Then time passes. In a town in the Anatolian steppes six or seven years feel like a thousand. You learn how to forget some things. It’s Eid and the hospital’s head physician and your colleagues, a young surgeon who is on rotation and an old practitioner, have gone on holiday. You are bored and sitting in your office one morning when the head prosecutor’s assistant comes in and tells you that you need to head out for a matter of justice. With the usual cast of characters, you head out to report on a fatal accident that has taken place in one of the fields outside of town. It must be July or August. The sun isn’t yet high in the sky. It’s the harvest season. Across the broad fields stretched over the steppes people are moving about like ants. Weary farmers stare at you with sleep dripping from their eyes as they pass you in tractors pulling wagons piled high with wheat.

The body of the young boy is lying in an uncut field of wheat. He is the son of one of the harvester drivers from Adana, who comes to the town every year to work night and day over these few months. He came to work alongside his dad, one of the harvester drivers who opted to work through the night to escape the unbearable heat of the day. Father and son worked two days straight without any sleep. Unable to bear it any longer, the boy went off to a corner of the field where he spread out his coat among the wheat and lay down to sleep. In the dark of night a tractor loaded with wheat never saw the boy and ran right over his head.

The owner of the field is distraught. He’s concerned about the reaping of his harvest and wondering if he is now running late. And the prosecutor is quite unhappy for having been called away on the morning of Eid. He is of the opinion that there is no need for a doctor to do a classic autopsy and that everyone should just head home.

Stricken by grief and with a cigarette that is no more than a strip of ash dangling from his lips, the father is looking down at his son. A little further on the tractor driver is explaining something to the gendarmerie and the prosecutor.

Tired, you sit down on a nearby stone. Dressed in şalvar from Adana, his sun-burnt, olive face steeped in pain, the boy’s father answers a question in a conversation running through his head: “People back in Adana were asking if we were going to sacrifice an animal this year so I should at least call and tell them that we did. May God take him.”