“Son, no one is listening to me so the least you can do is listen. Take me to Kıran. So I can visit the graves of mom and dad. It’s been so long. I’ll read them a prayer.”

“Alright, mom … Of course, let’s go.”

Half an hour later we are at the Kıran cemetery on the hill overlooking town. Mom is looking for my granddad and my ebe’s graves.

“The gravestones have all but disappeared. As if they were made of kısır. The wind and the rain have eroded the stones. Last time I came I brought some paint and splashed a little over what was left of the stones, leavıng a mark … So I would be able to find them.”

And we did. Mom kneels down like a little girl in front of the graves of my granddad and my ebe and she recites prayers and speaks to them. Standing a little behind her, I silently watch.

The next religious holiday is two months later. The holiday of Eid al-Fitr. I had both graves redone. And I brought mom for a visit. Weeping, she rubbed her hands over her face—she loved the new gravestones.

In her eyes I saw the same grateful look I saw in the eyes of an old man from Mardin looking at the cameras.

Seventy-year-old Ibrahim Aslan was shedding tears of joy because his prayers had been answered. Eighteen years later the bones of his son Emin had been found at the bottom of a well, which is why he was so happy. Now just lean back and think about this for a minute. A father is shedding tears of joy because the skull and the bones of his son who was murdered and missing had finally been found at the bottom of a well. In light of this all the other joys in this country seem profane …

*

There has been a military coup and the junta is keen to send people to the gallows to make a lesson of them. One of the victims is Veysel Güney. After attendıng two hearings, 11 days apart, he was sentenced to death and hanged on June 10, 1981. The Gaziantep Cumhuriyet prosecutor at the time tells about the night of the execution:

“… I said, ‘It is customary for us to ask. Veysel, what is your last request?’ ‘To write a letter to my father,’ he said. We gave him pen and paper. He wrote his letter. No one there knew this man who was taken to the rope. No lawyer, no relatives, no one at all …”

Veysel doesn’t have a grave. They weren’t satisfied with just hanging him— they never relinquished his body.

“… From afar came a crow with a dead crow in its maw and it landed nearby. It scratched away at the earth, placed the dead bird in the hole and then covered the hole with the same soil. Cain saw this and his heart ached and he felt remorse for having left the body of his brother out in the open and for not living up to the crow. Ah! It smarted …”