Zübeyde Hanım

But paper is a patient material, and it does not object when the truth beneath it begins to shift.

In a modest house near the edge of this restless city, in a household of middling means and considerable pride, a woman named Zübeyde presses a newborn son against her chest and feels perhaps the particular fear known only to mothers who have already buried children.

She has lost infants before this one.

She will lose more after.

Disease moves through nurseries the way weather moves through open fields, indifferent and total.

So when this boy draws breath and continues to draw it day after day, there is a wariness beneath the joy.

Zübeyde does not yet call him anything remarkable.

He is simply Mustafa, a common name, unremarkable, chosen without any premonition of the world-altering shape his life will eventually take.