“Mother Cemelli, I am here. From Cemel … Ibraam.”

“Oh my lamb! Ibraam has come. Fadime, look who has come to visit! Welcome my lamb.”

Mom knew the conversation could go on for a while so she used to go out to the back garden. Taking my ebe by the hands, I would set out an exciting adventure through her lost world I knew nothing about, drawing on the intuition of a child. My ebe was married to Mustafa of the Köse family and so of course she would ask after his fields, his sheep and his lambs and his wheat in the fields and tell me to pass on her regards to all her relatives. Some time later she would kiss my hands and, filled with greetings for everyone in Cemel, I would leave the house, setting the jacket and hat beside the pool where they would wait for me until my next visit. It made my ebe so happy.

“Oh Fadime, will you just look at that, girl. The wheat is doing really well this year. God praise, God praise! Oh let it be good, and may God not punish people with hunger.”

My ebe left me with a pure innocence, an endless drive and the smell of bread that prompted the hunger of people she didn’t know.

*

My university years. A time when we were always hungry. We had been thrown out of the dorm. I had a tough correspondence with dad. I had made myself clear in the harshest terms.

“I don’t want your money so don’t send any!”

For a while I was going to the hired hand meeting point in Karşıyaka. I was playing the part of the wild young man who couldn’t go to university after high school and who couldn’t find a job. I was working on a stud farm construction site in Şemikler with Kurdish laborers. When we broke for lunch we all went to a working class restaurant. A small helping of beans, a little rice and loads of bread. The only thing all those workers crowded around a wooden table would say was:

“Brother, more bread …”

In Bornova I generally go to the coffeehouse across from the hospital. I am flat broke. In a corner sits a thin, gaunt, sallow-faced man. He is one of the negative group blood donors. These people are selling their own blood. Every now and then the door to the coffeehouse swings open and a hurried voice says, “O Rh negative.” Someone from the group stands up and after a brief conversation they all leave together. What these donors most want from med students are sample blood stimulators and iron supplement pills. They call themselves “döner” (as in the Turkish kebab), inspired by the word donor in English, as if referring to something that slims down as it’s sliced. Tactfully I ask them how much they get for a bottle of blood. Not bad, it’s actually good money, enough to get by on. So I go to Kızılay to sell some of my blood. In the evening I go to a friend’s dilapidated house in Alsancak with a load of supplies. I have eggs, bread, a little ground beef and halvah. And there’s always plenty of tea and cigarettes. Seven or eight of us have founded a folklore group at the university, and everyone here is hungry and expecting me at the house. All the dancers are leftists but the drummer Mehmet has nothing to do with all that. As I prepare the food I talk to him about socialism and that sort of stuff. You see I’m trying to enlighten them. Going on about added value and dialectics and the fate of the country. It doesn’t seem to be sinking in with Mehmet but he keeps quiet. Then we sit down around a low table. Eight people huddled around a big tray. Without noticing it I push the eggs that had come round to me out to the center. Toward the end of the meal Mehmet says in a quiet voice: