Microsoft Word 1 Arif thesis cover final doc

CHAPTER 7 – ERGENEKON 
229 
A few pages further on the thought of the donkey introduces one of the most 
emotional passages in the novel which by a series of unexpected associations takes 
Ahmet Celal to the memory of his mother
47
:
For three days there has been a jet-black donkey colt in my stable, and I 
can’t help myself from awakening every morning with a heart leaping for 
joy. The many turns of fate were unable to save me from this childhood 
habit. When they got a new toy for me any hour of the day, whether I 
was studying my lessons or walking along the road, when I thought of 
the toy, my insides would be filled again and again by the endless, bright 
waves of the open sea. In the truest sense, my heart would be full. 
Everyone and everything around appeared to me as charming symbols of 
this magical world I had just discovered, whose essence seemed sweeter 
than honey.
Even in school, the school itself; even in front of the teacher my teacher 
himself; even the narrow, crooked, damp street that I got of seeing on my 
way to and from school twice a day; even the yard of our house, which 
was wet as a cellar on winter days and filled with sunshine like a desert, 
in the summer; to me they were all clouded with the same essence, had 
all come to life with the same magic. Everyone or everything I met, I 
wanted to hug and kiss. If you were going to analyse what the thing was 
which gave this extraordinary joy to my heart, what would you have 
found? Either a wooden horse, a locomotive of painted tin, or a little 
drum whose skin was doomed to be pierced within two or three days. So 
it was that a nothing, a trifle, a piece of wood or tin was enough to give 
my child’s soul this deep boundless joy.
And so, here on this bed of affliction and hardship in what remains of my 
ruined thirty-three -year-old life after a thousand calamities, a jet-black 
donkey colt, a live toy, is enough to give the same joy. So the soul inside 
this ruin of a body is still the same soul. 
I have seen fully ripe, tough soldiers, with mature beards, on the field of 
battle, into whose eye sat the moment of disaster, comes the look of a 
child; and as he falls to earth he cries, in the voice of an inexperienced 
boy who has not yet reached manhood, “Oh, mama, mama!” during the 
approach of ever higher fevers, at the time they put me under chloroform 
to cut off my arm, I too, kept saying, “Mother, mother!” It was as if she 
47
Karaosmanoğlu 2006, 98-100, Jacobson, 118-120. The memory of a mother, it will be recalled, dominates the 
Fragment C, comprising the closing pages of Yakup Kadri’s 
Ateşten Gömlek, 
in Appendix 1 with its translation 
in Appendix 2
. 

---