Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

When you put your head in my lap and slept I could have got up quietly and run away, I didn’t run away. While I was stroking your naked chest, that arrow of fire shot through my groin and rose to my stomach, my breasts, my nipples, my throat and my lips. I was enveloped by a sweet, sinful feeling. Do I really have the fire of a whore? Do I lead men on? Am I really a sinful slut, as people get my second mother to say instead of saying it themselves? Are they right?

Zelal remembers all this as she lies in the white bed of the whitewashed hospital ward with a severe pain in her stomach, the taste of pus in her throat and rust in her mouth. And she remembers that long road she used to walk along with the boys to school when she was a small child. They would pinch her, try to squeeze her breasts and pull down her pants. She would think of her mother and be afraid. She loved school, but sometimes because of this she did not want to go. She would insist that her brother took her. The road went through a mountain pasture covered with snow in winter and tall flowers and grass in spring and met a stream. At the point where the stream was at its shallowest and calmest, forgotten by the waterfalls and the foaming waters close by, there was a ramshackle wooden bridge with a rope for a rail. When the water rose, it left neither bridge nor stepping-stones. Once, as she was crossing the bridge with her mother and her brother, the rope they had been holding on to broke and she and her mother had fallen into the stream. Luckily the water wasn’t high at the time, so they survived the accident with few injuries. Then she had also stayed in a room like this with white walls and white beds in the county clinic. There was another child in the next bed. His name was Süleyman. She will never forget him. They had amputated one of his legs and one of his arms at the hospital in the city. And now they had brought him to the clinic because his wounds would not heal. The boy’s mother wept and cursed all day long. Zelal had cried her eyes out, terrified they would cut off her arm and leg as well. Her mother had tried to console her saying, ‘He was a naughty boy. He walked where he shouldn’t have and stepped on a mine. You have no business with mines and such things. Don’t be afraid.’

Then one day they said to her, ‘You are grown up now. You have almost reached the age of marriage. You cannot walk along those roads with boys, and it’s out of the question that you go alone. There are boys at the school beginning to sprout moustaches, and there are male teachers. A girl who has started to have periods doesn’t go to school.’ She hadn’t told anyone, not even her second mother, that the boys had already squeezed her breasts, pulled off her knickers and looked with curiosity at that particular place and laughed.

If it weren’t for the walk along the road, school was fun. They taught in Turkish; reading and writing, Atatürk, the flag … Her favourite subject was arithmetic. Numbers fascinated her. How does 1 become 10 when you put a 0 next to it? How does 2 times 2 make 4? If you have 15 eggs and 5 of them are rotten, how can you know there are only 10 good eggs left without counting them one by one? During the four years she attended school she saw herself as a wizard who solved the riddle of magic signs. While the other children were still scratching their heads with their pencils and counting on their fingers, she could solve a problem in her head and give the answer right away. Once, the teacher had called her father to school. When the man didn’t show up, the teacher made a point of going to the village. He told them, ‘I’ll look into the possibilities of sending her to a regional boarding-school or similar. She has a good mind. She is very different from the others. She might continue her education, become a teacher, go to university.’ But her father didn’t pay any attention to the teacher’s words. ‘You may be right, teacher beg, but my younger son was like her, too. You weren’t here, but that time they came to the village, too. This gift from God comes from my grandfather. He used to make calculations for the whole clan even though he could hardly read or write. If I had the means, I would have sent the boy to school. The girl’s grown up now. That’s enough studying for her. An educated wife looks askance at her husband.’

When the teacher, his head bowed, walked slowly away down the slope with his stick, she had wanted to run after him and go away with him. She would have liked to learn about the magic of numbers and the spell of words, to discover the secret of how the same things could be said in different languages, to understand why Kurdish should not be spoken, to find out about the moon and the stars in the sky, and those distant far-off countries — and especially the seas — the teacher had told them about; how that incredibly huge, misshapen ball called the Earth kept on spinning for ever in space and where that endless space ended. Something else she wanted to know was why the language they spoke at home and in the village was forbidden at school, why they got a thrashing if they spoke Kurdish — no, her own teacher didn’t get angry or punish them; he just said to them ‘You have to learn Turkish.’ However, the Principal — you know the type, hardly human — used to beat the hell out of those who spoke Kurdish. Why did people speak different languages? You could say ‘mother’ or ‘yade’ or ‘daye’ or ‘mum’, call a lamb ‘lamb’ or ‘berx’. They were the same; you understood the same thing. So why was it forbidden to say daye for mum and berx for lamb at school? She wanted to know this, to learn and teach what she knew to others like the teachers did. But these were things that could be learnt only in the city, at the big school, not the local school in the nearby village; she sensed that.

Happily they hadn’t married her off when she was twelve or thirteen. It is not our tradition to marry off girls that early. And if a girl is beautiful and has many suitors, they wait for the bride price to go up. The daughters of beys and aghas are hard to get. My father’s relatives were not beys, but we weren’t that poor either. It seems they had plenty of property and cattle before the war. My great-grandfather was also a sheikh, a holy man. People used to come to kiss his hand, and bring him chickens, food or whatever they had stuffed into their bags. She can barely remember. They used to eat a lot of sweets. Sweets in colourful wrappings that smelt of lemons and strawberries, toffees wrapped up with fortune poems … They used to give them to other children, too. There would be a crowd around her, waiting for sweets. She remembers a long house with separate rooms opening on to the earthen courtyard, a large, crowded house where women and children, grandfathers and grandchildren, wives and second wives all lived together. Then she remembers leaving that house suddenly one day and moving to a hamlet. She remembers that they no longer ate sweets, they had no cattle except for a few goats and sheep, their sheikh grandfather died, her brothers left home one by one and her favourite brother, Mesut, disappeared and his name was mentioned only in whispers. She remembers her father as a good man, that he was always affectionate and never beat her mother, although he beat her second mother once, badly — but she deserved it because she had been disrespectful to my mother — that he never ever hit his daughter and used to caress her when she was very little — fathers didn’t caress their daughters once they had grown — saying, ‘Keça min ja çawşina xweşik! My beautiful blue-eyed daughter!’

One day her father beat himself. You couldn’t say that he beat his breast because he literally beat himself. The women and children in the house ran to hide in corners so as not to witness it. They were afraid that if they did they would be guilty of being eyewitnesses.