The other day an art director friend of mine gave me a call. He has a brother, who was an engineer. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I remembered that he had graduated from Middle East Technial University, got married and settled in Ankara. Later we heard he had divorced and, like all the other young men who couldn’t decide what to do next, he opted on the most important thing (!) and went off to do his mandatory military service; a month later he was in Hakkari. My friend told me that this brother of his wanted to see me and he said that it was “important.”

Eren turned up a few days later. With premature wrinkles in his dark, young face and a glint in his eye that made him look even older, he slowly sat down across from me. This young man, who looked a lot like his brother, was thin as a whip. After some chitchat the conversation started flowing. In fact he did most of the talking while I listened. He spoke mostly about his ex wife.

“… When I first saw her I was a second year engineering student. It was a spring day when I went to see a friend who lived in a little house with a garden in Emek. I knocked on the door and a young girl I had never seen before opened it. It was her roommate. I remembered how my friend would occasionally complain about her. ‘So here’s the beautiful girl in the flesh,’ I thought to myself. Her name was Figen.

For ten years after that I thought of her every minute of the day. Now and then I still read her old letters, the little notes she left for me in the mirror frame—I still carry some of them around with me today—and poems I wrote for her. It was like I had lost my mind.

Alone I couldn’t fall asleep at night unless I heard her voice on the phone.

I never failed to kiss the palms of her hand when we parted and I’d keep something of hers with me so that I could remember the way she smelled. When I got close to home I wouldn’t be able to stand it any longer and I’d hop off the bus early and run the rest of the way. We would hold each other in a long embrace … For minutes … Later we got married. In ‘98. I started working at a mining company and she became a reporter for a new magazine … And then?… And then there was ‘litost.’ Thinking back over everything we lived through till 2008, I was usually at a loss to explain it, until I came across that word. It’s Czech. And it means loneliness, sadness, anger, disappointment, shame, helplessness, revolt and much more. A word that encapsulates all those feelings. In other words, a deep sigh. We divorced ten years after I went for those class notes.”