Meryem Ölmez

Meryem was fifteen when she decided that one day she’d go to the mountains. She’d grown up watching people in her neighborhood go, close friends, even family members. Every year, during the religious festivities, some men would come in the morning to drink some tea with her dad and his brothers, sitting and laughing in a room that Meryem was forbidden to enter. But then the women started coming to the village, too, sitting in the salon while mom and other women from the village welcomed them with tea and pastries. Then, Meryem was not only allowed in the room but celebrated, too, for being there, for being a girl, for being strong and the future of Kurdistan. Some of those women had played with her older sisters or her aunts, and they still remembered the times when they were going to school together, way before heading for the mountains.

Even though Mom was okay with the idea of Meryem joining them one day, she still cautioned her against telling dad. It was one thing to sit down with them and have tea every once in a while, another very different to lose your daughter to the mountains. Mom asked her to wait until after she was done with high school, and if by that time she hadn’t changed her mind, then she was welcome to go and fulfill her destiny—before being her daughter, Mom would say, she was the daughter of Kurdistan, and if she felt it in her heart to go fight for her people, it wouldn’t be fair to hold her back.

By the time graduation came, not only did Meryem graduate as the top student of her class, but she also had a full scholarship to the medical school of one of the most prestigious universities. She told herself, and then her mother, that maybe that was her calling. Maybe she could help her people just as much by being a doctor.

In her third year in Istanbul, Meryem was at the university hospital wandering around triage when a Kurdish woman came complaining about bleeding and abdominal pains. Her husband explained that a home pregnancy test had come back positive earlier that week, but now his wife was bleeding profusely. The nurse got mad at the husband for answering in her place, even after the husband had told her that his wife was from Qamishlo and she didn’t speak Turkish, only Kurmanci and a little bit of Arabic. The nurse didn’t seem to care, and she kept bombarding the woman, visibly distraught, with questions in Turkish.

“She’s having a miscarriage,” Meryem approached her, flustered. “And there you are, asking her stupid questions. She doesn’t understand what you’re saying.”

The nurse looked at her from head to toe with a certain disdain, as if unable to understand why she was defending the woman.

“I’m taking her to the ultrasound room,” the nurse told the husband, ignoring Meryem. “But you can’t come with her.”

“What do you mean I can’t come with her?” The man said, despair growing in his voice. “Don’t you understand she doesn’t speak Turkish? How is she supposed to communicate inside?”

“You said she speaks Kurdish, right? One of our residents came to us from a hospital in Bitlis, he knows some Kurdish.”

The husband tried again, but he couldn’t convince the nurse, who ended up wheeling the woman away and towards the ultrasound room.

“I don’t get it,” the man said in Turkish, looking at Meryem. “She’s scared and alone why won’t they let me go in with her.”

“She’s a pain in the ass,” Maryem told him, in Kurmanci, and a sense of relief flooded his face when he heard her speak his language. “Believe me when I tell you nobody likes her.” He smiled, shyly, and Meryem continued, “But, tell you what, I’m gonna go in there and keep your wife company. She’ll probably appreciate having someone who speaks her language in the room.”

Meryem walked into the ultrasound room without knocking. She knew they were probably already behind the divider and didn’t want to startle them, especially not the mother. When she walked in, she could hear them laughing as the woman kept crying.

“Still, still,” A voice was saying in Kurmanci. “No move.”

Meryem could hear the woman asking question after question. What was happening? How was the baby? Could they see something? But the doctors in there with her were ignoring her in the rudest way. One of the doctors, a woman, kept imitating her, her worried tone, the urgency in her voice, all while the other one, a man this time, kept going on and on about how insufferable people in Bitlis were, how filthy, how poor, how they refused to speak Turkish. More than anger, those words brought Meryem a lot of pain. She couldn’t avoid thinking that maybe that was the way residents from Western cities referred to her mother, father, cousin, or even neighbor whenever they sought medical help.

“I’m sorry,” Meryem said in Kurmanci, peaking through the side and looking directly at the woman on the stretcher. “Have you been properly helped?”

When she saw Meryem, the woman’s face lit up with relief, and never before had Meryem been happier.

“You can’t be here,” the male doctor said. “Get out.”

“Yes, I can,” Meryem retorted, showing her badge. “I can and I will be here. You clearly don’t speak Kurmanci and she doesn’t understand what you’re saying.”

“Then she should learn Turkish, don’t you think?” The female doctor interjected. “Burasi Turkiye.”

“How stupid are you, really?” Meryem said, unable to hold back. “This woman comes from Northern Syria, idiot, they don’t speak Turkish there. And even if they did, she’s Kurdish, can you hear me? Kurdish like me and like all those people that your stupid little friend here was making fun of before I walked it. So you can shove it,” it took her a minute to see her name on her badge, “Gamze. You can shove it real hard. Not only are you a horrible person but you are a horrible doctor and you disgust me and you should disgust everyone in this profession. I hope you lose your license.”

But it was Meryem the one to lose her license, or better yet, to never get it. And once what had transpired made its way to the hospital director’s ears, a case was opened against her for offending the republic and the Turkish identity. But it didn’t matter, because, by the time the officers knocked on her dorm’s door to take her to the station, she was long gone, on her way to the mountains.