Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

‘Then?’

‘I don’t know whether you’ve noticed. It doesn’t mean anything to you — you probably haven’t even noticed — but, look, the streets are dark again. The street lights aren’t being switched on. The snow-mask brigade has taken over once more. You probably cannot hear it, but our ears are very sensitive to certain sounds. We can hear the skirmishes, provocative fire, the mountain raids, the Cobras, the noise of the helicopters in the far distance. Mines explode, soldiers die, military operations are carried out, our children die. In other words, life has returned to the same damned rhythm. And, well, then there is this.’

They see that the men have silently moved off. The woman opens a corner cupboard with a wooden door. She takes out a bottle from a small fridge in which there are medicine bottles, boxes and equipment for dressing wounds.

‘A drink will be much better for you than those tablets. There is only a little whisky. How would you like it?’

Released from the tension of a moment ago, Ömer puts his head in his hands and begins to laugh. ‘It looks as though I won’t have to accept the Commander’s invitation after all!’

‘Not this evening at least. I have faith in my whisky. It’s the best contraband. I suppose you realize that we are on one of the most important smuggling routes in the country.’

As he looks at Jiyan’s face, he grasps what it is that spoils her unusual beauty, what hardens the expression on her face. It is the thickness and harsh curve of her eyebrows and their closeness to her eyes. It is a blemish that can easily be remedied.

‘Perhaps you are hungry. I forgot to ask. Alcohol won’t be good on an empty stomach. Let me order some kebabs from the shop across the road. I haven’t had anything to eat since this morning. I would have invited you to eat trout at Soğukpınar, but we can no longer go there at night; it’s forbidden. It was, however, the only really pleasant secluded spot in the vicinity.

Is she constantly going to complain about local conditions? It does not matter whether these people are ignorant or educated, whether they come from villages or towns, they all talk of oppression, discrimination and privations. Not because they want you to pity them; it is because they expect something from you, to wear you down with their their victimization, to make you feel inadequate. Ömer simmers with rage. All that trouble he faced to protect their rights; being denounced as a traitor, tried under this or that article and other things beside, and none of it is appreciated. They neither trust nor thank you. In their eyes you remain a Turkish collaborator from the west. A good Turk or a bad Turk: at the end of the day you are a foreigner. This talk of victimization begins to destabilize one after a while; it alienates those who want to help…

‘This is because such talk pricks people with a conscience who have not yet lost their sense of justice. You feel inadequate; you try to come to terms with yourself and you succumb to your conscience. And then, naturally, you get angry with us. You take refuge in your anger and find an excuse to cover up your lack of courage and your indifference,’ Jiyan was to say later when he mentioned the issue to her.

As he sips the whisky that she has poured into dark cola glasses saying, ‘Here you cannot openly drink alcohol,’ he asks, ‘Is your husband a chemist, too?’ As soon as he has enquired he regrets it; he is embarrassed. You are appalling. You are wondering whether the woman is available, if she might be interested in you. You don’t give a damn what her husband does for a living.

‘My husband was a jurist. He was murdered five years ago.’

When she says ‘my husband’ he hears the passion in her voice, the pride as well as her firmness. He is shocked to hear the unspoken challenge: ‘Stop right there. This is my private area. You don’t have permission to enter.’ The emphasis on the word ‘husband’ pre-empts ‘he was murdered’.

‘I didn’t know,’ he says in a low voice with genuine embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t have known.’

‘You couldn’t have known. How could you! But now you do. Welcome to our town, Ömer Bey.’

To say cheers, Jiyan does not raise her glass that she has filled with water; instead she merely flicks it with her middle finger. This must be a part of the ‘concealed drinking’ ritual.

A strange woman, thinks Ömer; unlike anyone he knows. There is that phrase ‘a very special woman’. This lady chemist is a very special woman — attractive but at the same time disturbing. Before taking a sip of whisky, he says ‘Your health’ without lifting his head and trying to avoid eye contact with her.

Towns have sounds. This has none. Especially at night this seems particularly quiet and characterless. During the day the market square is noisy and the area around the coach station is, too. Rows of shops line the market road, two arcades and a commercial building. The last, an office block housing lawyers’ offices, a notary, a dentist and a doctor’s surgery, is large and ugly. There are blocks of flats as well. Most of the upper floors are without plaster, unappealing, grey and grim-looking apartments. And between the many peeling, unsightly buildings a six-storey commercial building in glass with an internet café underneath rises from the ground as though it has fallen from outer space … It is a market similar to those in small Anatolian towns that no longer have any local colour or vibrancy — just a little more straggling, a little shabbier and poorer.

There is activity in the market: people going in and out of shops, people moving about in local dress with kaffiyehs and silk headscarves, idle men, women shopping and military vehicles rushing by. Ömer is amazed that people do not find armoured cars alien or take any notice of them or the new black jeeps that seem as out of place as the modern commercial building covered in coloured glass which stands in the middle of the market place, surrounded by horse-drawn carts and donkeys with panniers. Noise and humming; Kurdish, Arabic and a few Turkish songs, folk songs rising from the stalls of cassette-sellers, horns, children’s screaming, swearing, doleful folk songs that emanate from building sites, the calls to prayer, the ‘Tenth Year of the Republic March’ echoing from the military garrison at the end of the market road, orations recorded on cassettes booming from loudspeakers, verses of the homeland-nation-flag theme and the ‘One land, one language, one flag’ slogan that rises from time to time, followed by ‘I’ll destroy the nest of the bird that ogles you…’

During the day the town is filled with a medley of sounds like every other town: however, it does not have its own distinctive sound. Its sound has been lost. It has been suppressed, drowned amid the noise and the hum. The sounds that can be heard belong to others. The town has withdrawn into itself and stifles its own sound. And especially when the light is trapped early by the mountains and night falls suddenly, one hears in the dark, hastily emptying streets only the barking of stray dogs, the footsteps of one or two people and from time to time the sound of guns and sirens that pierce not only the night or the town like a dagger but hearts, too. None of these are the town’s own sound.

When he tried to explain this impression to Jiyan, she had said rebelliously, ‘We have lost our voice. Our voices and words have been silenced. It was the thousand and one sounds of the mountain pastures, the plains, our weddings and the drums of our herdsmen, the laments of our women, the songs of our brides, the weapons of the hunters, the rebelliousness of our language, our joy, our sadness and, above all, our hope that lent colour to our voices. Our voices used to break loose from the plains, rise up to the mountain pastures and echo on the mountains. They used to mingle with the rivers, pass through the gorges, hit the rocky cliffs and return to the town — and become the sound of the town. Our voices are no longer heard. Our whispers do not break away from here and reach the mountains. They do not echo in the mountains and return to us more more powerfully. Now other sounds come from the mountains. One should say the sound of death, but death has no sound. It is for this reason that the town is silent — very noisy but silent.’