discarded. He takes such objects home and, not wanting his mother to see them, moves them to the Merhamet Apartments, where he places them among the earlier keepsakes. Their accumulation records not only Füsun’s presence but the settings, gestures, and interruptions that made each meeting distinct.

The apartments also become a refuge between social engagements. On one occasion, before joining friends at Fuaye, Kemal washes his face and hands, removes his jacket, and sits among the objects surrounding the bed where he and Füsun had met forty-four times. He spends an hour caressing the keepsakes, then returns to the restaurant and conceals the reason for his delay. The contrast makes the collection’s private function clear: the same man who can appear among Istanbul’s social company carries out a hidden ritual that organizes his emotional life around Füsun’s remembered presence.

Grief and the Meaning of Everyday Things

Kemal’s father’s death brings another kind of loss into the same pattern of attention. At the family home, he opens his father’s drawers and looks at phone bills, telegrams, aspirin, and medicines. Familiar things have become vessels of a past that can no longer be entered. The street outside the apartment also seems newly irreplaceable. This experience parallels Kemal’s collection of Füsun’s belongings: in both cases, ordinary objects acquire exceptional value because a person or a world associated with them is no longer fully available.

On the day of his father’s funeral, Kemal is distressed that Füsun and her parents do not appear among the mourners. He leaves his family and goes to the Merhamet Apartments, where the lead pencil Füsun used and a teacup he has not washed since her disappearance offer consolation. He connects the pain of his father’s death with the pain of Füsun’s absence, describing the pain of love as indivisible: grief can be stirred by an event of any scale because it reaches into the rest of life. The objects do not resolve the competing losses; they let him seek a brief easing of the anguish that binds them together.

Time, Memory, and the Collection

Kemal’s later reflections give the collecting a temporal meaning. He understands a life as a line connecting separate present moments, a line that must eventually end. Füsun’s smile during the years of dinners in Çukurcuma could, in his memory, provide happiness lasting far beyond the moment itself. He collects the things she touched in order to preserve those moments for a future in which he can no longer share them. The collection turns remembered time into a sequence of tangible objects, while also reminding him that the sequence belongs to the past.

In retrospect, he argues that a memento can preserve the colors, textures, images, and pleasures of an instant with a fidelity that even the people who shared it cannot sustain. This claim explains both the appeal and the cost of his practice. The objects keep particular moments accessible, but they cannot restore the relationship or make the past recur. Their consoling force depends on the very absence that makes them necessary.

A journey to Paris gives Kemal some distance from this cycle. Away from Istanbul, whose streets continually remind him of Füsun, he finds that he can consider both her and his own obsession from the outside. His time in less crowded museums brings consolation, and the experience informs the way he understands collections: individual objects can hold the memory of moments, while their arrangement gives those moments a form that can be revisited. In this sense, his collecting is more than a habit of possession. It is the personal, uneven beginning of a museum-like ordering of memory, built from ordinary things that keep a lost relationship present without undoing its loss.