The Keskin Family Home in Çukurcuma is the setting for the long domestic interlude in which Kemal visits Füsun and her family for supper, watches television, and studies the person he loves from across the dinner table. Across 1,593 visits, the home’s familiar rooms and routines become more than a backdrop: they create a private measure of time, distinct from the clocks and political events of the world outside.

Setting and arrangement

The home occupies the second floor of its building in Çukurcuma. A model of the apartment records its arrangement: the living room is below the bedrooms, where Aunt Nesibe shares a room with Tarık and Füsun shares one with her husband; a bathroom lies between the two bedrooms. The model also marks Kemal’s regular place at the dinner table, facing the television, with the kitchen to his right and a sideboard behind him.

That sideboard holds an accumulation of ordinary household things: crystal glasses, porcelain, silver sugar bowls, liqueur sets, unused coffee cups, an old clock, a broken silver lighter, and a small patterned vase among other ornaments. The objects belong to the family’s everyday surroundings, but Kemal’s recollections make the room legible through such details. Even a slight shift of his chair can set the objects on the sideboard trembling, drawing attention to the material environment in which the evenings repeatedly unfold.

The routine of visiting

Kemal’s first visit took place on October 23, 1976, eleven days after Aunt Nesibe had given him an open-ended welcome. His last supper in the home with Füsun and Aunt Nesibe was on August 26, 1984. Across the intervening 2,864 days—409 weeks—he came 1,593 times, an average of about four suppers a week. The pattern was not perfectly regular: some weeks he visited daily, while at other times he stayed away in an effort to persuade himself he could forget Füsun. Yet he never went more than ten days without seeing her and her family, and they came to expect his arrival and keep a place for him.

The visits usually began at about seven in the evening and ended soon after the nightly television closing ceremony, around midnight. Kemal estimates that each lasted about five hours, though some ran longer. The family’s convenient description of the visits as sitting together helped make his presence socially manageable without naming his unspoken reason for coming. Supper, conversation, television, and long stretches of silence all belonged to the same routine. In the early visits, Kemal was still adjusting to the house and to Füsun’s regular presence there. He hoped his look would convey that he had come to be near her; she greeted him as if his presence were ordinary and welcome, while their opportunities to be alone remained scarce.

Clocks, television, and household time

A German-made clock in a wood-and-glass case hangs beside the door. With its pendulum and chime, it stands as a reminder of continuity and of the official world beyond the home, rather than as the family’s dependable way of telling the time. It is sometimes wound and sometimes neglected; its chime may fall silent for months or sound at unexpected moments. The family can discuss whether it has stopped or started without relying on it to tell the hour. For Tarık, its continuing presence helps the house feel like a house; for Aunt Nesibe, its sudden chimes can be an irritation. Their exchanges around it turn the clock into part of the home’s domestic life.

Television, rather than the wall clock, becomes the household’s practical timekeeper. Each evening, the family watches the enormous clock displayed on the screen shortly before the news begins on TRT at seven. Füsun checks her wristwatch while Tarık checks a pocket watch, adjusting their time against the broadcast. Kemal watches her concentrate on the screen and then glance at him when she has set her watch. In this small repeated gesture, public broadcast time and private attention meet: the television provides the cue, but Kemal’s memory preserves Füsun’s response.

The television also structures the shared evening. Füsun moves between the kitchen and dining area carrying plates and pots, passing in front of the screen while her parents follow a film, quiz show, weather report, or other program. Kemal experiences her movement not as an interruption to the broadcast but as the focus of his own attention. Around the table, the evenings also hold commonplace sounds and pauses: rain against the windows, a car passing noisily outside, coal added to the stove, and the television continuing in the background. Repetition makes these ordinary details memorable without making the household’s life less ordinary.

Kemal’s place at the table

Kemal can see Füsun by shifting his eyes slightly to the left, without turning toward her or making his attention obvious to the rest of the family. Sitting across from the television, he uses the arrangement of the room to watch her for long stretches while appearing to watch the screen. The placement of his chair thus gives the apartment a quiet emotional geometry: the television faces him, but Füsun remains within his peripheral view.

The home is also bound up with Kemal’s earlier attempts to avoid reminders of Füsun. On a mental map of Nişantaşı, he marked Kuyulu Bostan Street, where her family lived, as a prohibited area, along with other streets and places associated with their past. Later, the household becomes the destination he visits repeatedly. The contrast is central to the home’s significance in his story: a place once placed among the dangers of recollection becomes the setting of a new and sustaining routine.

Interruption and significance

The domestic rhythm persists even as the political situation outside changes. In September 1980, four years after Kemal began his visits, a military coup brought martial law and a ten o’clock curfew. He then had to leave by a quarter to ten, before his longing to remain with Füsun had been satisfied. The journey home through dark, rapidly emptying streets made the enforced end of each visit a recurring form of deprivation. National time entered the home not as an abstract date but as a limit on how long Kemal could stay.

In retrospect, the Keskin Family Home holds together both the repetition of those years and their eventual passing. Kemal’s account specifies the visits by dates and totals, while the remembered evenings linger in particular sights, gestures, and sounds. The family’s clock appears to defend the continuity of the house even when it scarcely tells time; the television registers the shared hour, and the dinner table gives Kemal a place from which to watch Füsun. After he can no longer visit her in Çukurcuma, they meet in Beyoğlu to see films, marking a change in the setting of their time together. The home remains the defining space of the years when simply being present at the same table became Kemal’s repeated, private measure of closeness.