I was around five or six years. May had exploded over the steppes in all her exuberance. The linaria, crocus and the evening primrose flowers had bloomed on the banks of the Kızılrırmak and I was holding dad’s hand as I watched him hurry hundreds of bleating lambs across the shallowest part of the river.

Each lamb was soon reunited with its mother. Suddenly the plain was a place of joyous celebration. The shepherd whistling, the lambs bleating and the river babbling. Such happiness.

I asked dad the first thing that sprung to mind:

“How do the lambs recognize their mothers?”

Pinching the ear of a lost lamb seeking its mother, he answered me without looking at me: “The mothers can smell them, don’t worry about that.”

*

Dad gave me a hug and breathed me in. I always remember his proud, upright way of walking. But now his shoulders were slightly slumped as he walked up the dirt road that led away from the school, without looking back, and then he disappeared. I was standing there stunned in front of the high school that had once been an old church, holding a plastic bag filled with a pair of pajamas we had just picked up from a fancy clothes shop, slippers, a toothbrush and soap. When I hug my own son now I can understand dad’s despair then.

After finishing middle school I took the tests that allowed me to go to Niğde High School as a boarding student tuition free. It was a Ramadan month. The older students were following the developments of the Arab–Israeli war on a transistor radio.

When the kids from Diyarbakır (boarding students who came at the same time as me) saw the cooked chickpeas at dinner they whispered to each other:

“Oh man, look, they cooked the chickpeas …”

By the third day I was curled up on my top bunk bed quietly crying as I breathed in the yarn in my hands. The zipper on my tattered old suitcase was broken and mom had tied it shut with the yarn she used to weave carpets. I had discovered that it smelled like her. In the nights to come I always slept with that yarn.

*