Old places have a way of holding feelings that haven’t yet settled.
Morning in Ankara seemed to have a different age depending on where you stood.
Kızılay woke early, already stirred by the movement of people. But as Barış drew closer to Ulus, the city’s time seemed to slow a little. Stone walls, old signs, shutters half-open over shopfronts. A new day had begun, yet something older than yesterday still remained there, quiet and unfinished.
Barış was walking downhill toward Ulus.
Even to himself, he couldn’t quite explain why he had come this way.
He could have gone home from Kızılay.
He could have turned down another street.
Still, there was only one feeling inside him.
If he was going to the station, this was the way.
Not that he had decided to go there.
Not exactly.
He had only become unable to keep looking away from the direction where the station was.
So he walked.
Not through a place like Kızılay, where people carried you along,
but toward older, quieter streets,
where thoughts were less easily left behind.
The air in Ulus carried the smell of dry stone and morning bread.
The toasted scent of simit baking somewhere.
The smell of metal not yet warmed by the day.
The sound of an old wooden door opening.
Across the street, a man was setting chairs outside a shop, moving with a face that belonged to no hurry.
In Kızılay, everyone had been heading toward now.
But in Ulus, behind every movement, there seemed to be a longer stretch of time.
This city was not simply old.
It was a place where old things had not yet finished their work.
That was what Barış thought.
When he thought of his father, places like this felt closer than new ones.
The map.
The shoes.
His mother’s silence.
All of them belonged to the past, and yet none of them had fully ended.
The morning in Ulus felt like that.
When he turned a corner, he saw steam rising in front of a small tea shop.
Behind the fogged glass, several tea glasses had been lined up.
Outside the shop were two worn wooden chairs.
An old man sat in one of them.
He wore a gray jacket, his cane resting upright against his knee, a glass of tea in one hand as if he had only just begun drinking.
Deep lines marked his face. But he didn’t look tired.
There was a quietness to him, like stone that had spent a long time in the wind.
Barış was about to pass by, then slowed a little.
The old man was looking at him.
Not watching him closely.
Not calling him over.
Just looking, as if he knew the kind of person who didn’t know where he was going.
“Toward the station?”
The old man’s voice was low and dry.
But not cold.
Barış stopped without meaning to.
“…I don’t know yet.”
After saying it, he almost found it strange himself.
The question had been about direction.
Not his life.
But that was the answer that came out.
The old man’s mouth softened, just a little.
“A lot of people come toward the station without knowing.”
Barış said nothing.
Inside the tea shop, a spoon touched glass with a faint sound.
Across the street, a man pushing a cart moved slowly past.
Ulus in the morning was quiet.
But not still.
Only unhurried.
The old man took a sip of tea and looked up at the sky.
“When I was young, I thought departure was the big thing.”
He spoke almost to himself.
As if talking to Barış, and at the same time to some earlier version of himself.
“But it isn’t. The big thing isn’t leaving.
It’s deciding not to go back first.”
The words dropped straight into Barış.
He looked at the old man.
“Deciding not to go back…”
“Yes.”
The old man nodded.
“The station comes after that.”
For a moment, the air in Ulus seemed to change.
It wasn’t that he had been told something new.
But something inside him, still vague until then, had been given another shape.
In Kızılay, he had been stuck between going forward and going back.
At the bus stop, drinking tea, he had thought about the difference between a place to go and a place one wanted to go.
But now, in this older air of Ulus, the question had shifted a little.
Not whether to go forward or back.
Whether he would no longer go back.
That came first.
For the first time, he understood.
“Are you going to the station?”
Barış asked quietly.
The old man didn’t smile.
He only looked at his tea glass and said,
“Not today. I’ve gone enough times.”
Barış didn’t understand right away.
Maybe he meant when he was young.
Maybe it was a metaphor.
Maybe he simply meant the number of times he had actually gone to the station.
But the uncertainty stayed with him.
“Then why are you here?”
The old man looked down the street.
People were beginning to increase, little by little.
A shutter rattled open in front of a shop.
“Because people heading to the station sometimes pass through here.”
It sounded like an explanation.
And not like one.
Was he waiting?
Watching?
Remembering?
Nothing was clear.
But someone like that suited Ulus.
In a place where old things had not yet finished their work,
people who did not clearly name their own purpose seemed more natural.
Barış looked down the street ahead.
If he kept going, he would come out toward the station.
He was still close enough to turn back.
Compared to when he had left home, something in him was a little lighter.
But lightness was not the same as being able to move forward.
Deep inside, the fear was still there.
What if he found nothing?
Would following his father really lead anywhere?
Or would it only make the emptiness wider?
He still didn’t know.
“You look afraid.”
The old man said it plainly.
Barış gave a faint, dry smile.
“Do I?”
“You do. But it isn’t a bad face.”
Something in those words helped.
Not encouragement.
Not a push.
Still, it felt as if his uncertainty had been recognized as something other than weakness.
A wind crossed the street.
Unlike the wind in Kızılay, the wind in Ulus carried the smell of old stone.
It didn’t push.
It reminded.
Barış breathed in slowly.
“…Is the station straight ahead?”
Only after hearing his own words did he understand.
It was not resolve yet.
But it was no longer only hesitation.
The old man lightly pointed down the street with the tip of his cane.
“Straight ahead. But not many people can go straight.”
Again, he said something unclear.
And yet, strangely, it didn’t irritate Barış.
He nodded once.
Then he left the tea shop behind and began walking down the street.
After a few steps, he looked back.
The old man was no longer looking at him.
Tea glass in hand, he was watching the other side of the street.
As if he had not been waiting for Barış at all.
As if Barış had simply passed through a piece of time in which the old man had always been sitting.
For some reason, the image stayed with him.
Morning in Ulus had not fully become new.
The smell of yesterday.
Footsteps from someone much further back.
Time that had never found words.
The day began while holding all of that together.
As Barış walked, he thought.
Whether he was heading to the station was still not clear.
But at the very least, he was no longer walking in order to go home.
That difference was much larger than it had been yesterday.
From somewhere ahead, he heard the distant creak of metal.
Maybe it really came from the station.
Maybe it was only the shutter of another shop.
He couldn’t tell.
But to Barış now, it sounded a little more meaningful than an ordinary noise of the city.
He did not stop walking.
There was still no reason.
Still no certainty.
And yet—
in the smell of an old city, a person sometimes knows one thing before anything else:
that he is already a little further ahead.
