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Oya Baydar: The Lost Word

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Oya Baydar The Lost Word

The Lost Word: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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One of the most acclaimed and powerful novels of modern Turkey is set across Europe, but retains the Turkish-Kurdish conflict at its heart A mixture of thriller, love story, political, and psycho-philosophical novel, this is a sobering, coruscating introduction to the potentially explosive situation that exists between the Kurds and the Turkish state. A bestselling author suffering from writer's block witnesses the accidental shooting of a young Kurdish woman who loses the baby she is carrying. He becomes involved with her and the two families caught in the fallout of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict, eventually finding a true understanding of the situation and rediscovering his own creativity with a new moral certainty, stripped of any ideology or prejudice. But there are many gripping perspectives to this vital and ultimately uplifting story from one of Turkey's most acclaimed writers, now translated into English for the first time.

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She thinks about his question, ‘Are you going to visit the boy?’ For months this issue has played on her mind, since the day she was invited to present the paper at the symposium in Copenhagen. Relatively speaking, Copenhagen is just a stone’s throw from Norway. Naturally she can go to see the boy. What is strange is Ömer asking this on the phone. What was behind it? Was it a mere reminder or suggestion, or was it a request? It is the first time he has mentioned the boy for a long time. Has the memory faded, or doesn’t it hurt as much as before? How much time does a person need for pain to turn to sadness? She remembers the words of a favourite author, ‘Because sadness is the projection of pain.’ My pain has slowly turned to sadness. It doesn’t burn as before, but it is more profound. And this is what I can’t bear: everything ending, passing, getting accustomed to it, and it becoming ordinary … How did Ömer survive? How did he bear his pain? We have never talked about it. We refrained from talking about it, and we avoided the subject. We did not share our mutual pain. If the source is the same, if it hits two people with the same arrow, pain cannot be shared — or at least it doesn’t lessen with sharing. You said, ‘Me to the east and you to the west’ in a broken, bitter tone. If you keep going straight to the east and I keep going to the west, perhaps one day, my love, we might meet on a small remote island.

A small remote island; her lost son’s island. She doesn’t not know if that tiny spot on the northern map is a real piece of land or a part of a nightmare from which she can never wake up. If she forgets it she thinks she will be able to overcome the pain. Nevertheless she strives not to forget — because this would mean forgetting the boy, too.

The island was a small point as big as the head of a pin on the tourist map. They had read the map with difficulty because the light in the car was insufficient on that December day when darkness fell at four in the afternoon. They had left Bergen and were travelling towards the north of Norway. The places that were marked with ‘overnight facilities’ symbols on the map were closed, and not a soul was in sight. The keeper who offered bed and breakfast at the lighthouse where they had stopped as a last resort had explained in English, German, Norwegian and sign language that they were not open on Christmas Eve and that he was going to have Christmas dinner with his family in the village. He had said that there was a small island fifteen kilometres further north and that they should try there. ‘We are little more than a smoke away from the North Pole,’ Ömer had said with his usual nonchalance. ‘Let’s put our foot down so that we reach this Devil’s Island before it’s pitch dark.’

They had been on the road since morning. The boy was only small; he was tired and hungry and, after grizzling for a while, had fallen asleep on the back seat.

‘At least he’s an easy, adaptable child — or we’d be in trouble!’

‘My son takes after his father. Am I complaining?’ Ömer replied.

She had thought: He’s right. It was my idea to go north in the middle of winter. But, still, we did the right thing. We’ll return to Turkey in the summer, and we might not get the chance to see these places again.

Her contract with the Genetics Research Institute in Denmark where she had been working for the past two years was going to finish at the end of term. And the short-term grant given to Ömer by the International PEN’s fund for writers under threat or suppression in their own country had been stopped. Now they wanted to return home. ‘Yes, we know that everything will be very difficult, but it’s our homeland. Our roots, our friends, our struggle is there. We can still do something there. We can still be useful. We are foreigners here. No one needs us.’ This is the sort of answer they gave when they were asked why they wanted to return to Turkey. And, what was more, Turkey was slowly changing. The darkness of September 1980 had begun to lift at the edges. The same old folk song was on their lips: ‘Don’t give up hope for your country.’ The song that Ömer sometimes sang as ‘Don’t give up hope for man.’

They hadn’t yet given up hope for life, the world, their country and mankind. We were young. Flames hadn’t yet begun to envelop the smouldering world. Even if bastions were falling one by one, we thought that they fell down because they hadn’t been well built, that too much sand had been mixed with the cement. We believed that stronger ones would be built in their place.

Was the weather especially clement that year, or was the climate of this region protected from Arctic winds by the surrounding mountains always this mild? ‘It’s because of the Gulf Stream,’ Ömer had said. ‘The warm current tempers the cold of the Norwegian coast.’ On one side of the road there was an inland sea without a wave like a smooth lake and on the other side were rocks covered with moss and stumpy deep-green reed-like plants. While travelling on the little car ferries that used a winch system to cross the twenty or twenty-five metres between the small islands, they thought to themselves: What an adventure! They tried not to show each other that they were a little concerned, wondering where the road would end.

Where the road ended — and the road really did end at the sea — there was a makeshift quay at which was moored a small boat resembling a miniature steamer with its funnel, wheelhouse, cabin and ship’s rail. A woman wrapped in woollen shawls carrying two heavy baskets, one on each arm, was standing at the edge of the quay observing the boat. They paused for a moment without knowing what to do and then realized that they had to leave the car there. A man with a pipe in his mouth beckoned as though to say, ‘Hurry up.’ The woman with the baskets jumped on to the boat. They went back to the car to fetch the child and their travelling bags. The boy had woken up and was looking around with anxious eyes. His father undid the seatbelt in the back and took his son in his arms.

‘There, we’re going to the Devil’s Island in the book. You can tell your friends about it when you get back.’

‘You don’t get back from the Devil’s Island,’ said the child in a sleepy but certain voice. ‘And, in any case, I don’t have any friends to tell.’

She remembers that just then a sharp pain shot through the middle of her chest, an irrational bad feeling. Was it the child’s loneliness or his anxiety — even in his father’s arms — that affected her like this? Then she heard Ömer’s laugh, his jokes that made the child laugh as well, a return to the familiar happy course of things…

On the boat no one was asking for tickets or directing passengers. It was just them, the woman with the baskets and two others. The island was immediately opposite. They could make out one or two dim lights and an imposing fortress meeting the sky in the twilight, like a castle of wicked giants in fairytales. Ömer continued the game with his son:

‘There, I told you! That is the Devil’s Castle.’

The boy had shaken off his tiredness and the drowsiness of sleep and joined in.

‘Daddy, tomorrow morning let’s go and see the Devil. And when I draw my sword, then…’

When they set foot on land there was no one around. The boat’s captain and the couple of travellers had vanished in a trice. Then they saw the woman with the baskets. It was as though she hadn’t got off the boat but had suddenly appeared from the sea or — in some strange way — had always been there, while the woman they had seen on the opposite shore was her ghost.

‘Hotel? Bed and breakfast?’

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