Winter 1986

Winter 1986 is a turning point in Kemal’s effort to understand Füsun through the objects she left behind. On a snowy evening, he finds the butterfly earrings she wore on the day of the accident, despite her having said for years that she had lost one. Aunt Nesibe reveals that she hid Füsun’s clothes and belongings to protect him from grief, and that Füsun put on the earrings before going to Kemal’s room that evening. The discovery makes the earrings evidence not only of what Füsun wore, but of a private choice and a long-kept silence.

The Earrings in the Drawer

After supper, Kemal searches through the butterfly brooches, earrings, and pins he had bought for Füsun over the years. In a box at the back of a drawer, he finds a pair of butterfly-shaped earrings, each marked with the initial F. He recognizes them as the earrings Füsun wore on the day of the accident, even though she had maintained that one was lost.

He takes them downstairs and asks Aunt Nesibe about their recent return to Füsun’s jewelry box. She explains that she had hidden the red dress, shoes, and other things Füsun wore that day because she did not want to intensify Kemal’s grief. She later put them back where they belonged. The earrings’ presence in the drawer is thus part of a larger act of concealment and restoration: Aunt Nesibe had tried to shield Kemal, but the objects eventually returned to view.

Aunt Nesibe also recalls what happened before Füsun went to Kemal’s room that evening. Füsun had expected to sleep in her mother’s room, but secretly took the earrings from her handbag and put them on. Aunt Nesibe, pretending to be asleep, said nothing. The detail changes the earrings from a mere recovered possession into evidence of Füsun’s intention to wear them when she went to Kemal. Kemal’s later question about whether she wore both gives the discovery its painful precision.

Earlier Traces and Unanswered Questions

The 1986 discovery reaches back to Kemal’s first visit to Füsun’s house. In the bathroom, amid a moment when he understood the world through desire, touch, and love, he found a hairpin and pocketed it. He also put Füsun’s orphaned earring where her lipstick had been. Years later, he tells Aunt Nesibe that he had asked her about that earring during the first visit. She cannot identify what happened to it, but remembers Füsun speaking of a pair of earrings she hoped to wear as a surprise in Paris. Aunt Nesibe never knew which pair Füsun meant.

The earrings also sit within a family history of gifts and regret. Kemal’s father once gave him a faded velvet jewel box containing fine pearl earrings bought at the Izmir Fair for a woman he had failed to treat as she deserved. He urged Kemal to give them to Sibel and to remember his warning about treating women well. Those pearls and Füsun’s butterfly earrings are different objects with different histories, but both carry the weight of love expressed too late, or through a gift whose meaning is not fully shared.

Objects, Memory, and the Work of Collecting

For Kemal, the earrings belong to a much wider practice of preserving things connected to Füsun. He had begun by pocketing easily overlooked objects such as matchboxes, cigarette butts, saltshakers, coffee cups, hairpins, and barrettes. As his collecting grew more conspicuous, he began replacing objects such as ashtrays, cups, and slippers with new ones. The objects were not simply possessions: each could hold a memory that the people around him did not recognize or discuss.

A crystal glass had already shown him how unevenly an object’s memory can be shared. On New Year’s Eve 1980, he brought the glass as a tombala prize; he and Füsun had drunk whiskey from it at their last rendezvous on the day of his engagement. The Keskin family accepted it among ordinary household gifts, and Füsun did not recognize its connection to that day. Tarık Bey later used it as a raki glass, while Kemal found that he could not properly recall the happiness it represented at the dinner table. The earrings’ return in 1986 similarly joins private significance to ordinary household storage, but this time Aunt Nesibe’s account gives Kemal a fact that the object alone could not supply.

Kemal’s reflections extend from intimate keepsakes to everyday goods made in many copies. He imagines saltshakers migrating from a small Istanbul factory into homes and restaurants across distant cities, including New Delhi, Cairo, Barcelona, and Rome. Their mass circulation contrasts with the singular history he attaches to each object he collected from Füsun’s life. In both cases, objects gather meaning through use and memory, though the people who handle them may not know what they carry.

The Journey to Paris

After Aunt Nesibe remembers Füsun’s wish to surprise Kemal with earrings in Paris, she begins to cry and apologizes. The next day, Kemal books a room at the Hôtel du Nord; that evening, he tells his mother that he is going to Paris and that a trip will do him good. The sequence gives the recovered earrings an immediate consequence: their discovery reopens the question of Füsun’s unrealized wish to see Paris and sends Kemal there in its wake.

Winter 1986 therefore gathers several strands of the novel’s treatment of memory into one scene: an object once worn, a claim that it had been lost, a mother’s protective silence, and a belated account of what Füsun intended. The earrings do not resolve every uncertainty—Aunt Nesibe cannot explain the fate of the earlier orphaned earring—but they make a hidden moment newly legible. Kemal’s search through drawers becomes more than collecting: it is an attempt to recover, from things that outlast their makers’ explanations, the choices and affections that time has concealed.