At noon, as I was heading out for lunch, I noticed he hadn’t moved from his seat. He opened one of the desk drawers and took out a paper-wrapped loaf of bread and a small lunch box. “Enjoy your meal,” I said, and left the room.
We sat facing each other in the same office for days, yet we barely exchanged a word. I’d gotten to know many of the clerks from other departments. Some evenings we’d leave together and even started playing backgammon at a coffeehouse. From them I learned that Raif Efendi was one of the oldest employees in the firm. Before this company was even founded, he’d worked as a translator for the bank we were now attached to. No one could remember when he’d first arrived. They said he had a fairly large family to support and barely managed on his salary. When I asked why the company—which threw money around so freely—hadn’t raised his pay despite his seniority, the younger clerks laughed and said, “Because he’s a lazy ox. It’s even doubtful he knows any language properly.” Later I found out that he knew German extremely well, and that his translations were accurate and well crafted. He could easily translate a letter about the specifications of ash and fir timber arriving via the Port of Sušak in Yugoslavia, or about the operation of tie-boring machines and their spare parts. The manager sent his Turkish-to-German translations of specifications and contracts to their destinations without a moment’s hesitation. In his spare time, I’d seen him open his desk drawer and, without taking the book out, read it dreamily. One day I asked, “What’s that, Raif Efendi?” He blushed as if I’d caught him doing something wrong, stammered, “Nothing... a German novel,” and quickly shut the drawer. Yet no one in the office believed he knew any foreign language. Perhaps they were right, because nothing in his manner suggested a man who knew languages. No one had ever heard him utter a foreign word or mention that he knew a language. No foreign newspapers or magazines were ever seen in his hands or pockets. In short, he had none of the air of those people who, with every fiber of their being, seem to shout, “We know French!” The fact that he never asked for a raise based on his knowledge, or looked for other better-paying jobs, only reinforced that impression.
He arrived exactly on time every morning, ate his lunch in his office, and in the evenings did a few small errands then went straight home. Despite my repeated invitations, he refused to come to the coffeehouse. “They’re waiting for me at home,” he said. I thought, A happy family man, eager to get back to his wife and children. Later I saw that wasn’t the case at all, but I’ll talk about that further on. His steady diligence didn’t stop the others from treating him with contempt. If our Hamdi found a tiny typing error in Raif Efendi’s translations, he’d immediately summon the poor man, sometimes even come into our office to scold him. My colleague—who was always more cautious around the other clerks, each of whom had some kind of pull, and who was afraid of a bad reaction from them—could easily treat Raif Efendi this way because he knew Raif Efendi would never talk back. He’d turn crimson and scream loud enough for the whole building to hear over a translation that was a few hours late. It was easy to understand: What is sweeter or more intoxicating than testing one’s power and authority over a fellow human being? Especially when that opportunity only presents itself against certain people, due to a set of fine calculations.
Raif Efendi occasionally fell ill and didn’t come to the office. Usually it was nothing serious, just a cold. But he’d had pneumonia years ago, he said, and that had made him overly cautious. At the first sign of a sniffle, he’d shut himself indoors. When he went out, he wore layer upon layer of wool undershirts; in the office he never allowed the windows to be opened; and in the evenings he would wrap his neck and ears in scarves and wouldn’t leave until he’d fully turned up the collar of his thick, slightly worn coat. Even when he was sick, he didn’t neglect his work. The documents to be translated were sent to his home with an office boy, and collected a few hours later. Despite this, the manager and our Hamdi treated him with an attitude that seemed to say, “Look, we’re not firing you even though you’re such a whining, sickly creature.” They didn’t hesitate to throw it in his face. Every time he came back after an absence of a few days, they welcomed him with sarcastic well-wishes: “Well? Hopefully it’s over with, right?”
By then, I too had started to get tired of Raif Efendi. I didn’t spend much time sitting in the office anyway. I was always out with a briefcase, visiting banks and government offices whose orders we handled. Occasionally I’d sit down at my desk to organize those papers and give explanations to the manager or his assistant. Still, the man sitting opposite me—motionless enough to make you doubt he was alive, translating or reading his “German novel” from the desk drawer—had convinced me that he really was a meaningless and boring creature. I thought that anyone with anything inside him couldn’t resist the urge to express it. I assumed that inside this silent, indifferent person there was a life not much different from that of a plant: he came here like a machine, did his work, read some books out of a habit I couldn’t understand, and in the evenings did his shopping and went home. Probably, in that endless string of identical days and even years, his illnesses were the only variation. According to what my colleagues told me, he had lived like this for as long as anyone could remember. No one had ever seen him get excited about anything. He responded to the most unfair, most unjust accusations from his superiors with the same calm, expressionless look. When he gave his translations to the typists and when he collected them, he always thanked them and made requests with that same meaningless smile.
One day, Hamdi came all the way to our office because a translation was late—entirely because the typists hadn’t paid attention to Raif Efendi—and shouted quite harshly:
“How much longer are we supposed to wait? I told you I have urgent work and I’m leaving. You still haven’t brought me the translation of the letter from the Hungarian company!”
The other man quickly straightened up from his chair.
“I finished it, sir! The ladies just couldn’t get it typed. They were given other work!”
“Didn’t I tell you this job was more urgent than anything else?”
“Yes, sir, I told them that too.”
Hamdi shouted even louder: “Instead of answering me back, do the work assigned to you!”
He slammed the door and left. Raif Efendi went out after him to plead with the typists again.
During that whole pointless scene, I thought about Hamdi, who hadn’t even deigned to glance at me. At that moment, the German translator came back in, took his seat, and bowed his head. His face wore that unwavering calm that could either amaze or infuriate you. He picked up a pencil and started doodling on a piece of paper. He wasn’t writing; he was drawing lines. But this wasn’t the restless fidgeting of a nervous person. I thought I could even see, just beneath his yellow mustache at the corner of his mouth, a self-assured smile appearing. His hand moved slowly across the paper, and every so often he would stop, squint, and look at what he’d done. I could tell from that faint smile spreading across his face that he was pleased with what he saw. Finally he put the pencil aside and gazed at the paper for a long time. I was staring at him without looking away. I was startled to see a completely new expression appear on his face: he almost looked like he was pitying someone. I was too curious to sit still. Just as I was about to get up, he stood and went back to the typists’ room. I leaped up, crossed to his desk in one stride, and picked up the paper he’d been drawing on. When I glanced at it, I froze in astonishment.
On that scrap of paper, no bigger than the palm of a hand, I saw Hamdi. There he was, in all his identity, captured in just a few simple but extraordinarily skillful lines. I doubt others would have recognized the likeness; in fact, if you examined each detail separately, maybe nothing matched. But for anyone who had seen how he’d been shouting his head off in the middle of the room just a little while ago, it was unmistakable. That mouth, stretched into a rectangle with a brutish rage and an indescribable vulgarity; those eyes, reduced to slits that seemed to want to pierce what they looked at but were instead drowned in helplessness; that nose, whose wings were exaggeratedly wide, spreading almost to the cheeks and giving the face an even wilder expression... Yes, this was the picture of Hamdi as he had stood there a few minutes earlier—or rather, the picture of his soul. But that wasn’t the real reason for my amazement. Ever since I’d joined the company—for months now—I had been making all sorts of contradictory judgments about Hamdi. Sometimes I tried to excuse him, often I despised him. I would confuse his true personality with the persona his current position gave him, then try to separate the two and only get more tangled up. And here, the Hamdi that Raif Efendi had revealed with a few lines was the man I had long wanted to see but never could. Despite all the primitive, savage expression on his face, there was something pitiable about him. Cruelty and wretchedness had never been shown together so clearly. It was as if I were truly meeting my colleague of ten years for the first time.
At the same time, this drawing suddenly explained Raif Efendi to me as well. Now I understood perfectly his unshakeable calm, his strange shyness in his dealings with people. How could a man who knew his surroundings so well, who could see so sharply and clearly into the heart of the person opposite him, ever get excited or angry at anyone? What else could such a man do but stand like stone before someone floundering in all his pettiness? All our emotions—our bitterness, our disappointments, our anger—arise from the unexpected, misunderstood aspects of what happens to us. Is it possible to shake a man who is prepared for everything and knows what to expect from anyone?
Raif Efendi had once again become a source of curiosity for me. Despite the light that had shone on him a moment ago, I sensed there were still many contradictions in my mind about him. The accuracy of the lines in the drawing I held showed that it wasn’t the work of a mere hobbyist. The person who made it must have spent years dealing with art. There was not just an eye that truly saw what it looked at, but also a skill that knew how to capture what it saw in all its subtlety.
The door opened. I wanted to quickly put the paper back on the desk, but I was too late. Raif Efendi approached me with the translation of the letter from the Hungarian company, and I said, as if apologizing, “What a beautiful drawing...”
I had expected him to be startled, to be afraid I’d revealed his secret. But that wasn’t the case at all. With his usual distant, absent-minded smile, he took the paper from my hand. “I dabbled in drawing for a while, years ago,” he said. “Sometimes, just out of habit, I scribble things... You see, meaningless things... Just to kill time...”
He crumpled the paper in his palm and threw it into the wastebasket.
“The typist ladies typed it very quickly,” he muttered. “There are probably mistakes, but if I stop to read it over, I’ll just make Hamdi Bey angrier... And he’s right, after all... I’d better just give it to him...”
He went out again. I followed him with my eyes. “He’s right, he’s right!” I muttered to myself.
After that, everything about Raif Efendi—even his truly meaningless and trivial actions—began to arouse my curiosity. I tried to take advantage of every opportunity to talk to him, to learn something about his real identity. He seemed not to notice my increased friendliness. He maintained his polite manner, but always kept a certain distance. No matter how much our outward friendship advanced, his inner self remained closed to me. Even after I saw his family and his position within it up close, my curiosity only grew. Each step I took to get closer presented me with new enigmas.
I went to his house for the first time during one of his usual illnesses. Hamdi wanted to send a document that needed to be translated by tomorrow with the office boy.
“Give it to me,” I said. “I’ll pay him a visit at the same time.”
“Fine... Go see what’s wrong with him. It’s been too long this time.”
Indeed, his illness had lasted a bit longer than usual. He hadn’t come to the office for over a week. One of the office boys described where his house was in the İsmetpaşa neighborhood. It was the middle of winter. I started walking through streets that grew dark early. I passed through narrow neighborhoods with uneven sidewalks, nothing like the asphalt-paved roads of Ankara. There were slopes and descents one after another. At the end of a long road, almost where the city ended, I turned left and went into the coffeehouse on the corner to ask for the house: a two-story yellow building standing alone among empty lots piled with stones and sand. I knew Raif Efendi lived on the ground floor. I rang the bell. A girl about twelve years old opened the door. When I asked for her father, she made a face, pursed her lips in an affected manner, and said, “Come in!”
The inside of the house was nothing like I had imagined. In the hall, which was apparently used as a dining room, there was a large folding table and, in the corner, a sideboard filled with crystal sets. A beautiful Sivas rug lay on the floor, and the smell of food wafted from the kitchen next door. The girl first took me into the guest room. The furniture there was also nice, even expensive. Red velvet armchairs, low walnut smoking tables, and a huge radio filled the room. Everywhere—on the tables and on the backs of the sofas—there were finely embroidered cream-colored lace doilies. On the walls hung wedding pictures of brides and grooms facing each other, and a plaque with the “Âmentü” written in the shape of a ship.
A few minutes later, the little girl brought coffee. Her face still wore that spoiled expression that seemed to belittle me and mock me. As she took the cup from my hand, she said, “My father is unwell, sir, he can’t get out of bed. Please go on in.” As she said this, her eyebrows and eyes seemed to indicate that I didn’t deserve such polite treatment.
When I entered the room where Raif Efendi was lying, I was even more astonished. This room looked nothing like the rest of the house. It was a small room with a row of white beds lined up side by side, like a boarding school dormitory or a hospital ward. Raif Efendi was lying in one of these beds, half-sitting up under white covers, trying to greet me from behind his glasses. I looked for a chair to sit on. The two chairs in the room were piled with wool cardigans, women’s stockings, and a few silk dresses that had been taken off and tossed aside. In one corner, a cheap cherry-red wardrobe stood with its door half open, inside which clothes, suits, and knotted bundles were hung haphazardly. An astonishing disorder reigned in the room. On the nightstand by Raif Efendi’s head, on a tin tray, sat a dirty soup bowl left over from lunch, a small pitcher with its lid off, and next to them a number of bottles and tubes of medicine.