After my last class I would while away the time in the coffeehouse across from the hospital with my satchel over my shoulder before I go to the casualty ward. Dressed in my scrubs, I was now an ambitious med student volunteering in the ward.
Some time after midnight I would slowly drift into the background and crash on one of the patient beds in a cubicle.
Many stories from those days remain with me as well as one harrowing brush with an emergency.
I remember it being one of those nights when the rain wouldn’t let up. They brought in a pregnant woman who had overdosed in Manisa. When she came in she still had a faint pulse. The team in the ward administered CPR straightaway. The doctor and the nurse struggled for some time but they lost her. When it was clear nothing more could be done, there was a brief moment of silence. Then you begin to clear away instruments, devices and any medicine. The young woman’s relatives are waiting anxiously at the door. Who’s going to give them the news?
Leaning against the wall and waiting, I noticed a casualty ward nurse. Opening the hand of the young woman she had been struggling to save, she carefully examined her palm.
I gave her a look to say, “what’s going on?”
“I have always wondered about the lines in our palms. I was looking for her life line. To see if it really was short?” says the nurse.
Filled with a strange emotion, I stepped over to the dead woman. I leaned over, looked at her body and then the palm of her hand. Right away I noticed her belly: she was pregnant. Her baby was no more than a month or two old. Now it won’t live. Her mother had taken her. Now I was out in the world with the thought of a child without lines in her palms and my heart was aching.
15
The Burnt Smell Inside Us
Mustafa Usta had come to Fırınbaşı to fire the pottery he had piled up the day before. But first he lit a cigarette. On their way to school in the early hours of the morning students had thrown their modest backpacks up onto the wheat market wall and were showing each other “Yılmaz Güney” cards they got from packets of gum. That melancholy, end-of-a-holiday look was playing on their faces. Watching the burning ovens, I am on my way to school, dressed in my “he-can-wear-it-next year” jacket with dad’s handkerchief in the inside pocket and a tie my uncle had tied for me that would stay like that all year.
When the fire from the oven got too hot, Mustafa Usta stepped over to a corner and lit another cigarette. A thick smoke rose up into the air and flames twisted like angry snakes as the fire hungrily blazed the jugs and crocks.
At one point the Usta caught sight of Ali from Hacı Bekir’s family, who was wandering around the oven as if he was still asleep. Ali was a strange bird who wandered the shores of the river alone and never spoke to anyone. He didn’t usually come to the Fırınbaşı so Mustafa Usta must have wondered what he was doing there.