Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

Ömer would ask, ‘Why are you so hard on yourself? When you are so uncompromising about yourself, then you become intolerant of those around you. All right, we appreciate that you are disciplined, hard-working and clever. But others can be different to you in ability and attitude. What entertaining rogues, what jolly tramps exist around us. They scorn the world, and they pass like a pleasant shadow from this world. The effect of stroking a velvety-soft cat is all that remains of them after their deaths.’

‘Don’t speak to me in that florid literary style you create to impress your readers, Ömer Eren. The traces of the wretchedness they suffered while they lived will certainly remain — not the stroking of a cat or anything else,’ she had said with her strong relentless logic. But, still, in a corner of her heart a contented cat had passed by purring, spreading softness within her. Without revealing it to her husband she had thought: You swine, this must be what they call the power of words. The stroking of a velvety-soft cat … What an appropriate metaphor!

On this island, in this room, on this bed I have missed you. I have missed you like I haven’t missed you for years. My mind, my feelings are in utter turmoil. Our son has got me all confused. I must return home soon. I can put off taking the classes that they offered me for a term. If I don’t take them at all, what will happen? What will I miss? I must return and say that I want to be like the stroke of a velvety-soft cat. In fact, I must tell him on the phone. I must say, ‘Be at home when I return’, without being afraid of being a pestering or clingy wife.

She gets up and freshens her makeup, she rearranges her hair, cut in an artful and dishevelled way according to the latest fashion, raking it with her fingers to provide more volume. The flesh that gently bulges over the waist of her narrow trousers vexes her. I must start dieting; fat beginning to collect around the waist is not a good sign at my age. She stashes the few belongings lying around, such as makeup and hairbrush, into her capacious handbag.

She goes down the stairs with the wooden banisters feeling lighter with every step. On the ground loor she pauses for a moment at the door of Deniz’s room, then she turns the handle and goes inside. It is dim and cool: the room of the elderly poet who had introduced himself twenty years earlier as ‘the unknown deserter’.

The room has not changed at all. Deniz has taken the place of the old man. On the desk in the corner sits the framed picture of Deniz and Ulla with baby Bjørn in their arms. She thinks that Ulla’s face is more beautiful than she remembers — or that anyway she looks good in this photograph. Deniz and Ulla are smiling but in the expression of both is a sadness that has become a part of their faces as though there from birth. On the desk there are two notebooks. One is old and worn with a leather cover; the other is a new book with the pages open. First she opens the ancient notebook. She recognizes the Fraktur italic script of Germans educated before the war. They must be the old man’s poems, the verses of that strange man who styled himself ‘the unknown deserter’. She picks up the other book. There are a few lines on the open page:

I am a sea, a fugitive from the ocean

Saved from the bloody seas

Running away from the sacred lies, all of them

In the calm harbours of my own lies

Content with licking the shores

I am a sea of nothingness…

The last line has been scored out. Beneath are two lines in Norwegian. Deniz must have tried to translate the verse from Turkish or else tried to write something else in Norwegian. She opens the first page of the notebook: Deniz’s Journal. There is a date; the days following Ulla’s terrible death, when he blocked his ears to our implored advice that he remain in Turkey, rather than return to Norway, and after which he never returned to our world … She flicks through the pages of the notebook: German, Norwegian, Turkish; notes, odd lines and verse. Most of the writing is in Turkish, although one of the longest entries is in Norwegian.

Language is a person’s homeland, they say. So which is my country? Day by day I’m losing my mother tongue. That surely means my language couldn’t have been my country. Where am I from? Can one be a citizen of the world? To be a citizen of the world one has to understand the language of the world. I can’t understand the language of this world. I can’t speak it. I’m frightened of it. Can one be a citizen of nowhere?

She closes the notebook. She places it on top of the old fugitive poet’s book. With a curiosity she cannot control — fully aware that what she is doing is wrong — she tugs at the handle of a single drawer in the middle of the desk. The drawer is not locked and is in a mess — just like Deniz’s childhood desk drawer. Blank paper, coloured pencils that perhaps at one time belonged to Ulla and a whole lot of useless little bits and pieces … A folded white envelope attracts her attention. On it is written in Turkish and Norwegian, ‘For Bjørn when he grows up’. The envelope has not been stuck down and there is a compact disc inside. She never tampered with Deniz’s private or personal possessions until now. She used to think that even with a child one should respect a person’s privacy, that one had no right to intrude on it. But now she wonders what is on the disc. What does Deniz want Bjørn to know, to see when he is grown up? She has an idea that if she finds out she will be able to understand her son better and reach out to him.

Deniz’s small computer — his camera and this computer were like an extension of his hand and arm in the old days, too — are on the table in the other corner of the room. With her heart in her mouth, afraid of her own heartbeats, she turns on the computer and pushes in the disc. The device, an old model, seems slow, and she becomes impatient. Finally a window opens on the screen. It is a disc of photographs; just four photographs. The first frame is an image of the wounded father in Iraq with a sack thrust over his head who is embracing his son; one of those photographs about which Deniz had said, ‘I did not want to be party to murder by taking a photograph of suffering and spending the money earned from it. I deleted them all.’ Elif looks at it again and again. Enlarging the picture, she stares at it as though wanting to engrave all the details of the helpless man and the child enfolded in his arms in her mind, in her heart. She scrutinizes the black sack thrust over the man’s head, his torn plastic sandals, the child’s bare feet, his small face dazed, as a result of sun, fever or shock, his lips slightly parted and parched with thirst. She sees the fear surrounding the bleeding desperate father behind the barbed wire, the fear of not being able to protect his child, his submission to fate. She sees all too clearly the suffering that Deniz has been trying to express in words to her and from which he is escaping. That year, a similar photograph, the same subject but perhaps taken from a different angle, was chosen as the photo of the year, she recalls.

When he asked about her achievements, was it revulsion at her routinely killing laboratory animals and receiving prizes for doing so that Deniz had wanted to discuss? Was her son right? She might be better off if she ejects the disc and closes the computer down at that point, but instead she clicks on the second picture. The father and child are lying dead on the dusty yellow sand of the desert. The sack over the man’s head has been slightly pulled away and blood is flowing from his neck. The child has fallen on top of his father, as though he is asleep, his parched lips are still parted, his tiny feet bare … This photograph was not published anywhere. Deniz had told us a bit about the first picture to explain why he had run away, but he had not mentioned this one, had not been able to talk about it. It is now too late to turn off the computer. She clicks on the third photo file. In the foreground Ulla is smiling vivaciously with her wheat-coloured hair flowing round her neck and face, clasping the toy camel to her bosom, wearing the sequined belt Elif remembers and her pale-blue frumpish dress. Sultanahmet Mosque, in all its glory, can be seen in the background, and there are red tulips immediately behind her. And the last image: it is as though it has been taken the wrong way, upside down. In the background once again are the dome and minarets of Sultanahmet, while red tulips seem scattered, indistinct, lines amid grey and white smoke, pieces of paper, a toy camel and … and human body parts! Pieces of Ulla fly around in the air.