TE16 Turkish Delight

The Adventures of Misfit Defne Kman: Earth would expect a librarian’s personal bookcase to be more orderly. A few silver-framed photographs were lined up on the shelves. As if directed by some external power, Defne put the slim-waisted tea glass down on the coffee table and headed straight for the photographs. She picked one of them up, a black-and-white one, and examined it. In a suit and tie and still with a full head of hair, her father posed for the shot with a noticeably pale-looking Gülistan and two small boys. Or rather three of themwere posing while the youngest boy stared down at the ground, his fists clenched. Gülistan was wearing a long, light-coloured dress, her head crowned with a handkerchief fromwhich hung presumably multi-coloured braidings that spilled over her forehead; her long lustrous hair fell down her shoulders as she looked at Defne’s father with bright adoring eyes, gloriously unashamed of her extra pounds. For all her beauty, perhaps another thing Defne’s mother didn’t have was Gülistan’s wild, innate femininity. The answer to one of her previous questions stared out at her from the photograph. It was Gülistan who was in love with her father. So, her father hadn’t fallen in love with another woman and run away, he must have left home for some other reason. The children in the photograph looked about three and five. The younger one was staring down at the ground in all the other photographs too. Her father came up to her to explain: “This one is a souvenir of our marriage, neither of us wanted a big wedding, just a family affair. I didn’t come to Çorum for her. We met here by chance about a year after I got here.”

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