Objects, memory, and collecting

Objects, memory, and collecting form a central way of understanding how Kemal experiences love, grief, and time. Everyday things preserve moments that people fail to recognize as precious while they are happening, then make those moments available to memory after they have passed. As Kemal gathers objects associated with Füsun and the Keskin household, his private collection becomes both a means of consolation and the material basis of a museum: a place where personal recollection can be arranged, revisited, and shown to others.

Objects and the moment of happiness

The relation between an object and a memory begins with Füsun’s earring. During the afternoon Kemal later identifies as the happiest moment of his life, the earring slips free while they are making love. They do not notice it fall onto the blue sheet, and the intimacy of the moment eclipses the object. Only in retrospect does its unnoticed fall become charged: the earring belongs to an instant whose happiness Kemal could not recognize as it occurred, and whose irretrievability he will come to feel.

That afternoon also leaves objects whose meanings are less dramatic but more enduring. After leaving Füsun, Kemal sees a Yellow water jug in a shop window and feels compelled to buy it. It remains at his family’s table for twenty years without attracting comment, yet touching its handle returns him to the early misery that began to turn him inward and to his mother’s silent, saddened gaze at supper. The jug’s ordinary domestic life allows it to hold a private history without announcing it to anyone else.

Kemal later presents other things as witnesses to the tenderness and unease surrounding the couple’s first intimacy: a floral batiste handkerchief that Füsun folded carefully and put in her bag, his mother’s crystal inkwell and pen set that she handled while smoking, and the belt he fastened with an arrogance that afterward made him feel guilty. He distinguishes these objects from a mere inventory of first love. Their value lies in the care, vulnerability, and shame attached to the scene, not simply in their status as relics. The objects make physical details available to later reflection, but they cannot replace the human feeling they help him remember.

Collection as memory and consolation

Kemal’s account gives collecting a retrospective logic. A true collector, he suggests, may not know what a first object will eventually mean or what fate awaits the growing hoard. Objects acquire their significance over time, as memories gather around them and the collector begins to recognize a pattern. The first objects are not necessarily selected with a museum already in mind; their later arrangement reveals connections that were not apparent when they were first picked up.

This pattern is visible in Kemal’s return to the Merhamet Apartments on May 10, 1975. He enters with a practical hope of finding a tin of pictures, but the unmade bed, unemptied ashtrays, unwashed teacups, old furniture, boxes, stopped clocks, pots, pans, and linoleum draw him back into the remembered hours with Füsun. The tin he finds is empty. The movie-star pictures eventually shown to museum visitors were bought years later from Hıfzı Bey, after Kemal had spent time among other collectors. The difference between the empty tin and its later contents makes the museum’s method plain: it does not simply preserve an intact past; it assembles objects and recollections across time. Even on that early visit, Kemal senses that the room, its old things, and the joy of the kisses will remain at the core of his imagination.

For Kemal, mementos answer a particular pain. Looking back, a person can name a happiest moment only by accepting that it is past and will not return. Objects that belong to that instant preserve its colors, textures, images, and pleasures with a fidelity that the changing people who shared it cannot guarantee. They do not abolish loss; they make remembrance bearable by giving it a material focus. Kemal’s collection therefore holds not only objects connected with Füsun but also his effort to return to happiness without pretending that the original moment can be recovered.

Household things, exchange, and private history

The meaning of an object also changes with the social setting in which it is used. At a New Year’s Eve tombala gathering in 1980, Kemal brings an antique glass inherited from his grandfather, Ethem Kemal. Füsun and Kemal had drunk whiskey from it at their last rendezvous, on the day of his engagement. The Keskin family has become accustomed to Kemal taking their belongings and replacing them with more expensive ones, so the glass appears among ordinary game prizes without provoking comment. When Tarık Bey wins it, Füsun does not recognize it as the glass from the saddest day of the affair. For the following three and a half years, Tarık Bey uses it as a rakı glass; Kemal, meanwhile, cannot freely recall its intimate association while sitting at the family table. The object carries a memory that its new household use both preserves and conceals.

Kemal’s collecting grows from small, unobtrusive things to more conspicuous possessions. He takes matchboxes, Füsun’s cigarette butts, saltshakers, coffee cups, hairpins, and barrettes, objects whose absence people are unlikely to notice. Later he begins taking ashtrays, cups, and slippers and replacing them with new ones. Although the collecting is driven by attachment, he does not want to share the collection and feels ashamed of hoarding. When a porcelain dog from the Keskin television set breaks at his home, he supplies a replacement and explains its arrival as an accidental discovery in the Spice Bazaar. The replacement keeps the household’s routine intact while hiding the transfer that has made the original part of his private collection.

The family’s own customs also make ordinary things legible as shared possessions rather than strictly individual property. During tombala, household members rejoice in winning the game, not chiefly in the socks, handkerchiefs, kitchen mortar, or cheap combs offered as prizes. Kemal contrasts this communal circulation with his imagined picture of Füsun’s separate room and wardrobe, filled with belongings that might belong to her alone. His collecting takes place within that tension: household objects are familiar and shared, yet he attaches to them a singular, private history.

Time, public memory, and the museum

Kemal’s reflections connect personal objects to the passage of time. Clocks and calendars regulate relations among people and the routines of society; they do not erase the painful awareness that moments form a line that eventually ends. Objects, like the moments they carry, can be gathered into another kind of line. In the Keskin household, a clock on television and Füsun’s attention to whether she has set her watch correctly belong to ordinary social time. Kemal’s attention falls instead on her smile and on the objects she touches, which he takes away in the hope of preserving happiness for the future.

The scale of memory widens beyond Kemal’s private life. From his home overlooking Teşvikiye Mosque, he and his brother learned about death through the daily funerals passing toward Nişantaşı Square. As children, they imitated the bearers by carrying heavy bolsters and humming the funeral dirge; public ceremonies gradually became familiar household spectacles. Later, after his father dies, Kemal handles old phone bills, telegrams, medicines, and other everyday belongings as vessels of a lost past. The changed value of these things shows how family rituals and shared places help shape individual memory, while loss makes ordinary details newly irreplaceable.

Kemal’s visits to museums in Paris offer another model for his eventual undertaking. He finds consolation in quieter collections, including displays of humble personal belongings, and experiences their rooms as a separate realm within the city. Away from Istanbul, he can view both Füsun and his obsession from a greater distance. The museum does not free him from memory; it gives memory a space and an arrangement in which it can be contemplated.

When Kemal brings his collection together in the converted museum house in Çukurcuma, common objects reveal a life beyond their individual histories. Saltshakers, china dogs, thimbles, pencils, barrettes, and ashtrays seem to migrate across cities and countries. Kemal recognizes versions of the same saltshaker in Istanbul restaurants, New Delhi, Cairo, Barcelona, and Rome, and imagines the mass production and circulation that have carried such objects into countless households. Their familiarity has not prevented people from forgetting how closely they once lived with them. By collecting and displaying them, Kemal seeks to make those unnoticed attachments visible. The museum transforms private keepsakes into a public record of ordinary life, while the bedframe, musty mattress, and blue sheet from the room where he and Füsun made love remain stored in its attic—a concentrated reminder of the memory that set the collection in motion.