Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

She had been brooding over this when she saw the wounded stranger who had fainted at the entrance of the cave with his head against a rock. She was about to make up her mind. She was going to get rid of the encumbrance inside her. Then with empty womb, empty heart, free, she would reach the boundless open sea.

Towards the sea that her teacher had described to them at length with such passion and longing … He had told them the sea was nothing like the Botan Brook or the Zap river or the Uluçay. He had said, ‘These streams and rivers are not even puddles compared to the sea. They’re just lines of water.’ So that the children might grasp the concept of the sea better he had asked with a faint hope if any of them had seen Lake Van but got no positive response.

Zelal had enquired how far from their village the nearest sea was.

The teacher had considered this for a while, scratched his head, made some calculations and had answered, ‘If you calculate in a straight line as the crow flies, disregarding mountains and hills, it would be 600 to 700 kilometres. If you calculate it by road it would be much more than that.’

The girl who was good at numbers quickly calculated in her head: 350 times the road they walked to school every day. ‘That is not very much, sir. It is like walking to school 350 times. And that equals 175 days there and back from school. We walk that many days every year anyway.’

The teacher looked at his little student not with pride and joy but with desperation and as though suffering. This was God’s gift, a miracle. She heard her teacher murmur softly to himself, ‘What’s the point of such brains? If she had a thousand times the intelligence what good would it be? To hell with this world!’ and shake his head.

From that day on Zelal thought constantly about the sea. They didn’t have big maps at school. The teacher brought to class pages torn out of an old geography book or atlas. He had shown the children what a small area Turkey covered on that vast ball called the Earth. They wanted to see their village and were surprised when they couldn’t. It did not exist either on the world map or on the map of Turkey. Even the county where the government was based wasn’t there. So that they should have some idea, could understand, the teacher had said, ‘Imagine me as the world. Turkey would be as large as my smallest fingernail.’ How much of that fingernail would be their village? The children felt disappointed. Those huge mountains, the wild rivers that dragged people away with their rushing waters in the springtime, pastures and meadows, their village, their houses, their school: didn’t they count for anything? What good is it if you’re not even a dot on a map?

This issue had not bothered Zelal. Not that she didn’t care but because she understood that if there had been a bigger map Turkey would have looked bigger; that their village — and even their houses — would be marked on a Turkey that had been drawn far larger. Instead of listening to the teacher it was the sea that she was obsessed with, that she could not stop thinking about, the dream that she became engrossed in during lessons. The sea that was very far away but still not further than a school year…

The vigorous evil seed that had resisted so much hardship and was growing inside her was hindering the life granted her when she was at death’s door. It was preventing her from reaching the sea. Not even Mizgin’s bloodless lips, the dark, dirty blood oozing from between her legs or her final blood-curdling scream was going to stop Zelal from getting rid of the thing inside her.

It was then that I saw you, as I was getting ready to dig about and empty my womb, to taste the freedom of life or death. You were wounded and bleeding. You had lost consciousness and fallen into a deep sleep, and I took your head to my bosom. I felt your warmth just below my stomach where the seed was sprouting. I imagined a vast sea; lukewarm, limpid, the colour of the sky … I made a wish, a vow; that if you, a stranger, were a good man and I took care of your wounds, you would take me and we would go and reach the sea together and become the sea. I calculated it was my ninety-sixth day. It would become more visible every day. Then I calculated by the moon in the sky; I had 184 lunar days to go. I told you, but it wasn’t out of fright. Why should I be afraid? What did I have to lose? I told you because my love for you could endure no lies and because I believed myself innocent and clean. You stroked my stomach and cried. They were tears of love that came from your heart, not your eyes. I understood that.

You said, ‘Perhaps everything, even the bad things, happened so that we would find each other.’ I was just about to say that when you took the words out of my mouth. At that moment I believed that the child was a gift from heaven. Those who had raped me were not soldiers, guards or guerrillas; they were spirits who had assumed the form of the cruel male warrior so that we could find each other, possess each other. Spirits of the skies, the waters, the mountains…

You knew that, too. You said, ‘The child is our child — not a child of war but of peace and hope.’ The seed inside me that I had thought was evil bloomed that moment like the roses of paradise and became our hope. My child became your child because we loved him before he was born. We loved each other for the miracle of the unborn child, to bring the unborn Hevi into this world.

They watched the military police leave hurriedly after a half-hearted search. They didn’t like to venture so far into the mountains to look for someone. They never knew who or what would emerge from a cave or from behind a boulder. It was obvious that they didn’t want to linger in these dangerous parts. Although some of them headed for the woods they gave up halfway there and turned back.

‘How many days have we been here?’ asked Mahmut when the soldiers were gone and all was peaceful and quiet once again.

‘Seventeen days,’ said the girl who knew about numbers.

They had bonded as though they had been living close to each other for seventeen years. And yet they were as full of longing as if they had been together for just one day. They could not get enough of each other.

‘How many days old is our beloved Hope?’ asked Mahmut.

‘He’s completed his 103rd day,’ answered Zelal.

They knew the time had come. They knew they had to wake up and return to the world, to bid farewell to the mountains and walk towards the open sea.

Two souls without refuge or shelter, two innocent children, carrying a third one within them like a lucky charm, descended to the land of hope to save Hevi from being consigned to the caves in the mountains, the barrenness of charred hillsides and the eerie solitude of deserted villages.

‘Tell me a tale of escape; one that is not sad, where nobody dies, nobody cries. As you are a storyteller, tell me a good story, where lovers are united, brothers make peace and everybody lives happily ever after. Storyteller, tell me a beautiful tale of escape. Let fugitives reach their goal, let no children die, let lovers not part and let no one go hungry. Let there be hope and peace at the end. Tell me a good story with a happy ending.’

Had Zelal spoken these words to Ömer Eren when her fear had left her and she had found her voice, or had he written them himself as he gazed at the sadness in the girl’s beautiful iridescent blue-green eyes?

When Zelal was transferred from intensive care to a standard room she had not said a word, had turned her face to the wall and been silent. Was it from weakness or was it anger, they couldn’t tell. To begin with Mahmut also remained silent so that his beloved did not exert herself and get tired or upset. Afterwards he could not tolerate the silence and the pretence that nothing had happened. He was afraid that she had lost her mind and her memory, that she would not remember anything. It was more than that: he was terrified. He panicked. What if she had forgotten their passion, their love and their love-making? What if she didn’t know him, if she could never again remember those fairytale days? He spoke to her. He told her again and again all that had happened. He told her at the risk of tiring her and causing her pain so that she would remember. But Zelal still said nothing. How much had she understood? He could not tell. He asked the doctors in fear and trembling. They said, ‘It will be hard for her to get over the shock, but she will get better.’ Then one day, when Ömer Eren was visiting, the girl turned her beautiful head towards the door. She pointed at the writer who was standing by the door with a bunch of flowers in his hand and asked in a brusque, unfriendly voice, ‘Ew ki ye? Who is he?’