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Now, all these years later, as I undertake to explain my love as sincerely as I can, explicating each object in turn, it seems to me that tombala captures the strange and mysterious spirit of those days. Invented in Naples, and still played by Italian families at Christmas, the game passed, like so many other New Year’s rituals and customs, from the Italian and Levantine families of Istanbul into the general population after Atatürk’s calendar reform, in no time becoming a New Year’s ritual.
Every year Aunt Nesibe would include among her presents a child’s handkerchief. Was this to remind us of the old wisdom that “To play tombala on New Year’s makes children happy, and so grown-ups should be mindful of being as happy as children on that evening”? When I was a child and an elderly guest won a present intended for a child, they would say without fail, “Oh, this is just the sort of handkerchief I needed!” My father and his friends would then wink at one another, suggesting there was a second meaning beyond our childish reach. Seeing them do this I would feel as if the grown-ups were not taking the game seriously with their sarcasm. In 1982, on a rainy New Year’s Eve, when I managed to complete the top line of my tombala card first and cry “Chinko!” like a child, Aunt Nesibe said, “Congratulations, Kemal Bey,” and handed me this handkerchief. And, yes, I said, “This is just the sort of handkerchief I needed!”
“It’s one of Füsun’s childhood handkerchiefs,” said Aunt Nesibe, perfectly earnest.
My mother would include a few pairs of children’s socks among the presents, as if to imply no lavish indulgence, only the furnishing of a few household essentials. Making the presents feel less like presents did allow us to see our socks, our handkerchiefs, the mortar we used for pounding walnuts in the kitchen, or a cheap comb from Alaaddin’s as objects of greater value, if only for a short time. Over at the Keskin household, everyone, even the children, would rejoice not on account of wi
It was on New Year’s Eve 1980 that I brought a surprise tombala present-a memento of my grandfather, Ethem Kemal: the antique glass from which Füsun and I had drunk whiskey at our last rendezvous, on the day of my engagement. Begi
Every time Tarık Bey used it as his raki glass over the three and a half years that followed, I would want to recall the happiness of the last time Füsun and I had made love, but like a child conditioned by some taboo to drive a certain thought from mind, I could not entertain this memory properly while sitting at the table with Tarık Bey.
The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also in the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory-of this there is no doubt. At some other time I would have had no interest in the bars of Edirne soap in this basket, and might even have found them tawdry, but having served as tombala presents on New Year’s Eve, these soaps formed in the shape of apricots, quinces, grapes, and strawberries remind me of the slow and humble rhythm of the routines that ruled our lives. It is my devout, and uncalculating, belief that such sentiments belong not just to me, and that, seeing these objects, visitors to my museum many years later will know them, too.
With the same conviction, I display here a number of New Year’s lottery tickets from the period. Like my mother, Aunt Nesibe would buy a ticket for the grand drawing on December 31, to serve as one of the tombala presents. To whomever won the ticket, the others at the Keskin table, as at our home, would say almost in unison: “Oh, look at that, you’re lucky tonight… You’re sure to win the ticket for the grand drawing, too.”
By some strange coincidence, Füsun won the lottery ticket every year between 1977 and 1984. But when the wi
At our house as at the Keskin table, the old saw about poker, love, and life was oft repeated, especially when Tarık Bey was playing cards with guests.
“Unlucky at cards, lucky at love.”
Everybody said it compulsively, and so in 1981, on New Year’s Eve, after we had watched the live broadcast of the grand drawing, supervised by the First Notary Public of Ankara, after it was clear that Füsun had won nothing, I drunkenly, thoughtlessly, uttered it too.
“Seeing as you’ve lost the lottery, Miss Füsun,” I said, imitating the English gentleman hero we watched on television, “you are bound to be a wi
“I have no doubt about that, Kemal Bey!” said Füsun, without missing a beat, just like the clever, elegant heroines of the same films.
Conservative newspapers like Milli Gazete, Tercüman, and Hergün were forever fulminating against New Year’s Eve, which, thanks to tombala, the National Lottery, all this card playing, and the ubiquitous promotions for restaurants and nightclubs, was slowly turning into an orgy of drinking and gambling. When some rich Muslim families in Şişli and Nişantaşı began buying pine trees to decorate and display in windows the way Christians did in films, I remember that even my mother felt uneasy, but because these were people she knew, she refrained from calling them “degenerates” or “infidels” as the religious press would, dismissing them rather as “harebrained.”
In the run-up to New Year’s there would be thousands of vendors selling tickets for the National Lottery in the streets of Istanbul, and some would go dressed as Santa Claus into the wealthy neighborhoods. One evening in December 1980, when I was choosing what tombala presents to take to Füsun’s house, I saw a small mixed group of lycée students deriding one such Santa Claus, pulling his beard of cotton wool and laughing. When I drew closer I saw that this man was the janitor of the apartment house across the street; as the teenagers tugged at his cotton wool mustache, Haydar Efendi stood there silently, holding his tickets, his eyes downcast. A few years later the conservatives’ anger at the drinking and gambling during the celebration overflowed when Islamists set off a bomb in the Marmara Hotel on Taksim Square, in the patisserie that had been decorated for New Year’s with an enormous pine tree. At the Keskin di