Growing Hands

When I am very sick and my temperature approaches forty, my hands grow larger. I have giant hands. It happened most of the time when I was a kid.

My hands are growing, I used to say.

My grandmother or my mother would take my hands in their cold hands. They would say, "Nothing, my child, nothing! Look, your hands are in my hands." I was calm for a minute or two. My hands grew again.

My hands would grow bigger. Oh my goodness, how big would my hands get? When I went out, my hands shrank from the cold. I was on the streets. I was one against thousands. "I was one against ten thousand."

From Growing Hands

"Sebzeci Cebrail", [Kozalakli Village] and [Kılıbık] in Growing Hands, a collection of manuscripts and drafts in the Sait Faik Museum Archive, meets its readers for the first time.

Growing Hands has a different importance in that it shows that, contrary to popular belief, Sait Faik wrote with meticulous care, read and changed what he wrote, corrected it, gave up some of what he wrote, and did not publish everything he wrote.