Tamuz Ogul sat on the old bus as it drove down the dusty country road and looked out the window. His possessions were in a cotton drawstring bag in the rack over his head. He looked out the window at the spare landscape. It was not hot enough for him to sweat, which was good, because then the dust kicked up by the bus would have stuck to him. As it was, a thin layer accumulated on everything. There were a few trees, large rocks, tall grass, rolling hills, the rutted dirt road the bus bounced over. Everything was brown and gray under a direct Anatolian sun.

The bus driver grumbled through his stubble because they were late, as they always were. They had been delayed by the herd of bloody sheep miles back. The shepherd had glared at the driver as the herd slowly, very slowly, crossed the road and the bus idled. The shepherd’s eyes dared the driver to move the bus through the herd. The shepherd’s dog, a big typical blond çoban köpeği with a snout like a wolf, a thick leather collar with metal spikes, no ears and no tail, stood next to the shepherd and also glared at the driver. The odds were not even. The driver thought of the shotgun under his seat, and calculated whether he could shoot the dog before it grabbed him by the throat. Every time he made this run, once a week for what, three years now, he made this calculation. One day he would take the gamble, and maybe win. Then he would shoot the shepherd. Then the authorities would hang him. No, perhaps today was not the day. His wife would be sad if he was hanged. She would say, be patient my dear, they pay you to drive whether you wait for the sheep or whether the steering wheel vibrates in your hands as you keep the bus in the worn ruts. Come home safely and I will make it worth your while.

As they drew near the institution, Tamuz watched two boys play basketball in slow motion. They stopped and watched the bus, observing the fresh meat it delivered. Tamuz was the only slab of beef on it. He did not know if this was unusual. He had not missed having anyone to talk with. Since the crackdown, there were fewer ordinary criminals like him. Today, the magistrate said, everybody has a cause. This one is a Kurd, that one an Islamist. Why the hell can’t they all just obey the laws of the Turkish Republic? Did Kemal Atatürk create it just so the magistrate could preside over boys who killed one another? Like this one, what was his name, Tamuz Ogul, who might deserve a chance. Save the hangman’s rope for Kurds and Islamists and other terrorists. The magistrate put down his small decorated glass of very sweet tea, and affixed the necessary red stamps to the stack of papers in front of him. “Tamuz, I think you’re basically a good boy. I’m giving you a chance. You won’t embarrass me by killing anyone else, will you?” Tamuz bowed his head, shuffled his feet, and held his hands in front of him. “No, sir.” But inside his head, Tamuz was surprised. He thought he was going to hang. He had no particular regrets. The man he had killed, Ali Kuchuk, had needed killing. Tamuz had acted out of necessity, and to protect his sister. The elders in the neighborhood had agreed, and were reluctant to give Tamuz up to the gendarmes. But the laws of the Turkish Republic must be followed. The oldest old man took his hand before the gendarmes led him away and told him to keep his dignity and know that a man must do what a man must do.

In the jail van, one of the gendarmes looked at Tamuz and said, “So you’re the one who killed that asshole, Ali Kuchuk,” then spat on the floor. The other gendarme looked at the first disapprovingly because he knew they were going to have to hose down the van at the end of their shift. “He deserved what he got. He was bothering your sister?” Tamuz nodded. “You seem like a good kid. I’ll put in a word to the sergeant. He’s a good guy. Maybe he’ll be able to put in a good word for you.”

The sergeant listened. His mustache twitched. “We can’t let the little f---er go, corporal. He killed a man. It would look bad. But I’ll talk to the magistrate. You’re pretty sure this Tamuz character won’t kill anyone else? I’ve got to worry about the statistics in our precinct.”

“He’s got a pretty sister, and all the young men buzz around her. I think if they’re worried that this Tamuz may come back and kill them, they’ll stay in line.”

“And you and your men, corporal, the neighborhood youth, they’re not afraid of you?” The sergeant and the corporal had had this conversation many times. “Sergeant, you know those neighborhoods, I send my men in pairs in there. They spend most of their time looking the other way. If we hanged everyone who needed hanging, the Republic would soon be composed of old women. We just try to keep a lid on things. A little fear of one of their own should keep the tongues wagging for a few years.”

The bus drew up in front of the institution. No one was around. It was hot enough that no one without a purpose or strong boredom or a job like the shepherd’s was outside. “End of the line, my friend.” The bus driver jerked his thumb toward the building. “Keep your nose clean and maybe I’ll haul your sorry ass back down this road in a few years. Good luck.” He had spoken little with this boy, who knew how to keep his mouth shut. The boy wouldn’t rat on anyone. Once during the journey the driver had broken out in song to keep himself awake and stave off boredom. An old gambling song. The boy had joined in. The driver was impressed that a youth of today even knew the song, from his own boyhood. “Where’d you learn that song, boy?” “From my father. When he sang it, my mother would wag her finger at him and remind him not to set a bad example for us kids.” The driver could not look back, because if he did, the bus would jump the ruts, but he felt that the boy smiled when he said this, remembering his mother, her warning finger, and her secret smile. The driver wished he had a son who would tell such stories about him and his wife. But their son, blessed be his memory, had died jumping out of an airplane—what an asshole!—on a training mission with the Army over Incirlik. If Allah had intended men to fly, he would have given them wings. It was all he could do to control this f---ing bus!

Tamuz slung his bag over his shoulder, climbed the stone steps, and pulled open the heavy door. Inside was gloom, but also the hum of human activity. Corridors stretched in front of him, and to the left and right. Nothing seemed to be happening front and right, so he turned left, toward an anteroom with a long chest-high wooden counter and benches. He stood in front of the counter, set his bag on the floor, and waited. He was not impatient. He knew how to wait. Waiting was better than hanging.

A middle-aged man with short steel gray hair, stubble, and a fierce mustache walked up to the other side of the counter. He looked like the American actor George Clooney. Tamuz knew what Clooney looked like because he had seen several movies with this star, sitting in the outdoor theater in a vacant lot in his neighborhood, pistachio shells clicking onto the concrete around him. “Papers?” Tamuz dug out the wad of forms from his pants pocket. “Ogul, Tamuz. You killed a man. The magistrate says you deserve a chance. Welcome to Antalya Rehabilitation Center. Where troubled boys become worthy citizens of the Turkish Republic. Want to join the Army instead?”

“If my country needs me, I will be happy to serve. But the magistrate says I belong here.” His father had also taught him never to volunteer.

“Good choice. Behave yourself, and you’ll be home in a few years, maybe two with good behavior. How did you do the killing?”

Tamuz held out his hands, palms up. “I broke his neck.”

“Any particular reason?”

“He was bothering my sister.”

Warden Clooney raised his eyebrows. Principled killers had always intrigued him. Many of us thought we could do it if we had to, but these characters actually did it. “How is she?”

“My sister? She told me I shouldn’t have done it. That she could take care of herself. But the old men, they said I did the right thing. I don’t know. “

The Warden liked this boy. He had doubts. It had taken the Warden many years to have doubts. Now he had plenty. Was he helping these boys? How many years did he have until retirement? What would he do then? Maybe if this backwards and lovely country ever got admitted to the European Union, he’d visit his relatives in Germany. “With hands like that, you’ll work in the butcher shop. Ever worked in a butcher shop?”

“No, sir. I delivered packages. And wrote letters for the old men.”

“You can read and write?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Read this.” The Warden shoved a sheet of paper across the counter toward the boy.

“Requisition. Forty-two sheets, bed, white, standard issue; tire, 570 by 40, truck, all-weather, tubed—”

“Enough. You can read. Write this.” The Warden pushed a pencil and blank sheet of paper toward Tamuz.

Tamuz took the pencil in his left hand and held it over the paper.

“Didn’t anyone tell you that the left hand does the Devil’s work?” The Warden noticed a flash of anger in the boy’s eyes.

“Yes, sir, my nickname in the neighborhood was ‘Satan’s Child,’ but the old men said that name was lifted from me after the incident.”

The Warden noticed that the boy had been in the system long enough to adopt its circumlocutions. Murder became just an incident. “The incident—when you murdered a man?”

“Yes, sir. The old men said I had done the neighborhood a favor.”

“And you, do you feel you did the neighborhood a favor? We frown on murder around here.”

“No, sir, I just did what had to be done. I take no pride in it. I am ashamed to have brought dishonor onto my family.”

“But it sounds like your neighbors approve.”

“Yes, sir. After the incident—killing—the women brought great bowls of food to my house. And when my mother visited me in jail, she said that the food keeps coming, the family has never eaten so well, my father is growing fat, and the neighbor women seem to be competing to see who can cook the best. Their husbands are jealous. My sister is embarrassed. But I think secretly she likes the attention. She says her girlfriends at school whisper that she is so beautiful that her brother had to kill a man to keep him away from her.” Tamuz blushed.

The clerks in the office were now openly looking at Tamuz and listening. In their mouths, they could taste the lamb the neighbor women brought, and in their minds they could see the beautiful sister. In their hands, they could feel the neck cracking of the local thug who dared to approach their sister in an impolite way.

The Warden turned his head slightly. “Back to work, guys. Tamuz here spins a good story, but we’ve heard plenty of stories before, right?” But he knew that this story had the ring of truth. “Tamuz, write this for me:

“Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness,
like a squirrel, for example—
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.

“Do you know that poem? Nazim Hikmet. F---ing communist died in Moscow. Still, he could write.”

The clerks rolled their eyes. The Boss sometimes went off like this, on these poetry jags. His stories of the Old Days, sitting around a fire in a sheep camp, reciting poetry, the stars above, the earth below, crapping in the dirt, drinking boiled coffee, yeah, right.

“And he loved the Republic.  I’ll whip any man who says different.” The clerks, a few with broken noses, knew better than to disagree. The Boss had his ways. His soft mouth spouted poetry, but his fists were fast, too fast, some said. That’s why he would retire from this shithole in the middle of nowhere. They say he also had killed a man who needed killing, years ago, in the Yenice Barracks, a captain who was raping a private. The authorities had hushed up the killing, and exiled the Boss to the Rehabilitation Center.  General Kanik had said, “Clooney, go rehabilitate yourself. I can’t say you did the right thing. I mean that, I am not permitted to say you did the right thing. But I will say that in my younger days, I would also have pinned the captain’s balls to the wall. Get out of my office. You report to Antalya in two weeks.” Clooney saluted, spun on his heels, and left.

And now he faced Tamuz. Who was he, anyway, to decide who should live and who should die? Clooney had regrets and knew it was foolish to have regrets. Life must be lived forward, not backward. “No neck-cracking here, you hear me? You have a problem with someone, you come to me, and I’ll handle it. No bodies on my watch.” The clerks knew this motto by heart. They could beat the boys with a stick. They could not draw blood or break bones. “No bodies on my watch.” The boys knew this, and walked up to the edge. The Boss had been known to look the other way at an occasional broken nose. He had been known to break a nose. Thus, the institution was governed by respect. And hence the Boss’s nickname—Nose Breaker. One of the clerks involuntarily touched his nose. It had been a beautiful straight nose. But it had been betrayed by the mouth that lived beneath it. What had possessed that mouth to talk back to the Boss? To make a joke about that hoary old Daglarca poem, “From Samsun to Ankara”?

My horse is ailing with hunger, my sword is stolen,
The cold bites.
Weapons rattle in my heart.
Till daybreak, in remorse and sorrow,
I fight the nights.

My butts had gold and diamonds
For ornament.
I brought them from Central Asia
To dazzle Western Europe.
Now my hands weigh down with their lament.

They all had different shapes,
But the rifle and the bow were brothers.
They gave my life its mad speed,
And made water and bread taste better,
And easier than the others.

 My sword was stolen.
My time turned crimson when the flames gored.
Epoch after epoch beat the anvil of our hearts.
So light and naked,
The mind becomes the sword.

Why had he said, “Yeah, my butt was dripping gold and diamonds, too”? Whap! The beautiful straight nose the girls had loved so much now had a hump like a camel. The other clerks laughed. An institution run on poetry, broken noses, and second chances. Life could be worse.