If he hadn’t screamed, no one would have heard

“Heeelp, my mother is hanging herself with a hoseee!…

Heeelp, my mother is committing suicideee!… Moooommm!…”

cried a boy of about twelve, sobbing and hurling himself onto the ground, wailing at the top of his lungs.

They lived in the same neighborhood as my father’s grocery store. They were living in a detached, rented house converted from a shanty, without a courtyard, without a garden. The iron outer door, painted the worst shade of blue, opened directly onto the street; beneath the door there was a small concrete threshold, and in front of the concrete threshold, slippers.

They had moved into the neighborhood not long before. I didn’t know him well; he had come to the grocery store a few times. He had bought basic things like half a kilo of loose yogurt, olives, and bread. He had a huge mouth, long eyelashes, and sad expressions that shifted back and forth between crying and smiling. We were almost the same age; his body was bigger than mine, but his behavior was smaller. Sometimes he would come to the grocery store with coins no one knew where he had found and ask, “What would this get me, Uncle Ahmet?”; and before waiting for an answer, he would point to things that would never be possible for his money and ask, “Would this work? Would that work?” Once, my father said, “Go on, take it, it works,” and right where he stood, I saw a small cloud of dust. I thought that only happened in cartoons; he was gone. At times my father would give him a piece of gum as a gift; seeing that big mouth of his smiling would make you smile too.

On a few occasions, when my father loosened his discipline, we played together in the street. Without any lead in, he would suddenly begin, “You know, my older brother…” and go on by himself, my brother this, my brother that, talking nonstop.

A child with an imaginary older brother who made up for his father’s absence, who shielded him from the roughness of the street…

Now he was in front of that iron street door, his knees pressed together, his feet turned outward, collapsed to the ground; braying as he cried:

— “My mother is hanging herself, my mother is hanging herself with a hose, mom don’t do it, mooom!”

The streets were echoing. I was terrified, I had never seen a dead person in my life, nor someone hanging themselves with a hose.

With a helpful, fearful, startled, and childlike excitement, I ran toward the front of their house. My brain, in a state of panic, was working at great speed; in that short distance, many things were running through my mind. Before my eyes, a green, flimsy water hose, attached to a ribbed iron bar left inside the ceiling, was taking shape. When I reached the house, I would wrap my arms around his mother’s legs, she no taller than Hafize Ana (Adile Naşit), and lift her upward so she wouldn’t suffocate, but more than that, I hoped it wouldn’t come to that, that before me an older brother from the neighborhood would arrive and intervene.

That wasn’t how it went. I was the first to arrive. When I looked in through the door, I could see a stool in the corridor, but neither his mother nor that cheap, shoddy green hose was anywhere in sight. My heart was pounding so hard that it showed through my T-shirt, jutting out like a triangle. Unable to ignore the cries any longer, his mother appeared in the corridor; when I saw her, my eyes squeezed shut with happiness and excitement. There is no happiness like that.

Halil was now crying in an even different tone, even more intensely. He clung to his mother’s leg. I never really understood what had happened. A few days later, I saw an Anadol pickup truck in front of their door. Just as they had come, they left the neighborhood quietly.