Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

‘Why are you doing this, abi? ’ In his voice there was suspicion mixed with gratitude and surprise.

Ömer had not been able to say, ‘Because of that scream … because of the child.’ Instead he had said in a forced tone that defied credibility, ‘What else could I have done? How could I have left you like that?’

‘You’re not a doctor.’

‘You’re right. I’m not a doctor. I just said that at the time so that I could get into the ambulance with you. In fact I’m a writer. Perhaps you have heard of me. My books are read a lot.’

Why would he have heard of you? Again that empty boasting. As if the whole of Turkey from east to west reads you! As if they are obliged to! As he took a card from his wallet and held it out he added sheepishly, ‘Very occasionally articles appear in the papers about me. For that reason perhaps …’

‘I haven’t read a paper for a long time. I’m sorry.’

The boy had begun to use the formal mode of address. Was it from respect or was it because the more they spoke the more distant, the more alien he seemed?

‘You’ve got a problem. That’s evident. If it’s something I can solve … There’s no need to be suspicious. Anything can happen to one at your age. I’m not an agent or anything. Don’t worry.’

‘No, of course not, hocam. Don’t take it like that. I–I mean we — we’re desperate. We’re in dire straits.’

The words, freed from the clutches of fear and doubt, suddenly spewed out. Ömer looked carefully at the youth’s face and saw the despair, fear and loneliness that he had seen in the features of his son.

‘Sometimes we are all desperate. I have a son your age. When I last saw him he looked as desperate and helpless as you.’

When I last saw you there was the suffering in your eyes of a shot animal. And when I first saw you, I had just come out of prison. Those were the days when it was more dificult being outside than inside. When I thought about those who were executed, those who had died from torture and those who had been given life imprisonment, mine was an insignificant thing, too embarrassing to even mention. I had been given eighteen months for a disparaging article that I had written before the September coup for one of the hundreds of left-wing magazines that were around at the time. A third of the sentence had been dropped, and I had spent a year in gaol and been released. When I left, you were in your mother’s womb and when I found you you were six months old. You regarded me as a stranger. I could see you asking where on earth has this stranger sprung from? In your eyes there were questions, fears and doubts. Holding my son in my arms was a unique, incomparable feeling that I had never experienced before, neither in the joy of the first kiss nor the pleasure of orgasm, nor in the awe, the elation one feels standing before a work of art or a natural wonder. My life blood, a life entrusted to me and that belonged to me, tiny and helpless against this terrible world! I always loved your mother, and I loved her still more because she gave birth to you. We named you Deniz to commemorate others named Deniz. It was not that you should carry the flag that they hoisted on the gallows to the future, as you assumed when you rebelled against us after you grew up. It was to the memory of the friendship and brotherhood of the rebellious days of our youth that were full of hope; and we gave it with a melancholic loyalty and romanticism afraid of breaking the ties with our lost youth. But I always called you ‘Son’, just as I said ‘Cat’ to the cat. I created a special name from the common name to express that you were the one and only.

When Ömer had last seen his son there was the same defeated, helpless, crazy look in his eyes: Mahmut’s look.

He had said, ‘Don’t go. Stay. There’s nowhere to run, Son.’ He had fixed his eyes on the ground. He could not look at his son’s clumsy body that had got prematurely fat, the swellings, the bruises that had still not gone down, his face disfigured by the deep scars of stitches and surgery.

‘I can’t do it, Dad. I can’t stay here, on the border of hell or right in the middle of it, and with Bjørn! Besides, with this body, with this face!’

‘Everything will pass. It will all get better. It’s not important. Bjørn would be happier here with us. Your mother needs you, too.’ Afterwards, he had added shyly, ‘I do as well.’

‘No one here needs me — neither you nor Mother. Mother’s happy with her experiments, her guinea pigs, her scientific meetings, her lessons and her students, as you are with your books, your articles, your social life, your friends and your admirers. I have nothing here. Here I, I’m not …’ — he can’t find the word he seeks. ‘Here I’m a loser. This place scares me.’

He had wanted to embrace his son, not with love but with pity, with desperation. ‘You’re not the only one to lose. We have lost together. The truth is that in a sense we are all losers. Perhaps … I don’t know, we can begin …’

My words sound like trite dialogue from a bad television soap opera. But my sentiments are not contrived. They just come out like this. Perhaps the humdrum conversations of humdrum people in those soaps we despise are the most sincere, the most natural way of communicating. It is that incurable intellectual malaise: one despises everything. One speaks differently. One makes comments that sound significant, and one tends to pontificate so that one seems elite and superior.

‘Let’s not dream, Dad. We can’t start anything again. I can’t be reborn, and I can’t be the son of your dreams. I can’t pretend what’s happened never happened. I saw Ulla scattered in pieces, and I saw the tarmac soak up the blood that spurted in every direction. It hasn’t been four months since then. I’m no stranger to blood and violence, as you know. After all, you sent me into the middle of battle to be a war correspondent. There was a great deal of blood in those deserts and in the battlefields. However, it was a foreign place — abroad — and the people who died, were burnt and in fragments were not my wife, child, relative or friend; they were merely the subjects of the photos that I took; they were objectified. Despite that, I could not stand taking pictures of suffering for long. I hated the work. Just think about it: blood is flowing, people are dying and I’m trying to depict the most striking suffering, violence and death in the pictures I take. The more violence, the more blood I show, the more successful I’m considered. I took hundreds, perhaps thousands of photos. I received praise, and I won your approval. Then I understood that I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t continue, and I ran away from there. I’m talking too much. What I mean to say is that I, who couldn’t stand the suffering and the blood of strangers that I didn’t even know, watched the woman I loved, the mother of my son, being killed in front of my eyes. If we had brought Bjørn here for you to see perhaps he, too, would have been blown to smithereens like Ulla. This land frightens me. Please understand.’

He had not been able to find anything to say. He was assailed by a sharp pain, a deep feeling of guilt. He had said, ‘What can I say? You are right, but, still, despite this terrible thing … here is more…’

Deniz had interrupted his father angrily and aggressively. ‘Here’s what, Dad? Were you going to say here’s safe? Were you going to say peaceful — or what were you going to say? What happened happened here, in your legendary city that you write about in your novels. I’d brought my wife to meet you and to show her my country. You know you were dying for us to come. For a moment, even I hoped that perhaps here, here in a village or on an island, I could start a new, peaceful life without blood and lies. Then … and then … Look …’ He stroked the deep wounds and cuts on his face. ‘You can’t even look at my face! You’re right. I was never an Adonis, but I wasn’t hideous either. Start afresh. Well? Even if I did begin all over again, how could I bring back Ulla? She was the one person who really loved me without making demands, without wanting me to be important, successful or handsome. She wanted me and loved me as I was. With her I found peace for the first time. It was my wife who made me feel that I didn’t have to lie and to pretend to be someone I wasn’t. She was the stupid, little northern village girl whom you despised, whom you ignored and whom you did not think suitable — not for me but for yourselves. A corpse without a grave or a grave without a corpse.’