I had been in Ankara about a year when I became pregnant.  Every Turk I knew, friends and coworkers, schoolteachers and housekeepers, all had the same reaction.  Smiling, they would shrug and say, "It's a fertile country". Then the teasing would begin.  Perhaps it was the water I drank from the fountain in ancient Ephesus, the one tour guides tout as bringing luck in love or procreation.  Or some fertility talisman I had unknowingly stroked in an antique shop.  As an Appalachian fiddle player’s daughter, I was no stranger to superstition.  I had witnessed my father slipping a rattlesnake’s rattle into the hollow of his fiddle to “keep the devil out”.  So I went along with the soothsaying.

I was looking forward to having a baby in a country where motherhood is honoured and where breast-feeding has always been encouraged.  Turkey is, after all, the land of Cybele, the ancient multi-breasted mother goddess worshipped in Anatolia by the Phrygians in the 8th century B.C.

Nonetheless, paying homage to the shamans of modern medicine and appeasing the gods of extended family, I travelled to New York for a sonogram, which showed in my second or third month that everything seemed normal.  Being thirty-six, I discussed with my American doctor the risks of pregnancy at my age and whether or not an amniocentesis was necessary. Such procedures, routinely done in the States, were at that time not so routine in Ankara. I decided to forgo it, ignoring the suggestion of a worried relative to remain in the States to have the baby.  Bearing a child is a natural, universal experience, I thought, my own mother successfully delivered all 13 of her children without benefit of sonogram or amniocentesis.  I was trusting fate.

Zübeyde was a window into another way of life, of the Anatolian village and its earthy simplicity.  I wanted to paint rural scenes and soon was invited to Zübeyde’s village, about an hour’s drive outside Ankara.  But when we arrived, the car’s trunk packed with art supplies, I quickly forgot the landscape, riveted to scenes of village women:  making yoghurt in clay amphoras, stirring pots over an open hearth, kneading dough on a broad hand-carved board smooth from years of pressing flour and water together.

When I had just begun to show my pregnancy around the fourth month I ran into Zübeyde, her mother and one of her aunts in the apartment hallway.   They smiled, tested my breasts and belly and conferred amongst themselves, laughing and shaking their heads.  When I asked Zübeyde to translate she held up two fingers and said, "Ikiz!  Ikiz gelecek... twins will come." Twins?  No way. My New York doctor hadn’t mentioned twins.  I tried to explain, in broken Turkish, how I knew they were mistaken.

The women listened to me politely and then dismissed the results as they said goodbye. “Insallah, ikiz gelecek, insallah,” they said, twins are coming if God wills it.

I was suddenly fed up with these charming villagers.

A few months later I missed my prenatal appointment, having lost my balance since my belly was so huge, fallen and broken my ankle.  When I finally went to my local hospital for a sonogram, I was in my eighth month.