Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

The ambulance arrives and stops just in front of them. As he helps to lift the stretcher he says, ‘Don’t be afraid. I’ll come with you, and we’ll sort out the hospital and everything. I know a hospital where there are doctors who are acquaintances of mine. Don’t worry. If there are any other problems we’ll see to them.’

He speaks with the confidence and the power of being Ömer Eren. The youth looks at his face with mistrustful, suspicious and anxious eyes that question why he is doing this.

The night is dark and the sky an inky blue. The moon sheds no light. The lights of the city obscure the stars. Over there, in the distance, is the Citadel. The giant flag on top of the Citadel is illuminated by a bluish light and is waving gently. To drown out the noise of the ambulance’s siren that grates on the nerves and wrenches the heart Ömer shouts, ‘Where did you come from? And where were you heading for?’

Just then the wounded woman screams in pain. Blood trickles on to the ground from the side of the stretcher. He cannot hear the answer. Perhaps no one has responded.

Looking lovingly at the laboratory animals with their pink eyes and hairless pink tails in the little cages Elif remembered a little sadly and with a longing for the days of her youth how she had cried when she killed her first mouse. It was thirty years ago — perhaps even longer. They were my first dead mice, my first murder.

She used to enter the laboratory at the crack of dawn before anyone had started work to finish the studies for her doctorate that she had begun with great hope, enthusiasm and determination. Her lecturers used to say jokingly that she would be the first Turkish girl to get a Nobel Prize. Why not! I’ll get it, you’ll see.

It could not be said that she was modest. As the not especially beautiful middle daughter of a middle-class low-income teacher’s family with three children, she had discovered at an early age that the way to break out of the narrow family circle, to excel and escape from a inevitable and dreary future and to gain recognition and respect was to achieve success. She was ambitious. Her ambition fed her determination, and her studiousness made up for anything she lacked in talent, ability or intelligence. She did not want to resemble her mother and to live like her aunts and neighbours. She hated being cooped up in rooms and kitchens and houses permeated by the smell of the workaday lives of ordinary people, mending clothes, making food and giving tea parties. Even when she was a little girl she had not played mothers and fathers; she had not liked toy furniture or kitchen sets, and she had not shown much interest in dolls. She adored soft furry animals: teddy bears, rabbits, cats, dogs and mice. If they had been alive, of course, that would have been better, but she was not allowed to keep animals in the house. She had cried bitterly when the timid hazelmouse that she had fed with nuts, dried fruit, breadcrumbs and morsels of cheese without telling anyone — not even her siblings — had been caught in a trap baited by the cheese that her father had smeared with poison. Her father had had to swear to her that he had let the mouse go and not killed it.

As she dons her lab gloves she remembers the agonized, numbed look of her dear little mouse caught in the trap. How strange! So many years have passed, and it’s still a vivid memory. She opens the cage on the large table and takes out one of the test animals, holding it with two fingers. Trying not to hurt it, she places it on the table covered with sterile paper. Now let’s put you to sleep and see what’s happened inside! When she realizes that she is trying to avoid looking the mouse in the eye a sad smile passes over her face. It is good that I recall my emotions when I cried over my first dead mouse. She feels compassionate and sensitive, and she is pleased about it. She stabs a needle into the nape of the mouse’s neck. There’s a faint desperate ‘eek’ that she still hasn’t got used to after all this time and that she cannot pretend not to hear: the mouse’s feeble dying scream. The animal goes into spasm, and its paws quiver a few times. She feels the tiny body go limp between her fingers. And that’s it. After all these experiments who knows how many little dead souls I have left behind. Suddenly she begins to weep quietly. And she is surprised at her tears. Is it because she has killed the mouse? She takes a curious delight in the warm drops trickling down her cheeks.

It had not been easy for her to get used to killing laboratory animals. ‘To obtain results one needs to be fairly brutal,’ her tutor used to say. ‘Think of the thing in your hand not as a living being but as a piece of cloth. Think how many children’s, how many people’s and how many animals’ lives you can save in killing one test animal!’

Elif wanted to obtain results, to succeed. She had thought about and approved of what her tutor had said and had been convinced. All the same, there was a side to this work that disturbed her. Can one consider a living thing a piece of cloth? Thousands of souls in return for one soul, thousands of lives in return for one life. And who was going to account for that one soul, that one life? Does the principle ‘for the benefit of the majority’ render all murder justifiable? Perhaps it was the increasing weight of these issues that gradually distanced Professor Elif Eren from the lab work that she had at one time passionately loved. It steered her to the philosophy and ethics of science and to ponder on ethical issues involved in genetics. She had also matured enough no longer to dream of a Nobel Prize.

As she examines the piece of brain that she has taken from the small white mound of fur under the microscope linked to the computer, she tries to free her mind from the sound of the telephone that continually rings somewhere in her mind and concentrate on her work — in other words, the dead mouse. The effort is useless. Everything she does and thinks comes back to the phone that rang towards dawn and to the strident metallic sound continuously jangling in her brain. The sound of the phone persists like some horrible background music that she cannot silence.

Towards dawn she awoke in a sweat from a confused dream in which she was trying to escape from an arrow of fire stuck in the middle of a misty, foggy road along which she was walking. In her drowsiness she had not grasped at first what was happening, and when she realized that the arrow of fire was the telephone ringing she became agitated. Since her childhood she had learnt through bitter experience that knocks on doors after midnight and before dawn and midnight telephone calls brought bad news. In her childhood memory, the death of her father was a midnight telephone call coming from a small, remote Anatolian town. Her father, a harmless teacher, had been posted there having incurred the wrath of the ruling party. In the days of the military coup, they had come for her husband in the early hours of the morning, kicking the door until it almost broke and barging into the bedroom with their heavy weapons. At the time she was three and a half months pregnant. She had silently watched Ömer being taken away with a look of contempt on her face, trying to protect her stomach with her hands — they could have harmed the child if they had pushed her around. The pain of her son — or should one say his going and disappearing — was the ring of a phone after midnight piercing their deep sleep, a call from the hospital. ‘Is Deniz Eren a relative? His condition is serious. Come straight away.’ They had informed her by phone at dawn, too, about the laboratory fire, which had, in only minutes, turned to ashes the months of effort she had expended on the important experiment and destroyed her beloved test animals. Elif was afraid of midnight telephone calls and knocks on doors at dawn.