Kemal’s grief after Füsun’s death

Kemal’s grief after Füsun’s death is at once bodily, domestic, and archival: it begins in the silence of a month in intensive care, gathers force through visits to her room in Çukurcuma, and gradually takes shape as the intention to assemble a museum. The objects he retrieves do not undo the loss. They let him approach it through particular things and remembered moments, while the effort to tell his story becomes another form of mourning.

Hospitalization and the first shift in grief

For a month after the accident, Kemal lies in intensive care, unable to speak. He describes the world as frozen; speech and ordinary movement have given way to an interval in which words do not enter his mind. After six weeks, physical therapy begins. Learning to walk again feels like starting life over, but the new beginning does not restore his former attachment to the future. He continues to think about Füsun, while the quality of that thought changes: she slowly becomes a dream of the past, something held in memory rather than a person he can still desire.

That change makes the pain more, not less, difficult. Kemal distinguishes his earlier longing, organized around desire, from the suffering that now comes from pitying himself in the face of loss. He finds himself suspended between fact and remembrance, and it is in that unsettled state that the idea of a museum first occurs to him. The project begins not as a settled plan but as a response to grief that has lost its old direction: desire can no longer promise a future with Füsun, so memory turns toward what remains.

The household receives the death through a family language Kemal already knows. At supper, his mother treats Füsun’s death as comparable to the death of Kemal’s father: each has lost someone beloved, and each can sigh and brood. She also sees a parallel in the prominence of raki glasses in both deaths and in the secret world each dead person had kept inside until the pressure made disclosure unavoidable. Kemal wants that second resemblance brought into view, even though his mother does not welcome it. Grief here is shared, but not understood in the same way by everyone who bears it.

Objects, memory, and the end of desire

Kemal’s understanding of bereavement connects the present loss to an earlier experience of grief. After his father’s death, familiar things—phone bills, telegrams, medicines, and the objects in drawers—became vessels of a past that could no longer be entered. He touched those things and breathed in the cedar and the scent of his father’s cough syrup. Even the ordinary street below the family apartment seemed newly irreplaceable. The comparison helps explain why, after Füsun’s death, collecting is not merely an interest in possessions: an object can make an absent life perceptible in a way that a general account cannot.

Looking back on the happiest moment of his life, Kemal argues that a moment can be named as the happiest only after a life has taken its final shape. Such recognition also acknowledges that the moment lies far in the past and will never return. That awareness makes remembrance painful, and he says that its pain can be borne through possession of something belonging to the moment. Mementos, in his account, preserve colors, textures, images, and pleasures more faithfully than the people who were present with him. The thought links his grief after Füsun’s death to the collection already forming around their shared past: the object cannot bring back the person, but it keeps a particular trace of their time together.

He gives this collection a temporal meaning as well. Drawing on Aristotle’s distinction between Time and the single present moments that compose it, Kemal describes time as a line connecting moments. Remembering that line means facing its end and contemplating death. Yet individual moments can carry enough happiness to last beyond their instant. During his years of dinners at the Keskin home, he hoped to gather happiness that would sustain him for the rest of his life; he took away small and large objects Füsun had touched so that those moments could be preserved. In retrospect, this practice appears as both consolation and preparation: after her death, the things he had kept become material links to a life he can no longer share with her.

Returning to Füsun’s room

Nesibe gives Kemal permission to go upstairs to Füsun’s room whenever he wishes and to take as much as he wants. For him, visiting Nesibe is also the one way to feel the old Istanbul he had loved. The permission opens a route into Füsun’s private space, but it does not make remembrance easy. Their shared memories are painful to Nesibe too; even the recollection of meals, conversations over television, and time at the table can bring tears to her eyes.

The visits settle into a repeated routine. Once a fortnight, Kemal walks down to Çukurcuma from Beyoğlu. He and Nesibe eat supper and watch television in silence. Before going upstairs, he checks the food and water in Lemon’s cage, repeating a small ritual from the years when he and Füsun were together. He then looks through Füsun’s bird pictures one by one. Only after that does he announce that he needs to wash his hands and climb to her room, where his heart beats faster as he opens drawers and cupboards.

The contents make the past tangible through their differences and their specific histories. Füsun had arranged in small cabinets the combs, brushes, little mirrors, butterfly brooches, and earrings Kemal had given her. Among them he finds things he had forgotten giving her: socks for the tombala sack, wooden buttons he thought he was buying for her mother, and hair clips. There is also the toy Mustang Turgay Bey gave her, alongside love letters Kemal had sent through Ceyda. These items do not form a simple record of Kemal’s gifts; their mixture of remembered and forgotten exchanges makes the room an archive of relationships and episodes he cannot reconstruct from memory alone.

He cannot remain among them for long. The drawers and cupboards still bear Füsun’s scent, and he never lingers for more than half an hour. Sometimes he sits on the bed to smoke; sometimes he stands at the window or on a balcony where Füsun painted birds, trying to stem his tears. Before leaving, he takes a sock or a comb or two. The restraint of the visit is part of its pattern: he approaches the objects, is overcome by what they recall, and carries away only a few pieces.

From private mourning toward a museum

As the visits continue, Kemal realizes that the things connecting him to Füsun need a place where they can be gathered together. The collection now reaches beyond the first objects he took impulsively: it includes things he retrieves deliberately from her room, perhaps, he thinks, even the entire contents of the house. At this point he does not know where such a place could be. The idea acquires its fuller significance only after he begins travelling and visiting smaller museums around the world. His grief supplies the need for a place; those visits help him imagine what such a place might mean.

The wish to make the story speak is also explicit in the Merhamet Apartments. During the first months after leaving hospital, Kemal goes there, sits on the bed, smokes, and looks at the surrounding objects. He feels that telling his story might ease his pain, but recognizes that doing so would require bringing his entire collection into the open. The movement from private possession to public telling is therefore not a clean cure. It exposes the material through which he has been living with Füsun’s absence, and makes his own account part of the work of arranging and presenting it.

A trip to Paris sharpens that work of perspective. Kemal leaves without telling his mother the real purpose, which he has concealed even from himself; on the way to the airport he thinks of the journey as atonement for his sins, including his failure to notice Füsun’s earring. Once airborne, he understands that he has set out both to forget and to dream. Istanbul is crowded with reminders of Füsun, while outside the city he can think about her and their story more profoundly. Away from the surroundings that continually return him to his obsession, he can see both the obsession and Füsun from the outside. The distance does not cancel his mourning; it gives him another position from which to understand it.

Grief within family and city memory

Kemal’s mourning unfolds against a city already organized around public acts of remembrance. From the balcony of his childhood home, overlooking Teşvikiye Mosque, he had watched funerals pass toward Nişantaşı Square. As a child, he and his brother imitated the bearers with heavy divan bolsters on their shoulders, while the household adults followed them down the corridor. Public funerals could draw curious visitors to the apartment, and the spectacle sometimes became a diversion rather than a comfort against death. That remembered mixture of ritual, curiosity, and family life gives context to Kemal’s later attention to mourning: death is at once an intimate wound and an event observed through the practices of a household and a city.

His own collection narrows that broad public view to particular traces: a letter, a hair clip, a comb, the bird pictures, the objects left in drawers. The movement is not from grief to recovery so much as from uncontained absence toward a form in which loss can be revisited and narrated. Füsun remains beyond reach, and Kemal’s visits still end with tears and a handful of things carried away. What changes is the scale of his response. He begins with the objects around him, recognizes that they need a place, and comes to understand that telling the story and assembling the collection belong to the same effort to give remembered moments a durable form.