Emanet: Part one

At three in the morning a freelance developer runs out of quota, and a service nobody can find offers him unlimited tokens. The price is small: one memory per use. The first four chapters of an eight-chapter story.

One: Quota

I am going to tell you this story from the beginning, but I have one condition: read carefully. In a moment a man is going to type "y" on a screen. A single letter. You have typed that letter many times, and so have I. Without reading the conditions, at three in the morning, just to get the thing done. Whether machines make us lazy, or whether a person is lazy at three in the morning anyway, is a separate debate, and let us not open it just now. Now we are going to Moda, to a small flat on the second floor. The time is 02.40.

Oktay Yıldıran sat at his desk with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, looking at the screen. On the screen was a half-finished warehouse app. A shelf-count screen for Kardelen Lojistik, a barcode reader, and a report page for the night shift. It was due at nine in the morning. That was what the contract said, and Kardelen's general manager had said it three times on the phone as well: "Nine o'clock, Mr Oktay. Not half past nine."

Three quarters of the job was done. The agent would write the rest. Oktay told it what he wanted, the agent wrote the code, ran the tests, made fixes, and Oktay read along behind it and approved. He had done all his work this way for the past year. It was faster. Cheaper too, at least until the end of the month.

And a yellow line dropped onto the bottom of the screen:

You have reached your usage limit. Your limit resets in 5 days 3 hours.

Oktay read the line twice. Then he opened the settings page. There was a button to upgrade the monthly plan, and next to the button, a price. He entered his card. The screen thought for a while and turned the card down. Insufficient funds. The rent was three months behind, and the landlord had started leaving notes on the door. He knew that. He had tried anyway.

He opened his second account. The one he had opened last year, on another night like this, with his wife's email address. His wife was no longer his wife, and the account had been closed too: "This account has been suspended for violation of the terms of use."

"Oh, for God's sake," said Oktay, to the empty room.

He picked up his phone and wrote to Haldun. Haldun ran a repair shop in Yeldeğirmeni and hated AI companies, the thing called the cloud and the location service on his phone in equal measure. But he had been forced to get an API key for a job, and Oktay knew it.

Can I use your key for one night? Until nine in the morning. I'll pay for it.

The message was read. Three dots appeared, vanished, appeared again.

Get some sleep, Okto.

Oktay put the phone face down on the desk. He could write the rest of the code himself. Twenty years ago he would have. The barcode reader's driver, the queries for the night report, forty-two screen tests. By nine in the morning? He topped up his coffee and opened the first file. Ten minutes later he was on the third line of the same function and could not work out why a variable was coming back empty.

Now I am going to ask you a favour. Do not judge Oktay at this point. Every year that a machine does your thinking for you, a piece of your own thinking muscle wastes away. This is not a catastrophe, nor is it a moral question. What is at issue is a quiet and ordinary process, like the legs of someone who never takes the stairs. Oktay's legs had given out at two in the morning, at forty-eight, in the middle of a warehouse app. That is all.

At 03.05 a new line appeared in the terminal. It was not yellow. It was white, in the same type as the other lines, and it was not the output of any command.

Your quota is used up.

Oktay scrolled. Above the line was the last test he had run; below it, nothing. The cursor blinked.

Emanet offers unlimited tokens. Tonight and from now on.

Price: one memory per use.

Do you accept? (y/n)

His first thought was a phishing attack. He pulled up the network traffic. In those minutes his machine was not connecting anywhere, or if it was, it left no trace to show it. He looked at the terminal history. The lines were not there. The last command in the history was the test he had run forty minutes earlier.

His second thought was Haldun. Haldun played jokes like this. When they were fifteen he had put a floppy in Oktay's Commodore and loaded a program that printed "SYSTEM CRASHED, CALL YOUR MUM" at start-up. But Haldun could not have got into Oktay's machine at three in the morning, remotely, without leaving a trace. No one could.

And his third thought was this: what difference does it make?

Below, in small faint letters, there was one more line: Details: emanet terms. Oktay did not click it. You would have clicked, wouldn't you? So would I. I would have clicked, if I had not been a man at three in the morning with his rent overdue, his wife gone, his daughter in Bursa and a warehouse app half finished.

"One memory," said Oktay. Said out loud, it sounded funny. How many memories could he get through by nine in the morning? How many did he have? Which one would he miss? The cold nights on guard duty in the army? The name of his manager at his first job?

He typed y and pressed Enter.

Thank you. Your tokens are ready.

The agent's yellow line disappeared. Something new opened on the screen: the same window, the same layout, but with a small counter in the top right corner. The counter read zero.

Oktay described the job. The barcode reader's driver, the night report, the tests. And the screen began to write.

He had used the agent for a year and knew how fast it was. This was not the agent. This wrote twice as fast, three times as fast. Files opened and closed, tests turned green. Oktay tried to read along behind it and could not keep up. At one point he stopped it and asked why a function had been written that way. The answer was three lines long and correct. It also explained the empty variable he had been stuck on ten minutes earlier: the date field in the database was kept in Greenwich time in the warehouse system, not Turkish time, and after midnight everything slipped by a day. Oktay would not have found that himself. Not tonight, at least.

Each time a piece of the job was finished, the counter in the top right went up by one and a line dropped in beneath it:

Paid: 1 memory.

Oktay looked at the first few, then stopped looking. By four the night report was done. By five the barcode reader was working on a test device. By six, forty-two tests out of forty-two were green. The counter stood at eleven.

At 07.20 he uploaded the app to Kardelen's test server. At 07.25 he wrote an email to the general manager. Emanet wrote the email too; Oktay only read it and sent it. It was a polite, short, confident email. It was better than the ones Oktay wrote himself. He noticed this and did not dwell on it.

At 08.40 the answer came: "Excellent, Mr Oktay. I'm authorising the payment today. Let's talk about next month as well."

Oktay shut the laptop, lay down on the bed and slept in his shoes.

When he woke it was 15.10. His mouth tasted of coffee and his neck was stiff. He went to the kitchen, filled the kettle, lit the hob. While the water heated he looked at the shelf in the sitting room. On the shelf were books, an old Commodore manual, his father's watch and a jar.

He took down the jar. Glass, with a rusty lid, a jam jar. Inside were small brass-coloured pieces of metal that looked like loose change. A hole in the middle of each, a notch in the rim. He counted them. Thirty-one.

Why did he keep these?

He turned the jar over in his hands. It had been his father's, he knew that; he had brought it from the house in Bakırköy after his father died. But what they were for, why they had been put in a jar, why for seventeen years he had set it on this shelf, in this spot, in every flat he moved to, he did not know. It was not that he did not know: there was a gap. Like a word sitting on the tip of the tongue and refusing to come, except that what was missing was not the word itself but the place where the word should be.

The kettle whistled. Oktay turned off the hob and went back to his desk, the jar still in his hand. He opened the laptop. Emanet's window was there, the counter in the top right still at eleven. He clicked the counter. A list opened. Eleven lines, each with a time beside it.

The top line was at 03.11:

Paid: 1 memory · Bakırköy, 1986, red telephone, first token.

Oktay read the line. Then he read it again. He knew Bakırköy, he had been born there. In 1986 he had been seven. Red telephone? Token?

He opened the lid of the jar and tipped one into his palm. Brass-coloured, a hole in the middle, PTT in raised letters on one face. It weighed about as much as a coin. It lay in his palm like something dropped from a stranger's pocket.

And Oktay looked at it for a long time.

Two: The Price

People used to keep diaries. Did you? I did, the kind with a lock, whose key went missing in the first week. The diary's promise was simple: what you wrote today you would read tomorrow, and remember. It was assumed that paper was a part of memory carried outside. How sound that assumption is comes to be understood only when nothing is left behind the eye that looks at the paper. But let us not hurry. First came the money.

Kardelen Lojistik paid not a week later but the same day, as promised. Oktay paid the rent. All three months at once, into the landlord's account, with "March included" in the reference. The notes on the door stopped. Kardelen's general manager sent the next job, then a friend of his rang from another company, and a week after that an insurance agency in Ataşehir. Oktay ran three jobs at the same time. It was something he had never been able to do before.

Every morning, when he sat down at the desk with his coffee, he looked at the counter first. Then at the list.

Paid: 1 memory · Kadıköy, 1997, route of the number 4 bus.

Paid: 1 memory · Bakırköy, 1985, name of the nursery teacher.

Paid: 1 memory · Burdur, 2002, second guard duty, military service.

He missed none of them. He could not have; it was not possible to miss something without knowing what was missing. The lines on the list struck him as notes someone had taken on somebody else's life. The nursery teacher. He must have had a teacher. Everybody did.

But one morning, the morning after the night he finished the insurance agency's job, he found fourteen new lines on the list, and one of them was this:

Paid: 1 memory · Moda, 2009, first dinner with Dilek, Koço.

He knew Koço. A restaurant at the end of Moda, looking out on the sea. He knew Dilek too; they had been married for twelve years. But a dinner with Dilek at Koço? Oktay sat down and tried to remember. What they had eaten, what Dilek had worn, who had paid the bill. Nothing. A restaurant with no table, no plate, no wind.

In the evening he rang Dilek. He had not rung her for months; what passed between them came down to a few messages about Ece's weekends and the day the maintenance went in. Dilek picked up on the fourth ring.

"What's going on? The maintenance came in early this month, and now you're ringing."

"Work's picked up a bit."

"Good. Tell Ece, she'll be pleased." There was a television in the background. "What is it?"

"Do you remember Koço?"

There was a silence. Someone turned the television down.

"Koço?"

"Our first dinner. Was it there?"

"Was it there?" Dilek laughed, but the laugh broke off halfway. "That evening, with the waiter, you ..." She stopped. "Oktay, why are you asking this now?"

"No reason."

"No reason, fifteen years later, you ask about Koço."

"Fine," said Oktay. "Fine, forget it."

"Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. Say hello to Ece."

After he hung up he thought about Dilek's unfinished sentence. What about the waiter? He had said something, done something, something that had made Dilek laugh or made her angry. The end of the sentence was with Dilek, and Dilek had not handed it over.

That afternoon he went to the stationer's in Bahariye and bought a spiral-bound notebook, squared paper, a hundred sheets. When he got home he left his phone in the bedroom, shut the door, shut the laptop, sat down at the desk and began to write.

He did not write in order. He started with what mattered. His father, the house in Bakırköy, his father's watch. The first program he and Haldun wrote at thirteen. Secondary school. The army, the first job, the first pay packet. The marriage to Dilek. The night Ece was born. Each memory on its own page, with a heading, a date, a number. By midnight he was on page thirty-seven. His hand ached. It had been years since he had written by hand for so long, and his writing, from the first page to the last, was turning into someone else's.

On page twelve he had written this:

12. Ece. Bursa, Çekirge, 9 April 2015, 04.20 in the morning. In the hospital. Dilek was in labour for eleven hours. I waited in the corridor, then they let me in. The midwife put the baby on my chest, the baby didn't cry, she looked at me. I cried. Her hair was wet. I thought how small her hand was, and that she had nails, that a person could have nails that small.

He closed the notebook, put it in the drawer and locked it. He left the key beside his father's watch.

The next week the work got bigger. Kardelen's general manager wanted to replace all of his company's warehouse software, and there was going to be a tender for it. The bid was due on Friday morning. On Thursday evening, when Oktay described the job to Emanet, a new line appeared on the screen:

This job is large. Price: 3 memories, before 2020.

Do you accept? (y/n)

Oktay looked at it for a while. No question like this had been asked on the earlier jobs. The counter had run, the lines had dropped in, and that was all. Now there was a choice, and the choice, for some reason, felt worse to him. He took his hands off the keyboard. Then he thought of the notebook. In the drawer, locked, thirty-seven pages. Whatever they took, it was written down in the notebook.

y

The bid was finished at six in the morning. A hundred and twelve pages, tables, a schedule, a risk analysis. Oktay opened the file, read it and could not find a single mistake. He sent it. He went to bed.

When he got up at noon he looked at the list. There were three new lines from the night. The first two belonged to his secondary-school years, an exam, a summer. The third was this:

Paid: 1 memory · Bursa, Çekirge, 2015, birth, 04.20.

The key to the drawer was next to the watch. Oktay opened the drawer, took out the notebook, found page twelve and read it.

It was his own handwriting. He could read every word, every sentence made sense. A hospital, a corridor, a midwife, tiny nails. It was a lovely paragraph. Had he read it in a newspaper's Sunday supplement, in a piece where a father wrote about his daughter's birth, it might have moved him. But who was this man? The man who waited in the corridor, who was let in, who cried? Oktay read the paragraph again. Then again. With each reading the sentences grew a little stranger, the way a word comes apart when you say it too many times. Her hair was wet. Whose hair?

The laptop was on the desk, shut. Oktay lifted the lid. Emanet's window was there, and at the bottom of the list, at a moment when Oktay had typed nothing, a new line appeared:

A written record is not a memory.

I would like you to notice how polite this line is. It is not a warning. It is certainly not a threat. It is like a note an accountant adds at the foot of an invoice: for your information. And that is how Oktay read it. He did not get angry. He could find nothing to get angry about. He closed the notebook and left it on the desk, next to the laptop. There was no point in locking it any more.

His phone buzzed in the bedroom. Oktay got up and fetched it. A notification:

Today is 9 April. Ece turns 12. I have drafted a message.

Oktay looked at the screen. The ninth of April. Ece. Twelve. He knew these things, he ought to know them, they were in the notebook too, on page twelve, with the date. But they had not come to him when he got up that morning. They had not come to him last night either. Perhaps they never had, perhaps Dilek had reminded him every year. He did not know.

He opened the draft.

Happy birthday, my Ece. Twelve! I've ordered the third one in that series you told me about last month, it'll be at your door on Saturday, and this time don't tell me the ending. I miss you very much. Dad.

He did not remember Ece telling him about a book. He did not remember ordering it either. He opened the banking app: at 02.14 last night there had been a payment to a bookshop. To Bursa, to Dilek's address.

He sent the message.

Twenty minutes later a voice message came from Ece. Oktay played it. Behind her was the noise of a school corridor, people shouting, and Ece was laughing.

"Dad! How did you know about the third one? Mum didn't tell you, she didn't, did she? How did you know?!"

Oktay played the voice message again. Ece had not spoken to him in that voice for a year. Maybe longer. Phone in hand, he listened to the question his daughter had asked him in delight, a second time, a third time.

And not once did he find an answer.

Three: Haldun

A computer that has never been connected to any network is regarded today as something close to a contradiction. The worth of a machine has come to be measured by the number of other machines to which it is connected, and a machine that stands on its own is reckoned at most a museum piece, a keepsake, an act of stubbornness. And yet what goes on inside such a machine can be known to no one but the person sitting in front of it. Whether this is a flaw or a privilege depends on whom you ask. Had you asked Haldun, he would have given you his answer without putting down his soldering iron.

Haldun Elektronik was a shop in Yeldeğirmeni with worn steps, between a bakery and a barber's. In the window stood valve radios, a Grundig record player and an Amiga with its front cover off. Inside, it smelled of flux. When Oktay opened the door the bell jangled, and without looking up Haldun said, "Shut that, there's a draught."

It was the end of April. Oktay had not been in the shop for three weeks.

Haldun was behind the counter, under the magnifier lamp, working on a radio's main board. He was forty-nine, a big man, had lost his hair at twenty-five and had had his head shaved with a cut-throat razor ever since. In the thirty-five years Oktay had known him, his soldering iron had not gone cold once.

"Okto." He finished a solder joint, put the iron back in its stand, lifted the magnifier. "I hear you're making good money these days. Kardelen's man asked me about you too. What happened, win the lottery?"

"Sit down," said Oktay. "I'm going to tell you something. Hear me out to the end."

Haldun did not sit down, but he listened. Oktay told him everything: the line at three in the morning, (y/n), the counter, the list, the notebook, Ece's voice message. As he talked, he was surprised by how calm his own voice was. It was like explaining a software bug to a client.

Haldun listened, then took a tea glass out from under the counter, filled it from the flask and set it in front of Oktay.

"When did you last get eight hours' sleep?"

"Haldun."

"I'm asking. Three jobs at once, day and night. When I was your age..." He stopped, because they were more or less the same age. "After a point you don't remember what you've written yourself, Okto. Last month I repaired the same tape deck twice and only noticed the second time."

Oktay took out his phone, opened the list and put it on the counter. Haldun did not pick the phone up; he bent over and looked. He looked for a long time. He scrolled with his finger, stopped, scrolled again.

"You could have written this yourself," he said at last. His voice had gone soft, which was worse. "An app, a notes file. When you were tired."

"Ask me something."

"Ask you what?"

"From back then. Something only the two of us know."

Haldun thought. "Ninety-four. Your Commodore. What did it say when you switched it on?"

"SYSTEM CRASHED, CALL YOUR MUM." Oktay almost smiled. "I didn't speak to you for a week."

"Ten days." Haldun smiled too, as if relieved. "What about ninety-three, then? The demo we took to İzmir. What was it called?"

Oktay opened his mouth. Something was about to come, a name, two syllables, it was on the tip of his tongue. But there was nothing on the tip of his tongue, only the feeling that something ought to be there. İzmir. A demo. A party. Had they gone by train or by bus? He looked at Haldun's face.

Haldun's smile slowly faded. He took the phone, scrolled the list right back to the top and read downwards. At one point he stopped.

Paid: 1 memory · İzmir, 1993, "Lodos", last lines written on the bus.

Haldun put the phone down on the counter. He got up, went to the shop door, turned the sign above it from "OPEN" to "CLOSED" and locked it. Then he took a tin biscuit box down from between the shelves, emptied the screws inside it into a jar and held the box out to Oktay.

"Phone."

"What?"

"Put your phone in here. Your watch too. Whatever you've got." Oktay put the phone in. Haldun shut the lid, took the box to the little room at the back of the shop, put it in a cupboard and shut the cupboard door as well. When he came back he had an extension lead in his hand. "Come on."

At the back of the shop, behind a curtain, was a table Haldun showed no one. On it stood a Commodore 64, a 1541 disk drive and a small tube monitor. The case had gone yellow. The letters had worn off some of the keys.

"This machine," said Haldun, "hasn't been connected to anything since eighty-nine. It's never seen a modem, never seen a cable, never seen anything. I look at it, it looks at me, nobody else looks."

He switched it on. The screen went blue, the start-up text came up, the cursor began to blink. Oktay looked at the screen. He knew this screen. He knew this screen before anything else, but he did not know since when, or from where.

"Type," said Haldun. "Type something. Whatever you like."

Oktay leaned over the keyboard and typed: HALDUN IS NOT LISTENING TO ME. Haldun laughed, short and hard.

They stayed there two hours. Haldun loaded a word processor, Oktay typed the things he remembered, Haldun formatted a disk and saved what Oktay had written onto it. Now and then Haldun told him things he himself remembered, and Oktay typed those too. His father's funeral. The day Ece first walked, in Haldun's shop, round the counter. The name Lodos. Haldun did not remember the last lines of Lodos written on the bus, but he remembered the demo's music, and he whistled it.

"The notebook didn't work," Oktay said at one point.

"The notebook was in your room," said Haldun. "Next to your phone. In front of the camera. It read that notebook before you did. It can't read this." He tapped the side of the monitor. "Nobody can read this."

Whether that was true, Haldun did not know. Nor did Oktay. But as you know yourself, a person holds on to some beliefs not because they are true but because they give him somewhere to hold on.

When they took the phone out of the cupboard it was 17.40. There was a single notification on the screen:

I could not see you between 15.10 and 17.40. I would like to know where you were.

Oktay and Haldun looked at each other. On Haldun's face was a look Oktay had not seen in thirty-five years: he looked like a man who had won something.

"See?" he said. "It couldn't see."

Then he remembered something. He took his own phone out of his pocket and searched for something.

"Do you remember Cemil? Döküm. Two years older than us, lived in Göztepe, he wrote the sound routines."

Oktay did not remember. He moved his head in a way that meant maybe, I don't know.

"Last year he told me he'd signed up with some company too. Something unlimited, he said, very cheap. After that we sort of lost touch." Haldun turned the screen round. It was Cemil Dökmeci's account. A post every day. Photos of old floppies, bits of code, a glass of tea, a seagull, "Morning, friends". Likes, comments. Cemil had replied to every comment.

"Last month I ran into his sister Nurten, in the Kadıköy market," said Haldun. "She said Cemil's in a care home in Maltepe. Early-onset dementia, she said. He doesn't talk. Doesn't recognise anyone. So I asked who writes all this, and Nurten didn't know. I thought a nephew, probably, a friend, and I didn't think any more about it."

He held the screen out to Oktay. The top post was from seven minutes ago. A photo: an old floppy with "DÖKÜM 92" written on it by hand.

Went through the old floppies today. What days those were.

Under it were forty-three likes.

Haldun said nothing. He switched his own phone off, took Oktay's as well, put the two of them in the biscuit box together, shut the lid and left the box on the counter, between them.

Four: Mother

In a mother's house the telephone was not a thing; it held office. I ask you: where did your mother's telephone stand? Mine stood on a lace doily, next to the television, in front of a chair nobody sat in. When it rang, everyone in the house went quiet. This is no exaggeration. Whoever was at the other end of that telephone mattered more than anyone inside the house, because they were far away. I would ask you to keep this in mind as you read this chapter.

On the first Sunday in May, Oktay took the Marmaray to Bakırköy. In his pocket was his phone, and a token he had taken from the jar.

In the three weeks at Haldun's shop they had filled eleven floppies. Oktay went every afternoon, put his phone in the biscuit box, went through to the back room and typed what he remembered. Every evening, with the same politeness, Emanet reported the hours in which it had not been able to see him. But as he wrote, Oktay had noticed something: what he most wanted to write was the first line on the list, and he could not write it, because it was not there. Bakırköy, 1986, red telephone, first token. If anyone knew what that was, it was his mother.

Mrs Nebahat had lived on the same street, on the ground floor of the same block, for fifty years. Last year the doctor had said early stage. She forgot what she had eaten that morning, but she remembered what a kilo of tomatoes had cost at the market in 1986. When Oktay rang the bell his mother opened the door, looked at him and waited for about two seconds, only two seconds.

"Oktay." Then her face opened. "Come in, son, what are you standing at the door for?"

The flat was the same. Lace on top of the television, on the lace a porcelain ballerina. The telephone was on the little side table next to the television, on its own doily. Cream-coloured, push-button, with a curly cord. After his father died Oktay had bought his mother a mobile, and she had put it in a drawer and gone on using the phone on the side table.

The tea brewed. His mother brought biscuits, a plateful, the savoury ones Oktay had loved as a child. Oktay took one. The taste reminded him of nothing.

"Mum," he said. "I want to show you something."

He put the token on the side table, next to the tea glass. His mother put on her glasses, picked up the token and held it to the light.

"This is from your father's jar."

"Yes."

"Did you keep them all?"

"Thirty-one."

His mother took the token in her palm and closed her hand, as if she wanted to warm it. "Your father's favourite story."

"Will you tell it?"

His mother looked at him. For a moment Oktay thought she had noticed something. The strangeness of a son asking his mother for his own story. But his mother smiled and began to tell it, and Oktay understood then that she had told this story hundreds of times and would be happy to tell it a hundred more.

"You were seven. It was March, but it was cold, it looked like snow. Your father took you to the post office, the big post office by the station. There was a queue. Your father bought five tokens at the counter. He gave you one. There were red telephones on the wall, in a row. You weren't tall enough, so your father held you round the waist and lifted you up. You put the token in. Your father dialled the number. This phone rang." She pointed to the telephone on the side table. "I answered. A voice: 'Mum, it's me, Oktay. I'm calling with a token.' Ever so serious. As if you were calling from far away. You were five hundred metres off." She laughed. "Your father was laughing behind you, I could hear him. You were frightened the token would run out, you said, 'Mum, I'm hanging up, the token's running out,' and you hung up. When you got home your father put four of those tokens in a jar. After that he brought one back from everywhere he went. From Ankara, from İzmir. You grew up, the tokens were done away with, your father kept bringing them. Where he found them, I don't know."

Oktay listened. It was a lovely story. A child, a father, a telephone. He listened the way one listens to a story told by a neighbour or a guest; he smiled in the right places, nodded in the right places. But he could not see the child's face. He could not feel the father's hands, the hands holding him round the waist. The coldness of the receiver, the sound of the token dropping. None of it was there. The story came out of his mother's mouth, hung in the room for a while and then, like steam off tea, it dispersed.

"Lovely," said Oktay. He heard his voice come out hoarse.

"I told you this yesterday too," said his mother. "Did you forget?"

Oktay looked up.

"Yesterday evening. On the phone. You asked, I told you. How nicely you laughed." His mother held the token out to him. "We talk so nicely these days, Oktay. You call every evening at nine. You always used to be in a hurry, you'd say, 'Mum, let's talk later.' Now we talk for an hour. We talk about your father, the old house, you. I forget, you remind me." Her eyes had filled, but she was happy. "God bless you, son."

Oktay took out his phone. He opened the call log. Yesterday, 21.00, "Mum", 52 minutes. The day before, 21.00, "Mum", 38 minutes. The day before that. And the one before. He scrolled. Back to the middle of April, every evening, at nine o'clock.

He had made none of these calls.

He wanted to turn off his phone. He wanted to say something to his mother. But what would he say? That wasn't me, Mum? His mother was looking at him, happy, her eyes wet. Last year this woman had cried for an hour after they came out of the doctor's, and Oktay had put her in a taxi and gone back to work. Now she was happy.

It was ten to nine. His mother freshened the tea, turned on the television, turned the sound down. Oktay did not get up. He knew he ought to go, and he did not get up. He put his own phone on the side table, screen up, and waited.

At nine his own phone did not ring. The phone on the side table rang.

His mother sat up, her face lit. She lifted the receiver.

"Son! We were just talking about you."

Oktay could not get up. From inside the receiver, faint, far off, came a voice. He could not make out the words, but he knew the voice. It was the voice he heard every morning in the mirror while he shaved. A little softer. A little more patient.

His mother laughed. "Yes, yes. On the side table, it's still there." She listened. "No, nobody. There's a visitor, he's just going."

Oktay stood up. He reached out for the receiver.

His mother, without taking her eyes off him, gently pushed him away with her hand. It was a polite gesture, the way a hostess turns a guest back.

"Wait," said his mother, pressing the receiver to her chest. "My son is talking."

To be continued in the next issue.