In Lojman, Ebru Ojen tells the story of Selma and Görkem, a mother and daughter trapped inside their state-provided teacher’s house, lojman (lodgement), along with a younger son and Selma’s newborn. In poetic prose, Ojen further traps her characters inside the foreboding landscape of the Erciş Plateau during a harsh Eastern Anatolian winter.
Selma and her children, defiant yet vulnerable, are powerless against geography and authority. As the characters develop an increasingly destructive microculture, Ojen, blurs the boundaries between the individual, the family, the lojman, and the landscape, and reveals the pervasive and dehumanizing effects of social institutions. Selma’s fraught relationship with her absent husband, and the evolution and dissolution of her daughter Görkem’s bond with an injured mallard capture the brutality of the institutions of motherhood, family, and government. With delicate and incisive language, Ojen leads her readers through a daunting, expansive, yet claustrophobic setting, and exposes them to the universal themes of self-preservation, existential fear, mental illness, and love and lust through a mystifying lens.
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Among the lakes, the desire to blossom into oceans. Silence, endlessly growing silence. The deep mountain craters! Lake Van stretching infinitely toward the yellow horizon, resisting change with its every drop, asserting its presence not in vastness or stillness but in tiny vibrations. Long separated from those other lakes that surrendered to the desire to join other bodies of water, Lake Van sprang forth from dark desert caves, resolute and whole, spreading like a mercury spill. Merging with the horizon, it suffused the plains in its steam, holding the mallards, the lightning strikes, and the people in place.
The smell of sulfur wafts up from the soil, filling the air with an acrid mist from Mount Süphan to Lake Van, permeating the present.
Greenheaded and mottled mallards take wing from dry reedbeds and fly toward the valley near the village. Here they are again! Their feet brush the snowbanks on the plains. As the golden ring of the noon hour splits the sky in two, the mallards beat their wings on the horizon line and ascend among the dark clouds. For them, the village is an unfavorable destination. If at all possible, best to avoid the villagers altogether. The reedbeds, the small hills are much safer. In fact, the villagers don’t bother with these latecomers to the landscape, these ducks who steal into the valley in rows. Overcome by the routines of their daily lives, the people simply deal with the Erciş Plateau, as harsh and desolate as an arctic desert. They burn dry cowpats in their ovens and stoves, air out their barns, dig out their vats of herbed cheese, cook meals with the provisions left over from summer-time. With detached industry, they live long lives in the triangle formed by Mount Süphan, Lake Van, and the Erciş Plateau. Into those lives, they fit reunions, separations, weddings, suicides, funerals, births, and murders. While life forever runs its course down below, the mallards, in search of rest, change their itinerary that usually extends from Iran to Russia; they glide from the Erciş Plateau to Çaldıran to spend the night among the reedbeds, in hot springs; they feed on insects and moss in misty nooks, and in the morning, they reappear over Lake Van as they descend into the plains. By day, they beat their wings, by night, they inhale the sulfur.
But mallards, just like humans, are subject to the senseless operations of happenstance. A momentary carelessness or inexperience can mean death in the span of a wingbeat. A stroll on the frozen lake can cause the ice to suddenly crack.
We cannot trust winter. Nature, although it allows for happy accidents, insists on disasters. If we are not attentive, it can easily bury our supposedly meaningful lives into history, like so much of nothing. When the burial is complete, the “important” life we once lived holds no meaning. We and everything we failed to make meaningful disappear in these unexpected encounters. The encounters, the missteps, and the detours are constant. We are not.
There is a time for everything. In nature’s orchestra, the rhythm of wingbeats, the breath, and nature’s music must create their own harmony. If the mallard fails to take flight at the right moment and flounders, then its downy breast and webbed feet, wet from the hot springs, will become inescapably stuck on the icy surface. As planets revolve in their galaxies with poetic rhythm, the motionless duck will surrender its body to the earth, as if settling on a new migratory path. And so here it is, another agonizing scene exalted before our eyes. Such scenes are always full of pain and heartbreak, and their beauty, at its core, belongs to nature’s nightmarish darkness.
The final days of December. Aside from the mallards spending time on the shores of Lake Van, nothing of note in the village. Winter had settled in, the time had arrived for fearsome storms. Frost hit the ground, the waters froze, the nights grew longer, the days shorter, leaving faint traces like tears rolling down dry, chapped cheeks. Everything was the same, as it was meant to be. Misty whirlpools, the sky’s braided colors, the plains, the mountain, snow squalls, birches, poplars . . .
That night, it was as if all the snow in the world was falling onto the village, especially onto the gray lojman, the teacher’s house next to the elementary school, off in the distance. The darkness and the storm had joined hands, blowing whirlwinds, ready to swallow that tiny dwelling, already nearly invisible in the snowfall covering the village streets with its pale blanket. The storm had piled walls of snow against the roofs, the doors, the cowsheds, clay ovens and troughs. The roads were closed, electricity was out. The howling from the mountain had grown louder, and the people withdrew to the furthest corners of their homes, waiting for the next day, for nature to relent.
In the East, the state builds its schools and the lodging for its teachers away from the residential areas of the villages. This lojman was no different, a forgotten dot on the village’s suffocating landscape, distant and alone under the dark clouds. It looked out onto the plains through a thick fog that conjured the atmosphere of ghoulish tales. Fearsome winter monsters, jinn, dead donkeys, and poison trees had gathered at the darkest point of the night, laying siege to the little lojman, having sworn an oath to terrify anyone who dared to step outside.
Görkem knew very well how and where those sinister snow jinn, those armies of poisonous squalls hid themselves. She knew she would not be able to poke her head out that night, even if a great disaster were to befall her. Despite the restless thoughts sprouting in her mind, she knew she was still a child. And while she was happy to take advantage of the luxury of being a child, she resented Selma’s indifference. Görkem hated that, when it came to her, Selma’s all-seeing eyes were blind, turned into deep, dark, empty wells. Selma’s sharp intellect stalled at the boundaries of her own existence, and her fingertips, usually so sensitive to the smallest vibration, turned to stone when they touched Görkem. Trapped in this cramped house perched on the vast plains stretching along the shores of Lake Van, she hated that she shared the same destiny with Selma, hated that she carried traces of Selma’s blood in her veins. Selma embodied everything she abhorred. The darkest emotions in Görkem’s compass pointed to her, and as she studied Selma’s crumpled figure, Görkem was spellbound, despite herself, by Selma’s paralyzing pull on her. Staring at Selma’s body slumped in a corner like a heap of broken toys, Görkem inspected her grimacing face, her usual indifference being shattered by physical suffering. It was fun to watch Selma wrestle with unbearable pain, as invisible hands like sharp scalpels slashed at her belly, her loins, her taut skin.
Selma’s contractions were becoming more frequent. Görkem couldn’t tear her eyes away from her ankles, her calves. What large legs, she thought. The swelling had cracked Selma’s skin here and there, turning her legs into hunks of diseased flesh. Görkem shuddered when her toes felt the warm, foul-smelling fluid that trickled from Selma’s loins. She suppressed a gruesome groan of pleasure.
If Görkem hadn’t known that Selma was giving birth, she would imagine that she was making love to Metin. Once, she had seen the two of them on top of each other in the bedroom and watched for minutes on end. Now, Selma was moaning with the exact same facial expression, the exact same movements. Görkem felt nauseous. How could she experience both pain and pleasure in the same way? Selma winced with alarming groans; her skin prickled with goosebumps, she shivered and shivered again, not from the cold but from anguish. The electricity was out. It was seldom on, so nothing seemed out of the ordinary now except for the baby being born. Everything was as dull, suffocating, and maddening as it always was.
*
Caught in labor pains, her mood more choleric than usual, Selma was screaming. Her cracked voice bore traces of an adolescent girl. That insufferable sound would get caught in a knot in her esophagus and, trying to force its way out, torment anyone in earshot. Collapsed in pain, Selma held out a razor blade and a pair of tweezers to Görkem. “Go to the kitchen, heat the razor on the burner, and bring it back,” she said. At her command, Görkem’s face faded like a sketch being roughly erased by a dissatisfied hand.
Once more Görkem realized how much she loathed Selma’s imposing voice, always loud at trying times, and her hideous face that resembled something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. She went to the kitchen knowing that she must follow Selma’s orders to the letter, and she returned after heating the razor on the stove. The storm had picked up. It was as if the source of the howling was inside their very lojman, or more precisely, the gap between Selma’s legs, spread open to give birth. Görkem was sick and tired of being there, of inhaling the foul air, and worse yet, of having to fulfill the woman’s demands.
Will the baby be a boy or a girl? I wish it would never be born, wish its lungs were filled with poison instead of breath so I wouldn’t have to struggle with such pointless questions, Görkem thought. If it had to be born, Görkem would prefer that it was a boy; if it were a girl, there would be no trace left of her own singularity. Selma was clenching her teeth. The vein that formed a thin line across her forehead widened, the skin on her face glowed as it stretched. One moment she broke out in a sweat, next she moaned, and in the end, unable to stand the pain anymore, she screamed again. The large drops of sweat trickling down her forehead and neck pinned Görkem’s attention to the anguished face. Selma looked like a disgusting, watery soup. A soup that ruins feasts with its rancid, rotting flavor.
As her breathing quickened, Selma’s face became even more intolerable. She kept pressing her enormous belly with her hands while spewing commands at Görkem.
“Go open the door!”
“It won’t open,” replied Görkem, her voice wavering in the air, “Selmaaa!”
“Stop crying, you’re going to drop the razor.”
On this cold day, on this wet and bloody ground, Selma’s scolding felt even more unbearable.
Please let it be a boy, please!
Wonder what name they’ll pick?
Enough, let the brat come out already!
“Go get Aunt Songül, hurry, or the baby and I are both going to die!”
This last sentence pleased Görkem. Quietly wishing that Selma would die before she uttered another sentence, she got up and walked toward the door. It would not open. Snow had piled up against it. Only Metin would have been strong enough to take on this icy giant. Besides, Görkem didn’t like calling Songül ‘aunt.’ Still, she put her shoulder to the door and pushed with all her strength, but the door, immovable from the start, didn’t budge.
“It won’t open, Selma; I’m not strong enough.”
They started crying. Selma, Murat, and her. A lovely choir. The thick whistling of the wind, the howling that rose from the void of the plains, accompanied them.
Selma’s voice cut like a knife through the dirge.
“The candle is out. Go get a candle from the other room! And heat the razor again. The baby’s coming!”
“Selma, if it keeps snowing, how is Metin going to come back?”
“All the way to hell that he went, it’ll take him some time to get back.”
She had never seen Selma this defeated. Normally she wouldn’t say such things about Metin. Her pregnancy had robbed her of what miserly affection she bothered to show and had left her raw. This thing, how she wished it would die before it even stuck its head out of Selma’s hole. The doors and the windows whistled. The only sounds missing were the cries of owls and wolves. Murat was wrapped up in the blue comforter; his crying had stopped, the tears had dried on his cheeks, and his snot had long since run down his chin. Unhappy about the new baby, his tense body sat motionless, he stared balefully, stung by the idea of a new sibling joining the crushing grayness of the house.
Görkem’s gaze was caught by the corner of the armchair. Despite its faded color, it seemed tempting, seductive. She was filled by a desire she could not control.
“Görkem, bring the razor. The baby’s head is out.”
Selma ruined anything beautiful. With her hideous, thick voice, her thorny, coarse hands, her feral eyes, she burned everything to the ground.
The baby, with bruised lips and a bloody head, managed to fling itself out of its mother’s uterus within seconds. She hadn’t expected such a speedy escape. In the blink of an eye, its shaky little hands, its wriggly body, and last, its feet came out of its mother. It must have been unbearable inside Selma’s belly. Her body was like an elastic prison. It could stretch but never cracked open a door to freedom. Even if one escaped somehow, the elastic body would not relent; it bulged, it shrank, mercilessly reminding one of who was the master.
Selma grabbed the razor from Görkem’s hand. She pressed it against the green cord coming out of the baby’s belly and connecting to something mysterious inside her. In one deft motion, she slashed the cord. She took a piece of twine from her pocket and tied the end. Now, there were four of them in the dark lojman. Görkem beamed with pride from holding the baby before Selma could, noticing that its small body weighed as much as an adult cat. The baby was screaming mightily. So was Murat. A terrible duet. Two unripe voices. Still, preferable to the duet between her and Selma.
“What’s its name going to be, Selma?”
“What does it matter, Görkem?” snapped Selma. After the hours of agony, she was in no mood to think of a name.
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Lojman by Ebru Open, published by City Lights Books on August 15, 2023. You may acquire a copy directly from the press at a discounted price of $11.17 by clicking here.