"Yes... But it's nothing new... Maybe ten years ago..."
"Ten years? Impossible..."
The woman looked me over again, then pulled me aside.
"I can see that Maria Puder's death concerns you. Let me tell you briefly," she said. "About two weeks after you left the boarding house to return to Turkey, Herr Döppke and I packed up and went to visit relatives who owned a farm near Prague. We ran into this Maria Puder and her mother there. Her mother and I weren't on the best of terms, but we didn't dwell on it. Maria was very thin and weak—she said she'd had a serious illness in Berlin. After a while, they went back to Berlin. The girl had recovered somewhat. We left and went to East Prussia, my husband's real homeland... When we returned to Berlin in the winter, we heard that Maria Puder had died in early October. Of course I forgot the rift and immediately looked up her mother. She was in a terrible state, almost as if she'd aged sixty years. But at the time she was only forty-five or forty-six. According to what she told us, after leaving Prague, Maria noticed some changes in herself, went to a doctor, and it turned out she was pregnant. At first she was very happy about it, but despite all her mother's insistence, she wouldn't say who the father was. She kept saying, 'You'll find out later!' and talked about a trip she was going to take. Toward the end of the pregnancy, her health began to decline. The doctors found the delivery risky; even though the situation had progressed quite far, they wanted to intervene. Maria absolutely refused to let them touch the child. Then she suddenly took a turn for the worse and was hospitalized. Apparently her albumin levels were very high... The earlier illness had also weakened her body... Several times before the birth she completely lost consciousness. The doctors intervened, removed the child, and kept it alive. Despite that, Maria continued having seizures, and a week later she died in a coma. She couldn't say anything. She never suspected she would die. Even in her last lucid moments, she'd say incomprehensible things to her mother like, 'When you find out, you'll be amazed; but later you'll be glad too!' She never gave the man's name. Her mother remembered that before they went to Prague, her daughter often spoke to her about a Turk. But she'd never seen his face or known his name... The child stayed in hospitals and care facilities until she was four, and then her grandmother took her in. She's a bit thin and quiet, but very sweet... Don't you think so?"
I felt so weak I thought I might collapse on the spot. My head was spinning. Yet I stood perfectly straight, smiling.
"This girl?" I said, nodding toward the train window.
"Yes... Isn't she lovely? So well-behaved and quiet! Who knows how much her grandmother must have missed her!"
The woman kept looking at my face as she spoke. There was almost a hostile glint in her eyes.
The train was about to depart. She jumped into the car.
A moment later, both of them appeared at the window side by side. The child watched the station and occasionally me with an indifferent smile. The old, fat woman wouldn't release me from the circle of her gaze.
The train started moving. I waved at them. I noticed Frau Döppke's malicious smile.
The child had been pulled inside...
All this happened last night. As I write these lines, a little over twenty-four hours have passed.
I couldn't sleep a single second last night. Lying on my back in bed, I kept thinking about the child on the train. I could almost see her head bobbing with the carriage's motion. A child's head with thick hair... I didn't know the color of her eyes, her hair, or even her name. I hadn't paid any attention to her. Even though she'd stood right beside me, a step away, I hadn't once looked at her face out of curiosity. I hadn't even shaken her hand when we parted. Nothing—oh my God—I knew nothing about my own daughter. That woman must have sensed something... Why had she looked at me so maliciously? She must have guessed something... And she took the girl away... They're on their way now... As the wheels jump from one rail to another, my daughter's sleeping head sways gently...
I thought about them constantly. But finally I couldn't bear it any longer, and the image I'd been trying to push away slowly, silently, stood before my eyes: Maria Puder, my Fur-Coated Madonna, with that delicate curve at the corner of her lips and the deep gaze of her black eyes. There was no anger, no reproach in her face. Maybe a little surprise, but mostly she looked at me with concern and affection. Yet I lacked the courage to meet her gaze. For ten years—a full ten years—with all the resentment of my poor soul, I had been angry at a dead person, holding a dead person guilty... Could there be a greater insult to her memory? I had suspected the person who was the foundation, purpose, and reason for my life for ten years, without hesitation, without ever thinking that I might be wrong. I had imagined the most unimaginable things about her, and never once stopped to think that maybe there was a reason for her actions and for abandoning me. But the greatest, most irresistible reason of all was death. I was going mad with shame. I writhed in the bitter, futile remorse one feels toward the dead. I sensed that even if I spent the rest of my life on my knees trying to atone for the crime I had committed against her memory, I would never succeed—that burdening the most innocent of people with the heaviest of faults, the betrayal of abandoning a loving heart, could never be forgiven.
Just a few hours earlier, I'd thought I couldn't remember her face because I didn't have a photograph. But at this moment I saw her much more vividly, in greater detail, than when she was alive. Just like in the painting, she was a little sad, a little aloof. Her face was paler, her eyes blacker. Her lower lip reached out toward me, her mouth ready to say, "Oh, Raif!" She was more alive than ever... So she had died ten years ago? She had died while I was waiting for her, while I was preparing my home to receive her. She had died without telling anyone anything, taking all her secrets with her so as not to leave me writhing in helplessness, so as not to trouble me.
Now I understood the real reason for the anger I'd felt toward her for ten years, for the wall of impenetrable isolation I'd built around myself: For ten years, I had continued to love her with an undiminished love. I had allowed no one else to enter my heart. But now I loved her more than ever. I reached out my arms toward the illusion before me, wanting to take her hands in mine again and warm them. Our life together, those four or five months, lay before me in every detail. I remembered every moment, every word spoken between us. Starting from seeing her portrait at the exhibition, to hearing her sing at the Atlantik, to her coming close to me, our walks in the Botanical Garden, our sitting face to face in her room, her illness—I was reliving it all one more time. Memories rich enough to fill an entire lifetime, compressed into such a short period, were more vivid and powerful than reality itself. They showed me that I had not lived for a single moment in ten years; that all my actions, thoughts, and feelings were as distant from me as if they belonged to a stranger. The real "me," in my near thirty-five years of life, had lived only for three or four months, and then had sunk into the depths of a meaningless identity that had nothing to do with me.
Last night, lying face to face with Maria in bed, I understood that carrying this body, this mind that had nothing to do with me would be even harder from now on. I would feed them as if feeding a stranger, drag them from place to place, and always watch them with pity and contempt. I also understood last night that after that woman left my life, everything lost its reality; I had died with her, perhaps even before.
The household went out early today, all together. I made an excuse about not feeling well and stayed home. I've been writing this since morning. It's starting to get dark. They still haven't come back. But soon they'll burst in laughing and shouting. What connection do I have to these people? What do all the bonds between us mean if our souls aren't together? For years I haven't said a single word to anyone. Yet how much I need to talk. Being forced to stifle everything inside—isn't that like being buried alive? Oh Maria, why can't we sit by a window and talk? Why can't we walk side by side in silence on windy autumn evenings, listening to our souls speak? Why aren't you by my side?
For ten years, perhaps I've fled from everyone for nothing, been wrong not to trust people. If I had searched, maybe I could have found someone like you. If I had learned everything then, maybe I would have gotten used to it over time, tried to find you in others. But now everything is over. After committing the greatest and most unforgivable injustice against you, I don't want to fix anything. Based on a wrong judgment I made about you, I held all of humanity guilty; I fled from them. Today I understand the truth, but I must condemn myself to eternal loneliness. Life is a gamble played only once, and I lost it. I can't play a second time... Now a life worse than before will begin for me. I'll go shopping again like a machine in the evenings. I'll meet people whose identities I don't care about and listen to their words. Could my life have been any different? I don't think so. If chance hadn't brought you across my path, I would have gone on living the same way, but unaware of everything. You taught me that another kind of life exists in the world, that I have a soul. If you couldn't carry it through to the end, it's not your fault... Thank you for the few months you gave me the chance to truly live. Aren't a few months like that worth several lifetimes?.. The child you left behind as a part of your body, our daughter, will wander in distant places, unaware that she has a father on this earth... Our paths crossed once. But I know nothing about her. Neither her name nor where she is. Yet I will always follow her in my imagination. I will invent a life course for her in my mind and walk beside her. I'll try to fill the loneliness of my remaining years by imagining how she grows up, how she goes to school, how she laughs, and how she thinks. There are noises outside. Our people must have returned. I want to keep writing. But what's the point? I've written all this, and what's changed? Tomorrow I should buy another notebook for our girl and put this one away. I must hide everything, everything, especially my soul, in places where it will never be found...
Raif Efendi's notebook ended there. The remaining pages had no notes, no entries. It was as if he had released his soul, which he kept hidden with great fear, only once onto the pages of this notebook, and then retreated back into himself and remained silent for years. Dawn was breaking. To keep my promise, I put the notebook in my pocket and went to the patient's house. The agitation that met me when the door opened, the crying from inside, told me everything. I paused uncertainly. I didn't want to leave without seeing Raif Efendi one last time. But I felt I couldn't bear it—that I couldn't bear to see this man, whose most vivid moments of life I had witnessed, even lived through all night, suddenly reduced to a meaningless heap. I slipped quietly out into the street. Raif Efendi's death hadn't affected me that much. I felt not as if I had lost him, but as if I had finally found him.
Last night he had said to me, "We never got to sit and talk properly." I no longer thought that way. I had talked with him at length last night.
As he left this world, he was entering my life more vividly than any other human being ever could. From now on, I would always find him by my side.
I sat down at Raif Efendi's empty desk at the office, placed his black-covered notebook in front of me, and began to read it once more.