My dear Sahe, couldn’t you have found another way? Oh you misfortunate girl, did you really think your baby would come with you when you tied him to your back? If only you knew the headlines in this country of mine, a country that leaves you no choice but the end of a rope? Your one-and-a-half-year-old dark-eyed son has stayed behind. Now he’ll grow up in a country where hustlers and thieves are respected, jesters are applauded and conspirators and the unrepentant are crowned. My hope is that when he grows up to be healthy and sound he won’t be mired in the pain and despair of a poor, dark-walled neighborhood of a big city.

A doctor of 25 years and I have no cure for a sister with no choice but to hang herself from the end of a rope … No balm for Ihsan’s loneliness … Not the power to erase the seal on Bektas’s wrist … To listen to Reyhan even once … I have nothing for them. And will I have anything after this? I don’t know. My hope is that the people governing this country will one day wake up from this deathly sleep. My hope is that there will be a sliver of hope left behind for us …

14

Hearts in the Palms
of Our Hands

All the brothers and sisters were stretched out on the wool mattress laid out on the floor. It was really cold. No one dares to look out from under the blanket. Keeping my eyes shut, I listen to the sounds of my ebe from Cemel. I can make out what she is doing. Not long ago we heard the morning call to prayer. Now she is taking her ablutions before muttering prayers as she patters about the house. After kneeling down to pray she gets up and keeps moving. On the doorstep I hear the sound of a shovel and then a broom. So she is clearing out the snow. Now silence. Surely she has gone to the stable. A little later she’ll come inside and go straight upstairs. To wake up mom. She’ll nudge her feet to wake her so as not to wake up dad, too. Mom needs to get up but dad can sleep; because she will always spoil her boy. As she comes downstairs she is talking to herself:

“The sun is high in the sky and these guys are still asleep.” By the way it’s still five in the morning. A little later mom will come down to light the stove. Now my ebe goes outside but she’s back in no time. Kneeling by the bed, she is up to something. Her hands are cold. Sticking them under the blanket, she wants to warm them up on my brother’s feet. We all scream:

“Ebe, don’t touch our feet!”

But her hands are frozen and she is determined to warm them up. I let her take my feet. To warm the palms of her hands. When I come back home from school my hands will be purple from the cold and I will put them in her warm, rough, wrinkled palms. Her weary palms whose lines have faded under the cracks of all the toil. Married when she was 17 and widowed at 20, my ebe always looked at the world with the innocence of a 17-year-old and with a great big smile stretched across her face. Her dad was my great granddad Ismail from Cemel, a poor sharecropper who worked on one of the fields that belonged to my granddad from the Köse family. When Köse Mustafa’s first wife died and he was looking to get married again, my great granddad said in desperation, “Uncle Köse, I have seven daughters so take any one you like.” Among them my granddad chose the youngest, Safiye, who was just 17 years old.