“From now on we’ll be able to go out into the streets in peace,” my mother said.

With the imposition of the ten o’clock curfew, the military coup cast a long shadow over my evening meals at the Keskins’. During the evening news broadcast on the country’s only television channel, the generals not only railed against politicians and dissident intellectuals but lectured the entire nation about the bad habits that had led them astray.

But it wasn’t just politicians and dissident intellectuals-they were also jailing common swindlers, brothel keepers, tombala men who sold black market cigarettes, and anyone who’d violated a traffic ordinance, written a slogan on a wall, or been involved in a porn film. A large number of people linked with terrorism were summarily executed as examples to others. Whenever word of one of these events reached the Keskin table, everyone would fall silent. At such times I would feel closer to Füsun: part of the family. They no longer seized young, longhaired “hippie types” from the streets to shave off their beards, as in the previous coup, but they did immediately fire a slew of university lecturers. The Pelür Bar was emptied out with other such places. In the wake of the coup, I resolved that I, too, would put my life in order: I would drink less, mitigate the disgrace my love had caused, and, if nothing else, tame my urge to collect things.

Less than two months later I found myself alone in the kitchen with Aunt Nesibe just before supper. I’d started coming to the house earlier, so that I could see more of Füsun.

“My dearest Kemal, you know that street dog with the black ears that you bought us-the one on the television? Well, it’s gone missing… Your eyes grow accustomed to things, so the moment they’re gone, you notice. Whatever happened has happened; it doesn’t matter to me-maybe the poor beast decided it was time to get up and go,” she said. She let out a sweet little laugh, but when she saw the harsh expression on my face, she became serious. “What shall we do?” she asked. “Tarık Bey keeps asking what happened to the dog.”

“Let me take care of this,” I said.

That evening I was too upset to speak. But in spite of my silence-or because of it-I was also unable to stand up and leave, a paralysis that intensified as it got close to the curfew hour. I think that Aunt Nesibe and Füsun were both aware of my predicament. Aunt Nesibe was obliged to say, “Oh please don’t be late!” several times. Only at five past ten was I able to leave the house.

No one stopped us on the way back, and after we were home safe I spent a long time thinking about the meaning of these dogs, and why I kept bringing them to the Keskins’ only to remove them later; in fact, despite Aunt Nesibe’s insistence that she’d noticed the disappearance immediately, it had taken them an astonishing eleven months to see that the dog was gone; it seemed to me that it had happened now only because of the coup, and the prevailing sentiment that we should all put our houses in order. Almost certainly, most of those dogs sitting on lace doilies atop the television were holdovers from the days when dogs sat on radios. As people listened to the radio, their heads would naturally turn toward it, and then their eyes would seek out something for distraction, something that offered solace. After radios gave way to televisions as the altars for family meals, the dogs were transferred to the tops of television sets, but now, with all eyes glued to the screen, no one noticed these little creatures anymore. I could take them away whenever I pleased.

Two days after that evening, I brought two china dogs to the Keskins.

“I was walking through Beyoğlu today when I saw these in the Japanese Market,” I said. “It’s almost as if they were designed to sit on our television.”

“Oh, what a lovely pair they make,” said Aunt Nesibe. “But why did you go to such trouble, Kemal Bey?”

“I was sorry about the one with the black ears going missing,” I said. “Actually, I used to worry that he was lonely, sitting up there on the television. When I saw how happy these two were together, I said to myself that it would be nice to have a frisky pair of dogs up there on the television.”

“Were you really worried the dog was lonely up there, Kemal Bey?” said Aunt Nesibe. “What a curious man you are. But that’s why we love you.”

Füsun was smiling tenderly at me.

“I get upset to see things thrown away and forgotten,” I said. “They say the Chinese used to believe that things had souls.”

“Before we Turks came here from Central Asia, we spent a huge amount of time with the Chinese; there was something about this on television just the other day,” said Aunt Nesibe. “You weren’t here that evening. Füsun, do you remember the name of the program? Oh, you’ve put the dogs where they belong, and don’t they look lovely. But do you think they should be facing each other, or looking at us? Right now I just can’t make up my mind.”

“The one on the left should face us, and the one on the right should face his friend,” Tarık Bey said suddenly.

Sometimes, at the strangest moment in a conversation, when we all thought he wasn’t even listening, Tarık Bey would suddenly make a judicious comment that showed how he grasped the details even better than we did.

“If we do it like that, the dogs can be friends, and they won’t get bored, but they’ll also keep an eye on us, and be part of the family,” he continued.

As much as I longed to touch them, I kept my hands off those dogs for more than a year. By 1982, the year I finally took them away with me, I had begun to leave money in a discreet corner to cover the cost of the things I took, or else I would bring over some quite expensive replacement the very next day. During those last years, many strange objects of the same form but different function-dogs that were also pincushions, and dogs that were also tape measures-had their time on top of the television.

66 What Is This?

FOUR MONTHS after the coup we were on our way home from the Keskins’ one night when, fifteen minutes before curfew, Çetin and I were stopped by soldiers checking people’s identity cards on Sıraselviler Avenue. I was stretched out comfortably on the backseat, and as all my papers were in order I had nothing to fear. But as he took my identity card from me, the soldier gave me a dubious look. When I saw his eyes light upon the quince grater at my side, I grew nervous.

By instinct, or by force of habit, I’d picked up the grater at the Keskins’ when no one was looking. It made me so happy that I’d been able to leave early without making too much of an effort, and, just before this, I’d taken the prize out of my coat pocket, like a hunter wishing to cast a proud look over a woodcock he’d just bagged, and I’d left it sitting on the seat beside me.

The moment I’d arrived at the Keskins’ house that evening, I’d breathed in the lovely fragrance of quince jelly. While we were talking about this and that, Aunt Nesibe mentioned that she and Füsun had been boiling the fruit all afternoon over a low flame, and that they’d had a nice mother-daughter chat. It pleased me to imagine how, while her mother was busy with something else, Füsun had slowly stirred the jelly with a wooden spoon.

After inspecting their occupants’ identity cards, the soldiers let some cars continue on their way. In other cases they ordered all the passengers out of the car and subjected them to careful body searches.

Çetin and I got out of the car as ordered. They studied our identity cards carefully. We complied when directed to place our hands on the Chevrolet, like culprits in a film. The two soldiers searched the glove compartment and looked under the seats and everywhere else. The sidewalks of Sıraselviler Avenue, hemmed in on both sides by apartment houses of some height, were wet, and I remember, too, that quite a few passersby turned to look at us. As the curfew drew closer and no people remained in the streets, I could see just ahead that the lights were out in the windows of Sixty-Six, the famous brothel that took its name from its street number, and that, in our last year of lycée, everyone in my class had visited. Mehmet knew quite a few of the girls.