Glass paperweight

The Glass paperweight is a gift Kemal gave Füsun that becomes, during his separation from her, a tactile source of temporary relief. Left behind at the Merhamet Apartments so that Füsun’s mother would not suspect the gift, it preserves for Kemal the possibility of contact through an object she had handled. His use of it captures the tension at the heart of his attachment: physical traces seem to bring Füsun near, but cannot restore her presence or end his suffering.

The Gift and Its Retention

Kemal later calculated from memory that he had given Füsun the paperweight on June 2. Like several other presents, it did not go home with her: unwilling to arouse her mother’s suspicions, Füsun left it at the Merhamet Apartments. Its presence there thus depends on the secrecy surrounding their relationship, and the apartment becomes a place where Kemal can still encounter an object connected to her even when she is absent.

The paperweight’s value is not described as monetary or decorative. Kemal seeks it out because Füsun’s hands have touched it. In a period when he is trying to forbid himself from visiting the Merhamet Apartments and caressing things that remind him of her, the object stands on the forbidden side of that self-imposed regimen: an intimate trace that he cannot simply discard from memory.

A Tactile Remedy

After briefly believing he has seen Füsun in the Şanzelize Boutique, Kemal realizes that the woman there is only a specter. The false sighting sharpens his recognition that his life with Sibel and its social distractions cannot answer his longing for Füsun. He goes instead to the nearby Merhamet Apartments, where he lies on the bed and tries to find Füsun’s scent in the sheets. As that scent has grown fainter, he reaches for the paperweight and inhales from its surface, desperate for a trace of her hands.

The action is bodily and concentrated: Kemal embraces the sheets, holds the glass object, and smells it for what feels like an unmeasured stretch of time. He experiences immediate relief in his nose and lungs. The paperweight does not speak for Füsun or represent a reunion; its comfort comes from its physical association with her touch, a small material contact that temporarily quiets the pain of her absence.

From Relief to Compulsion

Kemal conceals these visits from Sibel and, in a sense, from himself. He initially understands his trips to the apartment as a patient’s treatment rather than a collector’s pursuit. Alongside the paperweight, he handles other things Füsun has touched, including a brush spattered with many colors of oil paint, which he sweeps over his skin and puts in his mouth. The sequence shows how the consolation of an object becomes a repeated practice: he returns to the apartment every two or three days for visits lasting about two hours.

The relief is real but short-lived. A day and a half after the paperweight episode, Kemal’s agony is again as intense as before; after another visit and another object, he recognizes that he has become habituated, even addicted, to these temporary comforts. They do not help him forget Füsun. The paperweight therefore marks both the efficacy and the limit of material memory: it can soothe his body for a moment, while keeping his attention fixed on the absence that produced the need for consolation.

Touch, Memory, and the City

The paperweight belongs to a larger effort to govern memory by governing space. Kemal tries to remove streets and places associated with Füsun from his mental map, assigning some areas strict prohibitions and others conditional passage. Yet he also seeks out places where he might glimpse her ghost, until Istanbul becomes a network of signs that call her to mind. The object at the Merhamet Apartments is the private, graspable counterpart to this citywide field of recollection: both locations and possessions return him to Füsun, even as he tries to control how much of that return he can bear.

The paperweight also makes absence legible through touch. In the Beyoğlu cinemas, Kemal and Füsun can hold hands in the dimness, and he remembers the moment his hand closes around hers as an immediate, living contact. At the Merhamet Apartments, by contrast, he can only hold an object she once touched and search it for a trace. The difference gives the paperweight its particular significance: it offers a fragment of intimacy, not intimacy itself, and its brief consolation cannot bridge the distance between memory and presence.