The Municipality Man
Who Drew a Gun

It was in my fifth year of my mandatory civil service. I was in a little town quite close to the capital but it still felt like I was thousands of kilometers away.

I was tired and bored and I had lost those unadulterated emotions I had when I first started the job and worst of all I needed more and more money to support my new habit of whooping it up in the pavyons of Ankara at the weekend. It got to the point where the humble salary of a practitioner would not cover my nocturnal thrills.

Just around that time Ahmet Salcı, who served as mayor for a different political party every term, made a suggestion: “Why not have the doctor register as our official municipality doctor. We don’t have one. Would you agree to being our contracted doctor?” Of course I jumped at the offer.

A week later I would sign up as a municipal doctor after a decision was made by the municipality committee. There was no need for me to join the committee meeting and best of all the municipality was going to pay me a third of what I was getting from the state.

In the beginning everything went well. The short, unshapely accountant to the mayor, Selami would stop by the health clinic at the start of every month, come right up under my nose and place a little envelope stuffed with money on my desk with a mysterious flourish, as if performing some kind of cloak-and-dagger act. He was always wearing a red tie and with spittle gathering at the corner of his mouth he hardly made any sense from the moment he started talking.

Selami was an organic fixture common in most village municipalities and public institutions—a local staff member who served in a fabricated post. For Ahmet Abi, who served as mayor ad infinitum, Selami was a villager, friend, and of course a confidant. I heard that the municipality’s dirty work went through Selami, but whenever the subject came up I would say, “None of that matters to me, brother, as long as they pay me at the start of every month.”

We had come to the end of a cold winter. Everything was up and running smoothly but something had taken the taste out of my mouth. For the last two months Selami hadn’t brought me my salary and the worst thing of all was that I really needed the money that week. So that day I refused to sign the forms Şaban the Blind brought over for me and I scolded him before I sent him away.

“Tell Selami that the doctor wouldn’t sign these,” I said and I waited to see how Şaban the Blind would take my first salvo.

Grinning at me for a while with a blank look on his face, he left without saying a word.