“Bloody meat makes a hero you can’t beat,” she says, collecting the half-cooked giblets off the stovetop. My left ear is always filling up with water. But so what, I’m top of the class this year. The school principal, Rıza Bey, presents me with a Nacar wristwatch. “A Hislon would be better,” says my older brother. My dad’s childhood friend, Ali Doğan Abi, the oldest son of a bank manager, Uncle Hasan, has come from Ankara to stay with us. He’s a student at Middle Eastern Technical University, and he knows Deniz Gezmiş. “You should definitely go to the science high school,” he says to me. He’s going to send me practice tests from Ankara. Ali Doğan Abi loves my mother’s crock-cooked beans and he speaks fluent English.

One day a kid disappears in the river. All day his mom is crying on the bank, constantly searching for her son. Fanatics from Nevşehir beat the living daylights out of a kid from Avanos. My uncle is always talking about the Prime Minister, Ecevit …

But at home dad is telling us all about the big event: “Our bottles are now going to be washed by an automated machine.” How’s that? The machine is due to arrive from Istanbul in a week. We’re staring at the thing like it’s some kind of spacecraft. Niko Usta shows up. He’s a smart, thin man with a pointy nose. He stays with us for a few days. Straightaway he asks mom to make him mantı. Then he sets up the machine, gets it working. Places the bottles upside down on top of a revolving disk and pushes the button. The disk spins, the bottles disappear and a few seconds later they swing back around to us completely clean. A miracle!

Next day Niko Usta goes to Mustafapaşa in Ürgüp. It is the first time I hear him call the place Sinasos. It was his grandfather’s hometown. They still have houses and cemeteries there. When he gets back from Sinesos, I see Niko Usta quietly smoking a cigarette in the garden. He stays like that for a while. On Niko’s last day, dad makes a stew and we eat in the garden. Sitting on the edge of the pond, I’m trying to carve a whistle out of wood. I guess I’ve been struggling for some time. Niko Usta comes over to help. Taking the wood from me, he glances at my work and silently walks into the garden where he snaps off a branch from a different tree. Then he starts to whittle away at the wood with a sharp little knife he always carries with him. Not much later he comes over and hands me the whistle. In his sweet Istanbul accent, he says:

“Don’t you know you can’t make a whistle out of any old piece of wood?”

*