Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

The minibus is so full that he can hardly get on. He holds his arm in the air trying to protect the roses. They must not be crushed; nor must they wilt before he arrives at the hospital. Someone in the crowd accidentally jabs his bad arm, which aches horribly. To avoid arousing suspicion and being interrogated he has not received professional medical treatment for his injury. He had not even mentioned it to the writer. If he had, Ömer would have had a trustworthy doctor friend look at it. However, he does not want to get the man into more trouble. His wound is healing by the day. Zelal had laughed when she was dressing it one day and said, ‘You were shot from behind while running away. The bullet just grazed you, so don’t make a fuss.’ How smart she is. Some men find it hard to deal with clever women. He knows it can be hard, but it does not bother him. He loves everything about Zelal, including her mental agility.

His arm keeps aching. I hope to God the wound does not open up again. He clenches his teeth and keeps quiet and focuses on keeping the roses safe. The minibus is crammed so full that passengers are hanging on right at the door. The vehicle does not even stop at the bus stand where the two tall men are waiting. What a good thing I did not wait at that stop! Anyway the minibuses on this route are infrequent. If I had waited there I would not have been able to get on at all. Every cloud has a silver lining. Ignoring the pain in his arm or the jeopardy to the roses, he cranes towards the minibus window and tries to see the stand. He glimpses one of the men still waiting there, leaning against the post of the bus-stand. Perhaps I am mistaken. I’m nervous and overexcited. It’s because I’m frightened. Fear makes a person imagine things.

He has known fear ever since his youth, and he knows that it exaggerates the object of fear like a magnifying mirror, distorts it and makes it worse. From the depths of his memory a saying or proverb comes to mind: ‘A rabbit does not run away because it is frightened. It is frightened because it runs away.’

We wanted to run away from fear, to conquer fear; we thought we could quickly cross to the other side of fear like crossing the border. Now the more we run, the greater our fear … He is overcome with despair. You think that things have sorted themselves out, that your luck has changed, that it’s smiling on you, and suddenly you see the frightening dark night again. Not even your love, though it is as mighty as the mountains and vast as the sky, will suffice to reach the daylight. However firmly you embrace the ones you love, you cannot keep them, you cannot protect them — neither Zelal nor Hevi. What we experienced beside the spring in that secret corner of the grove that did not allow even light to penetrate was a dream, a fantasy, a story, or another life that we visited through God’s wisdom. Real life is full of hazard.

He feels totally exhausted. His head is spinning, and if he was not in a public place he would slump to the ground. He thinks it would not even be possible to slump in the overcrowded minibus. He would just stand there suspended. It was not déjà vu. He had already experienced this feeling of anxiety a long time ago in his childhood when, stuffed like tinned sardines in the trailer of a tractor, he went to work with others down on the plain. It was anxiety about the days to come rather than claustrophobia that had caused his sense of panic. Is life something like this? Is a better life, another world, not possible?

He had asked this question for the first time as a small child, as he rested his cheek against the chest of the black-nosed puppy he had clutched when their village was evacuated and they had to migrate to foreign parts, to foreign regions, to places unknown. Behind them the village had been set on fire. The onions in the garden ready for harvesting, the mandrakes and the spindly pear saplings, cats, dogs and chickens were burning fiercely. Those who could had taken a few of their large animals, cows and goats, with them — not to raise but to slaughter and sell when required. Such a lament rang in his ears that it was as though a sob had broken forth from the village and mountain and had echoed on the peaks and reached the migrating caravan. Was life something like that? If it was like that, what was the point of it? The question had gone round in circles in his childish head and was answered in the language of a child. If it is like that, then better that it isn’t; if it is like that, then better not to live. Years later when he had become a young man and was looking for the answer to the question ‘But how?’ he had realized it was not that simple.

‘Study and get a career. I’ve set aside everything I can to ensure your future. I’m going to send you to university. You are going to study. You will become a doctor. If not, you can become a teacher. I couldn’t do it for your elder brothers. I could not save them from the mountains, but you will be saved,’ his father used to say.

‘You cannot be saved on your own. You cannot be saved by selling your people. You will be saved with your people,’ his elder brother used to say. When they went to pick cotton or nuts in the summer the bigger boys from the towns used to lower their voices and say, ‘The workers, the proletariat, will be saved by revolution, by socialism.’ In the camps in the mountains, the comrades who trained them used to talk about the salvation of the Kurdish people and explain that it would not be individual salvation, just as his brother had said. However, the answer as to how the Kurdish people would be saved was less clear. It would change from time to time.

Only the Doctor said anything really original. ‘The key to salvation is within the people themselves. If you really know why you are here, what you are fighting for and if you believe in yourself and the job you are doing, you will be close to salvation. The salvation of a person and the people comes from their attaining an identity and their proud and confident sense of belonging.’ His statement was clearly significant, but it was less straightforward than Marxist dogma. For this reason some were suspicious of him. If someone said something tricky to grasp — not the standard revolutionary maxims committed to memory by most of the mountain leaders — one should approach that person warily.

When they arrived with all their belongings — pots and pans, beds and quilts wrapped up in bundles in the kilims handwoven by the women — that they had carried on their backs and dragged all that way, with their poverty and homelessness, and their fears, desperation and rebellion, to the banks of the streams of the other city where the capital city’s sewage flowed, the question had already been answered. A prison sentence awaited; like a seal of fate, an irrevocable, irreversible, iron-clad sentence.

A discordant polyphonic choir composed of poverty, deprivation, abuse and humiliation had provided the answer. What Mahmut wanted was to be considered a human being, not a doormat; just Mahmut, the person Mahmut, the man Mahmut — not a contemptible separatist. It was that simple, straightforward and innocent … Afterwards it became compulsory. It was the mountains. The mountains that would not let you be Mahmut but called you as a conscript to the liberation army, a hero, a guerrilla, a havel Mahmut. The mountains that promised to take those wriggling along the ground like worms, hanging around the shanties and rubbish heaps of the cities, without food, work or hope, and carry them to the peaks, to a world in which they could live without fear or shame … The mountains that sucked the blood of so many and spat out the dregs, that, at the risk of your life, brainwashed you into believing that there was no other life and never would be. The mountains from which he ran away…