Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

‘Why do I want to cleanse my heart? What is the dirt in my heart?’

‘Not dirt. Let us say rust. You have got carried away by the spell of your readers, your books and your reputation. Your signature has become your cocoon. It has wrapped you up soft and warm. It has distanced you from human suffering. I was curious. I thumbed through your books again; before you became famous you wrote about poverty, hunger, the underdog, the victim, the worker, men crushed yet resisting, and then I saw that you had stopped writing about these things. As you became more famous as the writer of ‘the psychological depths of love, of people, the postmodern novelist of alienation, east-west conflicts’ your books began to sell more. But you had broken away from your roots. You had become estranged. And then…’

He had secretly been annoyed, angry, but on the other hand his admiration for this fearless woman grew.

‘But I don’t just write novels, I often discuss the subjects you mentioned in articles I write for newspapers and so on. Literature is a different kettle of fish. I’m in no position to turn out ideology in a novel. My readers would not appreciate that, and if no one reads my books I won’t be able to convey the more universal messages about humanity and conscience that interest me.’

He realized that he had gone on the defensive and was ashamed; he became defiant. ‘Aren’t you being unfair, Jiyan? I never shirked from defending the truth when necessary.’

‘When necessary, yes. But when you begin to weigh up when the time is right to deal with a subject and when it is not, then you have digressed from the subject. You have put it at arm’s length and alienated yourself from it. You have now become the judge. Can one judge between hunger and satiation, death and life, love and hate? And you know you said “to defend the truth”. Defending the truth is looking on from the outside. One has to live the truth, not defend it.’

‘Is that the rust you mentioned?’

‘Forgive me. I’m afraid the word exceeded its intention. I always speak rather plainly, just as I feel. The more I love, the more openly, sometimes harshly I’m inclined to speak. I love you. That’s why I’m saying that your heart does not support you. It wants to have the rust wiped away and shine. That’s why you are here, and you are in the right place, Ömer Eren. The fountains of the west have dried up. It is no longer possible to be purified there. Here we still have fast-flowing water. Water that is cool and healing, even though the blood of brothers mingles with it from time to time. And if only we can cleanse it of the blood … Knowingly or unknowingly, you came to wash in this spring.’

‘It’s true I was looking for a healing spring, cool water that would quench the aridness and dessication within me, my withering, my thirst and that would wash and purify my heart. Perhaps you are right. I did come here to look for water, but now I’m not sure if the spring is here. This climate is too harsh, and, what is more, as you have said, the waters have mingled with blood.’

‘They say that flowing water does not retain dirt.’ She realized that their conversation had become too serious, and she said, ‘Since we have been talking about springs, I would like to invite you to ours to eat trout. They have closed the mountain pastures but one can still go to Soğukpinar during the day. Some enterprising citizen has put out a couple of tables and created a trout pool near the water. Our people like that kind of thing. They are enthusiastic about tourist amenities, even though they don’t always show it. At this hour there is no one around. Anyway folk are wary of going into the countryside, of going too far from the the towns. We’ll take my step-sister and my brother-in-law, too, if you don’t mind. A widow shouldn’t be seen alone with a man, isn’t that right? Even if that man is “our author”!’

Two details preyed on his mind, her insisting on saying my stepsister and not my sister and the slightly mocking tone of voice as she said ‘our author’.

Throughout the journey the stepsister and her husband had talked incessantly about the beauty of Soğukpinar: ‘A little corner of paradise, a natural wonder; oh, if only this war would end and peace and quiet return! Our homeland is paradise, Ömer Bey. If we could show you every part of it, believe me, you would write a novel about this place. If only tourism were allowed to develop people would be able to breathe a little easier. We have no factories and no real pastures or fields left. War has put paid to livestock farming. Smuggling, the maia and terrorism are rife. Don’t expect honesty from starving people. A starving person has neither hope nor honesty. What will a starving person do? He’ll either go up the mountain, become a village guard or start smuggling.’

Jiyan was silent, thoughtful. She was sad. It was as though she regretted suggesting this trip. She looked exhausted, as if she had been without sleep for days. Later she was to say resentfully, her eyes full of tears, ‘I realized that even if you didn’t show it or admit it to yourself, you would look down on us; you would feel sorry for us because we cannot share our paradise, and that would estrange us even more.’

In fact, it was a lovely day. The sky was as blue as could be, the little white clouds did not obscure the sun. The brother-in-law’s black jeep — Ömer had not found out how the brother-in-law earned his money — left the main road and turned on to a stony, dusty country road. From his first day Ömer had been amazed at the abundance of luxury jeeps, some armoured, some with dark-tinted windows, perhaps bullet-proof, amid the poverty, the neglect and ruins of the town. When she saw that Ömer was surprised, Jiyan explained that the vehicles represented security and prestige and were symbols of power.

‘Even in the big cities it would be difficult to find as many of the latest jeeps with massive amounts of horsepower or the luxury cars you come across here in the street. You wouldn’t believe that you were in one of Turkey’s poorest and most underdeveloped regions,’ the Commander had said during a conversation on the subject.

Now, as they travel in such a jeep along a road covered with bushes and scrub, the brother-in-law says, ‘Ten years ago this was all woods and forest.’

Ömer asks in an unguarded moment, ‘Then what happened?’

There is silence. Damn it, why don’t I keep my mouth shut! ‘Oh, I understand. I keep forgetting. I’m sorry.’

‘You don’t forget,’ says Jiyan who has been sitting silently in the back during the whole journey. ‘You don’t have to apologize either. No, you don’t forget. To forget you have to know. You never even registered it so that you could forget. There are things that a person cannot feel deeply unless they’ve experienced them. At the end of the day, the images on television screens are just pictures, unreal. Even if they are our whole life, for you they are bad things that happen in distant places.’

Later, when they were alone, she would say, ‘Please forgive me. I can’t stand this thing between us, this line that divides us. I can’t accept it. I get angry.’

Jiyan’s words subdues the mood in the car. There ensues a silence that seems longer than it is.

‘A girl has been born,’ says the step-sister.

‘We say, the Devil passed,’ says Ömer. The jeep turns off the earth road and progresses slowly along a dry river bed. When armed men — whether soldiers or civilians, Ömer cannot make out — block their path, no one except Ömer gets excited. Here everyone is used to everything. The extraordinary has become ordinary. What need is there for a state of emergency? Every state is always an emergency anyway.