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Back Fairy Chimney Soda Save as PDF
Chapters (38)
  1. Cover
  2. Half Title
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright Page
  5. Contents
  6. Preface
  7. 1 Kurban:
  8. 2 I Am an Orphan, Press Me to Your Chest
  9. 3 What Has That Got to Do with It, Dad!
  10. 4 I Am Grown Up, Dad
  11. 5 The Weight of Your Coat
  12. 6 “We’ll Ask Someone for Our Name, and She’ll Tell Us”
  13. 7 The Seal
  14. 8 Whose Blood Is That on the Photo?
  15. 9 The Smell of Bread or Blood?
  16. 10 What’s Left for Us
  17. 11 A Drop of Water
  18. 12 Just Let Go
  19. 13 Turkey at the End of Its Rope
  20. 14 Hearts in the Palms of Our Hands
  21. 15 The Burnt Smell Inside Us
  22. 16 The Quilt
  23. 17 Where Are Our Dead?
  24. 18 Mothers Sniff Out Their Lambs
  25. 19 The Soul of a Word
  26. 20 Three Kinds of Truth and Us
  27. 21 The Country Doctor
  28. 22 The File Under My Arm
  29. 23 The Country of the Forgotten Dead
  30. 24 The Coming of the Fiancée
  31. 25 The Lie
  32. 26 Why These Scars?
  33. 27 The Municipality Man Who Drew a Gun
  34. 28 Tell All Your Friends, I learned How to Die
  35. 29 God Willing, He Is Dead
  36. 30 Come Along, Let’s Start off by Saving Ourselves
  37. 31 A Whistle Out of Chestnut
  38. Glossary

Certain events can lead you up a road you can never come back down. There is turbulence and then a breaking point in your life and from then on nothing is the same as it was before.

You are a young doctor, just 23 years old. You get your assignment as a civil servant in a town in the middle of Anatolia, steeped in all the sadness and the heat of the steppes. In the middle of nowhere you are standing there with a prescription fluttering in your hand. It is as if you are lost somewhere in space.

You have been working for five or six months at a health center when a man who owns a funeral parlor comes in one morning and asks you to write a “burial report.” On foot you set off for a poor neighborhood some way out of town—the family doesn’t have a car or the money to pay for a taxi.

In the midst of incredible poverty you go through a crowd waiting in silence and come to the dead boy lying on a sofa in a corner of the room. His face seems quite familiar. And at one point you notice a prescription under a bottle on a little table beside the sofa. Straightaway you recognize your own handwriting. On top of that slip of paper is a half drunken bottle of cough syrup. Ok. So this is the boy with pneumonia you examined last week. You prescribed a heavy dose of antibiotics, too, but where are they? Didn’t they work? Sitting down on the sofa bed in the entrance by the door to write your burial report, you slowly ask the father:

“You used all the medicine, right?”

The father pauses for a moment then speaks as if offering an apology:

“These days we’ve been in a bit of a pinch, doctor. So we figured we would get the cough syrup and leave the injections for later …”

And so after that day you press every prescription firmly into the hands of your patients. Especially those for children. Waking up in the middle of the night in alarm, you go over the prescriptions you wrote that day one more time. From then on you can’t let a patient go until you ask him how and when he is going to get his medicine. From then on nothing in your life is the same again.

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