Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

We were going to go towards the sea, to those boundless waters. Zelal yearned for the sea; for the sea that she had not seen, that she did not know, the sea that was a dream. A person’s longing for a dream is greater than anything. The unknown is magical. That is why. Mahmut knows Lake Van. When he was studying at university he and his friends had been there a few times. What a beautiful stretch of water that lake was; how vast, how blue. ‘But Lake Van is nothing! What they call the sea is a hundred Lake Vans, a hundred thousand Lake Vans,’ Zelal had said, as though she had seen the sea. We were going to reach it. The child was going to be a child of the sea, not the mountains. ‘The sea softens people; the mountains harden them,’ one of the lecturers at the university had said. My father had expressed a similar sentiment. He used to say that mountains make people hard. Perhaps it is true. People are like plants; they grow hardier the more they are put under strain. The flowers at the foot of the mountains, along the riverbanks, in the valleys, have a more intense scent, while the grass is softer and its leaves more slender. Plants become tougher, thornier and more stunted the higher one climbs, but they also become more hardy.

The address he holds in his hand is where the shanties stop and the little houses with gardens begin. There are only ten or twelve houses. Some have not been completed yet; the rough construction work has been undertaken and they have been left half-finished. This must be a cooperative or something. To judge from the electricity poles, pipes and cables, they have electricity and other facilities. A tarmac road goes down the other side of the slope. People with cars do not need to climb up between the shanties. Admittedly it is a long road, a road that no one uses apart from the owners of the villas who have cars. So a road has been created just for these people!

He immediately sees the two-storey white house that the writer had described, with roses and flowers in the garden: number 7. Ömer Abi had said that the house belonged to a friend of his who lived abroad, that he stayed there occasionally but that no one was using it at the moment.

He had said, ‘Use the lower loor, and you can take care of the house and garden. For goodness’ sake, don’t let me down. Look after the place well. Don’t let anything get broken or ruined. In any case, there is not much in the way of furniture — no valuables or anything. But, still, be careful. If anyone around asks who you are and what you are doing there, say that you are acting as caretaker and give them the owner’s telephone number or mine. Mind you don’t talk too much.’

What especially warmed Mahmut’s heart was the writer trusting him. He had not asked himself: Who are this couple? Are they honest? What are they going to use the house for? Neither had he wondered whether they would get him into trouble. He’s obviously a good man, a man of the world.

Mahmut opens the gate, which is entwined with rambling roses, with difficulty, and he enters the garden. It is pretty, but the ground is dry. At the first opportunity he must water the garden and give the path and steps to the house a thorough cleaning. And when Zelal is better and comes here she will turn the garden into a paradise. There are two locks on the front door. Which key belongs to which hole? He has to fiddle with the door for a while. There! It’s open.

The house is clean and light inside. As the writer had said, there is not much furniture. The rooms are almost empty, just the bare essentials: a sofa, two armchairs, an old round table with four chairs; in the inner room a large double bed and a wardrobe; and in the kitchen a fridge, stove, pots and pans, plates and cutlery. They are probably wealthy owners, but there are no carpets, no kilims or embroidered throws. These people have strange taste. And clearly no one has lived here for any length of time.

Once more he is astonished that everything is going so well. Only a week, ten days ago they were in deep distress. The state, the organization even the code of honour were hounding them. They were fugitives, homeless, penniless and without identity … Now look. He stretches out on the sofa. It is well sprung, soft and comfortable. If this is the house the owner lives in occasionally, uses just from time to time — perhaps its purpose is for bringing back women or other shady business — then God knows what his real home must be like! Things he learnt from a female comrade when she was giving them ideological training on the mountain spring to his mind. As she was explaining the concept of exploitation in her class on the principles of Marxism-Leninism, she had said, ‘We cannot even begin to imagine the money the wealthy spend on their houses, food, drink and clothes, their luxuries. All this is only possible because the bourgeoisie exploit the working classes and the poor. And then the exploiters and the exploited get together and exploit us all. The workers and those who are exploited wage a class war against the bourgeoisie — the exploiters — and take power by revolution. And, as for us, because we are all exploited and crushed, our rich, our poor, our aghas, our peasants, all of us together wage a national war of liberation against the ruling nation that crushes us.’

Yes, that is true! The houses of the sheikhs, the masters in our region, even their tables cannot compete with the ones here. He suddenly feels hungry and thirsty. What a good thing I had the presence of mind to get a portion of doner and bread. He goes to the kitchen and opens the fridge. There is just water, a few bottles of some kind of alcohol that he does not recognize, a few eggs and a pack of margarine. But the fridge had been left on; no one worries about electricity bills or wasting energy.

The cold water does him good. Am I out of condition? Of course not! Climbing that slope in the heat of Ankara’s early summer would affect even a guerrilla. A guerrilla, eh? A fugitive guerrilla, a traitorous guerrilla, a guerrilla who deserves execution, a cas! I hope to God they think I died as a martyr. If they saw me rolling down the hill they would have thought there was no hope for me. Perhaps they didn’t even see me; everyone was preoccupied with their own troubles. No, the hevals would not do that. If they had noticed that I was wounded they would have done everything in their power to help me. They would not leave a comrade there like that; they would not leave him to die. We’ve been through a lot together. Our belief, our hope, our enthusiasm, death, fear, rage, pain and disappointments … Lying on our backs under the starry skies and taking drags from a shared cigarette, our traditional songs, our little secrets … When he thinks about the people on the mountains his heart aches. Bad things used to happen, too. For sure, there were also rotten guys, but what about the others, my close friends? I let them there and ran away.

‘I ran away,’ he says in a loud voice. Who will hear it here? ‘I ran away, see? I ran away…’ He has to assimilate this, his mind, his heart and, above all, his conscience has to get used to this fact.

I ran away because I was scared. If I hadn’t run away I would have been disciplined. This time it would be no joke. It would not be like the first time.

At the camp, during the second month of training, he had been sent for discipline for two weeks. In the disciplinary cave there were almost twenty men; he recalls the smell of sweat, foul breath and dirt, having to request permission to relieve oneself three times a day and receiving two meals of bread and water. What had I done? What was my crime? He had wondered about it then, and he thinks about it now. They had wanted him to undergo a public self-criticism in front of the whole camp. He had not regarded it as demanding. A militant who had committed a crime should face what he had done and be prepared to make a frank confession in front of his comrades. He should expose his misconduct, should purge himself. That much was agreed. But I wasn’t guilty. I didn’t feel guilty. I hadn’t done anything to warrant self-criticism. I had just secretly taken a few cigarettes, a piece of mirror and greetings to one of the troops in discipline — someone from our neighbourhood who was very young. Apart from those on duty, contact was forbidden with the men being disciplined. However, I knew the boy was afraid and that he needed support — not punishment. Perhaps the traditional methods of discipline would have continued, but Mahmut was in luck. Just then, for some unknown reason, tension had erupted in the command of the region’s mountain cadre and, according to rumour, it had turned to infighting. The revised training advice that came down from the top, in which it was emphasized that discipline and democracy were inseparable, that the broadest democratic debate should not conlict with inlexible punishment, had changed the atmosphere in the camp, and disciplining had been brought to an end.