*

Turkey in the wake of the 1980 September 12 coup will be remembered as a time when families searched for their sons who had gone missing. It was the middle of the night when the police arrived at the home of Ramazan Yukarıgöz, who had been executed during the 1983 junta. The body of the young man was now sealed in a coffin. Here is how his mother describes that night:

“Someone was banging on the door in the middle of the night. I got up straightaway. It was the police.”

“What’s wrong? What’s happened?” I said.

“Is this Ramazan’s house?” they said.

“What happened? Did something happen to Ramazan?” I said. I woke up his father. He went out to speak with them next to their car.

“Where do you want to have him buried? Are you going to have a funeral or not?” they asked. His father started pounding the car with his fist.

“Of course we are going to arrange for his funeral. If they are going to take away the living then we will take away the dead. What do you mean, not have his funeral?” he said. That’s when I fell to the floor…

“I want to see my child,” I said.

“You can’t,” they said.

“Why not?” I asked and they told me:

“The coffin is sealed shut.”

“Your seal means nothing for me,” I said and I pushed them aside and I tore it off. I opened the coffin. It looked as if his hair had been freshly combed. His eyebrows were perfectly straight. He was beautiful in a completely different way. I kissed his face…”

*

In composition class our high school literature teacher Zafer Bey had us write some juicy stuff. I was first in my class but I used to sit in the back row with the troublemakers. During free periods we would go down to the stream behind the school to secretly drink vodka and listen to Ferdi Tayfur. The source of my angst was a green-eyed girl I couldn’t open up to. Zafer Hoca would come to me in the back row, pull a little bottle of cologne from his pocket, tap a few drops onto his palm and inhale the vapors briefly as he said:

“Sevda is a dark seal. For those in the grip of the dark passion most certainly have this seal on their hearts.”

I have performed countless autopsies. And I have assisted in just as many. Whenever I put my scalpel over a heart, my eyes search for that dark seal. I wonder if what Zafer Hoca said was true. Do we have such a thing on our hearts?

For some ridiculous reason one of the rooms in the policlinic where I was working was officially sealed. I asked the health officer, who went crazy with fear every time an officially sealed envelope arrived, about this particular seal:

“What will happen if we break it?”

“Oh dear, hocam, you are talking about a ‘breach of the seal.’ Such a thing simply isn’t done.”