![]() We returned from Turkey with our original plane tickets, one of them unused. There are flashes outside, bright red and blue, which look to me like light-up sneakers. Some adult has lifted me onto a bed next to a window and left the room. I can summon a single brief scene from what I believe to be the night of the crime. I wanted what she had, which was firsthand access to the defining tragedy of our lives. We’d quibble over the specifics-had my writing filched details from hers?-but to me it was an epistemological problem. She, too, had written about our dad over the years, and she’d point to the chick story as an early sign of my tendency to cannibalize her experiences. But G always seemed protective of her recollections from that night and skeptical of my self-appointed role as family scribe. From a young age, I tried to assemble the story bit by bit, scrounging for information and writing it down. ![]() My mom considered my obliviousness a blessing. My grief had the clumsy fit of a hand-me-down.Īs far as I can recall, no one in the family explained his death to me. My dad’s murder was as fundamental and as unknowable as my own birth. It’s formed with the suffix “ ‑miş,” whose pronunciation rhymes-aptly, I’ve always thought-with the English syllable “-ish.” The heard past turns up in gossip and folklore, and, as the novelist Orhan Pamuk has written, it’s the tense that Turks use to evoke life’s earliest experiences-“our cradles, our baby carriages, our first steps, all as reported by our parents.” Revisiting these moments can elicit what he calls “a sensation as sweet as seeing ourselves in our dreams.” For me, though, the heard past made literal the distance between my family’s tragedy and my ignorance of it. The Turkish language has a dedicated tense, sometimes called the “heard past,” for events that one has been told about but hasn’t witnessed. We were both there when it happened, along with our mom, but I was too young to remember. One night in August of 1999, on a summer trip back to Ankara, our dad was murdered. But there was another encounter with death that I didn’t dare ask about, an untold story that involved the two of us. I read G questions from a how-to handout on oral history, relishing the excuse to pry. The assignment was to interview relatives and retell a “family legend.” G’s tale, which she repeated often, hinted at a strange, wondrous chapter of our past, before our parents immigrated to the United States and had me. I wrote my own essay about the chick many years later, for a high-school English class. In a school essay, my sister described this experience as her “first confrontation with death.” But he soon grew into a rooster, shedding feathers and shitting on the furniture, so our grandfather had a housekeeper take him home to kill for dinner. G would place him on her shoulder and listen to him cheep into her ear. ![]() The bird had a pale-yellow coat and tiny, vigilant eyes. ![]() When my older sister, G, was a child, she bought a pet chick from a street vender near our family’s home in Ankara, Turkey. ![]()
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