Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

In the suffocating, tense nights of those days when Saddam’s voice promised his people absolute victory while they fearfully waited for the bombing of Baghdad, he had found several occasions to talk to Olaf — that was the Norwegian boy’s name — at length. Deniz was as impressed as he was astonished by Olaf’s never-ending march triggered by a deep impulse — perhaps a kind of belief — that he called ‘my conscience’. It had taken him from Eritrea, in the grip of famine, to the Sudan where starving children were abducted and forced to fight and die in the war; from Bosnia, where people were murdering each other for belonging to another race and religion, to Iraq, which was gradually turning into an inferno, and to who knows where else. Olaf didn’t tell him all this as though he had sacrificed himself for a worthy cause or had accomplished important things. He talked about it as a simple, ordinary part in the flow of daily life, in the same tone as ‘I went out with that girl’, ‘This is my favourite beer’, ‘It’s good to see the world’, ‘I’m completely broke; I must make some money.’ This was how Olaf lived; no heroism, no rhetoric about being a saviour; no sermons on noble causes, no bragging; this was his way of life. Deniz liked the simple straightforward, lively way Olaf talked. There was no trace of the oppressive atmosphere that, since his childhood, Deniz had always felt when he was with his parents’ old friends; lengthy discussions about defeated soldiers, great causes and glorious revolutions, the unnatural and morbid longing for the past and the years of their youth, complaints about this awful world. He had begun to like Olaf. He seemed like a balm for the growing emptiness inside him, his feeling of futility and inferiority.

As he followed the famous war correspondent south towards the Persian Gulf, Deniz was rather upset to leave Olaf behind in Baghdad. Now he would feel completely alone in the desert. His camera was gradually becoming heavier and heavier, and so was everything that happened around him. In both mind and heart it was all too much for him, too heavy to bear. It was not his camera that was difficult to carry but the images caught on it.

There was no doubt that Ömer loved his only son as he handed him the very best camera and photographic equipment and sent him off to the middle of the war, to bloody, fiery, deadly deserts. I never doubted his love, but I found it difficult to understand. It wasn’t an introverted love that warmed his heart and gave him happiness because I lived, I existed. It was an extroverted love, presented for the approval of others and nourished by the pride he would feel for my achievements. Baghdad and the Iraqi deserts: these were the places I had been sent to revive and nurture this love that I had injured and destroyed. No, my father had not wanted to sacrifice me. It wouldn’t be fair to say that he thought of it like this. He just wanted to heal the wounds I had opened, to increase his love for his son and to be able to have faith in him again. I know that.

There was a lot of blood. I saw such a lot of blood, pain, fear and death. Blinded, enslaved, destitute, pathetic, humiliated people who had been made to squat next to walls, thrown behind barbed-wire fences, their heads covered with black sackcloth hoods reaching down to their chests … Mothers with their dead children in their arms, trying to make shrouds for them with their bloodstained black chadors and tattered clothes … Dead cats, dogs, dead birds, dead trees, mixed with the stinking rubbish heaped in the streets … Burning cities, houses collapsing, ruined buildings, humble mud huts riddled with holes, ponds where corpses floated … I saw more than a human heart could endure, but I was completely empty inside. I just stared indifferently, without reaction. As the psychologist said, I threw this, too, into my bottomless black hole. Only those who hope, who have something to lose, are afraid. I wasn’t afraid. I went right up to them to take photographs. I got much closer to the land of death than the most daring, most ambitious war correspondents. I smelt it in my nose, and I heard it in my ears. I kept on clicking to satisfy the crowds mesmerized by blood and violence, that never tired of watching the horror and the carnage they themselves had created and to satisfy the media that fed on the blood it offered those crowds. I transformed the suffering of mankind from reality into frozen images as I photographed devastated villages, towns in flames, people with bleeding wounds, shot children writhing in pain on the ground, babies burning up with high fever before they died from lack of care and medication, mothers opening their chadors and tearing at their breasts as they mourned their children, wounded soldiers around whom vultures flocked. I fitted the horrors of war, the collapse of humanity, into a tiny chip within my digital camera.

When he was working, he was as calm as if he were taking pictures of scenery, of birds, flowers or children. He was interested only in capturing the best pictures, in getting the best results. His emptiness, his lack of feeling, his indifference bordering on schizophrenia, his apathy and remoteness were thought to be courage. His skill was praised. His photographs were published — with the help of the famous television correspondent — on the front pages of newspapers and appeared on television screens over and over.

This time — once in a blue moon — he had been successful finally. When they reached a burning Baghdad, having passed through the desert, he had made contact by phone with Istanbul just before the foreign press were evacuated from the heavily bombed city. While he was speaking to his parents, he understood from their words and their voices and he felt in his heart that he had been forgiven. They were proud of their son. He could almost hear them talking to each other. ‘Well, so what? Not everybody can become a scientist. Being a good war correspondent, a brilliant photographer, is better than nothing.’ He waited in vain for them to say, ‘The war is spreading. Things are getting serious. The region is very dangerous now. Come back straight away.’ Even if they had said it, he might not have returned; he was so wrapped up in his work and the dazzling euphoria of success he probably wouldn’t have gone home. However, they didn’t say ‘Come back’; they didn’t summon him home. On the phone they expressed the hope that he would look after himself, and they wished him luck. ‘Keep it up, Deniz. You’re doing a great job. That’s my boy!’ said his father, and his mother said, ‘Be careful, Kitten. Give us a ring whenever you get a chance.’ It was the endearment ‘Kitten’ that upset him the most. Mother cats protect their young; they remove them from danger. He couldn’t bear the solitude any longer. He wanted to cry. His loneliness stuck like a lump in his throat. He couldn’t even manage to cry.

Attached to the American troops and protected by tanks, they passed through a poverty-stricken sacked village as they headed north. If he hadn’t seen the prisoners surrounded by barbed wire and heavily armed American soldiers he wouldn’t have jumped out of the jeep he had boarded with such difficulty. Was it the desire to capture a few good shots, or was it more that he was spurred on by success, love and admiration?

He later told himself hundreds, perhaps thousands of times that if he hadn’t seen ‘him’ his life would have been quite different; he would have been in an entirely different place, on an entirely different road.

‘Him’ … The one with a black hood — or sack — pulled over his head, sitting under the sun with legs spread apart, the sleeve of his white tunic with yellow stripes stained red with blood flowing from his wounded right arm, torn plastic sandals on his bare feet … ‘Him’ clasping his small son close to his chest: that wounded captive father, human, victim…