TE16 Turkish Delight

Buket Uzuner Kemal to plant in Çorum. Gülistan Kaman, who looked plain and provincial next to the well-groomed cosmopolitan beauty of her mother Ayten, obviously had the one thing of value her mother had lacked all her life. Gülistan was at peace with herself. “My late father really wanted his daughters to go to university, but he died young. I barely managed to finish secondary school, then we earned a living. I got a job as a clerk at the Çorum Governorate and managed to get by without anyone’s help. I got my high school diploma later and learned a bit of German to help with the correspondence in the office. As you know it’s mainly Germans who’re interested in the Hittite excavations. Akın says Germans believe they’re descended from the Hittites because of their double-headed eagle symbol. And as Akın said Allah gave me the chance to help people with autism. Well that’s enough about me. Welcome again Defne. Make yourself at home, take the keys and come whenever you want, my door is always open to you!” She left the cups of tea on a coffee table draped with white handmade lace doilies and slipped off quietly. It was the kind of coffee table her mother would make fun of – in fact it was one of five. Every surface in this tidy little sitting room – presumably the largest room in the house – every shelf including the bookshelves and the ones in the glass-fronted display cabinet, every chair, even the television, was draped in triangularly arranged white cotton doilies hand decorated in lace. So her father had been living for years in a house adorned with the doilies his ex-wife couldn’t abide, the kind that are regularly

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