Sometimes the clock was wound, and sometimes it was forgotten. Even when it had been wound and was ticking away, the chime would remain silent for months at a time; sometimes it would chime only once, on the half hour; sometimes it would surrender to the ambient silence and let weeks pass before it made another sound. That was when I’d realize, as a chill passed through me, how frightening everything must be when no one was home. Whether or not it was ticking, whether or not the chime sounded, no one looked at the clock to know the time, but they did spend a lot of time talking about whether it had been wound or not, and about how a frozen pendulum might be set in motion again just by touching it once. “Let it be, let it tick, it’s not hurting anyone,” Tarık Bey would sometimes say to his wife. “It reminds us that this house is a house.” I think I would agree, as would Füsun, Feridun, and even the odd visitor. So the wall clock was not there to remind us of the time, or to warn us that things were changing; it was there to persuade us that nothing whatsoever had changed.
During those first months I dared not even dream that nothing would or could change-that I would spend eight years eating supper in Çukurcuma, watching television, and chatting amiably without purpose. During my first visits every word Füsun uttered, every feeling that registered on her face, the way she paced up and down the room-all of it seemed new and different to me, and whether the clock was ticking or not, I paid it no mind. What mattered was to be at the same table with her, to watch her, to feel happy and remain perfectly still as my ghost left my body to kiss her.
Even without our being aware of it, the clock always ticked in the same way, and when we sat at the table, eating our supper, it brought us the peace of knowing we hadn’t changed, that all would stay the same with us. That the clock served to make us forget the time, even as it continually brought us back to the present, reminding us of our relations with others-this paradox was the cause of the cold war that flared up from time to time between Aunt Nesibe and Tarık Bey. “Who wound that clock again, to wake us in the middle of the night?” said Aunt Nesibe, if during a silence she noticed that the clock was working again. “If it wasn’t ticking, it would feel as if there was something missing in this house,” said Tarık Bey one windy evening in December 1979. He added, “It used to chime in the other house, too.” “So then, are you trying to tell me you still haven’t become accustomed to Çukurcuma, Tarık Bey?” said Aunt Nesibe, with a much gentler smile than her words implied (she sometimes addressed her husband with the honorific “Bey”).
Such measured quips, aspersions, and perfectly timed digs-the couple had honed their craft over many years, and whenever we heard the clock’s tick at an unexpected moment or the gong began to chime, the discord would become more intense. “You wound this clock so that I wouldn’t get any sleep either, Tarık Bey,” Aunt Nesibe would say. “Füsun, dear, could you make it stop?” If you used your finger to still the pendulum in the middle, then no matter how much someone had wound it, the clock would stop, but Füsun would only smile and look at her father; sometimes Tarık Bey would give her a look that meant, All right then, go ahead and stop it! and sometimes he would stubbornly refuse. “I didn’t touch it. The clock started on its own, so let it stop itself!” he’d say. Sometimes, when they saw that such mysterious pronouncements made an impression on the neighbors or the children who came to visit on rare occasions, Tarık Bey and Aunt Nesibe would begin an argument of double entendres. “The djinns have got our clock working again,” Aunt Nesibe would say. “Don’t touch it, you could get hurt,” Tarık Bey would say in a menacing voice as he frowned. “I don’t care if there’s a djinn ticking inside it,” Aunt Nesibe would reply. “I just don’t want it waking me up at night like a drunken church bell ringer who can’t tell morning from night.” “Don’t fret so, and, anyway, if you forget the time you’ll feel better,” Tarık Bey would say. Here he was using “time” to mean “the modern world” or “the age in which we live.” This “time” was an ever-changing thing, and with the help of the clock’s perpetual ticking, we tried to keep it at bay.
The device by which the Keskin family actually kept time was the television, which, like our radio during the fifties and sixties, was always on. In the days of radio, no matter what the broadcast-a piece of music, a discussion, a mathematics lesson, whatever-you would hear a soft blip on the hour and the half hour, for the benefit of those who cared to know. In the evenings, when we watched television, there was no need for such a signal, as most people had no need to know the time unless they were trying to find out what was on television.
Every evening at seven o’clock, when the enormous clock appeared on the screen a minute before TRT, the country’s only television station, began its news program, Füsun would look at her wristwatch (displayed here) as Tarık Bey looked at one of the many pocket watches I saw him use over that eight-year period-either to confirm they had the correct time or to adjust their watches to it. They would do this. It was deeply satisfying to watch Füsun sitting at the supper table, gazing at the enormous clock on the screen and squinting, pressing her tongue against the inside of her cheek as she calibrated her watch with the seriousness of a child copying her father. From my very first visits, Füsun was aware how much I enjoyed this spectacle. When she adjusted her watch, she knew I was observing her lovingly, and when she got the time right, she would look at me and smile. “Do you have the time right now?” I would ask her just then. “Yes, I’ve got it!” she would say to me, with a smile that was even warmer.
As I would slowly come to understand over the eight years, it was not merely to see Füsun that I went to the Keskin house but to live for a time in the world whose air she breathed. This realm’s defining property was its timelessness. And so it was that Tarık Bey advised his wife to “forget time.” When people come to visit my museum and view all the Keskins’ old possessions-especially all these broken, rusting clocks and watches that haven’t worked for years-I want them to notice how strange they are, how they seem to exist out of time, how they have created among themselves a time that is theirs alone. This is the timeless world whose air I inhaled during my years with Füsun and her family.
Beyond this timeless space was the “official” time outside, with which we kept in touch through television, radio, and the call to prayer; when we talked about finding out what time it was, we were organizing our relations with the outside world, or so I felt.
Füsun did not adjust her watch because life as she lived it called for a clock that was accurate to the second, so that she could be punctual for work or some meetings; like her father, the retired civil servant, she did so as a way of acceding to a directive signaled to her straight from Ankara and the state, or so it seemed to me. We looked at the clock that appeared on the screen before the news much as we looked at the flag that appeared on the screen, while the national anthem was playing at the end of the broadcasting day: As we sat in our patch of the world, preparing to eat supper or bring the evening to a close by turning off the television, we felt the presence of millions of other families, all doing likewise, and the throng that was the nation, and the power of what we called the state, and our own insignificance. It was when we were watching flags, Atatürk programs, and the official clock (once in a while, the radio would refer to the “national time”) that we were most keenly aware that our messy and disordered domestic lives existed outside the official realm.