I don’t know to what extent I have succeeded, but I have done what I know how to do, what is in my power. Sources of encouragement sometimes came in the form of a little note from a friend:

“My dear brother, today I could actually see what you wrote.”

1

Kurban

… Ibrahim got up early that morning. He threw a saddle on the back of his donkey and with his son Ishak he set out for the spot that God had announced to him. At the end of the third day he saw it. He had made Ishak shoulder the wood for the sacrifice he was going to make. He bore a knife and the means to make a fire. They walked on a little. With the wood on his back, Ishak looked around and said:

“Father.”

“Yes, son,” Ibrahim answered.

“Here’s the fire. The wood is on my back. But there is no sacrificial lamb. Where is the lamb we are to sacrifice, father?”

Ibrahim was silent …”

*

Dad opened his first soda works beside the mid-neighborhood coffeehouse run by his friend Hafi. When Brother Hafi died of a heart attack in dad’s arms, dad moved his shop to a place next to the fountain in the Lower Neighborhood. Later dad stopped making soda. After the death of his friend, he was haunted by fear and doubt for the rest of his life. Curled up under a blanket in the middle of the night with my eyes tightly shut, I would listen to his endless complaints, sometimes angry but mainly just helpless, as mom shuttled back and forth from the kitchen to their bedroom with a hot water bottle, trying to appease him:

“There’s nothing wrong with you, Mevlüt … You were like this the last time, and what came of it? Nothing … It was just a cold …”

Dad would keep on complaining for a while and then stop. For a few minutes mom would sit on the edge of the bed, unable to fall asleep, and then wrapping an old sweater around her shoulders she would sit down in front of her carpet loom.

The soda works shop was a cool, dark shop that smelled of essences. Just at the entrance was a little tub and there was a jug of syrup in a corner from which I secretly sipped and behind it was a globe-shaped copper cauldron. My older brother would turn me upside down and dip me into the waters. Thinking I might drown, I would struggle to get hold of his wrists.

Our hired hand Brother Dursun was always fighting with the women at the fountain. Once again they had unattached the hose that filled our storage tank at night.

“You’re just giving us fountain water to drink and calling it soda,” they say.

Now they weren’t entirely wrong about that.

Hikmet’s family lived in the boxy room above the soda factory and he was my best friend. His dad Şerafettin was a poor farmer who was lame in one foot. Hikmet was a quiet, dreamy boy. But he was great at math. He used to cut coupons out of newspapers and I was the one who most often completed the collection.