An hour later I was checking the body of the deceased into the hospital morgue. A police office was filling a bag with the man’s personal effects when I asked if I could have a look at the ID. The card was smeared in blood and because the corner of its plastic casing was slightly chipped a photograph slipped out and fell onto the table. It was a portrait of a little girl looking shyly through her dark, braided hair. She was dressed in a black pinafore and a white shirt. It was clearly a photo taken at her primary school registration. So her dad kept a copy in his wallet. Now the little girl must be out on the street, racing about with her friends, letting out whoops of joy, before she had to go home. Or she is already fast asleep, her beautiful head on her poor mother’s knees. She still doesn’t know that she is a fatherless child.

*

On my first day in the dorm in Bornova I put a small poster of Sezen Aksu (the kind they gave away with cassette albums) on the door of my metal locker, the ones assigned to every student. “The Little Swallow.” Perched on the edge of a chair, Sezen Aksu is trying to strike a sexy pose with her big lips and a playful look in her eyes; but in every pose she always gives off a childlike innocence. In those days it was my only poster that survived as the gendarmerie were always raiding the dorms and ripping everything out of our lockers. By then I had given up on looking for another poster of Che Guevara because he was ripped out every time.

Some time later I put up a photograph next to the picture of Sezen Aksu, one I had torn out of a magazine in the French Cultural Center. E. Smith’s photograph “A Country Doctor.” I carried that photograph around with me for years. Like it was my fate. After I finished school and went to the Keskin State hospital to start my mandatory civil service that photograph loomed over the head of my bed in the free hospital room where I was living at the time. Twenty-five years later when we went back to some of the same places to shoot a movie we put the exact same photograph on the doctor’s wall. During the shoot, colleagues, staff members and my driver Gara Gazi from 25 years ago all came to visit me. They showed me the old photographs they kept in their wallets. Most of them were pictures of friends who were no longer alive. There was a picture of Arif the photographer, Split Yaşar, Brother Mevlüt the Head Surgeon, and Heavy Crimes Brother Reisi Hamit. Together, after so many years, we looked at those photographs but more than that we looked back over our shared lives. A sense of destiny had seeped into them.

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