As a journalist and political prisoner, the entire “heavy” burden of Room 3 in Ward B10 of Silivri Prison, which I had just stepped into, was Dede—the old man who lay on the bunk by the window. When he skyrocketed from his bed with his heavy, bulky body and let out a wheezing breath from his chest, I saw before me a fatherly, wise old man rather than a dangerous criminal declared by the state.

— “Welcome,” he said, his voice coming from deep within.

— “Don’t disturb yourself,” I replied, unable to adapt the civilian, naive tone in my voice to the coarse jargon of the prison.

He could not hide the astonishment on his face; a writer trying to change the world with words and the filthy reality of the street were confronting each other for the first time on that concrete floor. As the days progressed, a strange, invisible bond was established between our bunks. In defiance of his extensive criminal past, his fingers were surprisingly elegant; he was patiently building a model ship, drawing an imaginary route of freedom behind bars. While in the beginning he called me “Teacher” out of respect for my intellectual identity, over time the distances melted away, and it turned into “Cevo.”

Despite his age and the asthma that constricted his chest, I admired his efforts to make a living through handicrafts, working in the corner of his bunk with those plastic knives. But when Pandora’s box was opened in the dim light of the ward, I realized that the old body beneath that fatherly mask was actually an atlas of crime. One evening, when he recounted with smug ease and laughter how they robbed a car dealership in just three minutes, our jaws dropped; we smiled with a heartbreaking grief.

This grief became utterly heavy when combined with the physical torment of sharing the same narrow room with him. Dede hated taking showers and emitted an unbearable, heavy odor that could be smelled from three meters away. Finally, my cellmate could not take it anymore and one day, in a voice careful not to offend him, said, “Dede, let’s wash you.” His stubborn pride kicked in and he resisted at first, but when my friend insisted, we took him to the bathroom together.

Under the hot water, as our fingers began to scrub that tired old body whose life had passed with drugs and theft, this extraordinary mutual aid in the cell reminded me of the prisoner brotherhood in Solzhenitsyn’s camps—sharing one’s bread far from grand words. Moreover, while washing away that dirty water, I was personally touching the truth Dostoyevsky found among hardened murderers in Siberian prisons: “Even in the deepest criminals, I found such noble hearts… The spark deep within the human soul never vanishes.” The state had condemned faith and crime to the same bunk, but beneath that dirty rust, the human essence waiting to be discovered even in the criminal of the street was still there. Perhaps that was the real problem: society prefers to classify people rather than understand them. In newspaper headlines, police files, and court records, people were mostly reduced solely to the crimes they committed. Prison taught me something else: a human being is sometimes greater than what they do. Dede’s life made it impossible to deny this.

After the bath, that strange loyalty between us took deeper root, making way for the old, noisy memories of the street. Dede had been a taxi driver in Istanbul for years. One evening, during one of those joyful moments when we placed a small bet between the bunks, “Look Cevo,” he said, his eyes shining, “one day a woman got into the car, and Sezen Aksu was playing on the tape. The woman leaned over and said, ‘Do you know who sings this song?’ I said, ‘How should I know, sister, it’s just playing,’ and she burst into laughter: ‘Shame on you, man, I am Sezen Aksu!’”

While the ward fell into a laughing fit, on another night Dede was talking about the long-haired man who gifted him a legendary jacket on İstiklal Avenue—one that he had seen in a shop window but could not afford—namely, Barış Manço. The story stretching from the grace of Turkey’s “Little Sparrow” and Barış Manço to this concrete abyss of Silivri was a naked mirror of how the human soul could drift.

As colorful and full of names as his outside life was, his shifts in the underworld were just as mysterious; he used a different pseudonym in every city. “I am a journalist after all, aren’t you afraid of me?” I asked one day. With a sly smile on his face, he said, “You save yourself first, Cevo…”

He was right. When evening came, the ordinary criminals would gather in front of the television, while I withdrew to my bed—my own small school—trying to heal my traumas by reading and writing. One evening, standing at the head of my bed, he asked, “Cevo, you write and draw so much… Does this work bring in any money at least? If it doesn’t bring money, I wouldn’t write a single word.” I smiled: “It’s not about money, Dede. A human being must also know why they live.” He looked at my face for a while, muttering to himself as he walked away.

Even though he disdained words, he had a wild passion for life; he was sixty-five, but he had a lover in her forties who became the talk of the ward during open visitations. “What did you do with all this money, Dede?” I asked once. He replied, “I spent it on women, Cevo. I earned from drugs and theft, and I spent it. But I never used drugs; I didn’t even smoke a cigarette. No money left, and look, I just lost my health.” When I asked, “Why don’t you quit these things now?” he shook his head and fixed his eyes on the concrete floor: “It’s very difficult after this age, Cevo…”

While he was lamenting over his own lost life, in my second month in prison, I was alone with my own wounds, with the intense longing for my children. I was silently kissing and smelling the photographs of my eight-month-old baby and my three-year-old son on my bed, dropping my tears upon their innocent faces. Dede saw that helpless crying of mine, came to my side, looked into my face for a long time, and said with a trembling voice, “You are so young, Cevo, I feel sorry for your children.”

“Would you also get emotional, Dede? Would your heart ache too?” I asked. That uncompromising figure of the criminal world bowed his head forward: “Our insides are not made of stone either, Cevo… A mother gave birth to us too.” After looking at the photos for a while longer, he walked away silently, and I hung those small squares on the ice-cold Silivri wall at the head of my bunk; that warmth was stronger than all the coldness of the prison.

Time flowed somehow, and finally, we reached the end of our common shift, our time of parting in that narrow cell. When the time to leave came and Dede hugged me tightly, he whispered in my ear:

— “Cevo, I will come and find you in Balıkesir.”

When I hugged that heavily ill body, I no longer smelled that heavy, suffocating odor in the room at all. Because on that narrow bunk where the scent of crime ended, the pure and naked human heart—which even bars could not capture—had begun.

---