Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

When he reached the island, he walked his bike directly to the Gasthaus, without lingering at the square by the quay. Had he remembered where the little guesthouse was, or was there no choice other than the road that passed in front of the varicoloured wooden houses and continued eastwards towards the last inhabited part of the island? The house suddenly appeared in front of him next to the steep cliffs, where the road met the sea. Yes, this is the place. He remembers it now. He also remembers the strange old man sitting in the rocking-chair. He remembers that the room where they slept was cold, that his body and his heart grew warm as he lay between his parents. His father reached over to his mother and stroked her hands, and he felt happy as though it was he who was being stroked.

It was foggy that day but not dark. A milky-blue mist had settled over the island. The yellow house, stone-grey cliffs, silver sea … The serene and somewhat sombre painting of a Nordic artist depicting shadows rather than light…

The front door of the Gasthaus that opened on to the road was closed. He knocked a few times, but no one answered. He remembered the door facing the sea. He had run out of that door and tried to climb the cliffs but had been scolded by his mother. He walked around the house to that side. Yes, the door was open, just as it had been all those years ago.

A plumpish girl with long blonde hair and blue eyes was leaning against the door frame observing the sea. First in English and then in broken Norwegian he asked whether there was a room free. The girl made a gesture as if to say ‘Come inside.’ He took his rucksack off the back of the motorbike and followed her. From the few words he knew, he deduced that she was shouting, ‘Grandpa, a stranger’s arrived. He wants a room.’ He thought that he might have seen the grandfather all those years ago, but, no, the man wasn’t familiar. They went upstairs together. He seemed to remember the room with its large bed and wooden ceiling, overlooking the sea. He nodded with approval. ‘Good,’ said the man and smiled pleasantly.

‘How much? How many kroner?’

At first he didn’t understand the price the man told him. He always confused the tens with the hundreds in Norwegian. Still smiling, the man indicated the figure with the fingers of both hands.

‘Fine. All right!’

‘How many days will you be staying?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps a very long time.’

A shadow seemed to pass over the man’s face, a memory, a question. Then he smiled again. He opened the shutters of the room. He said something to the effect, ‘The room is yours. Make yourself at home’, and went out leaving the door open. The old wooden stairs creaked as he descended, and then there was silence.

Deniz lay on the bed and stared at the wooden panelling on the ceiling. A few minutes later he was asleep. He slept as though he hadn’t slept for days, dog-tired, as though he had reached the end of life and the world.

It was almost evening when he awoke. A storm had blown up, and one of the shutters kept banging. He wasn’t immediately alert. What is this place? What time is it? Why am I here?

The girl was standing motionless in a long white dress — perhaps her nightgown — barefoot and with her blond hair loose down to her waist in the open doorway under the wan yellow light from the corridor. She ran off quickly when she noticed that Deniz had woken up. The stairs creaked, and a door downstairs closed quietly. In the room only the sound of the wind and the shutter banging against the wall could be heard.

He got up, and as he washed his face he realized that he stank of sweat. He remembered that he hadn’t changed his T-shirt the whole trip. He went downstairs to enquire where the shower was. In the room with the fireplace that was doubled up as a dining-room the girl was sitting in the old rocking-chair watching television and stroking a teddy bear in her lap.

‘Excuse me. Where’s the shower?’ He mimed shampooing his hair with his hand to make himself understood.

The girl pointed upstairs as she continued to rock the chair. ‘Upstairs, second door on the left, two doors before the room you’re in. The second,’ she repeated, wiggling two of her fingers. They were to continue this private game of charades in the days to come. It was a game they didn’t give up even after Deniz began to learn Norwegian and make himself understood.

It was not that night but not long after his arrival on the island. Had he left his door ajar with a premonition intensified by desire? Was he expecting Ulla? He wasn’t surprised when the girl appeared at his door in her long nightgown. The weight on his loins suddenly turned into an arrow of fire. He was lying on his back on the bed. He heard the door close. He shut his eyes and quietly waited for the girl to approach. From the vibrations in the air and the warmth that licked his face he could feel that she was right next to the bed. Without opening his eyes or otherwise stirring he held out his hand and gently pulled her warm, soft body towards him. He felt her vibrations first at his fingertips, then on his lips and finally all over his body. He didn’t whisper sweet words of passion as they made love. He didn’t know the Norwegian, and Ulla didn’t know the words in the languages he knew. Theirs was a mute love, a mute passion. It was a flood that gushed from the sea and returned to the soil. It was felt through the senses and emotions, unhindered by thought, purged of words and language, taking its power and joy from the body — not feeling the need for words.

When the spell of the stranger from far away merged with the shrouded mystery of the Devil’s Island their simple, ordinary love story became a myth, a legend. As they walked hand in hand in empty coves, on the cliffs, climbed the ruins of the castle that Ulla had also started calling the Devil’s Castle, they were transformed into the heroes of old Nordic legend. She was no longer a plump village girl or Deniz an unshaven, unkempt young man who had let himself go. The love between Ulla, walking in her long white, blue and pink skirts, with her hair blowing in the wind, and the mysterious stranger who had emerged from the sea one day — some said he was the son of an Arab sheikh, others maintained he was an Italian count — seemed the long-awaited miracle itself.

When he embraced her and felt her flesh upon his flesh and her heart in his heart, when he entwined her long hair around his fingers, when he snuggled against the comforting warmth of her soft breasts, when he held her hand or put his arm around her waist, Deniz became drunk with a happiness and satisfaction that he experienced for the first time in his life. The faint bitter memory of previous halting, awkward, inept and incomplete love-making faded each time they touched each other, each time they made love, during their long silences, whenever they went out to sea or climbed the cliffs. It was the first time he embraced a woman’s body with confidence, the first time his heart was not overcast with guilt and anxiety. For the first time it was a good match. The inferiority and timidity he had always felt deep inside melted away in Ulla’s eyes tinged with the hazy blue of the North Sea. For the first time he shed his identity as the child who could not handle life, who had destroyed people’s hopes in him and resorted to dream worlds as an escape.

Ulla was the first person who loved me for what I was and wasn’t. It was as though she had been waiting for me for years on that island. All she wanted was to make love to me and live by my side; she desired nothing more. We were like two seals playing and mating between the rocks in secluded coves. We were like the dolphins and the seagulls. We were part of the landscape of the sea, the cliffs and the clouds. We were the mascots of the fishermen when we went out with them to the open sea on their ocean-going boats. We had provided the joy and laughter in the guesthouse where visitors were few, the inhabitants quiet and the air sombre. We laughed. How we laughed at my inaccurate Norwegian, Ulla’s clumsiness, the funny things Grandfather did, the behaviour of the guests who arrived from time to time, the chat of fishermen going out to sea, the sun, the clouds, the storms, the rain. We didn’t talk much. We didn’t need to talk a great deal, and anyway we were bereft of words. I from my foreignness, from my fear of words … Ulla, because she didn’t feel the need for them …