EIGHT
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.
Whenever her son comes to her mind, she thinks of Deniz with a keen, clinging sadness. Was it not a form of violence when we looked for what we held to be right in him, condemned him to surpass us, to be successful, to be strong? When talking about violence we only think about wars, exploding bombs, mines, people killed randomly, women and children. Yet don’t we all continually feed the source of violence? I, killing my test animals, another interfering with embryos, someone else trying to find the formula for the most powerful weapon of mass destruction, those who philosophize on violence, those who use the power of government, we all constantly produce violence. Deniz found the solution in running away. He even considered taking photographs of violence, suffering and the helplessness of people as complicity, and he rejected it. We called him a deserter, a deserter of life! Perhaps the truly consistent, strong, moral person was our son whom we tried to erase from our hearts saying that he was weak, unsuccessful and a fugitive. Our son, who ran away from the sufferings of this world and from violence, from us, and took refuge on a foreign island, in his beloved who died, his little son and his hopelessness.
Elif had hoped that Deniz would call her on his return from the Big Fish competition when he did not find her on the island, or at least leave a message on her phone. Perhaps he was hurt because I had not waited. Perhaps he hadn’t had the energy to call. We live in such different worlds. In a sense distance repairs our relationship. If we had been together for another three to four days we might have upset each other. We could have altogether lost the fragile bond that we thought we had found. But still she would have liked her son to call. Sometimes quarrelling is better than silence. There is even an affinity, a dialogue, in continual bickering.
Outside it is rainy and a little cool. What sort of a start to July is this? Elif likes the sun and sparkling blue water. The characteristic of Cancer. She had read in a women’s magazine that included the signs of the zodiac and such things that Cancer always yearns for water. She feels depressed. If only I had stayed on the island or returned immediately to Istanbul rather than take part in this rather mediocre second congress. The symposium in Copenhagen really was important. All the famous names of the scientific circle were there. And I achieved the result I wanted. There was no need for me to participate in the Göteborg congress. Was it worth it to meet two or three more scholars, to make my presence known to a few more colleagues? Why do I always want more? Why do I put myself under more stress? This is a form of self-inflicted violence.
She closes her laptop. That’s enough. I can’t make it any better! Most of the papers of those self-important men and women are much ado about nothing. It’s as though they are on holiday. They come unprepared and, apart from one or two brilliant contributors, most of them present unoriginal research and stereotypical views within their specialist areas. We put them on a pedestal because of our inferiority complex towards the west. And they with their western arrogance — ‘Let’s see what this Turkish woman has to say!’- listen to me out of curiosity. They mostly pay more attention to my uncovered head, my smart western clothes and my good English than to the science I have to present — although increasingly my papers are receiving prominence and getting noticed.