MARCEL

When I opened my eyes, I was met with that familiar, pitch-black void blanketing the ceiling. The biting winter frost that had descended upon Istanbul had seeped through the paper-thin windowpanes, creeping all the way under my quilt, but what truly chilled me to the bone was the stifling stillness of the room. This was my room, yes; the place where I slept, woke, and spent my years. Yet, in this ungodly hour of the morning, with the heavy dampness and the scent of rotting wood filling my lungs, it felt less like a home and more like the cell of a prisoner whose sentence would never end. The paint on the walls had peeled away in patches—much like the hopes in our lives—shamelessly exposing the cold, gray plaster underneath.

Today was my birthday. I was turning nineteen.

According to the calendar, I was in the spring of my life, at that fabled age when my blood should be running hot, when I should be walking the streets whistling a careless tune. Instead, lying there with an exhaustion that seeped into my very bones, I felt like a forty-year-old man—too old and drained to even straighten his back. Life had never treated me or my family with the grace depicted in magazines or sung about in those cheerful radio tunes. Our lot had always been to diminish, to constantly sacrifice one thing or another.

Without sitting up, I slowly turned my head to the right. My eyes had adjusted to the dark. I could make out the frame sitting on the chipped nightstand by my bed. Behind its cracked glass rested that photograph—one that time hadn’t the power to yellow, yet made your heart bleed the longer you looked at it. The only family photograph we had, where my father and mother stood side by side, perhaps for the last time, with us gathered at their knees...

I slipped my hand out from under the quilt and reached for the frame, shivering in the cold air. As my fingertips traced the cracked glass, my mind carried me back twelve years, to that ominous year when I was only seven.

In the photo, I was in my mother’s arms. My eyes held the pure light of a child oblivious to the world's evils, waiting only for the roasted chickpea treats or the bottle of gazoz my father would bring home in the evenings. My sister Nazlı was just a baby, and my grandmother, Nazife Hanım, was not yet bedridden as she is now; she sat in her chair bolt upright, with the imposing air of a proud Ottoman woman.

And my father... Chief Inspector Selim Canatak. Wearing a thick coat that made his broad shoulders look even more formidable, a fedora tipped slightly to the side on his head. In his eyes, a relentless resolve that pierced right through you, even when looking at a mere photograph. Back then, at least as far as my childlike mind could grasp, we were a happy family. At dinner, we would laugh at the stories my father told, and watch my mother sing along to Müzeyyen Senar playing on the radio.

Until that night.

I remember that night in all its agonizing detail. Outside, a fierce southwestern wind—the lodos—was howling, just like the day he found that unidentified corpse on the Moda coast. The wind rattled the windows, and the floorboards groaned in agony. My father hadn't slept a wink for days. The table was littered with paperwork from what they called the "Moda Coast Case," a torn page from the Rubaiyat, and strange pieces of thread. The dead man's identity, those ciphers, that enigmatic nurse had turned into a worm gnawing at my father's mind. That night, he and my mother had spoken in the hallway—in whispers, but tense. My mother was crying.

My father, meanwhile, as he put on his coat, shouted in a voice I had never heard before, furious yet equally desperate:

"Şerife, you don't understand! They're trying to stop us. The roots of this go too deep, into the state, into the beyond. They want me to cover it up, but I won't let this case go! I can't!"

He slammed the door and left. The sound of that door echoing through the house was the herald that our lives would never be the same, that the door would never be opened by my father again. My father walked out that night and vanished, never to return, lost within the very secrets he had sacrificed everything for. He was found neither dead nor alive. He left behind only a massive, unspeakable void.

I pulled my gaze from my father in the photo and focused on my mother, Şerife. Looking at the woman in the frame, a knot the size of a fist formed in my throat. My mother in the photograph... Her thick, pitch-black hair falling to her shoulders with a soft fringe; that sweet, luminous smile never leaving her face. The lavender-scented young woman whose eyes smiled, looking at my father with pure love.

How tragically bitter it was that she was the same person whose footsteps I could now hear on the cold kitchen tiles outside.

My father's departure hadn't just torn down the pillar of our home; it had ripped out my mother's soul. The uncertainty my father left in his wake draped over us like a shroud of mourning, heavier than death itself. My mother couldn't even mourn her husband, for there were three people she had to keep alive: an orphaned little boy, a baby girl in arms, and an elderly mother-in-law battling the curse of asthma, bedridden with the longing for her son.

Şerife... My dear mother. From that day on, to keep us alive, to afford Nazlı's formula and my grandmother's endless medications, she sacrificed her youth to the merciless streets of Istanbul. She scrubbed the stairs of wealthy homes in Nişantaşı, washed clothes until her fingers cracked from bleach, and sewed piecework for tailors under a dim light at night until her eyes were bloodshot.

That beautiful, well-kept black hair in the photo was gone. In its place was a thin, frayed wisp of hair, lacking even the strength to be combed, brutally peppered with the stark white strands of time and sorrow. My mother had fallen out with mirrors. Her once-flawless skin had surrendered to deep lines, wrinkles etched by exhaustion. Those wrinkles were not merely signs of aging; they were the insignias of unpaid bills, unbought coal, hidden tears shed for my father, and the cruel reminders time left behind, whispering, "do not forget." My mother was so very tired; her body had collapsed, and her soul had followed.

I threw off the quilt and sat on the edge of the bed. As my feet touched the ice-cold wood, I felt that ache, that deep sense of guilt all over again. It was two years ago... I was seventeen.

My mother had only one great dream left in life: for me to get an education. "You will serve the justice your father left unfinished with your pen, Mahir Yekta," she would say, stroking my hair. She wanted me to study and become a great man so badly—perhaps a lawyer, perhaps an engineer—to rescue us from this misery, from this damp-smelling house... But the mathematics of life did not calculate like the textbooks in school. My grandmother's illness had worsened, and her medicine could no longer be covered by the few pennies my mother earned scrubbing stairs. Nazlı was growing up; she, too, needed to go to school and wear clean uniforms.

Someone had to be sacrificed. And as the "man" of the house, that someone was me.

I remember the day I dropped out of school like it was yesterday. My hands shook as I took off my high school uniform and folded it. When I told her I was going to work as an apprentice in a printing press in Sirkeci, amidst the stench of ink and the roar of machines, I will never forget the look on my mother's face for as long as I live. She didn't yell at me, she didn't get angry. She just stood there. Her shoulders slumped. The last, feeble flicker of hope in her eyes extinguished right then, in that dim room. The way she stroked my notebooks and quietly walked into the kitchen was like watching a person carry the coffin of their own dreams.

From that moment on, my mother grew even quieter. It was as if she had retreated into an unreachable cave within herself. Her merry laughter that used to ring through the house when my father was around was now nothing but a distant memory. Nowadays, the days she laughed or even smiled could be counted on one hand. And that was only when Nazlı brought home her report card, or when I collected my wages and counted them out completely into her palm, as she looked at me with gratitude.

I took a deep breath before leaving the room. The smell of dampness no longer nauseated me; this smell was my reality. I put the frame back in its place. My fingers traced my father's face in the photo one last time.

"No one could solve the case you left behind, Dad," I whispered to myself. "That secret you were looking for swallowed our lives whole. But I promise you... Today, I turn nineteen. Maybe I couldn't get an education, maybe I couldn't become a cop like you, but I will find out where you went when you walked out that door that night, and how that man on the Moda coast tore our family apart."

I pulled on my faded cardigan with the patched elbows. I cracked open the door of my room to go to the kitchen, to be by the side of my mother whose hair had turned stark white, the woman whose smiles had been stolen away, to be her invisible shield.

The day was beginning; with its pain, its poverty, and the dark secrets that had relentlessly haunted us for years...