Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

She got up and washed her face in the basin in the corner of the room. She liked what she saw in the mirror. Ever since I was young the more tired, the more depressed I get, the better I look. ‘You should feel sorry for yourself, darling. With that face you can’t possibly make others feel sorry for you!’ Ömer used to say, hugging his wife and stroking her hair. When he said this her worries would evaporate and troubles became meaningless. When did we lose the therapeutic power of our love? When did the river that watered our feelings dry up? Was it when we realized that we had lost our son? Or was it much earlier when you were in pursuit of the magic of the word, when you were climbing the slippery slope and grew away from us? Or was it when I lost myself among the fascinating images transferred from the microscope to the screen and forgot to come home from the laboratory? Was getting yourself caught up in your writing, your books and your admirers and drifting away and my getting lost in the kaleidoscope rings of my childhood dreams not a reason but a result?

A slight stroke of a pencil on her eye and her eyebrow, a touch of lipstick, a hint of foundation to soften the deepening lines on her forehead and at the corners of her lips were rituals she performed daily, as natural as brushing her teeth. As she puts on her expensive designer jeans — not one of the usual well-known brands — that fit her perfectly, that skim her body without being too tight, she smiles with the pleasure that she feels at still being slim, lively and active at over fifty. What was that? Fifty. She repeats the compliment that she is used to hearing: ‘Fifty years old? I don’t believe it! You don’t look more than forty.’ Deniz has become overweight. He has become clumsy, with a body that is harmful to the eye and to his health, reflecting the phrases that she retains in her memory from his childhood: ‘He doesn’t know his lessons, and he’s fatter than the other boys.’ When she realizes that she is ashamed of her son’s body she dislikes herself. I’m slim, graceful and well groomed, and I’m Professor Elif Eren. But what use is all this? What does it mean, for example, to Ömer?

She knows that her husband cheats on her periodically. She gets stuck on the word ‘cheat’. It is an ugly word, an inane, vulgar expression. It doesn’t reflect the truth. Ömer does not talk about these kinds of casual relationships, but he does not hide them either. All this belongs to a different part of his life; to a part that has nothing to do with me, that does not take anything away from me or diminish me … This has nothing to do with the body, desire, sex: it is a male instinct, a need constantly to prove himself; an obsession with being wanted, being considered important, being flattered and with making conquests. I’m the real one. I’m the woman to whom he returns every time. No, this is not true. He never parts, never goes away from me that he should return.

The bond, that instead of being worn out with casual relationships has stood the years and been made strong and firm, although no longer a passionate love, a blind love, seems to Elif like a safe haven. To be Ömer Eren’s wife, his woman…

‘How does it feel to be Ömer Eren’s partner?’ the young arts reporter had asked when she came to interview the famous author and his wife in their home for a national broadcast. Elif had been the the perfect interviewee. She hadn’t put a foot wrong and, to make a feminist point, she had responded, ‘It is also possible to ask the question in this way: “How does it feel to be the husband of Professor Elif Eren, known for her work internationally on the subject of genetic transfer of forgetting and recollection?”’ The young reporter had been stunned and wrongfooted by this and had continued the interview in an amateurish and hesitant manner. However, the last question that the girl had posed before leaving was now troubling Elif in mind and heart.

The hapless girl had insisted on speaking to Deniz who was at home at the time. Oblivious to the young boy’s fretfulness and unwillingness to participate in the broadcast, she insisted on asking just one question: ‘What is it like to be Ömer Eren and Elif Eren’s son?’

‘It’s dreadful,’ Deniz had replied in a rough voice. ‘I don’t recommend it. No one regards you as “you”. They simply see you as this or that person’s child. And you feel you have to perform impossible feats so that you can be yourself.’

Elif remembers the young reporter’s astonished expression. At least, she had had the decency not to include this last question when editing the interview.

Is being our son like that? Is it preferable to live on a remote island in the north at the other end of the world, on the island of the unknown deserter from life? Which conversation, which interview, which photograph reflects the truth about a person? Which one can explain why I’m here, the suffocating feeling inside me, the sadness? Why should I feel so disturbed? I, someone who, the day before, presented one of the most significant papers at an international symposium and received masses of praise — perhaps not least for being, unusually, a Turkish woman presenting such interesting findings. Someone who is beginning to make a name in the international community and getting close to achieving the Woman Scientist of the Year prize. What is this feeling of cold dark emptiness inside me, of not having succeeded? Why do I feel alone, helpless this morning? Is it because of the boy? Is it because I’m missing Ömer? Or is it both?

I need you. I need your voice. I need to hear your voice. When I return I mustn’t let you go again. Even if you want to go, I must cling and hold on to you. I’ve always hated the thought of being a clingy woman, and I’ve tried not to be. But now I must cling to you. We must never go again, you to the east and me to the west. The east and the west are big enough to take both of us together. On the telephone you said, ‘Me to the east and you to the west … We are gradually drifting apart.’ At the beginning of our journey we were so intimate, so close, that however much we separated it always seemed to me that our road, our roots, our bodies were one.

Perhaps it was for this reason that she hadn’t made an issue of her husband’s affairs, her escapes where she used her own academic studies as an excuse, their separations, their distance. It was as though their being together was a necessity rather than a state. Ömer was not a separate entity. He was an extension of her mind, her heart and her body. The fact that his being there felt so natural may have been down to her self-confidence, or perhaps — quite to the contrary — from her fear of losing him. Perhaps it was because secretly she did not notice the erosion of the years or have the strength to stop it.

I am gradually getting old. Reaching fifty would never have crossed the tip of my mind. I’ve come to it. I’m pushing it. I’ve even passed it. I love you. I need you more than ever before. I’m with our son, our wounded son, our son who wounded us. Last night we spoke until dawn. We had never before spoken for so long. He was fastening fish of coloured aluminium foil on to old fishing nets to decorate the fairground for today’s fish festival. He said that it made him happy. He asked me why a life full of peace, a conciliatory, decent pastime was bad in the midst of the violence that surrounds us in this world of blood and fire. I could not find an answer. I’m tired, darling. I need your wisdom, your voice and your words.

To rid herself of the depression that is hanging over her, the feeling of suffocation that rises in her breast and sticks in her throat and a feeling of deadlock, she understands that she has to separate the issues out and solve them one by one. First of all you systemize them: you take the questions one by one and eliminate them. You start with the ones you can solve, you establish the links, and you progress step by step towards a solution. The Cartesian method that makes the job simpler and prevents one getting lost in the maze; rationalizing and systematizing … But in life it isn’t like that. You cannot always isolate problems and solve them. Rationalism does not seem very analytical in this world where quantum theory and the metaphysical interpretations of chaos theory raise a storm even in positive sciences where positivism is almost obsolete.