I did not remain for long in Istanbul. Following Çetin’s directions, I drove to the garage owned by Şevket Usta, who specialized in Chevrolets, in the streets behind Maslak; in the empty lot behind the garage one look at our ’56 Chevrolet under a fig tree produced a paroxysm of emotional turmoil. The trunk was open, with chickens from the adjacent coop wandering through the wreck, and around it children were playing. According to Şevket Usta, some parts had been salvageable, among them the gas cap, the gearbox, and the handle of the rear window, all sold to owners of other ’56 Chevrolets, a sizable market as most of the city’s taxis were now the same model. When I poked my head into the wreck, to peer at where the fuel gauge and the speedometer had once lodged in mint condition, and the radio knobs, and the steering wheel, I caught the scent of leather rising from the seat coverings in the gentle heat of the sun, and my head began to swim. By instinct, I touched the steering wheel, which seemed almost as old as I was. And soon the intensity of the memories compressed into these remains overwhelmed me and I broke down.

“Kemal Bey, what happened? Why don’t you sit down over there,” said Çetin, his voice full of understanding. “Children, could you bring us a glass of water?”

For the first time since Füsun’s death, I’d been on the brink of crying in public. A boy apprentice, sooty as a coal digger and covered in axle grease, but with immaculately clean hands, brought us tea on a tray with the logo cyprus turk (I record this by force of habit; visitors should not waste time looking for it in the Museum of Innocence); as we drank our teas, after a bit of bargaining, we bought back my father’s car.

“So where are we going to put this, Kemal Bey?” asked Çetin Efendi.

“I want to spend the rest of my life under the same roof with this car,” I said with a smile, but Çetin Efendi understood at once that I was earnest, and unlike the others, he did not say, “Oh, please, Kemal Bey, life must go on-you can’t die with the dead.” Had he done so, I would have explained that the Museum of Innocence was to be a place where one could live with the dead. Though I had prepared this answer in advance, the words now stuck in my throat: Prompted by pride, I said something altogether different.

“There are lots of things stored in the Merhamet Apartments. I want to bring them together under one roof and spend the rest of my days among them.”

I had many heroes in mind, who, during the last years of their lives, like Gustave Moreau, had arranged for their homes to be turned into museums posthumously. I loved the museums they’d created, and so I continued my travels, revisiting the hundreds I’d come to know and cherish and going to the thousands of others I still longed to see.

82 Collectors

THIS IS what I observed while traveling the world, and wandering through Istanbul. There are two types of collectors:

1. The Proud Ones, those pleased to show their collections to the world (they predominate in the West).

2. The Bashful Ones, who hide away all they have accumulated (an unmodern disposition).

The Proud regard a museum as a natural ultimate destination for their collections. They maintain that whatever a collection’s original purpose, it is, in the end, an enterprise intended for proud display in a museum. This view was common in the official histories of small, private American museums: For example, the brochure for the Museum of Beverage Containers and Advertising describes how the collector Tom picked up his first soda can on the way home from school. Then he picked up another, and a third, keeping what he found until after a time his ambition was to “collect them all” and exhibit them in a museum.

But the Bashful collect purely for the sake of collecting. Like the Proud, they begin-as readers will have noticed in my own case-in pursuit of an answer, a consolation, even a palliative for a pain, a resolution of difficulty, or simply out of a dark compulsion. But living in societies where collecting is not a reputable act that contributes to learning or knowledge, the Bashful regard their compulsion as an embarrassment that must be hidden. Because in the lands of the Bashful, collections point not to a bit of useful information but rather to a wound the bashful collector bears.

I would come upon these dark sentiments in many places over the years, but it was in the early months of 1992, among those in Istanbul who specialized in film paraphernalia, that I caught my first glimpses of “collectors’ embarrassment,” while hunting for posters, lobby photographs, and ticket stubs from films we’d seen in the summer of 1976, to display in the Museum of Innocence.

It was after having haggled at length that Hıfzı Bey sold me an assortment of lobby photographs from films like Love’s Agony Ends in Death and Caught in the Crossfire, and after he had told me again and again how pleased he was by my interest in his collection, he turned wistful.

“It saddens me, Kemal Bey, to part with things that are so dear to me,” he said. “But how I wish that the people who mock my hobby, and make fun of me-the ones who ask, ‘Why do you cram the house with this filth?’-how I wish they could see someone like you, a cultured man from a good family, finding something to value in my collection. I don’t drink, or smoke, or gamble, or fool around with women. My only vice is collecting photographs of stars and films… Mght you be interested in stills from scenes on the Kalender in Hear My Mother’s Lament, in which Papatya played when still a young girl? She’s wearing a pinafore, and her shoulders are bare… If you would care to come to my humble abode this evening, I could show you photographs taken during the filming of Black Palace, which was never completed, due to the suicide of its lead, Tahir Tan. Until now, no one but me has seen them. I also have pictures of Inge, the German model who appeared in the advertising campaign for Turkey ’s first domestic fruit-flavored soda-she went on to play a kindly, Turk-loving German aunt in Central Station, which was part of the first wave of Turkish-German film productions. I have lobby photographs of her with the man she falls in love with in the film; he is played by Ekrem Güçlü, and they are kissing on the lips.”

When I asked about other lobby photographs I was seeking, Hıfzı Bey told me that there were quite a few collectors whose homes were packed to the rafters with photographs, films, and posters. When their rooms were so full of photographs, posters, newspaper cuttings, and magazines that no room remained to live in, their families would abandon the house (most had never married anyway), and the collectors would be free to begin to pick up everything they could get their hands on, until their houses turned into such rubbish dumps that no one could even enter them. Doubtless some of these famous collectors would have what I was after, but they would never be able to extract the items from the heaps that were their homes-it was hard enough for them to get through the front door.

Even so Hıfzı Bey proved helpless in the face of my entreaties, and he was able to get me into some of the rubbish dens that had become legendary among the Istanbullus during the 1990s.

Sifting through the detritus in these houses I was able to find most of the lobby photographs that I would go on to display in my museum, along with the Istanbul views, quite a few postcards, cinema tickets, restaurant menus that it had not occurred to me to save at the time, rusty old tin cans, pages from yellowed newspapers, paper bags with company logos, medicine boxes, bottles, photographs of film stars and other celebrities, and also pictures of ordinary, everyday Istanbullus that spoke more eloquently than anything of the place where Füsun and I had once lived.