Oya Baydar: The Lost Word

I’m lucky; there is a place on the waiting list for the plane. I call Mahmut as soon as I land. He is waiting for me in the hospital garden. He tells me so much so quickly that I can only understand that they wanted to shoot Zelal but they shot someone else instead. I rush to the medical superintendent, I rush to the doctors, go to the police, see influential friends and go to the place where Mahmut is hiding … My mind is at home, on Deniz and Elif … I don’t know where I’m going. I call Elif. I say, ‘I’ve returned, but I have to stay in Ankara to deal with a very important matter. As soon as I have put things in order I’ll be home.’ I don’t know how I will put things in order. Zelal looks at him with her limpid blue eyes. She’ll get better. She has just got over the shock, says the doctor. I’ll take you to the sea. Get well quickly, I say to her. I find a place for Mahmut to hide, somewhere safer. Don’t know how I have done all this. I just know that I had to do it and that I’m responsible for their suffering.

One night a few days later I find myself again waiting for a bus in the Başkent coach terminal. I missed the last plane while trying to help Mahmut and Zelal. I cannot wait until tomorrow. I can’t wait at all. I must set off immediately, tonight. I buy some cigarettes, a lighter and mineral water from the Başkent kiosk. I’m not drunk. My mind is clear, lucid. But I am tired. I have never been so tired in all my life, so tired that I could just fall down and sleep right there. Which platform does my bus leave from? Was it Platform 10? I walk in that direction so that I can get on the bus as quickly as possible and go to sleep.

The woman is there, in the same place once more. She is sitting on the bench in front of Platform 8 with the same straw hat on her head and the same light-coloured Capri trousers. This is something beyond a dream, a nightmare. Perhaps it is an illusion. The rightful rebellion of my nervous system. I don’t change direction. I don’t run away. I walk towards her.

‘I’m not the one who escaped from the east. I wasn’t among those people who were smuggled across the Danube. I didn’t see the child either. The Hungarian bride had gone to look for the candlesticks. It’s all a lie. I did not collaborate with them. Have you seen the child, sir?’

‘No, I haven’t seen him,’ I say. I want the woman to talk and explain. I feel her years of suffering inside me.

‘Where are we, sir?’ she asks. ‘They were going to send me to the west. The child was also going to come to me. What is this place? I’ve been waiting for the child for years. Have I come to the wrong place?’

‘No you are in the right place,’ I say. ‘The child will come. All lost children will return.’

I want to embrace the woman and cry my heart out. For those who come from the east and the west and lose their way; for the children who don’t arrive, for the ships that could not be boarded, for dreams that cannot come true, for the youth one can’t return to; for our days that go up in flames and for our past on whose ashes we walk heavily. I want to cry loudly for the mourning houses, the burnt villages, the lost children, the shot children, the unborn children, the unknown deserters and the unknown deserters of life.

I was looking for a word, I heard a voice.

I went far away in pursuit of a scream.

I did not know that the voice I heard was the voice of suffering born of violence. I learnt it.

I followed that voice. I found the word.

I now have a word to say.