Private time and official time

In Kemal Basmacı’s account, private and official time are not simply two ways of reading a clock. Official time connects people to public schedules, institutions, and the nation; private time gathers around the repeated life of a household, where a moment with Füsun can seem to stand outside the years passing beyond its walls. Their contrast explains both the shelter and the fragility of Kemal’s long attachment: the Keskin family’s suppers offer a world that feels suspended, but television, political violence, and martial-law curfews repeatedly expose its dependence on the wider one.

Two orders of time

Kemal introduces the distinction while addressing readers who might find it strange that he spent eight years visiting Füsun’s family. One kind of time belongs to individual experience; another, which he calls official time, is shared with other people. Clocks and calendars do not simply embody time itself: they help people coordinate their relations with society. Private time, by contrast, takes shape in what is felt and remembered. It is not a separate clock-system so much as a way of inhabiting experience in which a beloved person, a meal, or a familiar room can outweigh the passage of dates.

The distinction is made concrete by the Keskin family’s German-made wall clock. Encased in wood and glass, with a pendulum and chime, it hangs beside the door as a reminder of continuity and of the outside world. Yet nobody depends on it to know the hour. Sometimes it is wound, sometimes forgotten; its chime can fall silent for months, and the family may discuss whether it is working without consulting it for the time. Tarık Bey’s defense of the clock is not that it keeps the household punctual, but that it makes the house feel like a house. Its function is almost the opposite of timekeeping: it persuades the family that nothing has changed.

That wish does not mean that time has literally stopped. The clock’s intermittent ticking and the disagreements it occasions between Tarık Bey and Aunt Nesibe reveal the household’s ambivalence. Its sound can reassure them that the home remains intact, while also making them aware of silence, absence, and the possibility of change. The family’s private order is sustained by repetition, not sealed off from time’s passage.

Supper, television, and the public clock

The Keskin family actually takes its cues from television. During the years when the visits become a routine, the set is almost always on, and the nightly broadcast provides both entertainment and a public schedule. At seven, a large clock appears on screen before TRT’s news. Füsun checks her wristwatch against it, while Tarık Bey consults one of his pocket watches. Kemal watches Füsun concentrate on adjusting hers; when she gets the time right, she looks at him and smiles. The same broadcast that links the household to a national timetable becomes, for him, part of an intimate recurring scene.

That scene makes the two orders overlap rather than simply compete. The television clock, national flag, and anthem connect the family to millions of other households and to the state. They also mark the difference between official public life and the disorderly domestic world in which the family eats and talks. For Kemal, Füsun’s act of setting her watch is not primarily a practical need for exact punctuality. It appears to him as an acknowledgment of the public directive represented by the broadcast, while her smile becomes a private exchange made within that shared ritual.

The routine acquired a remarkable duration. Kemal dates his first supper visit to October 23, 1976, and his last to August 26, 1984: seven years and ten months, or 2,864 intervening days. In 409 weeks, he records 1,593 suppers, an average of four visits a week. The pattern was not mechanically even: some weeks he went every day, while in others he stayed away in an effort to resist his attachment. Yet the Keskin family kept a place for him, and more than ten days without seeing Füsun would leave him in a misery he associated with the autumn of 1975. The count belongs to official, measurable duration; its emotional meaning lies in the repeated evenings the count contains.

Television also sets the approximate length of a visit. Kemal usually arrived around seven and left after the closing ceremony, close to midnight; he estimates an average of five hours at the house. In September 1980, martial law imposed a ten o’clock curfew, forcing him to leave at a quarter to ten. Çetin drove him through darkening, emptying streets, and the shortened visit felt like being deprived of time with Füsun. The political clock could thus interrupt the household’s rhythm in a direct, bodily way. News of political violence also broke the calm of the evenings: the sense of being outside time while watching television lasted only until the news reported the country’s movement toward civil war.

Present moments and remembered time

Kemal draws on Aristotle’s distinction between time as a line and the indivisible moments he calls the present. The line connects one moment to the next; no one can simply forget it, and remembering its endpoint means confronting death. Yet an individual present can hold enough happiness to endure in memory. The years at the Keskin table matter to Kemal not because they abolish chronology, but because he learns to regard them as a sequence of moments whose value cannot be measured by the years they occupy.

This account also changes the meaning of his collecting. Kemal says he went to the Keskin home not only to see Füsun but to inhabit, for a while, the world whose air she breathed. He took away objects she had touched so that he could preserve moments for the future. A slender Buren wristwatch, which he gave her on her twenty-fifth birthday, brings back several scenes at once: Füsun kissing him on the cheek behind an open kitchen door, showing the watch to her parents, and her parents thanking him. The object does not record those events as a calendar would. It gathers them into a returnable cluster of experience.

The same logic shapes Kemal’s retrospective naming of the happiest moment of his life. A person living through joy may expect an even happier future; only when a life has taken its final shape can a moment be selected as the happiest. Naming it therefore acknowledges that it belongs to the past and will not return. Kemal describes mementos as a way to bear that pain, preserving the colors, textures, images, and delights of an instant. In the intimate scene with Füsun that he identifies as his happiest, her earring falls onto the blue sheet. The small object becomes inseparable from the moment, and the memory of the moment explains why an ordinary possession can acquire extraordinary weight.

The museum as a form of time

The Museum of Innocence extends this private practice into a public arrangement. Kemal imagines the Keskin family’s old possessions, including broken and rusting clocks and watches, as objects that seem to exist outside ordinary time. The museum is meant to let visitors encounter the household’s separate temporal world through what remains of it. Rather than present a clock as a reliable measure of change, this collection gives it another role: a witness to repeated life and an invitation to recover particular moments.

Kemal’s account of the 1,593 visits shows how retrospective narrative performs a related task. The visits were not all serene or identical; his shame, hesitation, and difficulty leaving the house belonged to them too. But looking back, he remembers even difficult, hopeless, and humiliating evenings as happiness. That revision does not erase the elapsed years or the conflicts outside the household. It reorganizes them around moments that can still be recalled. His journey to Paris makes the distinction newly visible: away from Istanbul’s reminders of Füsun, he can see his obsession and their story from the outside, and finds consolation in small, sparsely visited museums that seem to occupy a realm apart from the city. Across the visits, the collected objects, and the museum, private time becomes a means of holding experience against loss, while official time continues to mark the world from which that experience cannot finally escape.