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. The bird had a pale-yellow coat and tiny, vigilant eyes. G would place him on her shoulder and listen to him cheep into her ear. 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. In a school essay, my sister described this experience as her “first confrontation with death.”
I wrote my own essay about the chick many years later, for a high-school English class. 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 read G questions from a how-to handout on oral history, relishing the excuse to pry. But there was another encounter with death that I didn’t dare ask about, an untold story that involved the two of us. One night in August of 1999, on a summer trip back to Ankara, our dad was murdered. G was twelve and I was three. We were both there when it happened, along with our mom, but I was too young to remember.
Denne historien er fra November 27, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra November 27, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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LIFE ADVICE WITH ANIMAL ANALOGIES
Go with the flow like a dead fish.
CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS
The masterly musical as mblages of Charles Ives
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
How the Brothers Grimm sought to awaken a nation.
THE ARTIFICIAL STATE
A different kind of machine politics.
THE HONEST ISLAND GREG JACKSON
Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come.
THE SHIPWRECK DETECTIVE
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure-without leaving dry land.
THE HOME FRONT
Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.
PRESIDENT FOR SALE
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll.
SYRIA'S EMPIRE OF SPEED
Bashar al-Assad's regime is now a narco-state reliant on sales of amphetamines.
TUCKER EVERLASTING
Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.