The young man was quiet, resigned. Every week he brought whatever his wife and mother-in-law had asked for, the same people who had killed his own father. And every time he met with his wife he looked helplessly at the child in her arms. He was just a kid who didn’t know if this little boy was his brother or his son.

In a corner smoking a cigarette, he poured out his heart:

“What happened happened … There’s nothing to be done … My dad got what he deserved. And I can’t give up on my wife.”

He saved what he could from the house. Clearly he was trying to establish a new life. A life you rub out only for it to be used again but the more you rub the more you reveal what was written in the past; strips of a parchment; a palimpsest.

*

“When I die will you wrap me in a blanket before you bury me, son?” dad asked me one day.

“Why is that, dad?”

“It’s cold now and in the end I’ll be in the ground. I’ll get cold … And then there are all those creepy crawlies.”

Of course I couldn’t just say, “what difference does it make once you’re dead.”

“Ok dad. But for the love of God don’t think about such things,” I said slowly.

However I am still haunted by one tragic blanket story. On December 19, 2000, blankets like the one my dad had asked of me with startling innocence were thrown to young men languishing on their deathbeds for days in a cell in Bayrampaşa Prison. Listen how one of the soldiers who played a part in the massacre explained what happened years later:

“After the fire broke out in the cell we threw blankets at the inmates crying out for help, saying ‘we are throwing in wet blankets to save you, wrap yourselves in them to protect yourselves.’ ‘But the blankets were soaked in paint thinner and gasoline and not water.’ Wrapped up in them they burned even faster.”

For 12 years the smell of burning human flesh has smoldered in the lungs of this country. The voice of that girl shouting at the bulldozer at the wall of the collapsed prison, “you burned them all,” is like a palimpsest; you open a new page in your life to write down something new and it resurfaces. Either you turn away and slip back into a deathly slumber or you face the past and hold your shame accountable.

16

The Quilt

“I mean when exactly was I born, mom?”

“I have no idea, my lamb … Your ebe brought us a pole of grapes from the vineyard in Kuşadaşı. They had already dried. So it must have been the end of September. There was a carpet on my loom with a only a few days work left. Toward the evening I had contractions.

“You go to bed and I’ll call your dear mother Pembe,” your ebe said and then left. Karoğlan was playing just outside the door. Then Pembe ebe came. I gave birth to you right then and there. Your ebe cheered because you were a boy. Of course we were sharecroppers so we needed men to work the fields. Your brother ran to your dad to give him the good news. He was in Ortamahalle, playing prafa in the Hafi coffeehouse …”