The morning had begun badly, and by half past eleven, Emir had decided that there was very little in the world worth being grateful for.
His stomach had been troubling him since the previous evening, a dull, persistent ache that had kept him awake for much of the night. He had telephoned his office shortly after eight, hoping that his condition might persuade his manager to grant him an extension on a report that was already two days overdue. His manager had listened, expressed a perfunctory concern for his health, and then reminded him that the deadline had been fixed weeks ago.
There had been no argument. No raised voices. Only that maddeningly reasonable tone with which people sometimes deliver the most unreasonable disappointments.
Emir had hung up feeling insulted.
It was not merely the report, nor even the headache that had settled behind his eyes. It was the cumulative indignity of his existence: the years he had spent working without getting anywhere, the colleagues who seemed to advance by some mysterious privilege, the rent that consumed a considerable portion of his salary, and the constant suspicion that he was falling behind in a race whose destination nobody had thought to disclose to him.
At thirty-two, he had imagined himself to be somewhere else.
He had imagined a better apartment, a more impressive designation, perhaps a car of his own. He had imagined being the sort of man whose phone rang with invitations rather than reminders, whose opinions were sought rather than tolerated. Instead, he had spent the better part of the morning begging for forty-eight additional hours to finish a document that, in all likelihood, nobody would remember having read.
He walked through the hospital corridor with his hands thrust into his pockets, his face arranged into an expression of habitual displeasure.
He had come to have his stomach examined because the pain had grown difficult to ignore. The doctor had sent him for a few tests and asked him to wait. Emir had been waiting for twenty minutes, which he considered an unreasonable length of time, though he had no particular objection to keeping other people waiting when circumstances required it.
A nurse passed him with a file pressed to her chest. Somewhere behind a closed door, a child was crying. Two elderly women sat beside a window, speaking in low voices over a paper cup of tea. Emir noticed none of them for more than a second. He was composing, in his head, an elaborate reply to his manager, one that would make his own indispensability unmistakable and the man’s insensitivity impossible to deny.
He turned a corner too quickly and collided with someone coming from the opposite direction.
A small paper bag fell to the floor. An orange rolled beneath a chair.
“Good Lord!” Emir exclaimed. “Could you not watch where you’re going?”
The stranger steadied himself against the wall. He was a man perhaps in his late fifties, dressed in a pale blue shirt beneath a grey cardigan. He was thinner than Emir had first supposed, and there was something unsteady about the way he stood, as though the floor had shifted imperceptibly beneath his feet.
“My apologies,” the stranger said.
He bent to retrieve the bag, but the movement seemed to cost him some effort.
Emir watched him struggle for a moment before stooping to pick up the orange. He placed it in the bag with rather more force than was necessary.
“You should be careful,” he muttered.
“Yes,” the man said. “I must remember that.”
There was no irritation in his voice. This, for some reason, irritated Emir further.
The stranger glanced at him.
“Are you waiting to see the doctor?”
“No, I come here for the scenery.”
The man smiled faintly, accepting the remark without offence.
“Then I hope the scenery improves.”
Emir might have laughed under other circumstances. Instead, he checked his phone. There was a message from a colleague asking whether he had finished the report. He put the phone away without replying.
The stranger had begun walking again, slowly, with one hand resting against the wall. After a few steps, he stopped.
“Would you mind helping me with this bag?” he asked. “I seem to have bought more oranges than I can comfortably carry.”
Emir looked at the bag. There were four oranges, a packet of biscuits, and a small bottle of water.
He took it.
“Where are you going?”
“Just down there. Room seventeen.”
Emir accompanied him along the corridor, partly because he had been asked and partly because it seemed unkind to abandon a man who could barely carry his own groceries. He told himself that he was doing a perfectly ordinary favour and that it would take no more than a minute.
The corridor grew quieter as they went. The familiar bustle of the general wards gave way to a strange, subdued stillness. On one side, a woman sat with her head bowed over a folded handkerchief. A young man stood beside her, looking at the floor. Through an open doorway, Emir saw a patient lying beneath a white sheet while a nurse adjusted a tube attached to his arm.
He slowed without quite knowing why.
The stranger noticed.
“Oncology,” he said, following Emir’s gaze.
The word seemed to alter the air between them.
Emir looked at him. “You?”
The man nodded.
“Oh.”
It was an absurdly inadequate response, and he knew it. He searched for something more appropriate but could think of nothing that did not sound either foolish or intrusive.
They reached room seventeen. The stranger pushed the door open with his shoulder.
Inside, a woman in her fifties sat beside the window, peeling an apple into a white bowl. She looked up at once.
“You’ve been gone ages, Demir,” she said. “I was beginning to think you’d gone out to buy the whole market.”
“Only the oranges,” he replied. “I thought I’d leave the market for tomorrow.”
She smiled, and for a moment her face lost the anxious expression it had worn when Emir first saw her.
Demir turned to him.
“Thank you. You’ve saved me from a very difficult journey of perhaps twenty yards.”
“It was nothing,” Emir said.
The woman took the bag from him. “Won’t you sit down for a moment? You look tired.”
“No, thank you. I have to get back.”
“Of course.”
Demir settled himself on the bed. The effort left him a little breathless, though he tried to conceal it by reaching for the bottle of water. His wife watched him with the practised attention of someone who had learned to recognise small changes in a familiar face.
“At least sit until you’ve caught your breath,” she said.
“I am sitting.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, Gulmehar. I know what you mean.”
Emir stood awkwardly near the door. He had intended to leave at once, but something about the room held him there. Perhaps it was the way Gulmehar placed the apple slices in a neat circle on the bowl’s rim, or the way Demir looked at her when she spoke. There was an ease between them that seemed to belong to another kind of life, one in which people had known each other long enough to communicate through complaints that were not really complaints at all.
On the bedside table lay a pair of spectacles, a half-finished crossword, and a notebook with a blue cover. A small photograph had been propped against the water jug. In it, Demir stood beside a younger woman and a boy on a beach, all three squinting into the sunlight. Demir’s hair was darker in the photograph, and he was laughing at something outside the frame.
“Your son?” Emir asked before he could stop himself.
“Our daughter,” Demir replied. “And her son. My grandson. He insists on being photographed only when he is eating something.”
“He’s eight,” Gulmehar added. “At that age, eating is practically a profession.”
Demir reached for the photograph and studied it with a tenderness that made Emir feel he had intruded upon something private.
“We went to the coast that year,” he said. “Our daughter had been insisting on it for ages. I kept telling her we would go when work became less demanding.”
“And did it?” Emir asked.
“Did what?”
“Become less demanding.”
Demir looked up and smiled.
“No. I became less demanding of it, eventually. There is a difference.”
Gulmehar lowered her eyes to the apple she was peeling. Emir could not tell whether she was smiling.
“I spent most of my life believing that I was preparing to live,” Demir continued. “I thought that once I had earned enough, once I had secured my family’s future, once I had reached a certain position, then I would have the freedom to enjoy everything I had worked for. I had a very elaborate arrangement with the future.”
“What arrangement?”
“I gave it everything I had, and it promised to give me everything I wanted in return.”
“And did it?”
Demir turned the photograph in his hands.
“It seems the future is not much for keeping promises.”
He said it lightly, but something in his expression had changed. Emir looked away, embarrassed by the sudden intimacy of the remark.
“I suppose that’s true for everyone,” he said. “We all have things we want to do. We just can’t do them all at once.”
“No, of course not. But there is a difference between being unable to do everything and postponing the things that matter most because you imagine you will always have time.”
Demir placed the photograph back on the table.
“I wanted to take my wife to Italy. She has wanted to see Florence since she was a girl. I wanted to walk through those streets with her, to sit in a little café and pretend we knew something about art. I wanted to see my grandson finish school. I wanted to teach him chess, though I suspect he would beat me before long. I wanted to spend a summer doing absolutely nothing useful.”
“You could still do those things,” Emir said.
The words came out too quickly. He heard the false reassurance in them as soon as he had spoken.
Demir did not correct him.
“Perhaps,” he said. “Though I have begun to understand that there is a great deal of difference between what is possible and what one is permitted to hope for.”
A silence followed.
From somewhere farther down the corridor came the squeak of a trolley. A nurse appeared at the doorway, checked the fluid in Demir’s drip, and asked whether he needed anything. He said he did not. Before leaving, she reminded him that the doctor would be coming by later.
Demir thanked her.
Emir looked at the tubes, the thinness of the man’s wrists, the small collection of medicines on the table. Until then, he had understood the word oncology only as a name for a department in a hospital. Now it seemed to have entered the room and taken up residence among the ordinary things: the oranges, the notebook, the photograph, the half-finished crossword.
“May I ask you something?” he said.
“Of course.”
“How long have you been here?”
Demir glanced at Gulmehar before answering.
“On and off, for several months. More regularly lately.”
“And what is it?”
For the first time, Demir seemed to consider whether he ought to answer. He rubbed his thumb along the edge of the bedsheet.
“Cancer,” he said at last. “It began in my lungs. It has spread.”
Emir felt a small, cold sensation in his stomach, quite separate from the pain that had brought him to the hospital.
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” Demir said.
The simplicity of the answer caught him off guard.
Demir gave a faint laugh.
“People tend to expect me to say something more encouraging. That I am fighting, that I am hopeful, that I shall defeat it. I have said those things myself. Some days I even believe them. But the doctors have been quite clear with us. The treatment is no longer expected to cure me.”
Gulmehar continued peeling the apple. The knife moved slowly through the skin.
“Have they told you how long?” Emir asked.
“Not precisely. They think it may be a matter of weeks, perhaps less. They have told us to prepare.”
He said it without ceremony, as though describing a journey for which the tickets had already been purchased.
Emir looked at him, waiting for some sign of collapse, some visible rebellion against the words he had just spoken. But Demir merely reached for a slice of apple and ate it.
“Isn’t that terrible?” Emir asked quietly.
“Yes.”
“How can you sit here and speak about it as if—”
“As if I were speaking about the weather?”
Emir nodded.
Demir considered the question.
“I don’t always speak about it like this. Yesterday I was angry with Gulmehar because she had hidden the car keys from me. I wanted to drive home, though the doctors have forbidden it. The day before, I was angry because the soup was cold. I have been frightened enough to make a fool of myself. I have lain awake at night thinking of all the things I shall miss. There is nothing noble about any of that.”
He paused to catch his breath.
“But I am here now. And this afternoon, my wife has brought me an apple, and I have four oranges, and the sun is shining through that window. If I spend every moment thinking of what I am about to lose, I shall lose this as well.”
He looked towards Gulmehar.
“Besides, she makes a very good apple pie. I am told she intends to make one when we get home.”
Gulmehar’s hands stopped.
“Who told you that?”
“You did.”
“I said I might.”
“Ah. Then I have something to look forward to.”
She turned away, pretending to inspect the fruit.
Emir looked down at his hands. He could not remember the last time he had looked forward to something without first considering what it would cost him, how much time it would take, or whether it would bring him any closer to the life he had imagined.
“Do you ever feel cheated?” he asked.
Demir looked at him.
“By life, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Every day, sometimes.”
The answer surprised him.
“I thought you would say no.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Because you seem…” Emir searched for the word. “At peace.”
Demir smiled without amusement.
“That is because you have known me for less than an hour.”
Gulmehar laughed softly, and even Emir smiled.
“I have spent years envying people who had more than I did,” Demir continued. “More money, more success, more recognition. I used to compare my life with theirs and find it wanting. I would come home after a long day and complain that I had not achieved enough. My wife would ask me to sit with her, and I would tell her I was tired. My daughter would call, and I would ask her to ring back because I was busy. I was always tired, Emir. Always busy. And I was always certain that the real part of my life was waiting just around the corner.”
He looked at the photograph again.
“I don’t regret working. I don’t regret what I achieved. I wanted to give my family security, and I did. I am proud of that. But I wish I had understood sooner that providing a life for the people you love is not quite the same thing as living it with them.”
Emir felt something tighten in his chest.
He thought of the evenings he had spent staring at his laptop while his mother called from another city, asking whether he had eaten. He had often found her questions irritating. He would answer impatiently, promise to call her on Sunday, and then spend Sunday worrying about the work he had not finished. He thought of friends whose messages he left unanswered because he did not want to be reminded of the things he had not accomplished. He thought of the years he had spent waiting to become someone worth being happy as.
He pushed the thoughts away.
“But you have had a good life,” he said. “You have a family. You have achieved things. You have a home to return to. I haven’t even managed half of what I wanted. I work all day, and for what? I am thirty-two years old, and I feel as though I have nothing to show for it.”
Demir listened.
“Perhaps you have not achieved what you wanted yet,” he said. “That is not the same as having nothing.”
“It feels the same.”
“I believe you.”
There was no correction in his voice, no attempt to diminish the weight of Emir’s disappointments.
“But tell me something. If your manager had granted you those two extra days this morning, would your life have become a good one?”
Emir opened his mouth, then closed it.
“No,” he admitted.
“And if he had doubled your salary?”
“That would help.”
“Of course it would. Money matters. Work matters. The things you want for yourself matter. I am not suggesting otherwise. But would you have stopped being unhappy?”
Emir stared at the floor.
He had imagined a higher salary so often that he had begun to regard it as a kind of salvation. He had never seriously considered what he would want after obtaining it. There would be another position, another figure to reach, another person to surpass. He had made a habit of moving the boundary of contentment just beyond his reach and then resenting the distance.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Neither did I, at your age.”
Demir shifted against the pillows. Gulmehar moved forward to help him, but he raised a hand, asking her to wait. He adjusted himself slowly and settled back, his face briefly contorted with pain.
When it had passed, he exhaled.
“There was a time when I believed that if I worked hard enough, nothing could take away what I had earned. I thought that the house, the savings, the things I had built would somehow protect us from misfortune. I don’t think that anymore.”
He looked around the room.
“Still, I am glad I built them. I am glad I gave my daughter an education. I am glad I married Gulmehar. I am glad I had the years I had. What frightens me is not that I have accomplished too little. It is that I have only just begun to understand how much there is to love.”
Gulmehar put the knife down.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Then Demir said, almost apologetically, “I don’t mean to make you miserable. You came here with a stomach ache. You didn’t ask for a sermon.”
“I don’t think you’ve given me one.”
“Good. I have never been very good at sermons.”
Emir laughed, and this time the sound came naturally.
The older man smiled.
“May I ask you something now?”
“Yes.”
“What do you enjoy?”
Emir frowned.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what is it that you enjoy doing? Not what you want to achieve. Not what you hope to buy. Not what you intend to do once you have made something of yourself. What do you enjoy?”
Emir tried to answer.
He thought of his job, his plans, the things he had promised himself he would do when he had more money or more time. He thought of books he had bought and never read, of places he had wanted to visit, of evenings spent scrolling through photographs of other people’s holidays. He thought of the meals he ate while working, the weekends that disappeared into unfinished tasks, the conversations he hurried through because he was always thinking about what came next.
He could not remember the last time he had done something simply because he enjoyed it.
“I used to read,” he said eventually.
“What did you read?”
“Novels, mostly.”
“And do you still?”
“Not really.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t have time.”
Demir raised his eyebrows.
“Of course.”
There was no mockery in the remark, which somehow made it more difficult to hear.
“I keep telling myself I’ll start again when things settle down,” Emir added.
“And do you think they will?”
Emir looked towards the window.
“I suppose they have to, eventually.”
Demir said nothing.
Outside, the man with the umbrella had disappeared. The sunlight had moved across the floor, reaching the legs of the bedside table. Somewhere in the building, a telephone rang and rang before being answered.
Emir noticed that the room had become quieter. He was no longer thinking about his manager, or the report, or the colleague who had messaged him. The anger that had accompanied him into the hospital had not vanished, exactly. It had simply become less certain of its own importance.
“Can I tell you something?” he asked.
“Please do.”
“Sometimes I get so tired of everything that I wish I had never been born.”
Gulmehar looked up.
Emir regretted saying it almost immediately. He had never spoken the words aloud to anyone. They had existed in the private corners of his mind, appearing on particularly bad evenings and disappearing by morning, when there was work to be done. Spoken aloud, they sounded harsher than he had intended.
Demir did not look shocked. He did not offer a quick reassurance or tell him that he had so much to live for.
Instead, he asked, “How long have you been feeling that way?”
Emir thought about it.
“I don’t know. A while.”
“Are you always unhappy?”
“No. Not always.”
“Then there is a part of you that still finds something worth staying for.”
Emir looked at him.
“I suppose.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
Demir nodded slowly.
“Perhaps you have been so busy measuring what is missing that you have forgotten to notice what remains.”
Emir felt an old resistance rise within him. It was the kind of sentence he would once have dismissed as something a person said when he had nothing practical to offer. Yet Demir had not spoken it triumphantly. He seemed as uncertain of it as Emir was.
“I don’t think it’s that simple,” Emir said.
“No,” Demir replied. “It isn’t.”
He reached for the bottle of water and took a small sip.
“I would never tell you that your troubles don’t matter. They matter to you, and that is reason enough to take them seriously. But I wonder whether you have been asking your life to prove its worth to you before you are willing to enjoy it.”
Emir remained silent.
“I did that for years,” Demir continued. “I told myself I would be happy when I had achieved this, when I had earned that, when the next problem had been solved. I treated happiness as a reward that would be handed to me when I had completed all my obligations. I never considered that the obligations might never end.”
He glanced at the notebook on his bedside table.
“I have a list of things I wanted to do. Would you like to hear it?”
Emir nodded.
Demir picked up the notebook and opened it to a page covered in uneven handwriting.
“Visit Florence with Gulmehar. Teach my grandson chess. Learn to make bread. Read at least three novels a month. Sit on the balcony at home and watch the rain without feeling guilty about not working.”
He paused.
“Plant an apple tree.”
“An apple tree?” Emir asked.
“Yes. There is a corner in our garden where I thought I would grow apple tree. I kept saying I would plant one after the renovations were finished. Then after I retired. Then after we returned from our holiday. It is a very good corner, apparently. It has been waiting for me for years.”
Emir smiled faintly.
“Perhaps someone else can plant it.”
“Perhaps. But I wanted to plant it myself.”
For the first time, his voice faltered. He looked down at the notebook and ran his finger along the edge of the page.
“I wanted to see them. I wanted to stand beneath it one summer and pick an apple with my own hands. I wanted to complain that it wasn’t producing enough fruit. I wanted to be an old man who had nothing more important to do than argue with a tree.”
He laughed, but the sound broke halfway through.
Gulmehar reached for his hand. He took hers without looking up.
Emir sat very still.
It occurred to him that he had spent years wishing to escape the life he possessed, while this man was grieving for the smallest pieces of a life he could no longer be sure he would have. The thought made him uncomfortable, not because it condemned him, but because it revealed something he had not wished to see.
He had been waiting for his life to become extraordinary before he allowed himself to love it.
Demir closed the notebook.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I seem to have become rather sentimental.”
“You don’t need to apologise.”
“No? Well, that’s a relief. I was afraid you’d report me to the authorities.”
Emir laughed again. Gulmehar shook her head at her husband, though there was affection in the gesture.
“He’s always been like this,” she told Emir. “Even when he was perfectly healthy, he could turn the simplest conversation into an occasion for reflection.”
“Not always,” Demir protested. “Sometimes I talk about football.”
“Only when your team wins.”
“That is when football is most worth discussing.”
Their laughter was brief, but it filled the room with something that felt almost like warmth.
A little later, there was a knock at the door. A doctor entered, accompanied by a nurse, and spoke quietly with Demir and Gulmehar. He asked about the pain, checked the chart, and explained that they would adjust the medication to keep Demir comfortable. There was no talk of recovery, no promise of a new treatment that would turn everything around. The conversation was gentle and practical, concerned with the hours ahead rather than the months that would never come.
When the doctor left, Emir rose.
“I should go,” he said.
“Of course,” Demir replied.
Emir hesitated at the door.
“I hope you get to plant your tree.”
Demir looked at him for a long moment.
“So do I.”
It was all he said.
Emir stepped into the corridor. The door closed softly behind him, and for a few seconds he stood where he was, listening to the distant sounds of the ward.
A woman was speaking to someone on the telephone, asking whether they had remembered to feed the cat. A nurse walked past carrying a tray. From another room came the faint sound of a television. Life continued, with its small demands and its unfinished conversations, even here.
Emir returned to the waiting area, where his name was called a few minutes later. The doctor examined him, asked about his symptoms, and explained that the preliminary findings suggested gastritis. He advised Emir to take the prescribed medication, eat regularly, and try to manage his stress. There was no immediate cause for alarm, though further tests would be reviewed as needed.
Emir thanked him.
Outside the hospital, the afternoon had grown warm. He stood beneath the awning and took out his phone. His manager had sent another message.
Please confirm that the report will be submitted by tomorrow morning.
Emir read it twice.
The old irritation stirred. He could already feel the familiar argument assembling itself in his mind, the list of grievances, the bitter satisfaction of being wronged. For a moment, he wanted to write something cutting enough to make his manager regret the message.
Instead, he typed:
I will do my best to submit it tomorrow. I am unwell today and have been advised to rest for a while. I will update you this evening.
He read the message once, then sent it.
Nothing remarkable happened. His manager did not apologise. The deadline did not disappear. The world did not suddenly become kinder.
Emir put the phone away.
On the pavement beyond the hospital gates, a boy was trying to persuade his mother to buy him a paper windmill. She refused at first, pointing towards the road, but the boy persisted with the solemn determination of someone who believed the matter to be of the greatest consequence. Eventually, she relented. He ran ahead of her, holding the little windmill into the breeze, and watched it turn.
Emir stood looking at them longer than he intended.
He remembered the books he used to read. He remembered the calls he had meant to return, the people he had kept at a distance, the walks he had postponed because there was always something more urgent to do. He thought of his mother, who would probably call that evening, and of the way he had answered her last time, impatient to return to his work.
He took out his phone again.
For a moment, he considered waiting until the evening. He was still tired. He still had a report to finish. There were reasons enough to put it off.
He called her.
She answered on the fourth ring.
“Emir? Is everything all right?”
“Yes,” he said. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”
There was a brief silence.
“Have you eaten?” she asked.
He smiled.
“No. Not yet.”
“Then eat something. You never look after yourself.”
“I know.”
“And go to the doctor properly. Don’t just take some medicine and forget about it.”
“I will, Mother.”
She continued speaking, moving from one concern to another, and he listened. Not because he had suddenly become patient, nor because he had discovered some great secret about life. He listened because he had called her, and because she was there, speaking to him, and because for once he did not wish the conversation to end before it had begun.
When he finally hung up, the afternoon had moved on. The report was still waiting. His stomach still hurt a little. He was still thirty-two, still uncertain of his future, still a long way from the life he had imagined for himself.
But he was no longer in quite such a hurry to despise it.
That evening, he went home and opened the novel that had been lying untouched on his bedside table for nearly a year. He read only a few pages before his eyes grew tired. The report remained unfinished on his laptop, and the room was as untidy as he had left it that morning. Nothing had been resolved. There was no sudden revelation, no promise that tomorrow would be easier.
He closed the book, placed it beside his bed, and set an alarm for the morning.
Then, before turning out the light, he looked at the list of things he had written on a scrap of paper months earlier: learn to swim, visit the sea, save enough to travel, read more, call his mother more often. He had added new ambitions to the list since then, but had crossed off very little.
He picked up the paper and read it once.
For the first time in a long while, he did not think of the list as evidence of all the things he had failed to do. He thought of it as a collection of possibilities.
He folded it and placed it inside the novel.
The next morning, Demir would wake in his hospital bed. Perhaps he would feel well enough to eat an orange. Perhaps the pain would be worse. Gulmehar would sit beside him, and they would speak about the lemon tree, about their daughter, about the holiday they might never take. There would be hours in which he was afraid, and hours in which he would forget to be afraid. His life would continue to narrow around him, but he would still be living it, one ordinary moment at a time.
Emir did not know any of this as he lay in the dark. He did not know whether Demir would ever plant his tree, or whether the man would live for another week, or another month. He had no way of knowing what the next morning would bring to either of them.
He knew only that somewhere in the hospital, a man who had spent his life postponing happiness was trying, with what remained to him, to stop postponing it any longer.
And for the first time, Emir understood that tomorrow was not a place where life began.
It was merely the name he had given to all the living he had yet to do.