“You need to come and give a statement,” he says.

I went to the police station that looks nothing like it did before the coup; no trace of those words “Down with Fascism” written on the wall; it seemed as if this new massive structure had pushed out the old one. It was that imposing … Anyway. The chief inspector looks at my ID. He knows me. The picture on my card is of an innocent, clean-faced kid just out of High School. “How did you change so much?” he says.

His voice carries that sarcastic tone that comes with power. Of course he has every right, in the end they are going to read us the riot act. “Well I did grow a mustache,” I say.

How should I put it now? He pauses for a moment. Am I being serious or horsing around? “I’m not asking about your moustache, son. I’m asking about what’s up there in your head. Has your thinking changed?”

“No,” I say. “Same as always. Just like it was before.”

He looks upset but doesn’t raise his voice. That evening in the club he tells everybody about it. Later dad is in a foul mood under the vine outside our house, telling his “story of the seal,” which I would hear again and again:

“You know Ilhan Abi. When he was a student at university he went to a meyhane one day with his friends. While they are singing all the folk songs one of them decides to read a poem by Nazım Hikmet. Someone goes and informs the police, saying he was ‘peddling communist propaganda.’ So the police round them all up and take them away. As they were doing background checks and taking statements it turns out that the inspector was from Avanos. Luckily he didn’t book them. He let them all go. But he gave them a piece of his mind. He said: ‘Son, in this country they mark goat as lamb and sell it on the streets. You can struggle all you want and say you are a goat. But you have already been labeled a lamb. And that’s what you will always be.’ If they label you a ‘communist’ you keep the label for the rest of your life. So hurry up and get out of here.”

I am overseeing the building of a hospital in Istanbul. Dad is watching me with apprehension. He keeps going on about why I resigned from my management position in the state hospital and got wrapped up in something like this when I’m broke. At last the hospital is finished and dad has come from Avanos and I’m showing him around. The operating room, patients’ rooms, the morgue, everything. Clearly he is proud of me. In my office we have coffee.

“Give the hospital an official seal, son. You can’t not have one,” he says.

I later lost my dad in my own hospital. That night I put him in the morgue he had once praised. After living out a pure and meaningful life he was brought back to the steppes where he would be laid to rest at the foot of his mother’s grave with the seal of the hospital on the report for the burial of the deceased.