Objects as Memory and Collection

Objects as Memory and Collection describes how ordinary possessions can hold, recover, and reorganize the past. For Kemal Basmacı, the objects associated with Füsun do more than remind him of their shared time: collecting them makes remembered happiness tangible, gives him a way to endure separation, and eventually supplies the basis for a museum. Their significance develops through use, handling, removal, replacement, and display, rather than through rarity or price alone.

Objects within a shared world

At the Keskin family home in Çukurcuma, Kemal experiences the room and its contents as parts of one continuous domestic world. He watches Füsun’s bird paintings progress and looks at the photographs of Istanbul birds that Feridun took for her. The scene’s sense of stability gathers around details such as the brick-red Uşak carpet, scraps of cloth, buttons, old newspapers, reading glasses, ashtrays, and knitting. What matters is not one exceptional possession but the arrangement of a familiar life and the company in which it is encountered.

Kemal carries small objects away from this setting so that the memory can continue elsewhere. A thimble, button, or spool in the Merhamet Apartments recalls the room and prolongs the happiness he felt there. The objects are therefore neither detached souvenirs nor simple substitutes for Füsun. Their force comes from their connection to a particular scene: a table, a room, a shared evening, and a life whose ordinary details Kemal wants to keep present.

That attachment gradually extends beyond Füsun herself. The people and things around her—the family, dining table, stove, coal carrier, television ornaments, bottles, cigarettes, glasses, and bowls—merge in Kemal’s mind with his image of her. His affection for Füsun radiates outward into an attachment to the house and its inhabitants. The collection thus records not only a romance but the larger domestic world that gave its recurring meetings their shape.

Collecting as consolation and compulsion

Kemal’s collecting begins privately and without a plan for a future museum. He takes small things from the Keskin household because he wants to return to the past, and for much of the eight years of visits he expects that only a few more months will pass before Füsun agrees to marry him. As a result, the growing quantity of objects does not initially appear to him as an intended collection. It is the physical residue of a hope he still believes may soon be fulfilled.

The scale of his taking changes with his emotional distress. During visits he may remove three or four objects, sometimes six or seven, and during the most miserable periods as many as ten or fifteen. Matchboxes, cigarette butts, saltshakers, cups, hairpins, and barrettes are easy to take unnoticed. Later, he turns to larger things such as ashtrays, cups, and slippers, replacing some of what he removes with new items. He feels both triumph and shame: a pocketed object can help him leave the dinner table at the end of an evening, yet he worries that others might discover the hoard and that it could fill the Merhamet Apartments from floor to ceiling.

Small acquisitions also carry an immediate emotional charge. Holding a saltshaker Füsun has used, or taking a matchbox she has touched, lets Kemal carry a fragment of the visit away with him. He recognizes the possessive edge of this practice: although the objects cannot give him the relationship he wants, he experiences their possession as a way of taking a small piece of the beloved. Over time, the objects cease to be mere reminders and become, for him, part of the moments themselves.

Moments, memory, and time

Kemal connects this practice to his understanding of time. He distinguishes individual present moments from the line that links them, and finds that remembering the line can bring sorrow because it has an end. Objects offer another means of tracing experience: in his account, they carry moments within them, much as the museum’s arrangement connects one remembered scene to another. A happy evening with Füsun can therefore be revisited through what she handled and through the surrounding possessions of the household.

Cigarette butts make the connection especially clear. Their shapes can register a moment when Kemal and Füsun’s eyes meet, while their separate collection allows him later to recall past moments one by one. In time, he no longer needs to handle every object: seeing a porcelain saltshaker, a dog-shaped tape measure, a can opener, or a bottle of sunflower oil can bring back a specific association and then summon the wider experience of dinner with Füsun and her family. Individual memories expand and merge, so that a set of ordinary things can call up the whole scene.

The collection also makes visible the gap between a remembered instant and a life continuing beyond it. On New Year’s Eve 1980, Kemal brings a tombala present: an antique glass from his grandfather, Ethem Kemal, which he and Füsun had used for whiskey at their last rendezvous on the day of Kemal’s engagement. The Keskin family accepts it among the ordinary game prizes, but Füsun does not recognize its history. When Tarık later uses it as a raki glass, Kemal wants to recall the happiness attached to it, yet cannot fully inhabit that memory at the family table. The object preserves a private association without making that association shared.

From private hoard to public museum

The idea of collecting changes as Kemal’s objects accumulate. He first keeps them for his own return to remembered time and is embarrassed by the possibility that anyone might see what he has gathered. Much later, after visiting small and often empty museums in Paris, he finds consolation in collections that make a quiet, separate space within a crowded city. Away from Istanbul, he can consider both Füsun and his own obsession from a greater distance. Museums offer him a form in which objects can be arranged and contemplated, rather than merely hidden or handled in private.

When Kemal transfers the objects from the Merhamet Apartments to the museum house in Çukurcuma, the former private hoard enters a new setting. The collection includes possessions from the Keskin household, objects he has found on his travels, things recovered from rubbish dens, items from fellow collectors, and objects supplied by witnesses to his story. The objects’ histories are not identical: they have been used, taken, replaced, found, or given. Bringing them together makes those different paths visible while joining them to the story Kemal wants the museum to preserve.

He also observes that everyday designs travel far beyond their original settings. A saltshaker used on the Keskin table can resemble mass-produced examples found in restaurants, shops, and markets in distant cities. Such circulation makes a single object both intimate and commonplace: it can belong to one family’s routine and also have counterparts in many other households. The museum’s force rests on holding those scales together, preserving the personal meaning of familiar things without pretending that the objects are unique to Kemal’s story.

A memory made available to others

The novel presents Kemal’s museum as the eventual public form of a private attachment. Its objects preserve the colors, textures, and details of past experience more faithfully, in his view, than recollection alone. Yet the collection does not erase loss or restore the moments it records. The antique glass can remain unrecognized by Füsun; the cigarette butts preserve moments without reversing their passage; and an object’s ordinary circulation can connect a private memory to lives elsewhere.

This is why the collection’s meaning lies in relationships and sequences as much as in its individual contents. A matchbox recalls a shared table; a household object retrieves the broader setting around Füsun; and the assembled museum lets visitors move among material traces of a past Kemal has organized. What began as a way to carry happiness back to the Merhamet Apartments becomes an attempt to give remembered time a place in the world. Objects offer consolation because they endure, but their endurance also marks the distance between the present and the life they keep recalling.