Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

‘Our island is far away. Not everybody is brave enough to come here. That’s why.’

‘Then how did you come, Daddy? Are you very brave? You weren’t afraid of pirates or the Devil, were you?’

‘No I wasn’t afraid, Son.’

How can I tell him I was afraid; that I was a skein of fear that rolled to these parts; that I’m here because I was afraid?

Actually, how did I come here? How can I tell him about my cowardice, my weariness, my desertion? How can I explain to him that I am a deserter of life? The old man had written on the wall of the Gasthaus just before he committed suicide, ‘Fleeing from war was easier than fleeing from life.’ He had signed it ‘the unknown deserter’. Not the unknown soldier but the unknown deserter, the deserter of life…

The child runs towards the quay. The woman with the baskets disembarks first, then two students from the island, perhaps returning home from examinations. Then … Bjørn stops dead in his tracks. The boat has another passenger, a foreigner — finally a real foreigner!

As Deniz approaches the quay to fetch the child he realizes in the twilight that the passenger is a woman. The woman in jeans and a light-coloured T-shirt has slung a large bag over her shoulder and is walking with deliberation towards the jetty.

I know that walk and that bag from somewhere, just as I know the woman with the baskets from afar without even seeing her face. For a split second — that infinitely tiny, short and yet infinitely long moment that is filled with everything a person is: all that he has experienced, felt and thought — he wonders what he should do.

It’s too late. Passing the little boy standing perfectly still as though he is still enchanted and without paying any attention to him or even noticing his presence, the woman walks resolutely towards Deniz. The yellow lights of the quay make her face look pallid and its lines deeper. There is that insincere smile hovering on her lips; the one that Deniz knows so well, that he is wary of and which he doesn’t like.

He doesn’t know, he cannot sense that the smile is a mask for Elif’s insecurity, her fears and anxiety. He doesn’t know that the woman’s heart is pounding madly and that her jaw hurts from clenching her teeth so hard; how many sleepless nights the decision to come here has cost her and with what great effort she controls her desire to run back.

‘The woman with the baskets hasn’t changed at all in twenty years,’ says Elif in a casual, natural voice, as though they had been speaking only a little while ago and had had a long chat. ‘This must be a real Devil’s Island where zombies live. So how are you?’

He notices that her voice trembles, her cold smile disappears and that her face becomes sad.

‘Mother!’ he says amazed and hesitantly.

‘Well, how are you,’ she asked in the casual tone they use in television serials. Good question. How am I? Yes, indeed, how am I on this Devil’s Island where zombies live?

The woman with the baskets hasn’t changed in twenty years. That much is true. Is it always the same woman, or is it her daughter? Deniz is astonished now that he was never curious about this. Small wooden houses in pastel candy colours, a quay with piles of fishing nets on both sides, a miniature ship with a bridge and a funnel linking the island to the mainland, women with baskets on their arms, pot-bellied bearded fishermen, steep cliffs above and the ruins of the old castle … That’s the sort of place this is, not really worth thinking about, where people quietly live their natural, straightforward, uneventful lives and die in the same natural way. Just as it should be, just as I want it to be … So that means I’m fine.

He wonders what dragged him back to the Devil’s Island of his childhood after all those years. Was it fate? Nonsense! What is fate other than the steps we take or the paths we choose? Perhaps it would be better to call it coincidence. Yes, just a coincidence. When he joined his father’s close friend — the famous war correspondent and a prominent member of the press — and went to Iraq, he did not know he would reach the small island in the North Sea in such a circuitous way.

It would be more accurate to say that he was sent to Iraq rather than that he went there. It was his father’s idea that war photography would be a suitable job for him. It was not his own choice. Ömer had said to his friend, ‘Let’s send Deniz to Iraq with you. I’ll take care of the bureaucracy — visa, accreditation and the rest. It will be a new beginning for him. He will learn about the job from you. Deniz is a good photographer. I have faith in my son.’

He knew his father was lying, that after those dreadful days that he didn’t want to remember his father no longer had any faith in him; and, what was worse, he had every reason not to. Deniz was embarrassed and reluctant, but he could not refuse to go. He had nothing to lose anyway.

They were the days when his indifference and lethargy turned into failure, failure turned into hopelessness, hopelessness into fear and fear into shame. He was all alone, incompetent and desperate. He had built himself a dream world. In that world he was successful, brilliant and the best. He was all that his mother wanted and all that his father expected him to be. He left everyone behind, ran like a thoroughbred, took the lead and reached the summit amid applause. This fictitious world where dreams mingled with lies and where the borders between the two were undefined was his only refuge. He had friends in that world, phantom friends. They loved him; they admired him. He went on trips with them, imaginary trips that he had never taken, never made. He had a small pretty girlfriend in that world with whom he walked hand in hand, whose warm lips he felt on his own, someone who loved him, who took him seriously, who didn’t mock him or look down on him. The girlfriend that had never existed, that lived nowhere except in his dreams…

If there hadn’t been the others to whom he had to endear himself and ingratiate himself, and if he hadn’t been surrounded by people expecting him to conquer the world, there wouldn’t have been any lies. The lies were innocent, the expression and manifestation of dreams. In the land of wakeful dreams, as he went from one joy to another, from one love to another, from one success to another with a childish smile on his face that gave him a somewhat idiotic expression, his step was as light as a feather and his heart a cloudless deep-blue sky. Then one day, when he realized from the blows of arrogant kings and princes holding the scales of right and wrong, true and false, that he was forced to return to this cruel world, that he was nothing but a dreamer lost in his dream world; and that the curtain had finally come down at the end of the play, he put on indifference, insensitivity and silence as protective armour. Nothing could pierce his armour, reach his heart or affect him any more.

When the day came to face up to the truth, and he said in an icy voice, ‘All the achievements I told you about were nothing but lies’, he was surprised to see that they didn’t believe him. They in turn were amazed at how calm, distant and indifferent he could be. He didn’t object when his mother insisted that he saw a psychologist. He didn’t even feel the need to withdraw into his shell. In any case it was empty; it was an endless, bottomless, black hole that swallowed all emotion, pain and joy. Didn’t I really feel anything, or was I just suppressing my feelings? No, I didn’t feel anything. I was empty inside.

The last psychologist from whom his mother expected miracles had told him, ‘This is your safety valve, your defence mechanism. You wouldn’t be able to endure it if you felt anything. This is how you protect yourself. Your instinct for survival still fights back. That is good.’