The Kaymakam went on but I wasn’t listening any more. I felt the shame and humiliation running down my neck and over my back, taking hold of my entire soul.

Swaying from side to side and with my tongue glued to the roof of my mouth, I left the office. Vicdan was busy with some other work, her head lowered over her desk. She didn’t even look up.

My armpit was now empty. Not long ago it tightly held my file but now it felt like a great empty space that was grinning at me. My head bowed I walked the full length of the street. Passing Arif’s pharmacy, I tried not to look.

Going up to my room in the hospital, I lay down on my bed without taking off my clothes.

23 The Country of the Forgotten Dead

23

The Country of the Forgotten Dead

Summer

Night is about to fall. Still burning the steppes, the sun does not want to set. After spending the entire day rushing here and there, tending to patients, I was planning to get away to the city club, the only place to have fun in town, when I was caught by the gendarmerie commander who invited me to sit down with him and have a tea.

Sipping our teas in the police station garden beside the local hospital, I am trying to convince him that garlic alone won’t bring down his mother-in-law’s high blood pressure and insisting that she should take her medicine, too, when his assistant comes over and says something to the captain. I can tell from the look on his face that my plans for dinner have just gone down the drain.

The mysterious death of a child in a nearby village. We hit the road. Me, the prosecutor, the fat court clerk, my taciturn autopsy technician and our driver all stuffed in one car, and the gendarmerie jeep trailing behind us. We arrive in the little village. There is a house with a big courtyard. A granary in one corner. The body of a child in front of a pile of hay, covered by a sheet. A bearded, old man on his knees, his face in his hands. Villagers huddled in silence behind him.

Grain hauled in by tractors is dripping out of the back of the granary. Unable to support the weight, the door hinge snapped and all the grain inside came pouring out. A four- or five-year-old boy playing in front of the granary was crushed under all that grain. Tons of harvested grain. No one saw him there. Everyone carried on working until they realized that he was no where to be found …

When I pull away the sheet to determine the cause of death, the old man, who was most likely his grandfather, stands up and, wiping the tears out of his eyes, takes my hands in both his hands.