Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

He thinks about their coming down the mountain to the plain, to the city, to be among people. Then … He returns to the moment he does not want to remember but which never leaves his mind, to that moment when he is filled with a horrible feeling that sticks to him like tar. The more he tries to chase it away, the bigger and deeper it gets. The moment that is the end and the beginning. He doesn’t know if it is the end or the beginning.

He goes whirling into a dark tunnel with a searing, intense pain in his left shoulder; he doesn’t know if it is a knife wound or the bite of a poisonous snake or a scorpion. He remembers his own voice, his scream and that he whirls out into daylight from that endless dark tunnel. Then he begins to roll down a hill. If he wants, he can make one last effort to cling to a bush or rock, to stay where he is or call for help. He doesn’t. He lets himself go. He no longer feels any pain. His body feels as though it is made of sponge, rubber and rags instead of blood, flesh and bone. His mind is alert, quicker and clearer than usual. He wonders if they will shoot at him. He feels like a stranger observing the event from outside, like a television cameraman — once foreign television people came to the camp; that was where he saw them — as if he is watching an action film. He feels no fear, just curiosity. The bleeding from his shoulder gets worse as he continues to roll down. The blood smears the grass and the rocks. If they want to catch him, they can track him down from the trail of blood. If only he could stop for a moment and stand up, tear a piece off the shutik around his waist or, if that didn’t work, from his other clothes and wrap it tightly around the bullet wound to reduce the bleeding. But he can’t stop; he mustn’t. He has to roll all the way down to the dwarf oak trees and from there reach the depths of the woods and hide his tracks.

He knows these parts like the palm of his hand. He is familiar with every nook and cranny, every possible hiding place. The meadows, pastures and playgrounds of his childhood; the secret places of passion, innocent escapades of precocious village youths … Hillsides that were once green, then burnt black and which are becoming green once more … Who can stop the life that bursts from nature? Who can destroy for ever the seeds that hide in the depths of the earth? And who can prevent them from sprouting and cracking the soil, staying alive in defiance of death?

Even though the fighting is carrying on above, it is clear that it is gradually dying down. The shots are becoming less frequent, and the noise of the guns is quieter, further away. The only sounds in that odd moment of silence between the bouts of gunfire are the flapping wings of the frightened thrushes and the monotonous humming of the wasps that seem to have confused night and day. Today the operation lasted a long time, late into the day. This is not very common. Sometimes you fight as a duty; sometimes it is a matter of life and death. You are wound up to kill in order not to get killed. And at other times you fight with fury and passion, for the cause, for victory. That was how it was this time. New recruits who had just joined and had been sent fresh to the front — many of them still children, some of them young female guerrillas — were fighting, their belief in the leadership, the organization and the cause still intact. These people offer their lives, and their faith is as hard as a rock. They don’t retreat, run or surrender even if they know they will be killed. Death is a part of the saga. It is not the end, it is merely the prologue for becoming the hero of legends. They are so young, so far removed from death and have so little to cling to in life that they are afraid of pain, but they are not afraid of death. That is the reason why the conflict has lasted so long.

And how about me? What did I do? Did I run? That horrible sticky pitch-black feeling … No, I didn’t run; I was shot. Shot! It wasn’t my first combat so why should I panic and run? If I were to run, I would have done so long ago, when I had all those chances. I didn’t run. I was shot. Had he not stopped himself at the last minute he would have shouted at the top of his voice: ‘I was shot! Shot!’

The soldiers use the north and we the south face of the mountain when retreating. As though they have come to a tacit agreement, weapons are silent as the soldiers return to their barracks and the guerrillas to the mountains, the survival instinct prevails, and life overcomes death. They say that once the operation is over and both sides have begun to retreat, soldiers and guerrillas who happen to meet on the road do not draw weapons on each other. Perhaps it is just a rumour, but, still, it makes one feel better.

No one is firing at him. He lies face down and hangs on to the bushes and thistles with his good arm. He digs his fingernails into the soil and looks up for an instant to the top of the hill. No, there is no one following me. Didn’t anyone see me rolling down? Is everyone trying to save themselves? Did they see me tumbling down the hill like a stone and take me for dead, or is it something else? Whose bullet shot me? This is the question that hurts more than his wounds and gnaws at his insides and settles heavily on the stones, the rocks and his heart. I was caught in the crossfire. Had I thought of defecting, had it crossed my mind even for a moment? No … Yes … Yes! No. I don’t know. I was at the front, not from heroism, just an error in calculation … I shouldn’t have crept up so far. Why did I do it? Was I the bravest? Or was I running towards the soldiers? No, I don’t know.

He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t want to know. He hopes he was hit by a soldier’s bullet. The idea of being shot with a heval bullet is as good as committing a sin. It was an enemy bullet. It came from the opposite side. It must have winged me. Or is the bullet still lodged there? He feels his shoulder with his hand. He was wounded from behind. He shudders. I was facing the enemy, but I may have turned around for a moment when I realized I was a good way away from our group.

The enemy: a nameless, soulless, bodiless, faceless concept, a ghost. He can’t bring himself to call soldiers ‘the enemy’. My cousin Mamudo — he was also called Mahmut after our great-grandfather — my namesake and my soulmate … He is in the military, and I am here. Hıdır of the Zahos is a soldier, and his cousin is with the guerrillas. This is why his heart ached whenever he placed a bullet in his rifle, every time he fired, especially at the beginning. Now are we supposed to call these kekos enemies? We must of course. We have to. Once you get used to saying the word ‘enemy’ they really will be enemies. Keep on saying it and you will learn the enemy by heart. You will shoot the ones you’ve learnt to call the enemy, hurt them, take revenge and become a great warrior, a hero. Mahmut senses the aggressive power of the word that hones the mind. He knows that a tongue can become a weapon. What he can’t understand is why he has such difficulty in identifying the so-called enemy as such. When you come face to face with him, when you look him in the eye, you don’t see the enemy; you see another human being. If you have a split second to think, even when you are pointing your guns at one another, you cannot understand why you are foes. Some people have sent soldiers to the mountains, and others have led the guerrillas to soldiers and village guards. Instead of having a smoke together, chatting about your loved ones and showing photographs to each other, you shoot and kill. Then the one who is faster and a better shot, whose hand doesn’t tremble when pulling the trigger and who doesn’t nurse sentimental ideas, is the one who stays alive.

He was the first to realize that gradually he was becoming a bad fighter, sometimes missing the target on purpose. What was worse, he was staying in the rear during combat. This was due to his inability to call the soldier the ‘enemy’ and his obsession with ‘Is that my cousin facing me?’ He was afraid that the hevals would realize this, too, and his group commander would know. He knew that he would be criticized for being soft and weak. He would have to deliver a self-criticism and try to make it up to them; nothing would be the same as before, and a doubt would always remain somewhere in the hearts of his comrades. What was worse, one could be tried as a traitor, a caş, a secret agent and then … In the camp, one snowy morning at dawn they had executed Seydo who had panicked and attempted to surrender in the middle of a battle, and they had made all the troops stand and watch as a lesson. Mahmut had pretended to look but he hadn’t been able to. He had just seen the warm blood spreading on to the snow as it flowed from the chest of the boy who had fallen face down on the ground. Later, when they were carrying his still warm body towards the frozen rocks to hurl him into the darkness of the deep valley, he had noticed that the boy’s feet had become purple and swollen from the cold. What hurt him most and tore his insides to shreds was not death but those purple feet.