The kaymakamlık’s secretary, Vicdan, greeted me in a fairly bright mood, sitting me down in one of the old leather chairs before going inside to tell the Kaymakam I had arrived. Earlier that morning she had called to welcome me to the new post and managed to get me to write five separate boxes of the hypertension medicine her mother-in-law had been using for the past 10 years. When she came back, she wore a faint grin:

“Come in doctor, the Kaymakam is waiting for you, but please don’t forget your file,” she said as she led me inside.

Clutching the file ever more tightly in the pit of my arm, I went in to see the Kaymakam. I was meeting him for the first time. He hadn’t been at the club the night before. His businessman brother-in-law Cem had a visitor from Hatay and the kaymakam felt it wouldn’t have looked good on him if he’d left him home alone.

“Today is the auspicious day, doctor. Welcome, and may the job be felicitous,” he said as he walked over to me.

No sooner had we shaken hands than I handed the file over to its rightful owner, the Kaymakam (!), proud of finally having presented this extremely precious and holy keepsake to him.

Astonished, the Kaymakam looked down at the file that I had pushed into his hands and then up at my face.

“What’s this, doctor?” he said, the words tumbling out of his mouth.

“My start report, sir,” I answered with full confidence.

“Yes, but why did you bring it?” And after a short pause, he asked:

“Did Ertan Bey send this with you?”

“Yes,” I answered. He seemed slightly put off.

“Oh for the love of God, please have a seat,” he said as he went back behind his desk. I knew something was wrong but I wasn’t quite sure what.

He pressed a buzzer. A servant came in. The Kaymakam ordered two teas as he handed the servant the file as if he were relinquishing something disagreeable, and he said:

“Take these documents and have them process them.”

Before our teas had even arrived he had finished signing all the forms on his desk without saying a word. Then putting down his pen, he leaned back in his chair and began:

“Doctor, you are now a government doctor. It isn’t your job to shuttle back and forth with such documents. Now this ingrate they call Ertan plays the same trick on every incoming doctor so please forgive us. This is just some sort of game. More precisely, a scoundrel’s game. I have no idea what pleasure he gets out of it. ‘We’ll stuff the file under the man’s arm and totter him off on his way,’ they say, and so what? Anyway, don’t let it bother you, whenever there is another report send Kerim over and that will be that …”