“As you wish!”
We didn’t talk about anything else. We never touched on what we intended to decide and settle—not even with a single word.
The next day, she left on the evening train. We didn’t go out at all that afternoon. We sat across from each other by the window, watching the street. We wrote down each other’s addresses in our notebooks. I was to enclose a self-addressed envelope with every letter I wrote, so that her replies could reach me. Because there was no way she could write in Arabic script, nor could the postmen in Havran read Latin letters.
For about an hour, we talked about trivial things—how long the winter had lasted, how even at the end of February the snow still hadn’t cleared. It was obvious she wanted the time to pass as quickly as possible. But I, no matter how absurd it was, wished that the moments we spent together would stop still, never end.
Still, what we said to each other was so pointless it was almost bewildering. We looked at each other from time to time and smiled blankly. When it was time to leave for the station, we both practically breathed a sigh of relief. After that, time flew by terrifyingly fast. I took her to Anhalter Station with her two small suitcases. Once she’d arranged her luggage, she insisted on not staying in the compartment but coming down to the platform with me. The twenty minutes that followed, filled with those same meaningless smiles, felt as short as a second to me. A thousand thoughts raced through my mind. But rather than cramming them into such a narrow span of time, I preferred to say nothing at all. Yet we could have said so many things since yesterday. Why were we parting so flatly?
Maria Puder seemed to lose some of her composure in those last few minutes. Noticing this, I felt pleased: seeing her leave without any emotion would have hurt me badly, I was sure. She kept grabbing my hand and letting it go again.
“What nonsense is this? Why are you leaving, anyway?” she muttered.
“You’re the one leaving—I’m still here!” I said.
She didn’t seem to notice my remark. She grabbed my arm.
“Raif... I’m leaving now,” she said.
“Yes... I know.”
The train was about to depart. An official was closing the carriage door. Maria Puder jumped onto the step, then leaned toward me and said slowly, distinctly, in a low voice:
“I’m leaving now. But whenever you call me, I’ll come...”
At first I didn’t understand what she meant. She paused for a moment, then added:
“Wherever you call me, I’ll come.”
This time I understood. I lunged to grasp her hands, to kiss them. But Maria had already gone inside, and the train was moving off silently. I ran beside her window for a while, then slowed down, waving my hand.
“I’ll call you... I’ll definitely call you!” I shouted.
She nodded, laughing. Her face and her eyes told me she believed me.
There was a sadness inside me, like an unfinished conversation. Why hadn’t we touched on this point since yesterday? Why had we talked about packing suitcases, the pleasures of travel, this winter—but never even approached the things that really belonged to us? But maybe this was better. What was there to discuss at length? Wouldn’t it all come to the same conclusion? Maria had found the best way... Definitely... An offer and an acceptance. Short, without argument, without calculation. There couldn’t have been a more beautiful farewell. All those fine words I’d kept locked in my head, burning because I hadn’t been able to say them—they seemed so feeble and colorless compared to this.
Now I thought I understood why she had left on her trip before me. After I left, Berlin would probably feel terribly dull to her in those first days. Even I, though I was so busy with travel preparations—passport, tickets, visa paperwork—felt strange walking through the streets we’d wandered together. But there was really nothing to be upset about anymore. As soon as I got back to Turkey and sorted out my affairs a bit, I would call her. That was all... My great talent for daydreaming immediately showed itself again. I could already see the spot for the beautiful villa I would build near Havran, and the hills and forests I would take her to see.
Four days later, I returned to Turkey via Poland and Romania. There’s nothing special about that journey, or even about the many years that followed, that’s worth writing down... I didn’t start thinking about the event that had brought me back to Turkey until after I boarded the ship at Constanța. So my father had died. I felt a deep shame at having realized this so late. True, there was no reason for me to truly love my father; there had always been a distance between us. If someone had asked me, “Was your father a good man?” I wouldn’t have known how to answer. Because I didn’t know him well enough to have any idea whether he was good or bad. As a human being, my father had almost no existence for me; he was only the human embodiment of an abstract concept called “Father.” The bald, round-faced, gray-bearded man who came home in the evenings frowning, silent, never deigning to speak to us or our mother—and the man I’d seen at the Havuzlu Kahve, chest bared, laughing while drinking ayran and playing backgammon with curses—these two were completely separate people to me... How I wished that second one had been my father... But even in that state, when he saw me his face would immediately turn serious:
“What are you wandering around here for?” he’d shout. “Go on, head to the coffeehouse kitchen, have a sherbet, then go back to the neighborhood and play there!”
Even when I grew up and came back from military service, his treatment of me never changed. In fact, somehow, the more I thought I’d become sensible, the smaller I seemed to become in his eyes. He looked upon my personal opinions and views, which I kept insisting on, with a certain disdain. The way he’d recently agreed to whatever I wanted was a sign that he didn’t even consider me worth arguing with.
Despite all this, there was nothing in my mind to tarnish his memory. I would not feel his absence as a void, but as a lack. The closer I got to Havran, the deeper the melancholy settled in me. It was hard to imagine our house and the whole town without him.
There’s no need to go into all this at length. I’d even prefer not to speak at all about the ten years that followed those days, but to make certain things understood, at least a few pages must be devoted to that period—the most pointless phase of my life. I was not welcomed warmly in Havran. My brothers-in-law seemed to mock me; my sisters were completely distant; my mother was more pitiful than ever. Our house had been closed up, and my mother had moved in with my eldest brother-in-law. Since no such offer was made to me, I started living alone in the big house with one of the old family servants. When I tried to take over my father’s affairs, I learned that he had divided the inheritance before his death. I could never get a straight answer from my brothers-in-law about which properties had fallen to me. The two soap factories were never mentioned at all; it turned out that my father had sold them—to one of my brothers-in-law, no less—some time before. The payment for them, and in general the cash and gold that my father was rumored to have had in abundance, were nowhere to be found. My mother didn’t know a thing. When I asked, she said:
“How should I know, my son? The deceased must have hidden his treasure somewhere and gone without telling anyone. Your brothers-in-law never left his side in his final days... Would he ever think he was going to die? He must not have had time to tell where he buried it... What can we do now? At least we could go to a fortune-teller... They know everything, they say.”
Indeed, after that my mother visited every fortune-teller in the vicinity of Havran. Following their advice, they dug under every olive tree and scraped every corner of the house. She spent the few gold coins she had left on this. My sisters went along to the fortune-tellers too, but they were reluctant to share the expense; I could tell that my brothers-in-law were secretly laughing at these endless treasure hunts.
Since harvest time was over, I couldn’t get anything from the olive groves. I sold the future harvest of some of them for a few pennies. My aim was to somehow get through the summer, then, the following autumn as soon as the olive season began, to work as hard as I could to improve my situation and have Maria Puder brought over immediately.
After I returned to Turkey, we corresponded frequently. In those muddy spring and suffocating summer days, when I was bogged down with a thousand stupid tasks, her letters—and the hours I spent writing to her—were my only relief. About a month after I arrived, she went back to Berlin with her mother. I sent my letters to the post office at Potsdamer Platz; she would go there and pick them up. In the middle of the summer, she wrote something strange once. She said she had some very good news to give me, but that she would only tell me in person when she came. (I had written that I hoped to call her in the autumn!) After that, even though I asked again and again in many letters, she never wrote what the good news was. She kept saying, “Wait, you’ll find out when I come.”
Yes, I waited—and not just until autumn, but for a full ten years... And I learned what that “good” news was exactly ten years later... Just last night, in fact... But let’s leave that for now and tell everything in order.
All summer long, with boots on my feet and a horse under me, I roamed the hillsides and the olive groves. I was astonished to see that my father had left me the most barren, most inaccessible, most stunted plots, for some reason. In contrast, the olive groves on the plains, near water and close to the town—where every tree yielded more than half a sack of fruit—had been left to my sisters, meaning to my brothers-in-law. I realized that most of the trees in the places I wandered had begun to go wild, unpruned and untended for years; no one had bothered to come and harvest from these remote hilltops in my father’s time.
It seemed that a lot of scheming had gone on in my absence, taking advantage of my father’s illness, my mother’s helplessness, and my sisters’ cowardice. But I hoped to fix everything by working tirelessly, and each letter from Maria gave me new courage and enthusiasm.
At the beginning of October, just when the olive work was heating up and I was thinking of calling her, the letters suddenly stopped. I had had the house repaired; amidst the insults, disdain, and astonishment of everyone in Havran—especially my relatives, of course—I had ordered a lot of household goods from Istanbul, including a bathtub, and had tiled the old washroom to install it.
Since I hadn’t yet told anyone the reason for this, everyone attributed my actions to snobbery, mindless imitation of Europeans, or sheer pretentiousness. That a man like me, who hadn’t even sorted out his own affairs properly, would spend the few coins he’d scraped together by borrowing or selling his harvest on a mirrored wardrobe and a bathtub—that was sheer madness. I laughed inwardly at these accusations. They couldn’t possibly understand me. And I was under no obligation to explain.
But when fifteen or twenty days passed and Maria didn’t reply, I grew terribly anxious. My mind, already prone to suspicion and worry, began to torment me with a thousand possibilities. When I got no answer to the letters I wrote one after another, I fell into utter despair. Already the intervals between her last letters had been growing longer, and the pages seemed emptier and harder to fill... I poured all her letters out in front of me and read them one by one. In those written in the last few months, there was a certain confusion, something she wanted to hide, and a kind of evasive, secretive tone that didn’t suit the open, straightforward Maria at all. At times I even wondered: was she urging me to call her sooner, or was she afraid I would call and upset because she’d have to go back on her word? I started reading meanings into every line, every half-finished expression, every joke, and I was going out of my mind.
All my efforts came to nothing, and all my fears proved true.
I never heard from Maria Puder again, never heard her name... Only yesterday—but I haven’t gotten to that yet. A month later, the last letters I had sent came back stamped: “Not collected from post office—returned to sender.” That was when I lost all hope. Even today I’m amazed when I think how much I changed in just a few days. It was as if something that had given me the ability to move, see, hear, feel, think—in short, to live—had been pulled out of me, and I had become a husk. This time, it wasn’t like the days after New Year’s Eve. Back then, I had never been so hopeless. I had always held on to the awareness of being close to her, the thought of going to talk to her, of convincing her. But now I was completely powerless. That immense distance between us bound my hands and feet. I shut myself in the house, wandering from room to room, reading her letters and my returned ones over and over, dwelling on points I’d missed before, and laughing bitterly.
My interest in my work, even in myself, suddenly dwindled to almost nothing. I left the tasks of shaking the olives, collecting them, taking them to the factory to press the oil, in the hands of this or that person. Sometimes I’d pull on my boots and go out to the countryside, but I preferred to wander where I wouldn’t see a human face. I’d come home at midnight, lie down on a cushion, and after a few hours of sleep, wake up the next morning with the bitter feeling: “Why am I still alive?”
The empty, aimless, pointless days I had lived before meeting Maria Puder had begun again, but now they were far more painful than before. There was one difference: the ignorance that had once made me think life was nothing but this had been replaced by the torment of knowing that there was another way to live, that I had learned that once. I was no longer aware of my surroundings. I felt it was impossible to take pleasure in anything.
For a while, a short while, that woman had rescued me from my usual helpless, wretched state. She had taught me that I was a man—or rather, a human being—that even I had aspects capable of living, that the world might not be as meaningless as it seemed. But as soon as I lost my connection to her, as soon as I escaped her influence, I had slipped back into my old self. Now I understood how much I needed her. I was not someone who could walk through life alone. I always needed a support like her. Living without it would have been impossible. Yet I did live... But here’s the result... If you can call it living, then I lived.
I never heard from Maria again. The landlady of her Berlin boardinghouse replied that Frau van Tiedemann no longer lived there, so she couldn’t provide the information I wanted. Who else could I ask? Maria had written that after returning from Prague with her mother, they had moved to a new apartment, but I didn’t know the address. I was amazed, thinking how few people I had gotten to know during my nearly two years in Germany. I had never left Berlin; I knew the city down to its dead-end streets. I hadn’t missed a single museum, art gallery, botanical or zoological garden, forest, or lake. Yet among the millions of people living in that city, I had spoken to only a handful and truly known only one.
Perhaps that was enough. One person should be enough for another, surely. But what happens when that one is gone? What can you do when everything turns out to be an illusion, a deceptive dream, pure delusion? This time, I had lost the ability to believe and hope. A bitterness and mistrust toward people grew inside me so strong that sometimes I scared myself. Whoever it was, anyone I came into contact with I regarded as an enemy, or at least a harmful creature. As the years passed, this feeling didn’t fade—it grew fiercer. My suspicion of people turned into hatred. I fled from anyone who wanted to approach me. I feared most those whom I felt closest to or thought I might become close to. “Even after what she did…” I would say to myself… What had she done? That was never clear; and precisely because of that, my imagination dwelled on the worst possibilities and passed the harshest judgments. After all… when it comes to breaking a promise made in a moment of simple excitement at a farewell, the easiest way is to cut off all contact without any discussion. Letters don’t get collected from the post office… Replies don’t come… Things you thought existed disappear in an instant. Who knows what new adventure, what close and more sensible happiness had opened its arms to her by then. To give that up, to throw herself into an unknown life, a destinationless adventure, bound by a promise made partly to soothe a naive child’s heart, was not something her ever-practical mind would accept.