Keskin family clock

The Keskin family clock is a German-made wooden wall clock with a glass case, pendulum, and chime, but its importance in the Keskin home is not primarily practical. The family rarely consults it to learn the time; instead, its intermittent ticking and unexpected chimes make it a domestic presence, a reminder of continuity in a household Kemal experiences as suspended outside ordinary change. Set against television, the clock gives the family’s repeated evenings a visible tension between public time and the private wish for things to remain the same.

Form and Domestic History

The clock hangs beside the door. Its weight, pendulum, and chime place it within a tradition that had become familiar in Istanbul homes: large wall clocks came into fashion among Westernized pashas and wealthy non-Muslims in the late nineteenth century, and spread among the middle classes as the new Republic looked westward. By the mid-twentieth century, wristwatches and radios had reduced the need for such household clocks. Television later displaced the radio as the defining sound and rhythm of domestic life, and the wall clock lost still more of its practical authority.

The Keskin clock nevertheless remains part of the room’s arrangement. The family sometimes winds it, sometimes forgets it, and sometimes leaves it running without a chime. It may tick for a time and then stop; its chime can remain silent for months, sound only once at the half hour, or fall quiet for weeks. Because nobody depends on it for the hour, its changing condition is noticed less as a failure of timekeeping than as a change in the atmosphere of the home. Kemal recalls realizing that the clock’s sounds would be especially unsettling when nobody was there to hear them.

The Clock in the Keskin Household

During the first month of his visits, Kemal noticed whether the clock was ticking. Its presence became part of the evening routine: the family might be watching a Turkish film, a singer, or a program set in ancient Rome when the television fell silent and the clock’s chime suddenly became audible. Nesibe or Füsun would turn toward it, and Tarık would wonder who had wound it. The clock interrupts the show without becoming a reliable announcement of the hour; it draws attention precisely because the household has usually forgotten it is there.

Its uncertain operation also gives the family a recurring subject for teasing and disagreement. Nesibe blames Tarık for winding it and waking her; Tarık sometimes insists it should be left to tick, because it reminds the family that the house is a home. If Füsun stills the pendulum with a finger, the clock stops even if it has been wound. Her parents’ looks and remarks turn this small mechanical act into a familiar exchange: Tarık may invite her to stop it or stubbornly refuse to interfere. They sometimes attribute its mysterious restarting to djinns, playing up the clock’s odd behavior for neighbors or visiting children. The joke and the mild quarrel belong to the family’s shared life, as much as the mechanism does.

Official Time and Private Time

The clock’s most important contrast is with the television, which actually organizes the family’s sense of time. Television, like the radio in earlier decades, is on through the evening. Before the country’s only television station, TRT, begins its news at seven, an enormous clock appears onscreen. Füsun checks her wristwatch against it, while Tarık checks one of the pocket watches he uses. Kemal watches Füsun concentrate on setting the time, then look toward him and smile when she has it right. A national broadcast supplies the standard; a small, repeated exchange at the table makes that standard intimate.

The wall clock, by contrast, seems to oppose rather than measure the passage of time. Tarık says that it reminds them the house is a house, while Kemal understands its persistence as an effort to keep the changing modern world at bay. The clock’s contradictions are central to this role: it can be running without being attended to, silent while television keeps the evening moving, or suddenly audible when the room grows quiet. It brings the family back to the present even as it helps them forget the larger passage of time. Kemal describes it as persuading them that nothing has changed, not warning them that change is occurring.

Kemal’s Visits and the Meaning of Repetition

The clock becomes a measure of the repetitive domestic world Kemal enters through his visits to Füsun and her family. Between October 23, 1976, and August 26, 1984, he makes 1,593 supper visits across 409 weeks. He averages roughly four visits a week, though the pattern varies: sometimes he sees the family every day, and sometimes he stays away while trying to convince himself he can forget Füsun. He never goes more than ten days without seeing her. For the Keskin family, his place at the table becomes expected, and the visits are described obliquely as coming to sit together.

Kemal estimates that he usually arrives around seven and leaves near midnight, spending about five hours at the house on an ordinary visit. After the 1980 coup, martial law imposes a ten o’clock curfew, forcing him to leave at a quarter to ten and cutting short the evenings he has come to prolong. The clock’s domestic cycle therefore sits alongside, and is sometimes interrupted by, official time: the television schedule structures supper, while political restrictions dictate when Kemal must go home. In his account, the clock’s irregular chimes and the family’s repeated routines give physical form to a private time that seems almost still. Its force lies not in keeping the hours but in making an unchanging home seem possible, even as the years accumulate around it.