Kemal collects objects from the Keskin home

Kemal’s collecting from the Keskin household turns an unspoken love into a material record: he takes ordinary things touched by Füsun and her family so that moments of happiness will remain available to him after they pass. Across eight years of dinners in Çukurcuma, small acts of pocketing become a secret, increasingly deliberate practice. The objects offer consolation, but they also reveal a divide between Kemal’s intensely private meanings and the family’s everyday use of its possessions; gathered into his museum, they become the surviving traces of a life he has tried to hold still.

Purpose: keeping moments from disappearing

Kemal understands his collection through his belief that time links distinct present moments and that remembering this line also means confronting its end. A happy moment may seem capable of lasting, but it belongs to the past once it is gone. He says he went to the Keskin house hoping to gather enough happiness to sustain him for the rest of his life, and took objects Füsun had touched to preserve those moments for the future. In this account, an object does more than remind him of someone: it gives a vanished instant a physical presence he can keep.

That purpose is clearest in Kemal’s retrospective account of the happiest moment of his life with Füsun. He explains that identifying a moment as the happiest requires looking back, and that this choice acknowledges its distance and irretrievability. He believes mementos preserve the colors, textures, images, and pleasures of such an instant with a fidelity that even the people who shared it cannot provide. The lost earring from that encounter, which fell onto a blue sheet, gives this theory an intimate material counterpart: a small object is bound to a particular experience, while its significance outlasts the scene.

The household as a field of collection

The collecting develops within the routines of the Keskin home rather than apart from them. After the first six months of his visits, Kemal sometimes leaves the dinner table when he feels uncomfortable or needs to pace. In a back room where Aunt Nesibe sews and Tarık Bey reads the newspaper, he lingers among a sewing machine, shears, old newspapers and magazines, and an open drawer of ornaments. Before leaving, he often pockets something that might comfort him later when he is longing for Füsun. The room is both a familiar domestic workspace and a discreet route from present unease to private possession.

The family’s shared attitude toward its belongings makes taking them possible, but also shapes what the theft means. At tombala, household essentials such as socks, handkerchiefs, a walnut mortar, or a cheap comb can briefly acquire the excitement of prizes. The Keskin family rejoices in winning the game, not because a particular object belongs to one person; possessions seem to belong to the household as a whole. Kemal, by contrast, imagines Füsun’s private room and wardrobe upstairs, and is tormented by thoughts of her clothes and personal things. The difference between communal use and his wish for intimate possession gives ordinary objects an emotional charge they do not have for the family.

The distinction appears again in the keepsakes that become presents. On New Year’s Eve in 1980, Kemal brings an antique glass inherited from his grandfather, Ethem Kemal. It is the glass from which he and Füsun drank whiskey at their last rendezvous, on the day of his engagement. The Keskins have by then noticed that he pockets their belongings and replaces some with more expensive things, but they do not discuss the habit; the fine glass can therefore sit among pencils, socks, and soap without prompting questions. When Tarık Bey wins it at tombala, Füsun does not recognize its connection to the saddest day of the affair. Tarık Bey uses it as his raki glass for the next three and a half years, while Kemal cannot openly recover the memory he has attached to it at the dinner table. The same object thus carries different histories for its possessor and its users.

Secrecy, substitution, and small episodes

As Kemal’s attention shifts from things that can be taken unnoticed to larger household objects, he begins replacing what he removes. He takes matchboxes, Füsun’s cigarette butts, saltshakers, coffee cups, hairpins, and barrettes, then sets his sights on ashtrays, cups, and slippers, gradually supplying replacements. The growing scale of the practice does not make it more openly possessive: he remains ashamed of hoarding and does not want to share the collection with anyone. His substitutions preserve the appearance of domestic continuity even as the contents of the home begin to migrate into his private archive.

Small incidents show how his collecting becomes legible to others without being confronted directly. After a calendar leaf is read aloud at the table, the household falls silent over its saying; Kemal picks it up under the pretense of reading it and slips it into his pocket. On another New Year’s Eve, he wins a little handkerchief at tombala. The neighbor’s boy recognizes it as one of Füsun’s childhood handkerchiefs and asks to see it; Kemal refuses to give it up, explaining that he needs it. The child’s recognition turns the handkerchief from an unremarkable prize into an acknowledged piece of Füsun’s past, while Kemal’s refusal makes plain the strength of his attachment.

By 1979 the family has noticed objects moving in and out. The porcelain dogs on the television change with regularity, and Aunt Nesibe and Füsun appear to have guessed, or to know, that Kemal is taking them. He brings a replacement dog after claiming that one at his own home was broken, offering a story that disguises the transfer as an ordinary act of repair. The gesture extends the substitution pattern to a visible household ornament: the replacement keeps the television’s familiar arrangement intact, while the original passes into Kemal’s keeping.

From private keepsake to museum object

Kemal’s collection eventually exceeds the intimate scale of an individual keepsake. On a Paris journey undertaken both to forget and to dream, he finds that distance from Istanbul lets him consider Füsun and his obsession from the outside. Wandering through little-visited museums brings consolation and a sense of entering a realm apart from the city. This experience helps him imagine how objects gathered from private lives might be brought into a public collection rather than kept in shameful secrecy.

When he assembles the collection in the converted house in Çukurcuma, he sees that everyday things have traveled far beyond the household where he first encountered them. Saltshakers, china dogs, thimbles, pencils, barrettes, and ashtrays appear in flea markets, kitchens, restaurants, and shops across cities and countries. A saltshaker that stood on the Keskin table for two years can also be found in poorer parts of Istanbul, a restaurant in New Delhi, a soup kitchen in Cairo, sidewalk stalls in Barcelona, and a shop in Rome. Mass-produced objects circulate through countless households, where people may forget them even after living with them intimately. In the museum, Kemal places this broad, ordinary circulation beside the singular memories he has preserved, making the familiar object a vessel for both private attachment and shared domestic life.

The collection’s ending returns it to the scene of its most intense personal meaning. Kemal brings the bedframe, musty mattress, and blue sheet from the Merhamet Apartments, where he and Füsun made love, to the museum house, storing them in the attic. He wants to sleep among the objects that remind him of Füsun and make her presence felt. What began as furtive pocketing at dinner, in the sewing room, and around the family’s games thus becomes a carefully gathered environment: not a restoration of the lost relationship, but a way of inhabiting its material remains.