The Midyat to Batman dolmus in south-eastern Turkey was stopped at a gendarmerie checkpoint. Identity papers were collected and inspected. A gendarme put his head into the minibus and called a name. For once it wasn’t mine, the lone foreigner.
The man next to me put his little girl onto the seat and stood up. He walked out of the bus and began a conversation with the blue-uniformed officers. The girl sat with her legs straight out on the hard seat. Her eyes were wide.
“Must be about his military service,” said an old man in front of me. The man outside was showing a sheaf of papers to the gendarmes.
“I hope it doesn’t take long,” said a woman on the other side of the minibus.
The little girl made an experimental noise. I looked down at her. Her giant eyes took in as much information as possible to be processed to reach the awful conclusion: her Dad had gone. She made a couple of interrogative sounds. I smiled at her and looked out of the window. One of the gendarmes was waving his arm in energetic punctuation to his point.
“What if he’s run away?” The usual unofficial war was on in eastern Turkey. It was fairly common for young conscripts to go AWOL when they didn’t fancy evicting families from villages or being shot at by men coming down from the mountains at night.
“What will happen to her?” The woman indicated the little girl. Everyone in the bus turned to her. She blinked and wriggled closer to me. I felt little fingers tighten around my wrist.
The old man shook his head. “Where did she get on?”
“Before Hasankeyf.” The woman shook her head.
The discussion outside was getting heated. Papers were pointed at and voices were raised. Clearly, we weren’t going anywhere for a while. The girl began to cry, softly at first but increasingly insistently. Before long, the demanding blasts of discomfort filled the bus. It was amazing the volume that could come out of such a small person.
I looked up. Everyone was glaring at me. The little girl held onto my arm and blared a klaxon of grief and abandonment. The expressions on the minibus passengers hardened into hostility. This must be what lynch mob victims see just before the end.
I realised what was expected. I picked up the girl and sat her across my thighs. Her legs stuck stiffly out in front of her as I moved her. She looked up at me and rested against my chest. I put an arm around her tiny shoulders and checked the disapproval levels. Only the old man and the vocal woman were looking at me now. The man gave me an approving lowering of the eyebrows.
I could feel the girl shaking against me. She was still crying. All I had done was quiet her. This was fine for achieving my immediate goal of avoiding attention but meant that she could start up again at any time. Also, I supposed, she must be unhappy. This should have been my greatest concern. Obviously it wasn’t, but if I were to address this, it could erase the threat of her beginning to make more noises.
I traced the source of the problem back to its ultimate cause. I twisted my head over my shoulder to peer out of the back window. The girl’s father was still in conversation with the gendarmes. There were smiles and the gesticulation energy had subsided to sustainable levels. Inside my brain, a couple of concepts slid into alignment.
“Baba?” I said to the shaking girl.
She looked up at me miserably. “Gitti.” He’s gone. I could see the rounded redness of her lower lip, its quivering a warning of how close she was to attracting further disapproval from my co-passengers.
“Orada.” He’s there. I pointed over my shoulder. “Görmek istermisin?”
“Yabancı mısınız?” She was asking if I was a foreigner. This could either distract her from what was making her miserable or make her feel even more isolated. I didn’t feel like taking the chance. I hoisted her to her feet so that she could see out of the back window of the minibus.
“Babam.” My daddy, she said.
I patted her back, wondering if this was the right thing to do.
“Ne yapıyor?” she said. What’s he doing?
“Jandarmala konuşuyor.” He’s talking to the gendarmes.
She seemed satisfied with this and jumped up and down on my thighs for a while.
“Geliyor!” I looked out of the window. The gendarmes were walking back to their blue Renault. I felt the girl losing her balance as she twisted to face the front of the minibus.
“Baba!” The man was getting into the side door. He looked at the girl and shot a smile of thanks at me. The girl started struggling. I lifted her into her father’s arms.
I told this story to Defne when I returned to Istanbul.
“You’d be a great dad.”
“What?” I said. “This is irrelevant to any potential dadhood. The point was that I had no idea what to do when confronted with a crying child.”
“But in the end, you did the right thing.” Defne smiled fondly at me.
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