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went over to the harbormaster. She told him that her husband had died the day before, and that her children were going hungry. She asked for some help with his funeral and burial. The harbormaster told himself that this was the first time anyone had come to him with such a request. This was not someone asking him to arrange a free pass, nor was it a bill of goods upon which he could slap a fine of five or ten lira.
    “What can I do about something like that?” he said. “My job is to be here for the ferries.”
    “Aren’t you a Muslim?”
    “Of course we are Muslims, Madam. Praise be to God! But we are also harbormasters. I cannot leave my post. It is my duty to stay here. Please go and talk to the main porter.”
    The main porter lived in a handsome two-story house in the middle of the village. As she approached the house, the woman looked as if she had something to say to the flames rising from the stove. At one moment it even looked as if she were standing in a room lit by a stove, plucking yellow – amber yellow – tobacco from a bowl, wire by wire, and relating the village gossip.
    She knocked on the door.
    Sitting before the potbellied stove with two children, a boy and a girl, at either side, was a swarthy man reading an old and yellowing newspaper. He was wearing glasses. Poking out from underneath his nightshirt were hairy, Herculean calves. One was resting on the other; one of his slippers had fallen to the floor. The exposed foot was extraordinarily ugly; it looked up at the woman, bruised and bulbous, like a newborn child.
    “So Madam. Tell me why you’re here.”
    The woman repeated what she’d said to the harbormaster. “Last night, my husband …”
    “Madam,” said the porter. “Do you have any money? It’ll be hard, convincing any of my porters to go out there in the dead of winter. The rascals just won’t budge! They’re all going hungry. They’ve long since spent their summer earnings. They get no share of the fish, they could die of hunger. I could do something for you. I could, but not for nothing.”
    “I have nothing left to sell. I told you. I don’t even have food for my children.”
    “You must be able to find some money somewhere.”
    “If I had the money to get to Istanbul, then perhaps …”
    “Well, then. Here’s ten, eleven
kuruş
.”
    The woman thanked him and took her leave. She ran to the bakery. With a loaf in her arms, she headed up the steep hill. A young girl ran up to her and buried her head in the woman’s skirt. Bread that wouldn’t fill her for more than ten minutes.
    The woman went back down to the village. She’d remembered the district doctor. The district doctor was in the midst of his winter chemistry experiments. He’d dissolve his nitrates, turn litmus papers from blue to red, and from red to blue, produce chlorine, do an analysis of his water, check his blood pressure, sniff ozone.
    When they told him a woman had come to see him, he was conducting a urine analysis. He had added some substances to the urine to find out if there was any sugar.
    Eventually gases emerged from the liquid as it turned blue. Then suddenly the urine turned brick red.
    “Oh, no!” said the doctor to himself. “We’re in trouble! Now why did I drink that water? No sleeping now! My God grant us our just desserts!”
    Poking her head through the door, his wife said, “There’s a woman here to see you, sir.”
    “I’m coming,” he said.
    “I’ll make it clear to this woman that she shouldn’t be disturbing me like this,” he mumbled to himself, “I’ll show her …”
    “So tell me. What seems to be the problem, Madam?”
    The woman told him.
    “He can’t be moved until I see him.”
    “But he’s not ill. The man’s dead.”
    “We shall see if he’s dead or not. How else could I know?”
    “At the very least, ask them to move him.”
    “I can’t go all the way out there. I’m ill, too, Madam. I’m diabetic. I’m old, the trek up there would do