The Fragments, I
The last day of school smelled like warm asphalt and cheap erasers. June had already started doing its work on the city—heat so thick it made the tar on the roads go soft under your sandals and turned every apartment balcony into a stage for drying laundry and slicing watermelon. It was the early eighties, and summer didn't begin with a calendar date. It began with a report card.
Mine was perfect. Pekiyi across the board. All A's, every single line. I held the thin card in both hands like a winning lottery ticket, careful not to crease it, and walked out of the school gates into the blinding afternoon sun. My dad was waiting by the car—a boxy sedan with vinyl seats that would brand your thighs if you sat down too fast. He glanced at the card, nodded with that quiet, satisfied look fathers had back then, and said the words I'd been waiting to hear all week:
"Haydi, kasetçiye gidelim."
Let's go to the video store.
A small, dimly lit place squeezed between a bakkal and a tailor, its walls lined floor to ceiling with VHS cases—their plastic spines faded from sunlight, their cover art promising worlds I could barely imagine. Action heroes with impossible muscles. Spaceships hovering over alien landscapes. But here's the thing about video stores: the cases on the shelves were empty. Display copies only, their hollow plastic lighter than they should have been. The actual tapes lived behind the counter, and if someone else had rented the one you wanted, all you could do was stare at the cover and wait. Sometimes for days. Sometimes for weeks.
And there, right at eye level, as if the universe had placed it there just for me: Superman IV.
The cover alone was enough to stop my heart. Christopher Reeve, cape billowing, fist raised toward the sky. I grabbed the case off the shelf and brought it to the counter with the urgency of a man delivering an organ transplant. The shop owner checked behind him. The tape was there. It was available. It was mine.
My dad exchanged a few words with the owner—adults always had to talk, even when the most important movie in the world was being held hostage on the counter—and finally, mercifully, we walked out with it.
Excitement that makes your legs move on their own, that turns every sidewalk curb into a launchpad. I hopped off steps and swung my arms. I looked up at the sky and calculated the exact trajectory I would take if I could fly. All I was missing was the cape. The red one. I made a mental note to negotiate with my mom about a towel later that evening.
Report card: perfect. Superman: in the bag. I was, by every measure available to a seven-year-old, on top of the world.
But we didn't go straight home.
My dad pulled the car over on a side street I didn't recognize, outside an apartment building with a rusty garden gate and a vine-covered balcony. "I just need to stop by a friend's for five minutes," he said—a sentence that, in the language of fathers, could mean anything from five actual minutes to the rest of the afternoon.
We went upstairs. The friend was a large man with a mustache—they all had mustaches—sitting in a living room that smelled like cigarette smoke and strong tea. There were small glass cups on a brass tray. The TV was on, showing something boring. The two men fell into conversation instantly, the way adults do, as if they hadn't seen each other in years and also as if they'd never stopped talking.
I sat on the edge of a chair that was too big for me, the VHS tape on my lap, the report card folded neatly in my back pocket, and waited.
Then the man turned to me.
He leaned in with that big, friendly face, reached over, and gave my cheek one of those pinches—adults in the eighties considered them affectionate, children considered them an act of war. He squeezed and smiled, then asked:
"Yakışıklı, senin nasıl gidiyor bakalım? Kaç manitan var?"
Handsome, how's it going? How many girlfriends do you have?
I was seven. I knew about Superman. I knew that if you mixed Fanta with milk it tasted weird but you'd still drink it because someone dared you. What I did not know was what a "manita" was.
The word rolled around in my head for a moment. Manita. Manita. It sounded vaguely academic. Official, even. Like something that belonged on a report card. Like a subject.
And the man had asked "how many"—which was a numbers question. A grades question. A school question. So I did what any seven-year-old with a perfect report card would do.
I straightened up in my chair. I looked the man square in the eye. I answered:
"Hiç yok amca. Hepsi pekiyi."
None, uncle. They're all A's.
For three exact seconds, the room went silent. On the fourth, it exploded.
My dad threw his head back and laughed—really laughed, mouth open, shoulders shaking, the whole thing. I'd never heard him laugh like that. He was a quiet man, my dad. He smiled plenty, but this was something else entirely. The friend grabbed his knee and the tea nearly went with it. They fed off each other, the way two men do when something catches them completely off guard, and the laughter just kept going.
I smiled along. Clearly I had said something brilliant... I was a cute kid. People laughed. I didn't mind. I had things to do—and right now, the thing to do was get home and press play.
It wasn't until many years later that the memory came back to me and I finally understood what had actually happened in that room. By then I was old enough to know what a manita was, and to feel the retroactive embarrassment crawl up my neck. Old enough, thankfully, to laugh even harder than my dad and his friend had that afternoon.
None, uncle. They're all A's.