Eren paused for a moment and looked at me with an awkward smile.

“In fact I’m a secret fan of yours. I heard about you from my sister. I read some of your stuff in a magazine that came out in the 90s. Some evenings I still read a piece by you from those days. Every time it gets me right in the gut.”

He pulled a tattered photocopy from inside a book he had with him and handed it to me. I recognized the piece straightaway.

“… I know there’s no point in saying it might not have turned out like this. It did. That’s how it happened and let it be good news, tell all your friends that I have learned how to die slowly. The only thing left from those days when I ruled the world in my turtleneck and my bushy mustache is the memory of a pale-faced girl whose plans to leave me I had quietly put to memory; she is far away now and I will never hold her again. And it always pains me to think about her valise. Whenever she bowed her head, I thought of my childhood and whenever I leaned over to kiss her on the cheek, I was in Ankara, and when she clasped her hands and fell silent, it was Istanbul; and now I am left with a restless cold November rain that chills me to the bones and so many other things that have gone unsaid. She is so very far away from me now and yet she is all around me. You get me, don’t you? Now what do I have left but desperation? Where am I to go, what am I to do? Now the night is pressing down on me. Cold evenings when her letters no longer have any say, and bank accounts and dates are remembered and those phone calls to lick my wounds every time I drench myself in alcohol. This is all that’s left. But there is also the good news, tell all your friends, that I have learned how to die slowly …”

Some stories are so similar. I handed him the photocopy.

“And then what happened?” I asked.

“I went to do my military service. I was a reserve officer in the gendarmerie,” he said.

He drifted away momentarily … I watched him for a while.

Breaking the silence, I said, “How was the army?”