“Breaking Off a Small Piece of the Beloved”

“Breaking Off a Small Piece of the Beloved” describes Kemal’s way of turning separation from Füsun into a material relation: he pockets things from her family’s home and carries them away as fragments of the life he cannot possess. The phrase gives his collecting both its consolation and its disturbing edge. A matchbox or saltshaker can preserve an ordinary moment with Füsun, but Kemal also experiences taking it as a way of possessing a part of her.

The Metaphor and Its Contradiction

Kemal explains the metaphor directly: to speak of “breaking off” a piece of someone is to make the piece seem part of the beloved’s body. The objects are not literally Füsun, yet his attachment makes the distinction unstable. Her mother, father, and the furnishings of their home—including the dining table, stove, television dogs, cologne bottles, cigarettes, glasses, and bowls—merge in his mind with his image of Füsun. In this expanded sense, an object taken from the household is a piece of her world, not merely a keepsake from a single encounter.

The phrase also holds together tenderness and violation. Kemal says that calling his actions theft would be wrong, but he describes taking things without notice and feeling triumphant when he has secured them. The language of love softens an act that crosses the boundaries of another family’s home. His trophies console him, but they also turn intimacy into possession: although he has not “won” Füsun, he can carry away something that has been close to her.

The Practice at the Keskin Home

Kemal’s collecting intensifies during the years he visits Füsun and her family several times a week. He first takes small, easily overlooked things: matchboxes, cigarette butts, saltshakers, coffee cups, hairpins, and barrettes. As the habit grows, he reaches for larger items such as ashtrays, cups, and slippers, gradually replacing some with new ones. During the darkest months of 1979, he takes the most. In ordinary weeks he may pocket three or four objects; at worse moments, six or seven, and sometimes ten to fifteen.

The objects can register tiny domestic gestures that would otherwise disappear. Kemal remembers Füsun daintily salting her food without taking her eyes off the television. A matchbox she has touched carries, for him, the remembered scent of her hands, faintly like rosewater. Holding such things back at the Merhamet Apartments lets him revisit the pleasure of sitting at the same table and looking into her eyes. The smallness of the objects is part of their force: they attach memory not to a grand declaration, but to routine contact and shared attention.

The collecting also becomes a practical aid to departure. After the summer of 1979, knowing an object is in his pocket gives Kemal the strength to stand up and leave when the evening ends. The thing taken from the house both prolongs his connection to it and helps him cross its threshold. That double function captures the phrase’s emotional logic: possession cannot keep Füsun beside him, but it can make separation briefly bearable.

Concealment, Substitution, and Shared Time

Kemal is ashamed of the collection and initially does not want to share it. As he moves from small objects to items whose absence is more noticeable, he begins replacing them with new ones. The changing porcelain dogs on the television eventually make his interest in the household’s belongings apparent to Füsun and Nesibe. He explains one replacement by saying that Fatma Hanım dropped and broke the dog and that he found another in the Spice Bazaar. Nesibe accepts the black-eared figure as a street dog and welcomes it into the room. The replacement disguises the removal, while the family’s attention to the dogs’ comings and goings hints that the concealment is no longer secure.

A crystal glass brought to the Keskin family’s New Year’s Eve tombala gathering in 1980 shows how an object can carry a memory that its recipient does not share. It had belonged to Kemal’s grandfather and was the glass from which Füsun and Kemal drank whiskey at their last rendezvous, on the day of his engagement. When Tarık wins it as a present, Füsun does not recognize its connection to that painful day. For the following three and a half years, Tarık uses it as a raki glass; Kemal wants it to recall the happiness of his last time making love to Füsun, but cannot properly inhabit that memory while sitting at the table with Tarık. The glass is at once a household prize, a drinking vessel, and a private memorial.

These acts unfold within a domestic routine that seems to stand outside ordinary time. Kemal visits the Keskin home faithfully for eight years, finding peace in the shared meals and television watching; the news of escalating violence is what breaks that sense of suspension. In Çukurcuma, bombs and armed clashes make the streets dangerous, and Çetin is often unsure where to wait or park. Against that unstable public world, the repeated evening gathering offers a fragile continuity. Objects removed from the house let Kemal carry that private time elsewhere, though they cannot restore it as a living relationship.

From Private Compulsion to Public Collection

The meaning of the objects changes as Kemal assembles them. At first, they are tokens of moments; later, he says, they become elemental to those moments. He eventually recognizes in Istanbul’s other collectors a form of embarrassment like his own. In early 1992, while searching for film posters, lobby photographs, and ticket stubs from films he and Füsun saw in the summer of 1976, he encounters collectors whose attachments are treated as shameful. Their private holdings, like his, can point to a wound as much as to an interest.

The Museum of Innocence gives Kemal’s hidden practice a public destination. In the museum, matchboxes and other domestic things can be displayed as witnesses to a shared life rather than concealed as evidence of a private compulsion. Their ordinary manufacture and wide circulation do not cancel their personal charge: Kemal sees saltshakers like the Keskin family’s in restaurants and shops across several countries, while the particular saltshaker on their table remains bound to his memories of Füsun. The expression thus reaches beyond the act of pocketing. It describes how an everyday object can become a portable fragment of intimacy, and how collecting attempts to preserve a beloved person by preserving the world that gathered around her.