The Day They Met Again

Adana in those years was still small enough for people to know more about one another than they wanted to, and large enough for someone else's story to become everyone's story within a few days. Abit Süzülmüş was a noticeable man, if only because he had two houses, two families, and enough land to keep each of them demanding his attention. He moved from one house to the other, came back from the fields with dirt on his hands and the smell of tobacco leaves on his shirt, lingered in the courtyard with his friends — someone had already started pouring rakı — and from the neighboring house came the sound of a child, someone calling someone, and Abit answering without turning because he already knew who it was.

Hatice lived in one house. She had no children. In the other lived Şehide, and that house was louder: five children, conversation, work, and another child she was soon due to give birth to.

For Abit, this was simply life — a yard with two cows, one of them called Suzan, a stable with a bed where he sometimes slept himself so he could stay close to the animals at night, and evenings with friends when nobody was in a hurry to leave.

Everything was as usual — until a worker came into the yard and said that one of the animals in the stable was ill.

Abit did not get up immediately. But he went.

He bent down to examine the animal. He saw nothing else.

Şehide waited. Then she began to worry that her husband had been gone too long. She asked whether anyone had seen him.

Then she went to look for him.

She did not know she was walking toward her own death. She had simply gone to look for her husband.

She never came back.

They were found together in the morning, with the two younger children beside them. The two older ones survived: one was buried under mattresses, and the killers did not notice him in their haste; the other hid, then ran through the darkness to get help. The child Şehide was carrying did not survive either.

One necklace was taken from her body. Nothing else.

Among those arrested was one of Abit's own workers. His name was Ramazan. He would be hanged later, after the trial — a name that, by then, would already be spoken aloud by a completely different person.

A boy who had not yet been born.

At the end of September that same year, in the Mıdık quarter, a couple of kilometers from that house, a son was born to Mehmet Altınkılıç. They named him İsmail.

A neighbor would later tell the story — once there was finally a story to tell — that shortly before this she had dreamed something strange: Abit was sitting and talking with Mehmet. Someone called him outside, and he answered, No, I will stay here. I will not go back. At the time, she did not know Mehmet's wife was expecting a child.

In another quarter, a little more than a year later, a daughter was born to the tinsmith Kerim Bayrı, the ninth of ten children. They named her Cevriye.

For the moment, they were simply two new children in two houses, knowing nothing of each other.

He was a little over a year old when he first made it clear that he was not who people thought he was.

His father laughed.

The boy grew old enough to say it clearly — and then there was nothing funny about it.

"My name is not that," he would say. "My name is Abit. I have two wives."

He named them. He named the surviving children. He asked why this household lived so poorly — he said it had not been like this before — and demanded that someone finally repay a debt.

That same evening, without drawing breath, he told them how he had been killed. And he gave a name.

His father once took him to the Bey quarter to see where he would go on his own. Mehmet thought his son would lead him to the house that he himself had mistakenly believed was the scene of the murder. İsmail turned another way.

On the street, he suddenly stopped in front of an ice-cream seller whom he clearly had never seen before and called him by name. He named the man's wife and children. Then he added that the man's son had once worked for Abit.

The man looked at him and said nothing.

By then, the story of İsmail had already begun to spread through the district and acquire versions of its own.

Cevriye was two when the electricity went out in the house — nothing unusual; the power failed often. One of the adults went to look for a lamp.

In the darkness, the little girl suddenly screamed — not petulantly, but in genuine terror:

"Ramazan will kill me!"

Everyone fell silent. When someone finally lit the lamp, it was clear from the way she was trembling that the child was truly frightened.

No one had taught her that name. She recognized people in the street whom she seemingly could not have known: Şehide's friends, her dressmaker, her sister. She asked to be called by another name and became angry when they refused — and kept asking.

At first, people simply laughed at what the boy said. But the names he gave belonged to real people. Behind the names were people he could not possibly have known. And behind those people were details they themselves remembered — and wondered how a strange child could possibly know.

What had first seemed like a child's invention gradually became a question that could not be answered in a single sentence: where did he know all this from?

There was an uncomfortable side to the story, too. İsmail's father once asked for money in exchange for his testimony, which made some people doubt the entire case. Others objected that those who called the story fabricated had their own reasons: they had once owed Abit money, and the boy, repeating him, remembered the debt and demanded that it be repaid.

In 1973, another check was carried out. A man came to Adana who had never been there before and had no connection with the investigation. For two days, without explaining why he had come, he spoke in a coffeehouse with seven people who had never previously been interviewed — and what he heard did not contradict what was already known. By the time the investigations along both lines were finally complete, the number of people interviewed over all those years ran into the dozens — more than in any other comparable case these researchers had previously studied.

Of the forty-nine statements and recognitions that the researchers later connected with Abit's life, they regarded most as confirmed. There was one error: İsmail identified the murder weapon as an iron bar. It was a blacksmith's hammer. He could not have seen the weapon anyway — the blow had struck from behind.

Cevriye's case was more difficult. By the time she began to speak, İsmail's story was already well known throughout the district, and no one could completely separate what might have been her own memory from what she might simply have heard in passing.

İsmail was five. Cevriye was four.

By then, the adults decided it was time for them to meet.

His father brought him. Several other people came as well, simply to see what would happen.

According to İsmail's father, the children ran straight toward each other, embraced, and kissed. Someone brought ice cream for the boy, and he immediately offered it to her.

According to Cevriye's mother, the girl was less open. She embraced him, but almost at once began testing him: she asked how many head of livestock they had. He got it wrong. She corrected him.

They spoke about the murder — simply, as though it were something they had both known for a very long time.

He asked her why she had not come to help him that night.

According to her mother, she asked him the same question.

What they answered each other, no one remembered.

They exchanged gifts. İsmail held her hand.

Then they were taken back to their separate homes.

They were five and four years old.

They still did not know how to explain to the adults why they knew each other.

It was the day they met again.



AFTER

Documentary postscript

One continued to remember. The other gradually learned to live as though she did not.

For many years, İsmail continued to visit Şehide's children and bring them gifts. When Abit's mother died, he cried and went to bed without eating. At nine, he said that he missed the children he had left behind in his previous life. At sixteen, he was still saying that he wanted to marry Cevriye.

Cevriye grew up differently. By the age of fifteen, she had become uncomfortable speaking about the fact that she had had a husband in a previous life. She began avoiding İsmail, but she continued to visit Şehide's children.

This novella is based on a documented case investigated and repeatedly examined by Ian Stevenson and Reşat Bayer in the 1960s and 1970s. A detailed account of the case was published in Ian Stevenson's Cases of the Reincarnation Type, Vol. III: Twelve Cases in Lebanon and Turkey (1980).

Documentary note: The reality of the events described, and the existence of testimony concerning them, do not mean that reincarnation has been proven. The interpretation of the case remains open.