Just imagine the setting and how we go about it: there we are asking a wolf about a lamb. They rough up the brother-in-law a little and send him on his way but at the last minute they decide to detain me. We are 30 people packed into a 10-meter-square cell. Waiting for whatever it is that is going to happen next. In a room that is always dark you eventually lose your sense of time. But the set meals they slip under the door give us some sense of the time of day. In the morning it’s soup and in the evening dried beans or rice. Truth is I don’t take what’s happened to me too seriously. Something like this would strike me as a disaster now but in those days it was somehow just put down as run-of-the mill. But how wonderful those days were. Anyway. So there I am still worried about my friend. He must be in one of the neighboring cells. “What’s he doing right now? Is he all right? Have they tortured him? How is he holding up?” That’s what’s running through my mind. I think it was the fifth day when they gave us a mushy kadayıf with the meal. Tel Kadayıf. Unbelievable. It’s our friend’s favorite dessert. I know how crazy he is about it. And in that moment it seemed like everything disappeared: the September 12 coup, politics, fascism, everything. The idea of my friend eating Tel kadayıf right then was everything and the rest didn’t mean a thing. Now everything was beautiful.

We were in each other’s lives. Even if we had no idea.

*

My late granddad on mom’s side was a butcher. I always remember how he used to spot me when I was downtown distributing soda and he would call me over, take a piece of bread out of his classic handkerchief and, filling it with meat (he always made these delicious stews and homemade kuşgönü pastrami), he would stuff it into my mouth. I would see him in the afternoon when I managed to get away from my brothers and the gazozhane and make for town. There he was sitting absentmindedly on one of the benches near the mosque, leaning on his cane. When he saw me his eyes would light up and he would call me over right away:

“Are you hungry, my lamb?”

From the tone in his voice I know how wholeheartedly he wants me to be hungry. So even when I’m full I won’t let on. I know his tasty rice made in those little copper pots and those sausages dangling from the ceiling in his cellar under a cool rock and his fragrant butter from his little fridge are all waiting for me. As I eat granddad sits opposite me and watches.

I learned from granddad that “being human” means passing on to others those things that make you happy. You are human when you want for others the same things you want for yourself, and just as badly.