Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

He is enveloped by an ominous feeling, a dark fog. What an appalling metaphor. I, who am considered a master of language, Ömer Eren who thinks that he is endowed with the power of the word … I’m nothing. The French call it médiocre; in other words, average, indifferent, lacking in originality. ‘Hackneyed sayings and clichés, a bit of nostalgic sauce, a pinch of revolutionary spice, plenty of love and as much melancholy as it takes. The works of the famous writer, Ömer Eren …’ Was that smart-arse critic who wrote thus wrong? While some among us rejected the past and denigrated their former beliefs, cursing the gods that at one time they worshipped, I put such subjects into my writing and transmuted words into fame and money.

Lately, as the emptiness loomed and the fear rose within him that he could no longer write well or would never be able to write as well again, his dissatisfaction with himself grew, too. Drink was one escape. Taking refuge in book-signing days, talks, meetings and travelling from town to town was another. Was it the andropause or whatever they call it? A midlife crisis? The panic that there is little time left to live, the anxiety of having wasted past years, the sadness of knowing that there is no going back to those years …

Elif tacked those years together day by day, step by step, leaf by leaf and she reminded me that those years really had been lived. My wife ties me to a past that I have left behind and that I miss all the more. I should not have said to her, ‘We are gradually drifting apart.’ I should have said, ‘Let’s not part again.’

The question ‘Will you see him, too?’, like him saying ‘We are gradually drifting apart’, was his way of expressing the rebellion that he felt against the love, passion and sexual excitement that had been eroded by time; against Elif taking refuge in her never-ending experiments, her beloved mice, her successful scientific studies and in her acceptance of her husband’s distance, his absence and his affairs; against the loss of his passion, love, immature excitement and hope and the reality that they would not be returning to that beautiful country of their youth again. He had wanted to hurt his wife. He did not know why, but perhaps it was because he was hurting very much somewhere deep inside.

He was almost smug when he said, ‘I’m going to the east, to the south-east.’ He had implied intellectual bragging, of being ready to pay the price and make a sacrifice for his art, together with a degree of western arrogance. He had expected his wife to ask him what he was going to be doing in those parts. She had not asked. He wanted her to ask because he had things to to tell her. If he were to say them, it would relieve him and give him peace of mind. A forgotten tale whose remembrance would be good for his heart and soul …

‘Once upon a time, when we were eighteen or nineteen, we went with the revolutionary train to build a bridge over the Zap River. At that time this whole country was ours, from Edirne to Ardahan, you know, like the poem that we learnt in childhood. We had grown up, and we no longer believed in the “villages that were ours even if we didn’t go and see them” of our primary-school books. We had begun to understand that no place would be ours if we didn’t visit it or if we didn’t build bridges. We didn’t yet know that it wasn’t enough to construct bridges of good intention, that it was necessary to pass to the other side, and that the bridges that we had built were not strong enough and not wide enough. But we would learn. In our twenties we were burning revolutionary fires on the Nurhak mountains, in the Söke plains and the surrounding towns in the Çukurova countryside. The east was on our agenda, like a song of the people sung first in a timid and cautious and then in a loud voice. Those who lived there were our people — our shame because we left them destitute, our source of pride because they resisted oppression, and in whose name we went to prison for using the word “Kurd”, thus salving our conscience. They were a part of our hopes and our revolution, and they were partners in our liberation. They spoke our language with harsh, clipped accents evoking the craggy mountains. We knew deep inside that they spoke another language; but, still, they were our people; they were us. They were enigmatic, and they were not very open; we sensed they had secrets. We tried to respect these and to share their suffering. We were revolutionaries; our enemies and friends were the same. Our grievances concerned the military police, the state, the landowners and the bosses, as well as imperialism in general. We felt wronged, downtrodden and rebellious. If we felt it once, they felt it three times over. If you went to gaol and “if you were the three K, then you were in trouble”, our old comrades-in-arms used to say. “Kürt-Kizilbaş-Komunist” — you really were in trouble. If we were in a bad way the Kurds were three times worse off, so we felt inadequate. We used to sing the folk songs of the east together, read their epic stories and attempt to comprehend the things they could not say. But we were always inadequate and fell short.’

If Elif had asked, he would have liked to tell her a tale of remembrance like this. If he were to write, this is what he would have liked to write. Writing is the best thing. To write what he really wanted to say and leave to one side the worry of who would read it and who would be interested. In these postmodern times, when poverty, oppression, rebellion, revolution, the workers, peasants, ordinary people, lesh and bone, people with real feelings were subjects considered old-fashioned, stretched and sagging — ‘Are you still singing the same old tune, buddy?’ — he wanted to remind people about people — and to tell about people and their lives.

I would like to, but do I have the courage? Am I ready not to disappear but to be ignored? Am I ready to have no one around me — for my publisher’s polite warnings, for my career that for fifteen years I have been building brick by brick to be reduced to nothing, to hear the words, ‘Yes, he was quite famous at one time. People used to read him a lot, but then he aspired to probe deeper and returned to topics that were history and got stuck on anachronistic revolutionary discourse and a dated humanism. Well, of course, no one reads him any more. A pity.’ I’ve run out of words. I’ve worn out the words using them again and again; I’ve worn them down and emptied their contents. The shell of a word that has lost its soul rots.

Ömer Eren knows that he cannot write as he used to. He realizes the emptiness of the sentences that appear on the computer screen, their meaninglessness and that they are just black consecutive symbols. Does a person lose the word when the voice inside him is silent, or does it happen when the feeling of pointlessness brings the writer to the place where the word ends?

When he begins to muse how, step by step, he has lost his voice and how the gushing spring that fed the word has dried up, he feels caught in a trap. The only way he knows how to get out of it is to take refuge in alcohol and in the halo of his undeserved reputation. In the years when he excelled with his first novel and surprised the literati, a famous critic had called him ‘the writer endowed with the word’. Had he betrayed the magical word he had been endowed with, or had he been betrayed by the word? He doesn’t know.

Now he is looking out of the window of the vehicle that has been stopped for the second time in the last hour, amazed at how he set out on these roads and why he is on this coach. Making an effort to appear indifferent and at ease, he asks an elderly passenger in local dress sitting anxiously beside him, ‘Is it always like this or is it because of the events of the past few days?’ The answer is flat and short. ‘It’s always like this, but it’s got worse recently.’