‘What’s the topic?’
‘The health of mother and child. The midwife at the polyclinic is the main speaker. I’m going to be there as support; an extra speaker so that our women will come, too. In fact the problem for our women is birth control. Young people don’t want many children, especially after giving birth to a boy. However, they are frightened of birth control methods such as the coil. They don’t trust them. When people talk about preventing the Kurdish population increasing and birth control, they are frightened that they will be sterilized.’
‘You’re kidding!’
‘No, I’m not. When people’s trust has been shaken so badly, when they’ve felt so trapped, downtrodden and desperate, they are wary about others’ intentions. Fear makes a person suspicious. I understand our women. In fact none of them wants a lot of children. They don’t have any ambitions to increase the Kurdish population either. These are the issues of politicians, men scrambling for power. However, should they become infertile, especially if they do not have a son, then a second wife immediately comes along. And no one wants a second wife.’
‘That’s a difficult situation. It’s not for me. But how come the state trusts you?’
‘It doesn’t trust me, but it needs me. It uses me to make contact with the local people. We each walk our own path with little steps, covering for each other. The Governor’s wife and the Commander’s wife, the teacher, nurses and midwives need me if they don’t want just to talk to one another at the meeting. And, as for me, I need to convey a message to my people. As you see, we manage to rub along together.’
He feels the weariness, the feeling of being trapped, in her voice.
‘Forget about advising women about birth control, my woman, and give me — us — a child. A Kurdish-Turkish child to replace my lost son, a child of the common language of love, of hope and the future.’
‘Why did you say your lost son?’ Now she sounds not just weary but sad.
Ömer realizes what he has said. He becomes confused. He feels like a skein of betrayal. It’s as though he really has lost his son — just now in saying these words. Yet I came here to some extent to look for him. While I was speaking to Mahmut’s father I had thought I might be reunited with my son if I took the path that the wise man had paved for me in my heart. I humiliated Elif, not by making love to Jiyan but with these words. It’s as though I erased my son from within me. What was traitor in Jiyan’s language? Xayin! Du rû! Caş! When I said ‘my lost son’ and wanted a son in his place, then I really did lose Deniz. I killed him. I killed Elif, too.
Was he to lose his way completely in this foreign land where he had come to look for his very nature, his inner being, his values and the word he had lost, to be cleansed and purified? The Governor who had tried to show off his knowledge of mythology had mentioned the sailors who had been enchanted by the voices of the sirens.
I must save myself from being dashed to pieces on the rocks. I’m a complete mess. I’m disorientated and alone.
He does not answer Jiyan. He gently touches her forehead with his lips.
I have never loved like this. Like loving the earth, the sky, the sea, like loving the mountains and loving myself. So naturally, inevitably, indisputably … No, this was not a sentence from the book he could not write. It was no fiction. It was exactly what he had experienced. The overflowing enthusiasm of an eighteen-year-old youth wildly and madly in love: a bird constantly fluttering in his breast, his throat, his head and at the tips of his fingers. A love without beginning or end, time or space. As they made love it was as though their bodies melted, as though they evaporated, a sensation from head to toe. As they stand silently side by side they are a folk song for two voices; as they speak they are the word that reverberates on the rocks. Then comes the meaninglessness, the emptiness into which he falls when he is apart from Jiyan, when he is without her. The question that is never asked when he is with Jiyan, that has no equivalent in any language and that resounds in his brain and heart in every language and sound when he is by himself, alone: why am I here? What am I after? Where am I going?
Ömer is surprised at himself. He wants to apologize to all the women he has known and loved, especially to Elif — to his wife to whom he thought he was inseparably bound. No, not because he loves someone else — Jiyan is not someone else — but because he has grasped that what he offered them as passion, as love and desire was a lie with which he tricked himself, not them. In any case, what were all those women who had come and gone in his life other than the satisfaction of his male ego that was so utterly inflated by his fame and success? But Elif was different. She was the strong safe lap of youthful years when we ran flat out in pursuit of a revolution we had no doubts about, our shared ideas, the plane tree I rested my back against, the mother of my son. For a long time there has been no passion but essentiality, necessity. He feels depressed by these thoughts, but he no longer feels guilt. Elif would understand this; she would understand that this feeling is not directed at her, does not take anything away from her, does not belittle her. She would understand that the nameless, indescribable, irresistible attraction that I feel for Jiyan has clinched its own place, its own meaning and bound her more strongly to me.
Would she really understand? No, no man or woman would understand, and even if they did they wouldn’t acknowledge it. I’m making all this up to comfort myself, to live for today. I want it to be like this. I’m resisting reality. Jiyan never asked about my wife. It’s of no importance to her. In fact, I’m not very important to her either. She is not jealous because she doesn’t feel as though she is sharing love and passion with another woman. She lives in the moment; she keeps it alive. Then she returns to her own world that she never reveals and whose narrow door and tiny window she doesn’t leave ajar which is hidden behind her thick black eyebrows. Just like this town. Strangers cannot fathom Jiyan or get through to the realities of that world, its secrets and its fears.
He knows that he should escape from her magnetic field immediately and from this frightening, magical, strange town before being carried away and sinking completely, before leaping over the threshold of no return. If he were to take his small case and board the first coach, jump on the first plane to take off from the nearest airport to his own land, his own world, if he were to return to himself … If he were to return to his wife, to his son who still gave him hope of returning to life, to his readers queuing at his book-signing days, to his arrogant intellectual circle so pleased with themselves and full of their public image, to the comfort brought by alcohol, the lethargy of emptiness, the meaninglessness of life … Before it is too late, before all his bridges both inside and out are entirely burnt?
He knows very well that he will not return, that these questions are an attempt to purge his conscience. He knows it, but he is trying to deceive himself. He finds fault not with Jiyan but with Mahmut and Zelal, the mountains, the region and the town for leading him astray, for enticing him. Sometimes he thinks: put Jiyan in the middle of Istanbul and she would at most be a fairly pretty countrywoman. And if she began to speak she would be a baci from the other country. But in these lands, under this sky, in the shadow of these snowy peaks, with the secrets that envelop her like mist, with the invisible halo that she carries like a crown, and with the power of the mountains and the traditions that have filtered down through the centuries, she becomes Jiyan. She becomes life. Ömer likes this new life whose door he has pushed ajar. With Jiyan he is reborn from being burnt out. It is as though he is going back many years, to youth, to hope, and perhaps to the word he lost. As he tries to penetrate the depths of the town, to reach its soul, to hear its scream, Jiyan and the town intermingle; they overlap. The secret that entwines them both, that renders them unattainable does not manifest itself to the stranger, be he lover or friend. The moment he thinks he has lifted the curtain, town and woman withdraw into themselves. They take on the identity of an ordinary town, an ordinary woman. The stranger remains outside the shell that he feels he will not be able to pierce. Or it seems like that to the stranger.