Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

Ömer did not want to hear any more, and the Commander did not want to tell him any more. The conversation had ended and both of them understood this.

‘I hope you are not angry and that you have not been hurt. What I told you was to warn you, to protect you,’ the Commander said in a friendly tone. ‘And perhaps in a way you are right. You know I told you that we get intelligence leaks. Sometimes they want to mislead even us. I mean, disinformation spreads this far. I have moments of doubt, too, about who knows the truth or, more to the point, who plans and dishes out what is presented to us as the truth. I’m a soldier. I cannot always gauge who is right and what is just. Soldiery and war do not allow this type of analysis, Ömer Bey. This conversation did not take place between a commander and a writer; it was just between two friends, I rely on your understanding in this matter.’

‘I understand. Thanks. Don’t worry. Of course what we have discussed will remain between us. If you ask me, this is all very complicated. We reputable novelists don’t like such complicated stories. We consider this the stuff of crime writers or of mediocre writers who seek to embellish their work with intrigues and conspiracy theories. Perhaps the truth, I mean the truth about Jiyan Hanım, is much more ordinary than all these conjectures, these conspiracy theories. But thank you again, both for informing me and for trusting me. What you have told me won’t go any further. Don’t worry. You are right, even if the truth is in the hands of certain people, we are all being manipulated.’

The two men, about the same age, shook hands in a friendly manner. It was a warm, simple parting without ceremony but one that neither of them would forget. A current of feeling reaching from person to person, man to man, flowed between them.

When Ömer had passed through the garrison’s barbed-wire gate with its sentry boxes and watchtowers and reached the road, he paused for a minute at the top of the slope and looked at the dusty, grey, barren town bleakly lying in the valley below. The dilapidated houses mainly with flat roofs, virtually identical government buildings placed without the least nod to aesthetic considerations, schools, some lead domes sparkling under the sun, a few minarets and the market road which from this viewpoint looked thoroughly seedy, neglected and rundown. And the poplar trees … The poplar trees in rows with crows perched on their branches. Then he turned his eyes to the mountains. The mountains that rose on all sides to spite the town’s dismal wretchedness, their peaks quite white with summer snow, their slopes fresh spring green and with cataracts gushing from the precipices. He remembered Mahmut’s words, ‘We look at the mountains, abi, and we listen to them. It has been like this for generations. The town is captivity, the mountains are freedom … Or that is what we think.’

He feels upset when he thinks about Mahmut. What will they do? What will happen to them? Has his helping them been of any use? By embracing Mahmut and Zelal how much can we solve? How can people be saved one by one? How can they keep their heads above water? In my youth I believed in individual salvation. We used to say that malaria would not end with killing the mosquitoes one by one, without draining the swamps. Did I say being saved? Well, who will save me? Who will save us?

He took off down the slope with rapid steps, a great number of unanswered questions hanging over his head and about his feet. Thinking about Jiyan with a solid lump in his breast, impatient to be reunited with her, and trying not to think about Elif, he walked back to the town.

The Subtle Pain of Killing a Mouse

A faint stab clawing at the middle of her breast. The echo in her heart of the thin muffled ‘eek’ uttered by the laboratory animal as it dies. One gets used to it. After a while you begin to think of your victim as a rubber toy. A little mouse, a guinea pig or sometimes a cat; a life entrusted to you hanging on your orders and your mood. You are God. The little creature in your hand does not even understand from where and from whom death comes. It resists with all its strength, reacting with fear as life does towards death, existence towards non-existence. All its strength is this slight, feeble ‘eek’. The sound of a person is a little louder than a mouse, a test animal. Sometimes it is a scream. Even if the sound is a scream it cannot rebel against extermination. It cannot conquer death. Can’t it rebel? Can’t it conquer it?

As Elif, in her hotel room in Copenhagen, makes the final corrections to the paper she is going to present at the congress in Goteborg two days later, she ponders the sentence, ‘Even if the sound is a scream it cannot rebel against annihilation, it cannot defeat death.’ There is something in this statement that is troubling. To reduce life and death to this single dimension is a precept too simple and superficial. If all the dozens of guinea pigs and hundreds of test animals were all to scream with one voice, if they were to rebel against their executioners en masse, they would be able, for a time at least, to hinder their annihilation. They could succeed in living for a while longer. To live for a while longer … For what? For what purpose? What would be the use of extending the life of a little mouse for a few hours? What is the sense of a mouse’s life? Well, what is the use of extending a person’s life for a few hours, a few days or even a few years? What is the meaning of a person’s life apart from the fact that it is a person asking the question and not a mouse?

Well, that is a question thinks Elif. That famous question that Hamlet posed with the skull in his hand: ‘To be or not to be’, where we come full circle. The moment you ask what the point of a mouse’s life is, then to kill it for a higher purpose gains legitimacy. And so it is quite possible to leap quite easily from the question ‘What is the point of a mouse’s life?’ to ‘What is the point of a person’s life?’ The transition from killing a mouse to killing a human can theoretically be less dificult than one thinks. If death is the annihilation of a living creature then the difference is of quantity not quality. You can sacrifice the lives of people one by one for the sake of a noble cause thought to be for the benefit of all mankind. You can kill half of mankind in order to save the world. You will risk dying and killing for your country, your homeland and your nation. For the sake of beliefs and ideology you can sacrifice the lives of people. You can sacrifice a great many lives, animals or people in order to find the cure for a deadly disease. Which noble purpose, which noble cause justiies death and killing, exterminating life? Can good intention, the right purpose, legitimate violence? Then, what is the standard for good and right? Who defines the standard? Whose morals? The thousand-year-old questions of philosophy and ethics…

I am not a social scientist and I’m not a psychologist either, she thinks. But still, in most of the scientific congresses she attends, especially those that are predominantly about ethics in science, she inevitably finds herself caught up in a debate about the position of man versus the violence fed by the technological revolution of the age.

All types of violence, all their aspects, are in need of investigation; from the violence considered innocent of the child who tortures a mangy dog, ties tins to cats’ tails and who treads on flowerbeds and grass, to the violence of the researcher who kills guinea pigs for science; from the violence of a man who beats the dog he loves, his child and his wife, to the violence of the death sentence legitimized, legalized by politics and war; and from the planned organized violence that has enveloped the whole world to daily violence. No one has any doubts on this matter. Everyone is united. And then what? When people cannot produce solutions to eliminate it what is the good of exposing violence, explaining it? Was it not Marx who said, ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it’? Our generation was nurtured by Marxism, and even if we didn’t study it in depth we knew these quotations by heart. For a moment she considers ending the paper she is to present by quoting Marx. For example, a sentence such as ‘We content ourselves with explaining the unethical, shocking developments that gene technology can give rise to and the violence that it can create, but it is necessary to produce solutions to resolve this.’ She stops at this point. Quotations from Marx no longer go down very well in scientific circles. They may even cause loss of prestige. So how am I going to end this paper? Suddenly she feels inadequate. She can’t think of anything other than the rebellious collective eeking of mice as a possible solution. A naïve joke to add pleasantry to the debate — that’s all.