“I don’t want you! Go away,” I yelled the first morning we were together in the kitchen. She had clearly prepared breakfast with dedication: chopped fruit, chocolate milk. “I don’t want you! I want Sonia!” I yelled again, and my voice shook. Nana took a walnut kuchen from the oven, cut a slice, and handed it to me with a smile.

“A person can get used to anything,” she said in an apologetic tone, keeping her mouth in a curve, tensing the millions of wrinkles around it. Her white hair was messy, as always. Her skin was dark, leathery, and she had a small hump on her back.

Naturally, I had met Aunt Nana before, but I didn’t know any details about her life until later. She was sixty-five years old, although everything indicated she was older, since she could remember the day she was added to the civil registry. She was the first of three sisters—half sisters, really. Supposedly she was the daughter of a Turk her mother had worked for, or so they said. The fact is that she never met her real father, although to her, that was more anecdote than tragedy. Also, unlike her sisters, she never married. She was the daughter who stayed at home to take care of her mother. During the ’60s she’d worked in the Hirmas fabric factory as a seamstress. She handed over her entire salary to her mother, who likewise decided what was done in the house and what wasn’t. During the dictatorship, the factory had closed like so many others. She got work as a maid, a “nana,” and after a few years, just after her mother died, she started to take care of her sisters’ children, and later the children of her sisters’ children. It was then that the name Monica was hidden behind her main occupation, and she became Nana, Aunt Nana.

My mother didn’t pay her to take care of me, although not because of the economic problems we were going through, or not only that. The fact that she had nowhere else to go after her mother’s death was as obvious as the fact that in ten more years no one—neither of the other sisters, none of the nieces—would want her in their houses. It wasn’t necessary to explain the matter further; my mother offered her lodging and food at least until I could take care of myself, which would be more than long enough, considering the years she could have left to live.

I found all this out later, at about the same time I realized that, in spite of appearances, Nana wasn’t as fragile as we all supposed.

“I’m not going to love you ever!”