Those were the most beautiful, most exciting, brightest years of my life … But having said that they were also the times when I plucked diamonds off trees and stars out of the earth, years when I was blind to the notion of the impossible.

One day a group of patients had gathered outside my examination room like they always did every morning. At one point nurse Mesude hanım opened the door and shouted:

“Anyone waiting for a report.”

Out of the crowd comes a middle-aged man with a beard and a seven- or eight-year-old boy at his side, hanging his head … It’s Remzi and his son Bektaş … Wending through the crowd, they come into my room. It seems a relative has raped Bektaş, and was caught by the gendarmerie. They are asking me to prepare a rape report. I have to examine the boy’s anus. His head bowed, the boy is silently waiting, the faint seal of the courthouse on this right wrist. When we have him come up onto the examining table and get on all fours and he looks up at me fearfully, my heart falls and for a moment I don’t know what to do. The examination surely reminds him of what has happened to him. Then it is over and they are gone as quickly as they came. The image of the purple seal on the boy’s right wrist is lodged in my mind.

*

Another day I went off to a village quite far away from town to perform an autopsy on a young woman who hanged herself.

Traveling with the prosecutor, I soon learned the young woman’s story. Her name was Reyhan. She was newly married. Her husband was serving in the military when she was raped by her father-in-law and got pregnant. Her mother-in-law knows everything but stays silent. Her husband is soon to come back from the military so she is left with only one solution. The young woman hangs herself from a beam in their pantry.

The family has carefully followed the prosecutor’s orders: “don’t touch a thing until we get there.” When we step into the pantry the first thing I see is the stretched-out, frail little frame of the young girl, her şalvar around her feet and the rope around her chin. A chair has toppled to the ground and beside it is her a bundle filled with a funeral shroud, soap, a washcloth, a loose robe and some jewelry. It’s as if she has prepared for the trip.

Something else was hanging from a rope tied to the ceiling. A wheel of meat. Roasted in the summer and kept throughout the winter. It was traditional to keep this sort of thing hanging from the ceiling. Half of it was already eaten. Outside a group of villagers was silently waiting with a pot of water, ready to wash the body. When I got back to the residence that night I couldn’t sleep.

*

Twenty-five years have passed since. Now I am in Istanbul. In the papers I read the following story: “Sahe Fidan from the city of Urfa, who was married off in a bride exchange, had an argument with her husband. Unable to bear a life with him any longer she took refuge in her father’s home where she hanged herself in the bathroom, her year-and-a-half year old child strapped to her back.” Those close to Sahe have said, “women married like this around here don’t come out of their homes alive.” And that’s precisely what happened.