Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

Mahmut suddenly appears beside him looking somewhat green and without making eye-to-eye contact. Ömer says to him as though he’s repeating a line that he has learnt by heart in a language he doesn’t know, ‘Congratulations. Your wife has been saved. The doctor said that the baby in her womb had protected her. But they weren’t able to save the child.’

Why had he lied saying the baby had protected her?’ The doctor hadn’t said anything of the sort. Perhaps I made it up so that he wouldn’t be so upset about losing the child and that he would find comfort thinking that if it hadn’t been for the foetus his wife would have died. He doesn’t tell Mahmut that it was a boy. The stray bullet, the son shot in the mother’s womb. The young doctor had said, ‘This could be a good subject for a story for you.’ Was it a clumsy compliment or was he being sarcastic?

Mahmut takes two steps back and crouches against the corridor wall. He presses his chin on his chest, folds his arms round his knees, making himself into a ball as though he wants to grow small and vanish. He murmurs something in Kurdish to himself; like a lament, a plaint. Then he lifts his head. ‘The child wasn’t going to be like us. His destiny wasn’t going to be like Zelal’s or mine. He wasn’t going to take to the mountains. He wasn’t going to ight, and he wasn’t going to be sacrificed to the organization or to the code of honour. The child was going to be educated and live a decent life. We were going to get lost in the big city. No one would be able to pick up our trail: not the state, the organization, her father, nor her agha. The child would have been free, and he would have been without fear. His name would have been Hevi — Hope.’

Rocking slightly where he crouches he continues his quiet, muffled lament. The tears trickling down his cheeks thread their way between the stubble and gather on his chin. ‘This would be a good story for you!’ Is that right? Who has the right to write the story of suffering when they can’t relieve the pain? They’ve killed the child. Hevi’s dead. Now what’s the point of running away? What is there to save now? Zorok kuştin. Hevî mir, êdî hewceyî reve noke?’

He lapses into Kurdish. Perhaps he’s repeating the same things for himself, for his heart and for his memory in his mother tongue. As he speaks in his own language his suffering stops being a narrative and becomes his own property. It becomes himself. He no longer needs words. Pain escapes words and settles in his heart for ever.

‘Why and who are you running from, Son?’

He realizes that he has said ‘Son’ to the young man and is astonished at himself. I used to say ‘Son’ only to Deniz!

‘From death,’ he says as though spitting through his teeth. ‘From the military, the military police, the organization, the state and from tradition … From everything, everything that you know about our parts, because they all bring death.’

‘Where are your parts?’

‘They are burnt villages, ambushed hamlets, mines, unsolved murders and codes of honour, and they are the mountains — especially the mountains. They are all death.’

Now the boy speaks with the typical accent of an eastern mountain villager. He has returned to his mountains, thinks Ömer. His suffering has taken him back to his native self. He doesn’t shun himself any longer or his language…

‘Where was your village?’

He gives its name. Then, again as though he is lamenting for the dead, he says, ‘Our village was burnt down. Our aghas took to the mountains. I was still a child, aged eight or nine. We abandoned our animals, pastures, fields and our two-roomed house; we left it all behind. The old, the disabled, families and our belongings, on our backs, on carts, on an old tractor, the black-nosed puppy in my arms … I screamed the place down and wouldn’t leave it even though my dad beat me. When we came down the hill to the plain and looked back, our village, home and barns were all in flames.’

It’s as though he is someone else when he speaks with that broad south-eastern accent. The pain has pierced his silence; words flow like water gushing from a burst pipe. For him there’s no longer any point in being silent and trying not to give himself away or hiding behind a dignified, sceptical resistance. There is no longer anything left to lose. He wants to speak, and it is as though he can’t stop speaking. Like breaking down under torture, thinks Ömer. The moment you break down you start blurting out both what is asked and what is not.

‘We came to the city and took shelter with my uncle by the stream. We settled in a tent and then we made a shack from sheets of tin. Later I went to school. “This son of mine, my young son, my last son, will study,” my father used to say. “I’m not going to sacrifice him to the mountains or to the state.” However, the mountains completely surrounded the city, and they beckoned. The teachers taught us in Turkish. To begin with, we didn’t understand what they said and asked what it was in Kurdish. Some of them said kindly that Kurdish wasn’t allowed and that in any case there wasn’t such a language. As children we were astonished that the language we spoke didn’t exist. Some of them used to cane us, and we learnt Turkish with a good beating. In the senior class they taught us history — about Atatürk mainly. We used to bemoan the fact that the Kurds had no Alparslan, no Fatih and, especially, no Atatürk and that all the great men were Turkish. Were Kurds stupid? Were the Kurds cowardly? Didn’t they have heroes? Didn’t they have great men? We took it to heart, and we felt downtrodden, and because they used to say Kurds have tails we used to check to see if we really did have them. As we grew up we looked to the mountains and listened to the mountains rather than to what our teacher told us. We no longer checked our tails. To spite those without tails we began to wish that our tails really did grow. Wherever we went we were completely surrounded by mountains. And even if there weren’t any we would create them. The mountains were ours, and we understood their language. We didn’t have any heroes. Well, that was all right! Yet we didn’t even have our paltry honour, our name or our dignity. At the slightest mistake they said we had no honour. And, well, if you were stubborn and tried to defend yourself then you were deemed thoroughly dishonourable. In the mountains we were no longer going to be without honour. We would be heroes, and we’d gain a reputation. We didn’t have a future, so we’d establish our own. We listened to the voice of the mountains, and we took to the mountains. Then … and then…’ He falls silent.

‘Then? Then what happened, my little man?’ Ömer is lost in the voice tunnels of his own words. My little man … my little man … my little man … A poem that filters through from the depths of his memory, a piece of music, a vague feeling, a recollection.

‘Dear little man, you are afraid,’ says the Pilot to the Little Prince who going to meet the snake in the desert. The Little Prince tells him that he will be more frightened that night and that the Pilot should not come then. But he says, ‘I shall not leave you, my little man,’ even though the Little Prince says that he will suffer if he does, as it will look as though he’s dying.

Why did he say ‘my little man’? What similarity has Mahmut to the child in the story who came to the world from his own little planet that was big enough only for a single rose bush to make friends and to get to know the world? There was nothing about him that resembled the Little Prince. But, yes, there was his loneliness, his sadness and his passion for his rose and the longing he felt for his mountains that were a distant planet. The night the Little Prince got the snake to bite him so that he could escape from his body that prevented him from flying to his planet, had the Pilot stayed with the child? He can’t remember. He recalls that he hadn’t been able to persuade him to stay on the earth and prevent him from flying of to be reunited with his rose and his lamb and the sunsets waiting for him on his planet.