Reading: The Night Shift at the Bakery

Mehmet has been getting up at half past two in the morning for nineteen years. By three he is in the bakery on Hanauer Landstraße, where the ovens are already warm because Yusuf, who closes up, leaves them on a low heat. Mehmet says this is the only kindness that matters in a bakery: the heat you leave for the next person.

The first hour is silent. He weighs flour, water, salt and yeast, and he does not weigh them with a scale, because his hands learned the amounts before the scale was bought. Then the dough rests, and Mehmet drinks tea and looks out of the window at the empty street. At four the delivery vans begin. At five his daughter Elif arrives, still half asleep, and starts on the rolls.

Elif is nineteen and studies engineering in Darmstadt. She works three mornings a week and she is not planning to take over the bakery. Mehmet knows this. He tells his customers that she will change her mind, and he tells Elif that of course she should finish her degree, and both things are said in the same voice.

By seven the shop is full. There is a man who buys the same two rolls every day and has done since 2011, and Mehmet has never learned his name. There is a class of schoolchildren at ten past seven who are loud and always two cents short. Mehmet gives them the bread anyway, and he has done the arithmetic: it costs him around forty euros a year.

At one o'clock he goes home and sleeps. He says he has not seen an evening properly since before Elif was born, and then he laughs, because he does not want it to sound like a complaint. It is not a complaint. It is just what the work is.