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me in. Find me a donkey, and then I could come out. Without a donkey, I’m not budging.”
    “All right,” said the woman as she left. “I’ll try to find a donkey.”
    As she stepped outside, the woman saw with amazement that the morning’s summery spell had ended most abruptly. A stinging wind had blown in. The clouds were rolling toward their house in the woods, one after the other, like a great funeral procession. She ran home. Rolling the body in a sheet, she carried it outside. It had begun to snow. In the space of a minute, her nightdress had turned white. She half carried, half dragged him as faras the top of the hill. Passing over it, she went down the other side until the ground was flat again. She was sheltered from the wind there. Here again, it was almost like summer.
    It was quiet in this valley, and almost warm. Here and there, a snowflake swirled through the warm air. Only the south wind came as far as this cliff top. The north wind reached only as far as the tops of the evergreens.
    A bit further along, there were more cliffs. And there, at the edge, the woman stood quivering – perhaps she was praying, or perhaps she was just cold. At first she could hear nothing. Then she did. But it was only pebbles, rolling down to the sea.
    It snowed for three days. For three days, the wind howled. In three days, only three ferries stopped at the island. The head porter sat in front of his stove reading two-year-old newspapers, popping corn. The doctor ate at least a bit of pilaf every day, on the pretext of testing his urine. He just about forgot that a woman had come to see him.
    The harbormaster was a thin, dry, nervous man. Now and again, something flamed up inside him. One moment he would remember this woman who had come to him, asking him to help her bury her husband, and the next moment he would forget.
    But whenever the memory hit him, it was as if he were seeing his own body, dead for days, and still unclaimed.
    It was another unseasonably warm day. The barber stopped shaving his customer and, pointing out the window with the tip of his razor, said, “There’s the woman from the house on the hill again. Where’s she off to this time?”
    The sallow-faced woman was heading to the pier. Then she stopped. Instead, she began to walk along the shore. An old man was doing the same. He looked like one of those men who used the good weather as an excuse to come out to the islands for a stroll.
    The woman walked straight over to the man. She seemed to want to tell him something. Then she gave up on the idea, smiling to herself as if something amusing had just occurred to her, and set off for the ferry that was just coming around the edge of the next island.
    She was the only woman on the ferry, and the only one without a ticket. But the number of passengers disembarking at Kadıköy was the same as the number of tickets. Not a single ticket more, not a single less.

On Spoon Island

    Mücahit was at the head of the rowboat, holding two little oars. I was bent over at the very bottom because rowboats always made my head spin. I couldn’t see the water. All I could see was the bright sky above me shifting like running water. Odisya was singing something in Greek. Yakup was naked from the waist up and seemed to be listening. Sometimes moonlight flashed across his blue eyes. A boy whose name I didn’t know was sitting beside me. He had an unusually small face and his body was small. Every part of him was small: his hands, his ears and his eyes. We called him “Sultan Hamit’s dwarf.”
    We were crossing over to Spoon Island. Robinson’s ghost was whirling inside us: Our ship had sunk and we were on a raft, we were bound for a deserted island, where we’d build a hut …
    Reluctant to share our secret Robinsons, we all fell silent; the better to keep the dream alive. Seven of us on the boat, seven Robinsons in disguise. A single word would remind us that we lived on Burgazada, and that just an arm’s length