Faruk died a month later. I went to his funeral. In a little mosque tucked away in the neighborhood. Only a few people attended. We stopped to pray together. Beside me were Faruk’s dad and his little boy. He was praying too. He was just receiving his blessings and the prayers began again when the boy slowly went over to the body on the musalla stone. He approached his dad wrapped in his funeral shroud and placed his head on his chest. For a while the imam and the crowd looked dumbly at the child. It was as if his dad was still alive and in the most natural way he had placed his head on his chest. “He’s an orphan now. What else is there for him to do,” mumbled the neighborhood barber who was standing beside me.

*

Dad was also an orphan. Granddad died when he was five …

“Me and mother were in Kızılöz … It was July … Harvest time … The news came. Yusuf of the Cerit clan came with his horse and carriage to give the news, he told my maternal uncle Abdullah. ‘Mustafa of Köse is sick … He’s not well … They are taking him to Kayseri.’ It was a summer day … Really hot … We set out along the path … Mother walked along through her tears … I struggled to keep up with her … Halfway there we ran into a horse and carriage and thankfully they took us the rest of the way … When we got there they had already buried dad. They said he started to smell, you see it was a summer day … Mother was in such despair as she cried because she wouldn’t ever see his face again … . Water had gathered in the part of the courtyard where they had washed him … Water from the funeral cleansing … I was just a kid … With a stick I made channels so the water could run into a little puddle … I was playing on my own. Then my sister came over and hit me on the head … to say, ‘look, your dad’s dead and there you are making puddles’.”

“What more can you remember about him, dad,” I would insist.

“What kind of person was he? How did he treat you?” Toward the end, his mind was pretty confused and he would tell me fragments of memories:

“He was like this, dad had this broad, chubby face. And a beard. No doubt he got the nickname ‘beardless’ because we raised lambs and goats. In a cupboard in his room he kept sugar cubes. Sugar cubes. They were precious back then. I always had this really pale face. Everyone used to say, ‘the kid’s got worms, give him some gasoline to get rid of them.’ So one day when I was playing on the doorstep, he said, ‘Come inside and I’ll give you some sugar. But first you have to drink this.’ And he handed me half a glass of gasoline. ‘Knock this back,’ he said. And before I had the chance to spit the stuff out he stuffed a sugar cube in my mouth. I wept as I chomped on the cube. Then he pressed my head against his chest and we stayed like that … . I’ll always miss him … not the gasoline or the sugar … but his chest … that’s the only thing I remember …”