Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

Every cloud has a silver lining. Perhaps we saved our lives at the expense of losing Hevi before he was born. Perhaps the wheel of destiny turned in our favour. The writer helped and will help us further. A small shop selling knick-knacks, a small business in a pretty place by the sea … It could be carpets and rugs. Nowadays Kurdish kilims are in great demand, and foreigners in particular are snapping them up. Tourists and people with summer houses will come in the summer, and there will be plenty of sales. We will gradually build up the business. I won’t let Zelal work. She can bring our children up, although she can be in the shop sometimes and check the accounts.

Carried away by his own dreams, he walks through the crowds with the smile on his face of a rather vacant child imagining a fairground. The writer abi had told them to keep a low profile, but this evening he did not feel like returning home straight away. That house is pleasant and comfortable, like the houses of rich people; but it is only pleasant with the one you love, pleasant with Zelal. Loneliness is bad even if you are in paradise. What use is beauty if you don’t share it with the one you love?

Nothing would happen if he returned to the house late. No on was waiting for him. If Zelal were sitting at home watching out for him it would be different. Then he would have rushed back. I’ll get back late. It’s better anyway. The minibuses and buses will be less crowded. What’s more, going up the slope in the dark will be safer. If there is anyone taking an interest in me it is better to shelter in the dark than be seen in broad daylight.

He strolled leisurely along the street that branched off from one of the city’s main squares. Rows of shops selling smart clothes, women’s clothes, men’s shirts, trousers and suits … We must get Zelal some nice clothes when she’s better. How they’ll suit her. If she gets dressed up she’ll look like a beauty queen! But wouldn’t I get jealous of other men’s eyes? Mahmut, you stupid twerp! Watch what you’re thinking! Jealousy is all you need!

He passed in front of the kebab and lahmacun shops with their appetizing smells. The Dersim Kebab House, Urfa Grill, Munzur Kiosk, Komegene Çiğköfte House, the overpowering smell of roasted fatty meat … Amazing! Our food, smells and even our Kurdish names are taking over the capital. Kurds invaded the west long ago, but, look, they’ve even stormed the capital! He chuckled cheerfully, then pulled himself together. If anyone saw him they would think he had gone mad. He longed for a kebab. A spicy one, with plenty of onions, grilled tomatoes and peppers and a drink of ayran. He thought how long it was since he had eaten a kebab. As though you used to eat them every day! How many times did you eat a kebab at a shop, eh? In his childhood, when they were in the village, they used to eat meat. There would be animals they singled out for slaughter and sometimes an animal would become ill, a wolf would savage it or something else would happen, and they would have to kill it. His mother would roast it beautifully. There were no fresh vegetables, but onions would be fried in oil in a pan to go with the meat. And sometimes she would bury potatoes in the ashes of the hearth. All the children loved this.

He had been to a kebab shop twice in his life. The first time was when he was a child; those were the days when they had just moved from the village, when they were trying to get used to the hut of scraps at the edge of the stream. They used to call their hut ‘rubbish house’, not because they belittled it but because it was made from rubbish bins and materials collected from dumps. In those days, everyone in the house, apart from his mother, collected rubbish. In the morning before dawn the folk by the stream, whole families would hit the road; they would pour into the town centre, the wealthy districts and the neighbourhoods of civil servants. ‘Well, I’ve had enough. I’m not coming to collect rubbish. This filthy work disgusts me,’ said his big brother one day. His father had said nothing. He looked straight ahead and remained silent. When his mother nagged at him for not being tough with the lad he had said, ‘It is offensive to a young man. It doesn’t bother me or the youngsters, but a young man is ashamed of raking through rubbish.’

Didn’t it bother the youngsters? It used to bother me. The rubbish smelt revolting, and I would tie a cloth over my nose and mouth. I was also afraid that someone from school would see me. It felt as though I was thieving. Two days after he had had his say and left home, my brother came back and told them that he was going to the mountains. My mother cried, and my father said in a feeble voice, ‘Don’t go, Son’, but he did not entreat. Even if he had said, ‘Stay, don’t go’, there was no alternative, no future for the boy he could offer other than the bins.

Mahmut owed his first kebab to this rubbish business. That day he had not gone off to work in the early hours of the morning. He had fallen into the deep sleep of a child and his mother had not had the heart to wake him. During the day as he was sifting through the rubbish in front of one of the kebab shops in the large market, the cooking smell suddenly overpowered the smell of rubbish. He had paused for a moment, put his sack on the ground, turned his nose towards the open door of the kebab shop and, with half-closed eyes, breathed in the inviting smell long and deeply. He was not especially hungry. His mother had fed him bread and onion that morning. But that smell! The smell could lead one astray, could drive one insane. Even if you had eaten ten loaves of bread you could not resist it. He heard a voice immediately behind him saying, ‘Boy’, and a hand touched his shoulder. Mahmut was frightened to death. Supposing the cops picked him up and took him away? When foreigners or high-level state visitors came to town they would pick up beggars, children selling tissues and people collecting rubbish in prominent public places and cart them off to the police station. He stood rooted to the spot with fear.

‘Let’s go and eat a kebab,’ the man had said.

‘No, umm, I don’t want one,’ he had murmured, ready to flee.

‘Come on. Don’t be afraid,’ the man had persisted. ‘When I was your age I used to love kebabs. We didn’t have any money, so I couldn’t buy them. I feel like one now — those damned kebabs do smell good. Come on. Don’t be awkward.’

Finally he had had the courage to turn and look at the man. He was middle-aged, obviously a city-dweller; he spoke like one. He is lying not to upset me; he is lying so that I do not feel inferior. Mahmut had thought that the man did not look like somebody who had never eaten kebabs in his childhood through lack of money.

‘Did you collect rubbish, too, in those days?’ he had asked with childish logic to test the man.

‘No, I didn’t collect rubbish. I worked at other jobs. But I know the smell of kebabs,’ he said smiling. And then without giving Mahmut the opportunity to argue he took him by the arm and pushed him inside.

Now Mahmut smiled to himself and went towards the door of the kebab shop in front of him. I’m damned if I won’t have one! All right, I’m being careful with the money the writer left me. I’m keeping it for Zelal’s convalescence. But surely I have the right to a single portion of kebab!

The second time his father had taken him to a kebab shop. It was when he had announced that he had passed the university examination. ‘You deserve it! We’ll go and have a kebab, father and son, and after that a baklava. When you become a doctor you’ll take your mother and father, all of us, out for kebabs with your first salary,’ his father had said. He remembers that he had made do with a single portion, not to make it too expensive. The money for the cramming course, the university entrance fees, clothes and a little spending money — even if he were to stay with acquaintances — was all to come from collecting rubbish, the work on building sites and quarries that his father found if he struck lucky when he waited every morning at the labourers’ market, from the washing that his mother did and the cleaning job she had found at the town hall and the pittance he got from the hotel where he had worked nights while he was studying at school. And if the kebab money were to be added!