Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

And yet, as things stand, if I’m to be shot let me be shot with a soldier’s bullet. The bullet of a soldier is preferable to that of the organization. If the former, you go as a martyr; if the latter, as a traitor. It is the same death, but the names are different.

To have studied at university, not to mention medical school if only for three terms, was a privilege that brought one safety at the beginning. It was rumoured that the leaders took the educated and the students under their wing. You felt well supported. However, some of the troops in the mountains, especially certain commanders, had no sympathy for those who had studied or for the students who came from the city. ‘These people have problems in focusing, and they can’t stand hardship. They tend to broadcast their concerns and lower the others’ morale.’ Such words were circulated in whispers and sometimes even out loud. You could sense what they thought about you from the attitude of the people who were close to the commanders. A few incidents in the camp had been enough for Mahmut to understand that he was being given the cold shoulder. He felt that they had taken him along on the last combat because they had to — and perhaps to test him as well.

I’m not a traitor. I have never been one. From time to time children would be taken from their villages against their will. However, no one brought me to the mountains by force Most of us were not obliged to come here. It was our choice. We felt in our hearts the sound, the poetry, the legend of the mountain. We combined them with the heroic stories we had acquired since childhood. We fortified the memory of our raided, evacuated, burnt villages with rebellion against our poverty, our oppression and rejection.

We followed the sad songs of comradeship that echoed over hill and dale:

Dur neçe heval

Na na! Tu dur neçe!

We dedicated our squalid, hopeless, futureless lives to legends of liberation, silently and without feeling the need for ponderous words. We were ready to believe and we believed. We were ready to fight and we fought.

His father used to say things like ‘The future is not in the mountains. Dahati ne li çiyanan e. You can fight each other in the mountains. You kill and get killed, but you can’t build a future with guns and weapons. You can’t gain your rights in the mountains. If you study and have a good career you can save and enlighten both yourself and other Kurds.’ Nobody forced me to take to the mountains. To the contrary, they always told me not to go. I was never coerced into joining the organization.

I believed my father. I thought I could do it. I thought I could save myself. The whole family collected rubbish to pay for my courses. My father, that great proud man who was a descendant of holy wise men, rummaged in bins. He always tied a scarf over his face, not to avoid the foul stench, but the shame of being recognized.

He had studied very hard. Only two students from the course had got into university that year. He had won a place at medical school, his first choice, too; what was more, at a university close by, in his region. People had looked down their noses at him, saying, ‘You can’t become a doctor in those provincial universities. At most you will learn how to dress wounds, and no one will give you a decent job. All you will be able to do is to help midwives and give injections in state-run health centres.’ But the family was overjoyed. His father had patted him on the back, and his mother had thrown her arms around her son and wept. The neighbours had come to congratulate him and had been offered refreshments and sweets his mother had made out of nothing. My mother had always been a secret hoarder. She had produced the last of the five gold pieces that had been given at her wedding. They thought it had been spent long ago, but she had put it aside for a rainy day. They bought me a new pair of jeans, a good pair of trousers, some shirts and a pair of shoes. Their son was going to appear in public. No one should look at him askance; he should not feel wanting or ashamed. Everyone had believed things would work out, even Mahmut himself.

He had completed the third term and passed his examinations when he was disciplined for dancing on the campus at Nawroz and suspended for a term. Then the military officer at the campus, who had taken a dislike to him for some reason, had filed a complaint against him and the other members of the student culture club saying they had sung Kurdish songs and staged a silent liberation play. As a result, he was suspended for another two terms. Otherwise he would have continued his education and become a doctor. It didn’t matter if it were in the state clinics or small-town health institutions; he would still be serving the people of this country. And what was wrong with a civil servant’s salary. Your money was in the bank at the beginning of every month.

It didn’t work out. He did not have the chance to carry on to the fourth term. If he had had the means or been able to find a part-time job he could have waited for the suspension to be lifted and continued from where he had left off, although it would have been difficult. He had no means, no job or money from his father. When he was handed the disciplinary order he became so distressed that an electric dart had passed through his brain and burst a blood vessel in his eye.

In our region, if you are in trouble, if lightning flashes through your brain and stress makes a blood vessel burst in your eye, the places you go to, the places you take refuge in, are the mountains that surround your land and your heart. To see a free horizon you look at the mountains, and then you climb them. You heed the mountains, and you listen to their sounds before singing a song in your language. At the beginning, when the mountains were merely mountains, there was no war, treason, guerrilla forces or Kurdish separatism. In our region, where all exits and doors are sealed, where all screams and voices are smothered, where your voice is silent however hard you scream and is never heard even if it does emerge, the mountains represent hope; they are liberty, the high podium from which you can make your voice heard, where your scream will echo.

Bleeding, he tumbles down the hill, surprised at the speed of thought and remembrance, with a pleasant drowsiness in his brain as though he has smoked grass.

The night their village was raided, the doors of the huts and barns were broken open with rifle butts and the people inside lined against the walls. His mother, grandmother and aunts were forced to lie face down on the ground while boots pressed on their necks and the house was searched. The grown men were taken from their homes — some in their underwear, some naked — and herded together in the village square amid Turkish-Kurdish curses, slaps and kicks. He was only a small boy cowering under the only window of their flat-roofed yellow-grey mudbrick house that stank of dung. He remembers — how could one forget? — seeing his old limping grandfather, his father in his long johns, his cousin and his big brother as they were frogmarched away. He remembers watching the armed men in snow masks and motley uniforms that blended into the night, as they goaded the grandfathers, fathers, uncles and brothers crawling along the ground with sticks and rifle butts. He remembers that some of his people were pushed and prodded into trucks amid shouts of ‘Spawn of Armenians and Kurds!’ ‘Traitors!’ ‘Criminals!’ and were taken away and that his father and grandfather were considered lucky to have returned home, even if bruised and broken. He also remembers that for three days his father didn’t get out of bed, not from pain or sickness but from grief and shame, that for three days he lay facing the wall on the cushions in the corner.