Kemal’s obsession with Füsun

Kemal’s obsession with Füsun turns looking and collecting into substitutes for a relationship he cannot confidently recover. During years of regular dinners at her family’s home, he searches her expressions for signs of shared feeling, sometimes treating a glance as reassurance and sometimes meeting her averted eyes with anger. He also takes objects from the household to preserve the past outside his own memory. These habits make his attachment both intimate and troubling: they sustain his visits, but depend on interpretations and possessions that cannot establish what Füsun herself intends.

The Uncertainty of Looking

Kemal regards the exchange of glances as an intricate form of communication, but its meaning remains uncertain even to him. He believes that Füsun may understand from his expression that he is remembering their former happiness and feeling hurt; he also admits that he may be imagining this understanding. In his account, a look can communicate an emotion, but it can also seem to mean only itself. The gap between what is felt and what is inferred becomes central to his attachment: he longs for evidence of mutual recognition while knowing that he may be supplying its meaning himself.

At the dinner table, he tries to hold Füsun’s gaze. The looks last ten or twelve seconds, or, in his boldest attempts, half a minute. When a television scene recalls their past and he tries to catch her eye, her turning away can provoke fury. He recognizes that his staring lays the intimacy they once shared before her family, although she may wish to conceal or forget it. He does not excuse himself by pointing to drink; instead, he explains that giving up this limited pleasure might have made him unable to continue visiting. His own account thus makes the practice both a means of staying connected and a pressure imposed on Füsun.

The pattern is not a simple exchange. Kemal says that Füsun often recognizes from his first looks when he is in an angry, obsessive mood, yet she gives no answering glance. He reads her composure and silence as a maddening refusal, then stares more fiercely. He worries that she might see him as one of the men warned against by columnist Celâl Salik, whose public admonition concerned men who bore into women with their eyes. That possibility does not stop Kemal; it adds to his anger. The episode reveals how his desire to be understood becomes entangled with conduct he knows could be experienced as threatening.

Visits, Withdrawal, and Return

The dinners preserve a repeated cycle of hope and distress. Kemal acknowledges that across the eight years he rarely achieved even the contentment of believing that he understood Füsun, much less the certainty of understanding her. At times he struggles to rise from his chair and leave. After one difficult evening, he returns home, drinks heavily, and resolves not to visit again. His indignation does not last: ten days later, he rings the family’s doorbell as if nothing had happened.

When he and Füsun meet eyes on his return, he reads the brightness in hers as a sign that she is glad to see him and becomes, in his words, the happiest man on earth. They sit down to dinner and resume exchanging looks. The sharp turn from withdrawal to elation shows how much emotional weight he places on small, ambiguous signs. A glance can seem to confirm the bond; its absence can make the same household feel unbearable. His attachment therefore renews itself not through a settled understanding but through repeated visits and renewed interpretations.

The Collection as a Return to the Past

Objects extend this pattern beyond the dinner table. Kemal takes knives and forks that Füsun has used, then examines them at home as though they formed a complete picture of a shared memory. Visiting the Merhamet Apartments, he surveys his growing collection with wonder. He describes its contents not only as mementos of happy hours, but as tangible remnants of the turmoil within him. Their accumulation intensifies his sense of love, while also making him ashamed and anxious that someone else might see them or that they might eventually fill the rooms from floor to ceiling.

Kemal says he did not begin taking things with any plan for the future. He wanted the objects to return him to the past. Even as they accumulated, he expected that only a few more months—six at most—would pass before he could persuade Füsun to marry him. This expectation helps explain why he treats the collection as provisional, even as its growth points toward a life increasingly organized around preserving what has already happened. The objects are at once evidence of his visits and a private means of reliving them.

By the darkest months of 1979, he takes more than small tokens. Near Füsun’s neatly arranged painting supplies, he slips a colored porcelain thimble and an orange pastel pencil into his pocket. He says that the objects have become elemental to the moments they recall, rather than merely reminders of them. Matchboxes touched by Füsun acquire a special place in this system: holding one at the Merhamet Apartments can restore, for him, the pleasure of sharing a table and looking toward her. Taking an object also gives him a sense of possession when he feels he has not won the woman he loves.

Objects, Intimacy, and Memory

The collection grows to include traces of the entire household. Kemal says that Füsun’s parents, the dining table, stove, coal carrier, porcelain dogs, cologne bottles, cigarettes, raki glasses, and bowls of sweets have merged in his mind with his image of her. Although he sees her three or four times a week, he takes several things from the house during an ordinary week, and as many as ten or fifteen in the most miserable periods. A saltshaker she uses while watching television becomes a private trophy that helps him find the strength to leave at the end of an evening. After the summer of 1979, he describes an object in his pocket as the key to getting out of his chair.

Across eight years of suppers, Kemal gathers 4,213 of Füsun’s cigarette stubs. He associates each one with a particular moment and remembers that she smoked Samsuns; he even gives up Marlboros after beginning to dine with the family. The stubs stand out among the objects because, in his account, they preserve singular moments of intimacy and distress. Sometimes he takes only one home, sometimes several, then handles them at the Merhamet Apartments as prompts for memories. He identifies the cigarettes most closely with what he calls Aristotle’s moments.

Eventually, he says, he no longer needs to pick up the accumulated things. Seeing them is enough. A porcelain saltshaker, a dog-shaped tape measure, a can opener, and a bottle of sunflower oil each call up a particular moment; over time, those moments seem to expand and merge. Looking at the collection can then summon not just isolated memories but the wider experience of sitting at dinner with Füsun and her family. The habit that began as an effort to recover the past has become a system for keeping it present. Its emotional force rests on that transformation, while its limits remain clear: the objects can recall Kemal’s experience, but they cannot settle the uncertainty at the heart of his attachment.