Jingyu Memories

Objects and memory are bound together in the novel through a practice that is at once intimate and uneasy: Kemal Basmacı collects things touched or used by Füsun and her family, then reads into them the moments he fears losing. A watch, a glass, a calendar leaf, and an ordinary saltshaker do not hold a single fixed meaning. Their significance changes with use, transfer, concealment, and display, until the objects from a private history form the basis of a museum.

Mementos and the shape of time

Kemal understands memory as more than the recollection of past events. Looking back, he identifies his lovemaking with Füsun as the happiest moment of his life, but the retrospective name also makes the moment painful: it is over and cannot return. He argues that a possession belonging to that instant can help bear the loss, preserving its colors, textures, images, and pleasures more faithfully than the people who shared it. The earring that falls from Füsun’s ear onto the blue sheet during their lovemaking becomes an especially charged example. Its unnoticed loss joins an intimate scene to the later story of Kemal’s regret and collecting.

The distinction between clock time and remembered moments gives this practice its larger logic. Kemal reflects on Aristotle’s distinction between Time as a line and the indivisible present moments linked by it. Clocks and calendars regulate social life, but they do not themselves recover an experience. A television clock reminds Füsun to check whether she has set her watch correctly; to Kemal, her smile in that scene belongs to their shared present, not to an abstract measure of time. He says that the evenings at the Keskin family home, including the difficult and humiliating ones, came to seem like happiness in retrospect. His collection preserves the moments as he remembers them, resisting the sense that the line of time simply ends in death.

From keepsake to household possession

Objects acquire memories through both personal attachment and ordinary use. On New Year’s Eve in 1980, Kemal brings a crystal glass from his grandfather’s belongings as a tombala prize. He and Füsun had drunk whiskey from it at their last rendezvous on the day of his engagement, so for him it carries the sadness of that parting. Tarık wins it and uses it as a raki glass for the next three and a half years. Kemal wants the glass to return him to his last happiness with Füsun, but cannot properly inhabit that memory while sitting at the family table. For the Keskin family, meanwhile, it is simply a prize in a game and then a drinking glass. The same object therefore holds private longing and shared domestic routine without making those meanings identical.

The New Year’s presents also reveal how the household’s possessions differ from Kemal’s imagined boundaries around ownership. He observes that items such as socks, handkerchiefs, and kitchen tools seem to belong to the Keskin family collectively, rather than to one person. This unsettles his fantasy of Füsun’s private room and wardrobe, filled with things that would be hers alone. The tombala prizes—among them modest bars of soap shaped like fruit—become valuable to him because they recall the slow, humble routines of the household. Repeatedly, meaning arises not from an object’s price but from the occasions on which it was handled, won, used, or seen.

Taking, replacing, and remembering

Kemal’s collecting begins as secret appropriation. He pockets small things that can disappear unnoticed, including matchboxes, cigarette butts, saltshakers, coffee cups, hairpins, and barrettes. As his interest shifts to more conspicuous items such as ashtrays, cups, and slippers, he starts replacing them with new, often more valuable versions. The replacements let everyday objects continue to serve the family while their earlier counterparts pass into his private collection. Yet this tactic cannot preserve the objects’ original place in the household: it transfers them into a different story, known most fully to Kemal.

At the New Year’s Eve gathering in 1980, he places the antique glass among the family’s tombala gifts, but Füsun does not recognize it as the glass from their last rendezvous. A different kind of acquisition occurs when she reads a leaf from the Saath Maarif prayer-time calendar. After the family falls silent at its saying for the day, Kemal pretends to read the leaf and slips it into his pocket. The small act makes the gap between public household life and private remembrance visible: the family has shared the words, but Kemal alone turns the paper into a keepsake.

His father’s pearl earrings offer a related but distinct passage between memory and possession. Before his death, Kemal’s father gives him earrings he had bought for a former lover but never gave her, explaining that he regrets not having treated her with the care she deserved. He suggests that Kemal give them to Sibel and remember the lesson. The earrings are therefore both an unfulfilled gift from the father’s past and an attempted inheritance of advice. Their meaning depends on a story attached to them, not merely on their material or monetary value.

The collection’s wider world

Kemal’s private interpretation of objects does not mean that objects are unique to him. Once he gathers the collection for the museum, he notices that ordinary manufactured things travel far beyond the homes and places for which they were first intended. Lighters resembling one he bought for Füsun appear in flea markets in Athens and Rome, as well as in Paris and Beirut. A saltshaker from a small Istanbul factory turns up in restaurants and kitchens in Istanbul, New Delhi, Cairo, Barcelona, and Rome. Copies circulate through molds and mass production, entering the daily lives of families who may never acknowledge their attachment to them.

That circulation complicates the idea that an object’s meaning belongs to one owner. The saltshaker can be mass-produced and widely shared, yet it still recalls its two years on the Keskin family table to Kemal. Its social life and his personal memory coexist: common manufacture does not prevent particular attachment, while private attachment cannot make a common object singular in the world. In the museum, items such as saltshakers, china dogs, thimbles, pencils, barrettes, and ashtrays become evidence of both scales—the intimate history of one household and the broad, often unnoticed migration of everyday things.

The museum project also grows from Kemal’s experience of visiting small, little-visited museums in Paris. Their collections console him because their rooms seem apart from the surrounding city, offering a quiet place in which objects and memory can be attended to. Back in Istanbul, he brings together the things he had stored at the Merhamet Apartments with objects from the Keskin home, his travels, rubbish heaps, association members, and witnesses to his story. He even preserves the bedframe, musty mattress, and blue sheet associated with his first lovemaking with Füsun. Transferred into a museum, the objects no longer function only as hidden aids to his own recollection: they become a visible arrangement through which others may encounter the traces of a life. The collection’s central claim is thus both tender and unsettled: ordinary things can keep moments present, but their meanings remain shaped by who remembers them, who uses them, and where they are seen.