It takes about two hours from Ankara to Keskin so she would get to my place around 11 or close to noon. In detail I described the spot on the roadside where she would get off, the petrol station at the beginning of my road, the chicken farm and everything else. I explained to her that I wouldn’t be able to pick her up there but that I would be waiting for her at home, and that once she got off the bus she should walk two hundred meters down the road and take the stairs on the left beside the restaurant that sold alcohol, which would take her straight to the door of my house. Suffering from a shyness whose origins still baffle me today, I didn’t want the town to know I had a girlfriend. So after Handan and I spent the weekend together, Aykut, son of Naci Abi, who ran the bakery, would secretly pick us up in his Murat 124 and drop us off at the petrol station.

I got up early on Saturday morning and lit the stove. The house warmed up right away. Turning on the water heater I had put in last week, I checked the temperature of the water. Then I hurried through breakfast and pulled my chair over to the balcony door whose curtains were almost always drawn and sat down to wait. There wasn’t a soul around. The cold winter we were having gave me the impression I was in the middle of nowhere. Apart from trips to the kitchen to top up my tea, I kept my eyes fixed on the street, peering through a crack in the curtain. I kept thinking to myself that when I see Handan walking toward the house I’ll signal the front door to her from the window and maybe even meet her on the stairs before she has a chance to knock on the door.

At one point I got distracted creating an elaborate arrangement of sample medicine boxes in the living room medicine cabinet when there was a knock on the door. Thrilled, I raced over. Yes, she had finally come. There she was smiling at me from the other side of the door. She was wearing her classic jeans, her sister’s beret and the woolen cloak—the kind that were so popular in those days and which I’d bought with my first salary and sent to her—and she was holding a little suitcase—there she was standing right in front of me. Clearly she was cold. I quickly led her inside and shut the door.

“No one saw you, right?”

“Oh no… Nobody is out there. And I was the only one who got off the bus.”

We had spent no more than an hour alone and I was on my way to the kitchen to brew another pot of tea when someone rings the doorbell!