Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

The room is hot, suffocating even.

‘There’s air conditioning,’ says the man.

There is air conditioning, but despite the man’s heroic — and hopeless — efforts it does not work. He pulls back the net curtain and opens the window. It looks over a wood yard at the back. Flat-topped brick houses without roofs and plaster and with metal rods sticking out of the top are visible, buildings set next to each other like skulls; poplars here and there on which silent night birds perch, and behind, so near that if you stretched out your hand you think you could touch them, the mountains whose peaks are snowy even in June. Mahmut’s father had said, ‘You just go off and leave us with our poplars, our crows and our snow.’ He remembers the acute sadness in the man’s voice.

‘Is it all right, sir?’ asks the man from reception.

‘Fine. As long as the sheets are clean, that is.’

‘They are clean. You are only our fifth customer. They’ll do for another five people!’ He laughs mischievously, in a friendly manner, pleased with his joke. ‘The sheets are changed regularly if not every day, sir. The cleaning ladies have to earn their keep. Don’t worry.’

He turns down the covers and examines the sheet and the pillowcase as though wanting to confirm what he has said. The sheet is worn and there is a hole in the middle. ‘Look — as white as snow. It’s been worn with washing. Well, this isn’t the Presidential Palace, is it?’

After the man has left leaving the key, Ömer opens his case and takes out his shaving things and his toothbrush. He hangs a few shirts and a spare pair of trousers in the cupboard in the corner. He goes to the bathroom and washes his hands and face and looks at his face in the mirror above the basin. He has some stubble. Never mind. Here there is no need to shave every day. His face looks a little tired. That is to be expected. How many hours has he been on the road? And with all the tension as well. He locks the door and goes downstairs. He is still undecided about whether to visit the chemist straight away. Instead of sitting in the hotel’s stuffy lobby, to go out towards the market, to go into a restaurant for some local food and, if available, a small drink such as rakı, would do him good. He goes out on to the street. Young teenagers are sitting on the steps in front of the hotel and at the roadside, passing the time fooling around. There are also young children selling tissues, trinkets, eucalyptus sweets, toffees with rhymes on the papers and other knick-knacks from cardboard boxes hung around their necks with string. In a shop next to the hotel all kinds of souvenirs are sold, from local kilims to honey, from silverwork to regional dress. I must take a look later. Elif likes that sort of thing.

The road that leads to the market is livelier, more crowded than he had expected. He walks towards the Hayat Chemist thinking that it will already be shut.

The streetlights have not yet been lit, but the lights of the coffee houses and one or two shops have just come on. There is a red fluorescent light over the chemist’s sign. It is illuminated inside. The metal shutters that evidently come down to the ground when the shop is shut are half open. On a sign stuck on the window it says, ‘Tonight our chemist is on duty.’ He gently pushes the glass door protected by metal bars. A long tinkling of a bell is heard announcing that the door has been opened.

The woman arranging some products on the shelves with her back to the entrance turns and looks at the door. ‘Yes? What can I do for you?’

Ömer’s first thought is how the voice and the face could be in such harmony and his second whether the woman’s raven-black hair is dyed or natural. No, it can’t be tinted. Under the yellowish light one or two silvery white hairs are visible at her temples.

In the following days he would relate to Jiyan the moment of that first meeting. ‘I first saw your hair, only your hair. It was as though it had got entangled with your voice. I noticed your face much later.’

‘Please give me something for a headache — something more effective than aspirin. And … I’ve had a long journey, so something relaxing as well, something to make me go to sleep for the night. Herbal if possible.’

While checking the shelves for suitable products the chemist asks, ‘Is this your first time here?’

A few long curls escaping from her thick hair loosely gathered at the back of her head and held by a sizeable ivory-coloured slide fall on her shoulders. Ömer is surprised that the woman is so tall and so slim. As she reaches up to the medicine cupboards, he immediately sees silver bracelets with a black inlay that she wears on her graceful wrists and slim arms and also the huge, striking, strange rings on three fingers of her right hand. All these contrast with the simplicity of her clothes which consist of black trousers and a tight black combed-cotton blouse. They are like a natural extension of the woman’s body, a part she cannot conceal.

He has not yet seen her eyes. He will see them when she brings the medicines down from the shelves and places them on the counter and when she looks and smiles at the weary stranger who really doesn’t know what led him to these parts.

‘I think these should help you. Our roads are indeed long and gruelling. Here the medicines I sell most to foreigners are mild tranquillizers and antidepressants. It is difficult to survive otherwise.’

Her eyes are a deep black, surrounded by long black lashes; huge in relation to her face. ‘Her eyes are not just eyes, they are the land of eyes’ … Which poet wrote those lines?

‘Your eyes are a distant country. Your eyes are the mirror of your town, your country; so sad, so fearful, so mysterious, rebellious,’ he was to say later, referring to the lines of the poet.

Now, as he prepares to take money from his wallet to pay for the pills, he asks himself whether or not the woman is beautiful. At the same time he attempts to gain time in order to say something else to her. No, she is not beautiful. One could not call the chemist beautiful. It’s not exactly beauty. She leaves one with a different feeling; the feeling that the question is absurd — should not be asked. Different, unusual, striking … No, none of these adjectives describes her well. For someone who has seen her for the first time to ask these questions is a sign that she is unusual. Perhaps she is just a rather dark ordinary if presentable woman with jet-black hair, and my impression is merely the result of what I have been through the last few days; her extraordinariness just a delusion.

‘I’m sorry, but are you Jiyan Hanım?’

‘Yes, that’s me. Why are you sorry? she says, smiling again.

He realizes that the woman is young, despite the small hollow under her left cheek at the corner of her mouth and the odd white hair. About thirty-five years old — perhaps not even that.

‘I’ve come to visit this area and to see you.’ He does not know why he has difficulty in saying this. Suddenly all that has happened since that frightful night at the coach station, and especially his being here now, seems strange and unreal. He falls silent, not knowing how to carry on the conversation, undecided whether to continue or not.

‘If I could have your name,’ says Jiyan. ‘It’s as though I know you from somewhere.’

‘Ömer Eren. I’m a writer.’

Of course, of course, I know you. To tell the truth, I haven’t read all your novels, but I did read your essays in which you discussed the east-west question. I thought it was about Turkey’s east-west conflict when I bought the book. I was wrong, but, still, I found it informative. I’ve watched you on television a few times. Please forgive me. I should have recognized you at once. When you meet someone you don’t expect to see you can’t place them immediately.’