Weren’t we supposed not to leave a wildflower to bloom and wither on its own?

In the crumbling plaster of the house, there was a gray light seeping through the lace of the torn tulle curtain. Dawn must have only just broken. She woke from her warm bed into the ice-cold room, went on tiptoe to the kitchen and added about two tea glasses of water to the bottom of the teapot, lit the camping gas cylinder in the corner of the kitchen with a match and placed the sooty dark-blue teapot over the flame. She splashed her face with ice-cold water, rubbed her eyes, and dried herself with the blue towel whose edges were frayed.

She put on her white socks, her gray pleated skirt, her short-sleeved white cotton blouse, her navy-blue jacket. She tied up her long hair tightly. The teapot had begun to bubble. She poured the cold, burgundy-to-black brew left over from the night before into the bottom of the glass, added hot water, broke off the corner of a stale loaf of bread, tucked a piece of cheese inside the bread and ate it with her bitter tea. When her chilled hand went into the pocket of her jacket, she found fifty kuruş; her mother must have left it. A crispy simit with plenty of sesame seeds and a warm, yellow, very sweet Oralet that she could buy for fifty kuruş appeared before her eyes; the taste the two would give together formed in her mind in an instant. The steam of the yellow Oralet, hot enough to burn the mouth, and the smell of the toasted sesame simit had filled the cold house as she tied her shoes and said, “If I don’t drink Oralet, I’ll buy a pen.”

She opened the door of the historic building where they had taken refuge with a creak and stepped out into the street. The neighborhood’s wretched cats, the laundry hung from one window to another despite the smell of soot and smoke, the piles of garbage on the corners, puddles, chilled children going to work. At that hour of the morning, each was pretending not to see the other, and everyone together was ignoring everything happening around them.

The clothes she wore set her apart from everything that was happening; as long as she could wear this school uniform, she had hope. “Another life is possible,” said the books she held close on her way to school. At every strange danger she saw, she clutched the books she carried in her arms a little tighter. Her bag had been torn for a long time; for some reason, carrying her books in a plastic bag felt as if it would be an insult to the books, and of course there was also the shame she felt before her friends and teachers.

She was good at her lessons; she had a teacher who occasionally handed out books, and she loved that teacher most of all. She was 15; there was only one year left before high school was over, and if she could get through this year too, she would be a full-fledged high school graduate. Then she would get a job at a market and earn money, and prepare for the university entrance exam with the second-hand books she bought.

Time was passing, and it was becoming a little harder each day for her to look as she had in childhood. No matter how much she tried to walk hunched over, her growing height and her increasingly beautiful face had begun to catch everyone’s eye, and the world had suddenly begun to see her not as a child but as a woman. It was her maternal uncle who often reminded both her and her 12-year-old sister of this. He was a skinny, frail, filthy man. While her mother and father were at work, he had begun coming to their house in the middle of the day; at first, when he tried to touch her under the pretext of beating or scolding her, she had thrown him against the wall several times,

Once, she had threatened him with a knife. When she noticed something strange in her sister, she asked, “Does my uncle come to the house when I’m not there?” The child could not answer.

She told her mother what had happened; her mother beat both her and her little sister terribly and said, “If I ever hear this from your mouths again, I’ll kill you.” “God knows what kind of whoring you did,” she said to my sister, “you seduced the man. Go on, tell your father if you want,” she said, “tell your brother too, let them kill my brother and go to prison, and then you’ll see what all the men in the neighborhood will do to you and your sister when they enter your room; sacrifice all of us for yourself, maybe then you’ll feel better,” she said.

Both children were crying and trembling violently at the foot of the wall where they had shrunk back. She left school... Her sister was too young to defend herself. When they went to the school together so she could say goodbye to her teacher, the teacher who gave her books was very upset, but there was nothing she could do.

From that day on, she never parted with her knife; she protected both herself and her sister. When she turned 17, her father took her to a venue and said, “This place is sort of ours; you’ll work here as a waitress.” The owner of the place hired her to work nights at the bar, saying, “Don’t worry, brother, she’s entrusted to us.” The owner paid most of the money to her father; while she thought she was only working as a waitress, she had not been able to imagine that even a 17-year-old girl merely waitressing in such a place was itself a service being sold.

She met a young man at the bar and fell in love. When her father and brother noticed, they beat the poor young man almost to death. She could not understand: while she was serving so many men, why had her father and brother, who saw the various disgraces she faced and did not get angry, attacked this young man with such rage?

That was when she realized she was capital that must not be allowed to slip away for her father and brother. A man she had met at the bar had offered her courier work. “You’re beautiful,” the man said, “and if you take a little care of yourself, no one will suspect you. You’ll just pick up a package from one place and deliver it somewhere else. It pays well; you’ll be comfortable,” he said, and gave her his card.

After her boyfriend was beaten, she had stopped working at the bar, but life at home had turned into torture because of the constant beatings by her father and brother. Every day the house was filled with curses, chaos and screams. One of the neighbors, disturbed by the noise, called the police; when the police who arrived saw the state of the girl’s face, they immediately called an ambulance. She looked at her mother and sister as she was leaving. A report was drawn up; she did not file a complaint. Her father said, “She is not mentally stable, she harmed herself.” Neither the police nor the doctor believed the man, but the girl needed to ask for help, because she had already turned 18.

When she ended up at the hospital once again, she had tried to take her own life, but her father had not allowed her to die either. She had not understood the show of affection beside the police officers at the hospital anyway. When she saw her father like that, she thought, “So he doesn’t hate me that much after all; he would be sad if I died,” and hugged her father and cried. At the door of the room where she lay, her father said to his son, “If she dies, she’ll be trouble for us.”

How frightening is it to stop the story here and try to imagine the ending of this story, isn’t it? The young girl stabbed to death by her father was found dead on the street she walked down every day on her way to school. The young woman lost her life in a fight that broke out at a bar. When she said “no” to the man who wanted to marry her, she was stabbed in eight places; she was sold by her family. The bruises on the body of the young girl who died by suicide were found suspicious. These women, young girls and children are not just newspaper stories. Where do the name of the street where they were killed, the number of the house, their names, their dreams, their primary school report-card grades fit among the manipulated figures reflected in the statistics? Their fearful last looks should not be black numbers written on white.

Migration fell upon the soil of the copper plain

Black arrowhead, old youth, children and grandchildren

Boys and girls, young men dark and strong,

Migration fell upon the soil of the copper plain,

Before migrating to Istanbul, the family made its living from animal husbandry. They obtained the food they would eat all winter — cheese, butter, kavurma and similar products — from their own animals. The children ate plenty, and with the money from what they could sell, they bought their other provisions. The father of the house worked as a watchman at a construction site in the winters; the eldest son worked as a tea server in a coffeehouse, and with the money that came from there they bought wood and coal and scraped by.

Between 1990 and 95, the family had been caught right in the middle of the clashes in Southeastern Anatolia. Because of the armed clashes in the region, they could not go to their village. Even if they did go, both their own lives and the lives of the animals would be in danger. They had pens in the back garden of their detached house in the city. They were already keeping the few head of small livestock there. Finding a good job on construction sites was very difficult if you were not a skilled worker. Although two of the girls had married, it was not enough to feed a family of eight. They had one hope: their eldest son.

He would send the daily wage he earned at the coffeehouse to his mother in the afternoon through one of his siblings, and with that money she would buy bread and a little vegetables and prepare the evening meal. For some time, there had been a man hanging around the coffeehouse where he worked, and each passing day he bothered the young man more. This man gathered the neighborhood’s children there and bought them tea and soda; he even bought some of them new clothes and shoes. With the children aged between 10 and 15 gathered around him, this man was delivering speeches with all his might that began, “Those whose killing is permissible are as follows.” The number of people brutally killed in the backstreets was increasing with each passing day: the neighborhood grocer, the mosque’s imam, primary school teachers, booksellers, people selling vegetables at the market... By what standard, according to whom, were they choosing their victims? They were slaughtering everyone who read, wrote, thought, spoke. One day, the young man working at the coffeehouse could no longer bear it and said, “Who are you, my friend?” “You weren’t in this neighborhood last year; you are not from our village, from our land. We don’t know you from anywhere. What do you want from our children? Don’t come to this coffeehouse again,” he said, throwing the man out of the coffeehouse. To the children sitting there, he said, “Are you listening to this man for two sodas? Go home, study.” Of course, the matter was not soda.

Only 7 days had passed since the incident; as he left the coffeehouse and was returning home at night exhausted, he was killed by three shots fired at close range. The people of the neighborhood had seen that the person fleeing was a child. Neither the person who committed the murder nor the person who had it carried out was ever found. Fire had fallen into the home, and it had burned where it fell. His mother was crying and wailing without pause; the father and the other siblings were silent. That was when the younger siblings in the house first learned the phrase “perpetrator unknown”; when asked what had happened to their brother, one of the little ones said, “My brother became an unsolved killing”; he would no longer come home...

None of them was safe anymore; sinister types were constantly prowling the neighborhood. After a while, it emerged that their immediate neighbors’ house was a cell house, and over the years they all watched together, children and adults alike, as dozens of bodies of those killed were carried in bags to ambulances. Not a day passed without a police raid on one of the houses in the neighborhood. The city had turned into hell. They loaded the child they had lost onto their backs like a black cloud and came to a poor district of Istanbul whose name they had only heard. They entered and settled in an abandoned building that was in danger of collapse and that no one entered because it was said to be “haunted by jinn.” They had to survive; the mother began going out to clean houses, while the younger ones sold gum, Selpak tissues and water on the street after school.

The dead, and those who married, were left behind by the caravan.

Iron rails with black teeth, smoky soot-stained tunnels

Two layers of wool mattresses, three bridal bundles,

5 children, each with 10 fearful, curious eyes

The suicide she attempted was a scream she wanted the whole world to hear. No one heard it. Her cut wrists hurt terribly. She carried the bandages for days with a masochistic pleasure. When the cuts healed, while she was working at the bar, she remembered the card given to her by the man who had offered her courier work. She started working for the man; she did not know what she was carrying where. She was aware that she was doing something bad, but her childhood, which had come to the brink of death, and the desire to build a new life for herself, her mother and her siblings with the money she earned prevailed. It did not take long for her to be arrested; she was sentenced to two years. Beybin, in her navy-blue jacket, white T-shirt and gray skirt, who clung to her books against all the evil in the world, served time for a crime she did not fully understand. Her grandmother had given her the name Beybin; Beybin meant wildflower...

The black train passed through cities,

Yellow fields, green mountains

The soil of the copper plain vomited death

The only salvation: iron rails.

When she got out of prison, she had nowhere to go; she returned to the family hearth. Beybin was worn down, exhausted, her shoulders slumped, faded. She no longer had the strength to stand up to either her father or her brother; her character had been broken. Before a week had passed, she found herself at a table in a hostess bar. When she should have been going to a preparatory course for two years like her peers and now listening to lectures in university classrooms, Beybin had fallen into a hostess bar.

Hasan Ali Yücel once said, “We will not leave a flower to bloom and wither on its own in the mountains, hills and fields of the homeland, even in its remotest places,” and regarded each child with the importance of a wildflower. These children would become the architects of the country he dreamed of. In their schools, they took courses in psychology, philosophy, art, painting, music and sports. Where they lived, they received vocational training that would enable them to benefit that region.

In laboratories, they conducted physics and chemistry experiments; they learned to ride bicycles and motorcycles and to operate fishing boats. They took lessons from professors famous in their fields; they learned to play the piano, violin, accordion and bağlama.

Girls, who before the Republic had not even been included in population censuses, learned Turkish music and world music alongside positive sciences. They listened to Vivaldi, Beethoven and Bach. In theater plays, they performed Molière’s The Bourgeois Gentleman and Sophocles’ Oedipus. Before graduating, every student was expected to read at least 150 books from the world classics, with the choice of books left to the students.

What happened over the past 80 years that these children, for whom Hasan Ali Yücel said, “We will not leave a flower to bloom and wither on its own,” became, instead of scientists, doctors, musicians and architects, young women who are harassed every day, thrown before drunken tables, whose lives hang by a thread — “hostess-bar roses,” in quotation marks?

What a picture of shame this is. A hostess bar cannot be described as a country’s culture.

At most, a hostess bar can be an indicator of how, in a country, girls who are actually in need of help are truly treated. Moreover, praises are now being sung of hostess bars as places frequented by white-collar workers, bureaucrats and politicians as well. This does not show that the level of hostess bars has risen; it only shows that the white-collar people who go there are so devoid of compassion and morality that they mock the suffering of the children there, and even take pleasure in it.