In the middle of the day a strange crowd has gathered outside the courthouse on the public square. It seems like the whole town is there. Turns out the amiable old owner of the Merkez coffeehouse has been raping his dark, long-faced busboy, Ihsan, an orphan from a neighboring village, for the past two years. I always delivered our soda directly to their doorstep. One way or another the kid came to his senses and talked. Handcuffed and with police officers on both sides, the coffeehouse proprietor was hurried over to the courthouse with his head hanging. Hypnotized, the crowd watched them pass.

Suddenly our late relative Ismail pulled out a cobblestone and hurled it at the proprietor as he howled. If he hadn’t ducked, that enormous stone would have smashed his head to smithereens, but instead it crashed into the gutter of the coffeehouse beside the courthouse. The image of that shattered gutter was lodged in my young mind and I would always think about it every morning as I wandered through town distributing our soda.

Four or five months later the coffeehouse proprietor went back to work as if nothing had happened. I thought he would never have a place in this world again but there he was back making teas, joking and carrying on with the regulars as he handed them out. Ismail, who had hurled the cobblestone, was back in the coffeehouse, too, playing Okey as if nothing had happened, now and then cracking jokes, too, with the people around him.

I never saw Ihsan after that. They told me he went to Istanbul to be an apprentice to a relative who worked as a tailor. I never left soda on the stoop of that coffeehouse again.

*

I am going to middle school. In the morning I wake up to the sound of mom working her loom and together we start the day as I have one more look over my lessons in bed. That morning mom has got up to do her morning prayers, splashes her face with water before she wanders about the room muttering prayers. At one point she approaches the window and carefully looks outside. In the empty silence of morning it becomes clear that a woman she knows is hurrying over in her slippers. For some time mom looks out the window full of curiosity and concern. I think I hear her say, “What in the world is she doing here at this hour?”

Toward noon they found the body of a swaddled dead baby at the base of a vine in the corner of a vineyard outside of town. I have never spoken to mom about that morning.

*

I have grown up … Now I am a doctor. Ready to serve out my years of mandatory civil service.

After drawing lots for our posts most of my friends have ended up in health clinics in the east or the southeast, but I have been fortunate enough to get a post in a village clinic not far from Ankara.