The Fragments, III
The receptionist had reading glasses pushed up into her hair and a pen behind each ear.
“Demir?” she said.
The waiting room smelled like someone had recently microwaved fish and then tried to cover it up with lavender. Demir had been in one of the orange plastic chairs for thirty-two minutes. A woman in a stiff blazer sat reading her phone with surgical focus. Next to her, a young man kept adjusting a tie that didn’t need adjusting. Demir counted the adjustments. He stopped at nine.
He stood up before the second syllable had landed.
She pointed down a corridor with the pen from her left ear. “Second door on the right.”
The office was larger than he expected. A wide mahogany desk, nearly empty—just a closed laptop, a glass of water with no coaster, and a single manila folder, very thin, positioned exactly in the center. Behind the desk, a window that looked out onto a construction site. A crane was moving something slowly across the sky, and for a moment Demir watched it, trying to figure out what it was carrying.
The man behind the desk stood up to shake his hand. He was short and wide, built like a filing cabinet, with thick fingers and a watch that sat too loose on his wrist, sliding down toward his knuckles every time he gestured. His eyebrows were remarkable—dense and expressive, two grey caterpillars conducting an orchestra only they could hear. He wore a shirt that had been ironed recently and well, except for one crease along the left forearm that he kept smoothing with his other hand, a gesture so habitual it had probably lost all meaning years ago.
“Sit, sit,” he said, waving at a chair. The chair was leather, tall-backed, the kind that makes you feel like you’re either about to be promoted or fired. Demir sat.
“So,” he said, opening the manila folder. He looked at whatever was inside for a long time. Longer than felt natural. Demir resisted the urge to lean forward and peek.
“Tell me about yourself.”
Demir told him. University, internship at a small agency, some freelance social media work, a certificate in Google Analytics that he’d earned on a Sunday afternoon while eating leftover börek. He didn’t mention the börek. The man nodded throughout, his eyebrows rising and falling with the rhythm of Demir’s sentences.
“Good, good,” he said. He closed the folder. Opened it again. Closed it.
“And your English—how is it?”
“Fluent,” Demir said. “I lived in England for a year.”
“Let’s continue in English, then.”
This made sense. International company, probably. Maslak was full of them. Demir straightened in his chair.
“What do you think,” the man said, switching to English with an accent that was hard to place, “about the current state of the Turkish economy?”
Demir blinked.
“It’s in a transitional period,” he said. “There’s inflation pressure, but the export sector is showing resilience, and there are structural reforms underway that could—”
The man wrote something in the folder. His pen moved quickly. Demir tried to read it upside down. He couldn’t.
“Now. If you had to choose between—let me think how to phrase this—between institutional loyalty and operational efficiency, and you could only preserve one, which would you eliminate?”
“I’d argue they’re not mutually exclusive,” Demir said. “But if I had to choose, I’d preserve efficiency, because loyalty without results eventually erodes itself.”
The man stared at him for a full three seconds. On the fourth, he smiled—a wide, genuine smile that rearranged his entire face, pushed his eyebrows up toward his hairline, and revealed a gold tooth on the upper left that caught the light from the window.
“Very good answer.”
He leaned back. The chair creaked under him. He picked up the glass of water, took a sip, and put it back down in a different spot. A wet ring remained where it had been.
“One more question. This is important.” He leaned forward again. “Do you believe that a person can be taught integrity, or is it something they either have or they don’t?”
They must know what they’re doing, Demir thought.
“I think integrity can be practiced,” he said. “It’s like a muscle. Some people are born with more of it, but everyone can develop it if the conditions are right.”
The man closed the folder for the last time. He stood up. He extended his hand.
“Welcome aboard.”
Demir walked out of the building into the afternoon sun, lighter than he’d been in months. The receptionist smiled at him on the way out—a knowing smile, the kind receptionists give when they already know the outcome. The woman in the stiff blazer was still in the waiting room. The young man with the short tie was gone.
Outside, he called his mother. She cried. He called his roommate. His roommate said finally. He walked to the Starbucks on the corner and ordered an Iced Shaken Espresso Lavender Oatmilk, which cost more than his dinner the night before.
The email arrived two hours later. He opened it on the bus home, standing, holding the overhead rail with one hand and his phone with the other, reading between the jolts.
Dear Demir,
We are delighted to confirm your appointment as Junior Policy Analyst at the Strategic Planning Division of…
He read the sentence again. Then once more.
He had never applied to be a policy analyst. He had never heard of the Strategic Planning Division. He had walked into the wrong office.
He could call. He could explain. He could say there’s been a mistake, I’m not who you think I am, I was here for the marketing position on the third floor.
The bus stopped. Someone got off. Someone got on. The doors closed, and they moved again.
Demir put his phone in his pocket.
He started on Monday.