“Dad, mom has given birth.”

“Really, gave birth to what?”

“A boy.”

“Oh that’s all she knows how to do.” Well, of course, after three boys the poor man was expecting a girl. How else do you think he would react? Despondent, my brother said, “He didn’t even give me twenty-five kuruş.”

“And then, mom?”

“And then … You were very weak. No bigger than a hand. I wrapped you in the blanket that was draped over the tandır. And I made enough tatlık to last the winter. In other words you grew up in a blanket …”

*

When they left their homes they brought with them “one enormous stallion, an old mare, an old carpet and two blankets.” Or so mom used to say. In our new home I remember how she would weave at her loom day and night while my ebe folded blankets. Such labor and belief in the middle of the Anatolian steppes. In the mornings I would wake up to the sounds of mom at the loom and under the blanket I would do my homework for my classes that day. Those lines are forever etched in my mind: “… it is a dark climate. The summers are hot and dry, winters are brutal and cold. This is a desert climate. Vegetation consists of shrubs and low trees …”

“Did you write it down, my lamb?”

“Write down what, mom?”

“What I told you last night.”

“I did, mom.”

I had written down what she had told me in my blank yellow mathematics notebook. “Let us have loads of wheat this year. Let us have loads of wheat this year …” One hundred times. Behind me mom prays and there is a strange rush in my breast. Later I am leaning over the stone bridge, tearing up those pages and throwing them in the river.

The sixth of May. It’s Hıdrellez. Mom has gotten up early and gone to the river bank. She will draw shapes in the sandy shore of the Kızılırmak. She’ll make houses out of little pebbles and make-shift figures out of reeds. She will wish for her cousins to have children to raise, for her grandchildren to have homes to live in and for me to go to university. It was probably Sunday because I hadn’t gone to school. I had been lost in a book I couldn’t put down for days. Three Saplings in the Gallows. Hüseyin İnan had returned to his hometown of Sarız as a fugitive. Birds of prey hot on his tail. Embracing her baby boy his mother didn’t know what had happened to him. He was tired and needed to sleep. The blanket was too short. His mother is anxious, thinking Hüseyin might catch a cold.

“I will make the blanket longer,” she says. “For the next time he comes.”

“Don’t bother,” says Huseyin, “I might not come back.” His mother doesn’t know what he means. It’ss this spot in the book that always makes me cry, hiding under my blanket.