Oya Baydar - The Lost Word

She thinks about dawn on the mountain. Mahmut and I used to wake up cuddling up to one another. Listening to the sound of spring water, we used to wait for dawn to break. Our provisions had run out. There were just a few sugar cubes left. There was nothing to put in our mouths other than plants and the wild birds we caught, but what did we care? We made love as the dawn broke, the redness of sunrise fell on our glowing bodies. Each time we made love the child within me grew. It was as though he became one hundred children, one thousand children. We used to get hungry, and the child got hungry, too. We could no longer get provisions, bread and milk from the villages as before. Locals would quickly shut the door in our faces, either from fear or because they were fed up with us. They might even inform on one if one persisted too much. Nowhere was safe. Especially for us. Mahmut would go around looking for something to eat. I collected strawberries, plums, nettles, mallow and anything else that was edible. We used to light a small fire to cook the birds and little fish. After that we would wash at the spring. The water was like ice. It was good for both our hearts and our bodies. In my childhood I used to enjoy listening to fairy stories and telling them. Before a language was superimposed on my own and the two languages fought each other, the elderly woman storyteller in the village used to say that in time I would replace her. Perhaps I would have become a kind of female dengbej. I used to like fairytales because they were more glorious, happier than real life, because lovers would attain their desires, villains would be punished and good would win. I didn’t need fairytales any longer. In our haven in the grove I was in the middle of the most beautiful one I had ever heard.

Zelal knew that fairytales could not last for ever. And that in real life one cannot attain one’s desires and live happily ever after. But the couple’s love was so powerful that the tale of the prince who had come to save the little Sultana who was fleeing from the wicked giants and monsters could not end badly.

She thought how much she loved her man. She felt Mahmut’s love in her whole body, in her every limb, everywhere from the strands of her hair to her most intimate parts. She thought: Whatever the end was going to be it was good to have experienced this. To how many of his servants does God grant such a love! If I had not followed the black lamb that night up hill and down dale and left the village; if those men had not raped me; if Dad had been unable to spare his daughter, risk disobeying the code and secretly let me go, I would not have met Mahmut. Zelal was amazed at a person’s fate. She blessed that night. She thanked Allah for what had happened to her. Hope shone within her. Soon I shall recover and get out of this room. We will go towards the sea. I shall give birth to Hope.

She heard the door of the room open slowly. She looked towards the door trying to see who had turned up. She remembered that Nurse Eylem was on duty. She never neglected visiting all the patients on her wards when she was on night duty, whether they summoned her or not. She could tell not only a patient’s physical state but also their state of mind just by looking into that person’s eyes. She never asked what Mahmut was to me, who we were or what our troubles were. She did not speak much. However, she saw and listened with her heart, and she understood us.

In the redness of the breaking dawn, Zelal dimly saw the shadow in front of the door. It was not Nurse Eylem. It was a fairly tall well-built man. Then she heard a muffled sound. A gun, muted with a silencer or wrapped in cloth, went off. For a moment she thought that the noise had come from outside, from the hospital garden. Two more shots were fired. And then … the elderly woman’s thin shrill scream. A commotion in front of the door. Shouts, swearing and another shot. The echo of footsteps — heavy boots — of someone running down the corridor. A familiar sound to her ears. A familiar face that disentangled itself from the darkness and slowly took shape, that forcibly recalled itself to her memory: Kekê Mesûd!..

Sirens, bustling, lights switched on one after the other. People on duty filling the room, doctors, nurses and the security guards that were too late.

She saw that it was Nurse Eylem lying on the floor. She heard the young woman say, moaning with pain, ‘I’m not seriously wounded. He shot me in the leg.’ She saw how the blood flowing from the head and chest of the elderly patient who lay on the bed in front of the door had stained the white sheets red. She watched them put Nurse Eylem on a stretcher. She observed how they had intended to wrap the dead patient in bloody sheets and carry her away but then gave in to those who argued against destroying the evidence. Instead, they eventually pushed the old woman still in bed into the corridor. Through the door, where both sides had been opened to allow the bed out, she saw people gathered, petrified with fear: she saw doctors, patients, carers and employees. Everything was dealt with as if Zelal had not been in the room, as though her bed was empty. The morning call to prayer rose from the loudspeakers of the nearby mosque. It must be half past five, she thought. The day is beginning. I’m alive. The old woman will not be able to see the sun, for she is no longer alive.

Zelal pulled the bedcover over herself and hid under the white sheets. She wanted to merge with the white and vanish. Cleaners arrived with buckets and mops. She observed them through a slit she had made in the sheet in which she had wrapped herself. As they moved around her bed they commented to one another, ‘That’s some sleep! She hasn’t stirred, even with all this commotion!’ She made herself even smaller under the sheets. They are not going to leave me like this. In a while the police, the gendarmes, the security guards and the doctors will all come and question me, she thought. I’m deaf and dumb. I have become deaf and dumb. I’ve become a mute. No one will be able to get a word out of me.

She thought about her neighbour in the next bed. Had the poor woman had a premonition? Had she been horrible to me because somehow she knew that her death would be my responsibility? If she had not changed beds with me yesterday evening, I would be the one dead. She had not believed me when I said I had seen someone sinister at the door. She had said that it was normal for people to pop their heads round the door when it was ajar and for me not to worry. She did not believe me, but I did see a person: it was Mesut Abi. Death personified. He was in my nightmare, too. That was why I screamed in my sleep. I saw him. His face was the face of the Devil. It was the Devil I saw at the ward door disguised in the image of my Mesut Abi who used to bounce me on his knee, take me on his back to school when the Delice stream flooded and carry me over the water, who patted me, protected and watched over me calling me ‘my sky-eyed sister with the gold-stranded hair’, becoming as fierce as a lion if any of the village children so much as harmed a lock of my hair.

She had understood that the Devil had taken possession of her brother the day he came to the hamlet with the two evil men. His voice was not his own and neither were his looks nor his gait. The Devil had torn out his heart and taken it away. He had stolen Mesut’s heart and entered his body. Her poor brother had become a devilish traitor.

Kekê Mesûd was unique. He was fearless and could be a somewhat brutal at times. He had such a way of wringing a hen’s neck, putting a knife to the calf’s throat that I was always frightened. But as far as my mother and I were concerned, he was an angel. He was loyal to his ancestry, to the customs. His uncles loved him, too. After the villages had signed up for the militia and my father had left the village and we had gone down to the hamlet, they had said that Mesut should stay in the village, but my father had not let him. He was just beginning to grow a beard when they took him.