Tricycle

The Tricycle is a shared childhood possession whose passage between households gives it a history of family ties, hand-me-downs, and remembered visits. Years later, Füsun asks Kemal Basmacı to bring it when he comes to supper at her parents’ home, making the old toy part of a carefully framed return to one another’s family lives.

Childhood and Circulation

After Kemal and his brother had outgrown the Tricycle, Kemal’s mother gave it to Füsun. Füsun, too, was already too old to ride it when it came to her, so it was a gift she did not use as a toy. When she visited Kemal’s family with her parents, her mother brought it back. Kemal’s mother later brought it into the house again, where it ended up among her stored possessions.

The toy’s movement was part of a broader domestic practice: Kemal’s mother passed on old children’s things to poorer relatives, while her own home accumulated furnishings and belongings she had acquired and then set aside. When Kemal later searched through trunks of old clothes and household objects, he found the Tricycle among them. Its presence there made an otherwise ordinary object a link between two families’ childhoods and the changing ownership of their things.

A Recovered Memory

Kemal’s recollection of the Tricycle returns in fragments. As he is falling asleep, memories of a cold, gray holiday morning surface: he remembers the toy, going outside with Füsun to watch a lamb being slaughtered, and then taking a ride in a car. The next day, when they meet at the Merhamet Apartments, Füsun supplies the detail he cannot fully remember: the Tricycle had been returned from their house after she received it from his mother and had outgrown it.

Their exchange shows the object working as a prompt for shared memory, but not as a guarantee that they remember equally. Füsun recalls its transfer more clearly than Kemal does; his memory of the day gathers around images and is completed by her account. The Tricycle’s earlier passage between homes is thus recovered through conversation, as the two piece together the history of a possession neither had kept in active use.

A Condition for Visiting

After making love, Füsun sets a condition for their relationship’s next step: one day Kemal must come to supper with her mother and father and bring both her earring and the Tricycle she rode when she was little. The request brings the toy out of storage and assigns it a new purpose. It is no longer simply a remnant of childhood or an object exchanged between families; it becomes part of a proposed visit to Füsun’s home.

Füsun gives that visit an ordinary social explanation. A relative who encountered her could ask after her parents and accept an invitation; Kemal could also plausibly say that he wanted to see them or offer to help her with mathematics before the university entrance examination. The Tricycle belongs to this carefully managed scenario: bringing it connects the visit to an established family history rather than making the meeting appear to announce their secret intimacy.

Significance

The Tricycle’s significance lies in its successive roles rather than in any account of continued use. It passes from Kemal’s household to Füsun’s and back, rests among stored belongings, and is then recalled as a condition for renewed contact between the families. Its circulation makes private memory tangible while exposing how childhood objects can outlast the uses for which they were made.

The object also gives Füsun a concrete way to define what she wants from Kemal after their intimacy: not merely another private meeting, but a visit to her parents’ table. In this movement from childhood hand-me-down to remembered possession to proposed offering, the Tricycle joins their past to a possible public, familial future.