We are going to a village quite a way out of town. It’s winter. It takes us some time to get to the house where the funeral is being held. The villagers have gathered in the courtyard, waiting for us. A young woman has shot herself. I am about to perform my first autopsy during my civil service as a doctor. Leaning over the woman’s body laid out on a wooden plank in the middle of a mud brick storehouse, I am trying to remember my notes from med school. First the cranium. No, first I have to write down what she’s wearing, her height, approximate weight and appearance. Then I should take off her clothes and move on to the standard autopsy. When the prosecutor leaned over to offer me a cigarette, I was caught repeating the sentence, “three sections have to be opened.” Oh my God, I hope everything goes all right. I’m aware that the autopsy technician is keeping a close eye on me. Anyway soon enough we were half way through. But there’s still no bullet: we can’t find it. There’s an entrance point but no exit. Which means it has to be in there. The short, stout prosecutor keeps coming over to me and asking. Clearly this is going to take a lot longer if we can’t find it. The technician pauses for a moment and then makes a philosophical statement about the missing bullet:

“It can see us, hocam, but we can’t see it, you know that right?”

In the end we have our eyes on the bullet, too, and pulling it out we finish the autopsy. The prosecutor is really cold now and keeps hopping up and down. But he is delighted when we find the bullet. Yes, now we can move on to his part of the job: typing up the report. Spitting on his fingers, he rolls a piece of carbon paper into his Olimpiyat typewriter and starts tapping out the official report:

“Ercan Kesal, born in 1959, son of Mevlüt, was taken into our custody and duly swore to determine the cause of the death …” Cause of death? Was I supposed to tell him? How in God’s name was I supposed to know why this dark, thin-faced girl in a faded dress and ripped sandals killed herself in the middle of this strange land that was not unlike some dim planet, the source of such heartache? But you see I had to give an answer. Because I had grown up, I was a doctor.

*

The nurses who see me pacing outside the door to the maternity ward say, “You can go in, too, if you want Doctor.” I drive away the offer with a shake of the head as if I am used to such a situation. But inside I am a tangle of nerves. I have to keep up appearances. Meanwhile I study the faces that come out of the operating room. Has something happened and they aren’t telling me? It feels like a thousand years have passed when they bring him over to me in an incubator. Thank God everything is all right. I look at his long hands and feet. He looks like me. His mother has woken up from the anesthesia and she wants to hold her baby. They place the little boy who isn’t much larger than a hand on her chest and when she lifts up his head and looks at his face she says: “Is this mine? Is this my baby?” Then with tears in her eyes she gives Poyraz to her mother who is looking down on them. “Look, mom this is my baby.” The joyous tumult in the room sucks up what her mother says like a vacuum and then the full weight of her words falls on my heart: