I was passing by there by chance. The rain was falling with all its force. The mud in the roads was at a level that would reach not just a person’s knees but even their waist. In front of the upper gate of Babıali, around a few flags dripping water from their edges, approximately fifty or sixty people had gathered and were waiting. Then someone in the middle, with an umbrella in one hand and in the other hand a paper whose writing had been ruined by water dripping from the eaves, was trying to read a speech, shouting, shouting, shouting—imagining that even those watching from afar at the edges, pitying only the miserable state of the spectacle, were listening to him.
Was this perhaps a meeting? My friend was showing that this was only a school meeting, saying “Look, they’re all kids.” Indeed it was so.
Under the endless whips of the rain gaining intensity, the orator who was trying to read even the swollen dots of the paper in his hand finally folded his paper, put it in his pocket. Scratching his ear with one hand, he cast a desperate glance at this fearsome meeting that had diminished around him to eight or ten people.
I couldn’t stand it anymore. Nudging my friend beside me, I asked what this crowd was. The poor man, standing a bit apart so as not to get more wet from the water flowing from my umbrella, said: “Meeting…”
Then, thinking, he added: “They say freedom isn’t good after all, and they’re going to exile all the journalists again like before.”
“Poor journalists!…”
Ömer Seyfettin
