TE16 Turkish Delight

Altay Öktem “You know, this cellar is very important to me. This is where my sister was held before she disappeared.” He was speaking slowly, as if he paid extra attention that I heard him right. “This is where her last pictures were taken. Do you understand what I mean?

“Uhm... your wha- your sister?”

“Yeah, my sister. Seniha.”

“I, I... I didn’t know. How surprising... But what does that have to do with me?”

He, on the other hand, wasn’t paying the least bit of attention to what I was saying. He was watching the wall behind me. His eyes opened wide in the meantime, to the physically widest possible. “One day, she vanished. We looked everywhere, asked everyone we could think of. For days, and days... We found nothing. Not the slightest clue as to where she was. All we knew was that some guy had come, took some pictures of her, and went back to his country. I wonder if he cared what would happen to her at all... He had gotten what he came for. Days later, my sister’s corpse washed ashore. No one could figure out what had killed her. Some claimed that she couldn’t carry the burden of her sinful acts anymore and took her own life, others that some shady types from the filthy places she frequented had to get rid of her... No one knows the true story behind her death, but me.”

88