Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

The heavily armed and intimidating men in camouflage uniform and masks who barge in without leave are checking identity cards, lightly prodding the passengers with their guns. There is a tense silence on the coach that will break at any moment. Is it the fear of getting used to fear — or of showing it? By now he has learnt that they are going to take some people off the vehicle. Cases, bundles, cardboard boxes tied up with string and sacks will then be thrown down, opened and strewn around. Sacks of onions and potatoes — why do people insist on carrying onions and potatoes from one place to another? — jars of honey, packets of lokum — made by small-town confectioners, underwear, packets of pills, tins of cheese, embroidered linen from a trousseau, artificial flowers, long johns and more will be scattered around. Then the things that have been picked through and strewn around will be gathered up in grave silence. Faces will reflect the shame of displayed underwear, the paucity of the bundles. How many of those taken off the coach will get back on again? Who will end up next to an empty seat? The driver will doubtless grasp the gearstick with the imprecation ‘God give me strength!’ He will begin humming a Kurdish air and put his foot down on the accelerator. The coach will start moving off again with sighs, curses muttered in hoarse voices and oaths hissed between the teeth. The curses will be in Kurdish and the oaths in Turkish, and the rebellion smothered by fear will be entirely human.

‘The bridge we built over the Zap River has been destroyed,’ said one of Ömer’s old friends who frequently came here on business. He works it out: thirty-seven years … No, it can’t be. Was it so long ago, so far back in time? It can’t be. A tiredness of thirty-seven years descends on him. As the coach travels along the winding road with rocky mountains on one side and a deep valley on the other, he looks intently around. In vain … After all these years, he would not be able to pick out the location of the bridge. When they stop for a tea break he addresses the driver. ‘You’re young, but perhaps you’ve heard about it from older people. Years ago youngsters from Istanbul and Ankara came and built a bridge over the Zap River with friends from the area. We carried the stones and mixed the cement together. Is the bridge still standing? I have heard that it had been destroyed.’

‘I have heard about it. I know of it,’ says the driver. ‘My uncle worked on the bridge. There was Deniz Gezmiş, too. I know about it from what he told me, obi. Would such a bridge still be standing here after all these years, in this day and age? It was mined years ago. Some say it was the military and some say it was guerrillas. If you ask me, it was the Zap River itself that demolished it. It’s stronger than all of them. In fact, the bridge’s abutments are still standing. I’ll point them out to you as we pass.’

Was Deniz really there on the Zap Bridge expedition? If he had been I would have remembered. Perhaps he just stopped by. In those days Deniz wasn’t in a position to stay long in one place. Even if he hadn’t been to the river heroes are ubiquitous. People need epics and heroes.

Without turning round the driver shouts, ‘Zap Bridge!’ as they pass through a rocky gorge. He slows the bus down to a crawl. All that remains of the bridge are the ruined stone abutments. Ömer remembers that he has seen such ruins on both sides of the river all along the road. It was as though our bridge was further along and on the opposite bank was a village clinging to the rocky slope. No it wasn’t here; it must be further along. It doesn’t matter where it was exactly. The good thing is that there are people who still remember it, who know of it. ‘Thanks,’ he calls out to the driver. Let them remember the bridge as being here. It is important that someone remembers. Legends shouldn’t be forgotten, the spell shouldn’t be broken, and doubts should not arise.

The Zap River flows a murky grey. It’s as if there is less water these days. Calm in appearance but seething beneath, it has forgotten the fury of the winter months during these hot June days. It’s the same as it’s always been — just the same. The cliffs rising on either side of the gorge and the grey slopes are the same, too. At the hour when daylight falls and the sun disappears behind the high mountains, the road stretching away, the sky, hills and river are girded in the same yellow-grey. And now, just at this moment, in their bareness, wildness, starkness and isolation they are all incredibly beautiful. Too beautiful to compete with the blue of the sea, the green of forest and meadows, the white of snowy peaks or the red purple of the setting sun. Or so it seems to me. Even though we look with our eyes, we behold through the glasses of our longings, our beliefs and our dreams. That is how we were when we believed that we would establish the union of the revolution and the brotherhood of the people with a makeshift bridge. The bridge was the symbol of hands held out by young people from the west uniting with the hands of the east. The good thing was believing in it and in the hope this belief created.

The depression of knowing that the poignant sadness of ‘I travelled these roads years ago’, the despair of ‘The bridges that I built have been completely destroyed’ and the fruitless, hopeless fatigue of Sisyphus as he carried the rock to the peak will never turn to hope.

He looks at the remains of the bridge. Even if it isn’t here it is good that someone still remembers it. A lad from the east, who perhaps had not even begun to talk when Deniz was hanged, knows Deniz Gezmiş, It is necessary to die young for memories to be appealing and for heroes to remain immortal!

Ömer Eren is going to the east. To the most eastern part of the east. The title of his last book was For the Light Rises in the East. It was a phrase borrowed from the Bible, from the faith of the western world. It rose rapidly on the bestseller list, and literary circles and thinkers praised it to the skies. He admits to himself that when choosing the title he had looked for a reference that could be translated into English and French. We take our bearings from the west and write about the east. We are eastern Orientalists. He finds his play on words clever. He must use it in an article. With a heavy heart he remembers the Argentinian Solanas’s film, South or El Sur. Solanas, too, was in exile in Europe in the 1980s. They had met at the showing in Paris of his film Tangos that told of Argentinian political exiles. Solanas was filming El Sur at the time; the film in which three old men play tangos on their bandonéons on a street corner in Argentina in front of the Lost Dreams café amid the mists and smoke. Whether dream or reality nobody knows. His film tells of people in love, rebelling, betraying, resisting and defeated, and people embracing hope and life. Their ka’bah is the south: the place where wars and freedom begin and where hopes of revolution are hidden. Patagonia, with its ice, freezing winds, and air of desolation and isolation, a refuge for fugitives, a grave for prisoners who do not return … The melancholy tango of Maria seeking her lover who has died while being tortured … ‘South: the land of our hope, our glorious dream, silently dying comrades. South: the final stop of our love, our never-ending road.’ Her lover murdered, the very young Maria is going south to carry on the fight on a truck travelling along the never-ending roads of the pampas, perched next to the driver like a silent bundle of sorrow.

Ömer Eren goes east murmuring Maria’s song, ‘South: the country of our loneliness, the final stop of our hopes, our never-ending road …’, breathing in the air that has grown heavy with the smell of human breath and sweat in the coach that travels between the yellow-grey hills, cleaving the yellow-grey light. He asks himself yet again why he is on this road. He goes along singing Maria’s ballad in his own language. ‘East: the last stop of our conscience, the refuge of our defeat. East, land of the eternal struggle …’