The first few weeks passed with learning just enough language to get by and wandering the city in a daze. The initial bewilderment didn’t last long. After all, this was just a city. Streets a little wider, much cleaner, the people blonder. But nothing to make you drop dead from amazement. The Europe I’d built in my mind was something else entirely—a place packed with wonders. When I thought about it, I couldn’t even say what that imagined Europe was like or what exactly this city lacked in comparison. I hadn’t yet grasped that life never matches the marvels we conjure in our heads.
Deciding I couldn’t start any real work without the language, I began taking lessons from an old officer who’d been in Turkey during the Great War and had picked up some Turkish. The lady who ran the pension also devoted her free time to chattering with me and helping out. The other guests considered it a rare opportunity to befriend a Turk and pestered me with absurd questions. The crowd that gathered around the dinner table each evening was quite colorful. Among them, I particularly befriended Frau van Tiedemann, a Dutch widow; Herr Camera, a Portuguese merchant who brought oranges to Berlin from the Canary Islands; and old Herr Döppke. The latter had done business in Germany’s colony of Cameroon, but after the armistice he’d abandoned everything and taken refuge back home. With whatever money he’d managed to save, he lived modestly, spending his days attending political meetings—which were plentiful in Berlin at the time—and his evenings recounting his impressions. He often brought along newly discharged, jobless German officers, and they’d argue for hours. From what I could half-understand, they believed Germany’s salvation lay in a man of iron will like Bismarck taking power and immediately rearming to right the wrongs through a second war.
Sometimes a guest would leave, and another would promptly take the vacated room. But over time I grew accustomed to the constant changes, the perpetually lit red-shaded lamp in the dim dining room, the ever-present smell of various cabbages, the political quarrels of my tablemates. I even started getting bored with them—especially the quarrels. Everyone had their own idea for saving Germany. But not one of those ideas was actually about Germany; each was tied to personal grievances. An old woman who’d lost her fortune through currency inflation blamed the officers. The officers blamed the striking workers and the soldiers who refused to keep fighting. The colonial trader cursed the emperor for starting a war out of nowhere. Even the maid who tidied my room in the mornings tried to talk politics with me, immediately picking up her newspaper in her free time. She too had fervent opinions, and when discussing them her face flushed completely red, she clenched her fist, and shook it in the air.
I seemed to have forgotten why I’d come to Germany in the first place. Only when my father’s letters arrived did I remember the soap-making business. I’d write back, saying I was still busy learning the language and would soon apply to some related establishment—this way I consoled both him and myself. My days blurred into identical copies of one another. I’d already toured the entire city, the zoo, the museums. The fact that this million-strong metropolis had exhausted itself within a few months almost drove me to despair. “So this is Europe,” I’d mutter to myself. “What’s so special about it?” And I concluded that life was essentially a very boring affair. Most afternoons I’d stroll down the main avenues amidst the crowds, watching the women returning home with the serious expressions of people who’d accomplished very important things, or hanging on men’s arms with dreamy eyes, scattering smiles all around, and the men who still carried a military step in their walk.
To avoid lying outright to my father, I applied to a luxury soap company with the help of a few Turkish friends. The German employees of the firm—which belonged to a group from Sweden—received me warmly, perhaps out of lingering wartime camaraderie, but they hesitated to show me the deeper aspects of the trade, aspects I’d only learned superficially at our soap factory in Havran, probably treating them as company secrets.
Maybe they sensed I wasn’t particularly keen on the work and chose not to waste their time. Gradually I stopped going to the factory. They never asked where I’d been. My father’s letters grew further apart. And I kept on living in Berlin, without once wondering what I was doing there or why I’d come.
Three evenings a week I took German lessons from the old officer. During the day I gazed at paintings in museums and newly opened galleries, and I could smell the cabbage a hundred steps before reaching the pension. But after the first few months passed, I started feeling less bored. Slowly I tried reading books, and over time I began to enjoy it more. Before long it turned into something like an obsession. I’d lie face down on my bed, open a book in front of me, place the old, thick dictionary by my side, and stay like that for hours. Often I couldn’t even bear to look up words; I’d guess the meanings from context. A whole new world seemed to open before my eyes. This time, what I was reading wasn’t like the translated or original books of my childhood and early youth—stories that only talked about heroes, extraordinary people, and unheard-of adventures. In nearly all of them I found pieces of myself, of my surroundings, of things I’d seen and heard. I suddenly remembered things I’d lived through but never understood or noticed, and I thought I was now giving them their true meanings. The ones that affected me most were the Russian writers. I’d read Turgenev’s enormous stories all the way through in a single sitting. One of them in particular shook me for days. The heroine of that story—called Klara Milič—falls in love with a rather naive student, but without saying a word to anyone, eaten up by shame over loving such a fool, she becomes the victim of her terrible passion. For some reason I found myself very close to that girl. I identified with her inability to speak her feelings, with the way she hid her strongest, deepest, most beautiful aspects behind a ferocious jealousy and distrust.
The old masters in the museums also gave me a reason to live without boredom. I’d spend hours looking at a painting in the National Gallery and then carry that face or landscape in my mind for days afterward.
Nearly a year had passed since I’d come to Germany. One day—I remember it very clearly—on a rainy, dark October day, while flipping through newspapers, my eye caught a review of an exhibition by new painters. I didn’t understand much about these modernists. Maybe the excessive pretension in their work, their urge to stand out and show off, went against my temperament, and that’s why I didn’t like them... So much so that I didn’t even read the article. But a few hours later, while taking one of my usual aimless walks through the streets, I realized I was standing in front of the building where the reviewed exhibition was being held. I had nothing important to do. I obeyed chance and went inside, and for a long time I wandered past the many paintings of various sizes on the walls, looking at them with indifferent eyes.
Most of those paintings made you want to smile: angular knees and shoulders; disproportioned heads and breasts; landscapes that tried to render nature in harsh colors as if cut from construction paper. Crystal vases as shapeless as broken brick fragments, flowers as lifeless as if they’d been pressed between book pages for years, and finally, terrifying portraits that looked like they’d been pulled from a criminal album... But still, it was entertaining. Perhaps one ought to resent these people who tried to accomplish such great things with so little effort. But when I thought they almost seemed to accept—with a morbid sort of pleasure—the punishment of being misunderstood and laughed at, all I could feel was pity.
I suddenly stopped in front of a wall near the door of the large hall. I can’t describe what I felt at that moment, especially after so many years. I only remember standing there, rooted to the spot, in front of a woman’s portrait in a fur coat. People who were looking at the paintings and passing by bumped into me, pushing me left and right, but I couldn’t move from where I was. What was there in that portrait? I know I can’t explain it. Only that it had a strange expression I’d never seen in any woman before—a little wild, a little proud, and very powerful. Even though I knew from the very first moment that I’d never seen this face or anything like it anywhere, ever, a feeling came over me that we were somehow acquainted. This pale face, these black eyebrows and the black eyes beneath them, this dark chestnut hair, and above all this expression that combined innocence with will, infinite melancholy with a strong personality—it could never be foreign to me. I recognized this woman from the books I’d read since I was seven, from the imaginary worlds I’d built since I was five. In her there were pieces of Halit Ziya’s Nihal, of Vecihi Bey’s Mehcure, of Chevalier Buridan’s lover, of the Cleopatra I’d read about in history books, and even of Amine Hatun, the mother of Muhammad, as I’d imagined her while listening to the mevlut. She was a synthesis, a fusion of all the women in my imagination. Wrapped in a wildcat fur coat, there was a small patch of neck whose dull white showed through the shadow, and above it, an oval human face turned slightly to the left. Her black eyes looked down as if lost in deep, unfathomable thoughts, almost searching with a last hope for something she knew she wouldn’t find. Yet the sadness in her gaze was mixed with a trace of disdain. As if she were saying, “Yes, I won’t find what I’m looking for... but so what?” This disdain was fully visible on her lips, which were slightly full, the lower one a little plumper. Her eyelids were slightly swollen. Her eyebrows were neither very thick nor very thin, but rather short; her dark chestnut hair framed her angular, fairly wide forehead and fell downward, mingling with the wildcat’s fur. Her chin curved slightly forward and was somewhat pointed. She had a long, slender nose with slightly fleshy wings.
My hands were almost trembling as I flipped through the catalog. I hoped to find some details about this painting. Toward the end, at the bottom of the page, aligned with the painting’s number, I read three words: Maria Puder, Selbstporträt. Nothing else. It seemed the artist had only one work in the exhibition—her own portrait. I was a little pleased by that. I feared that other paintings by the woman who’d created this marvelous image might not affect me as deeply, or might even diminish my first impression. I stayed inside until late. Every now and then I’d walk around, looking at other paintings with unseeing eyes, then quickly return to the same spot and gaze for a long time. Each time I felt like I could see new expressions on her face, a life that gradually revealed itself. I imagined the downward-looking eyes were secretly studying me, the lips moving slightly.
No one was left in the hall. A tall man standing by the door was apparently waiting for me. I pulled myself together quickly and went outside. A light rain was drizzling. Unlike every other evening, I went straight back to the pension without lingering on the streets. I was burning with the desire to eat my meal quickly, retreat to my room, and bring that face before my eyes all alone. I didn’t speak at the table. The pension owner, Frau Heppner, said, “Where did you go today?”
“Nowhere... I walked around, then I visited an exhibition of modern painters,” I replied.
Everyone in the dining room immediately started talking about modern art. I quietly went to my room.
As I was undressing, a newspaper fell from my jacket pocket to the floor. I picked it up and was about to put it on the table when my heart suddenly began to race. It was the paper I’d bought that morning—the one I’d been reading in a café when I noticed the article about the exhibition. I tore through the pages to find out what it said about that painting and its artist. I was amazed at my own agitation—a slow, unexcitable man like me. I scanned the article from the beginning. About halfway through, my eyes froze on the words I’d seen in the catalog: Maria Puder...
The article talked at some length about this young artist showing her work for the first time in an exhibition. It said the woman painter—who, it seemed, preferred to follow the path of the classics—possessed a surprisingly great expressive ability, and that she lacked the tendency to “beautify” or “deliberately uglify” common among most artists who paint their own portraits. After a lot of technical discussion, it claimed that, by a strange coincidence, the woman in the painting, in her pose and the expression on her face, bore a startling resemblance to Andrea del Sarto’s depiction of the Virgin Mary in his Madonna delle Arpie. With a half-joking tone, the article wished success to this “Madonna in the Fur Coat” and then moved on to another artist.
The next day, my first task was to go to a shop that sold reproductions of famous paintings and look for the Arpie Madonna. I found it inside a large album of Sarto’s works. The reproduction was quite poorly printed and didn’t show much, but the article’s author was right: This Madonna—sitting on a raised seat with the holy child in her lap, her eyes fixed on the ground as if she didn’t notice the bearded man on her right or the young man on her left—had exactly the same face, the same tilt of the head, and the same expression of melancholy and resentment in her eyes and lips as the painting I’d seen the day before. Since they sold this page of the album separately, I bought it immediately and returned to my room. When I looked carefully, I decided this painting possessed great artistic distinction. It was the first time I’d seen such a Madonna. In all the depictions of the Virgin I’d ever come across, there was an expression of innocence that was emphasized a little too much, even taken to the point of meaninglessness; they resembled little children who, looking at the baby in their arms, seem to say, “See what God the Father has given me!” or servant girls who stare blankly at the children they’ve conceived from some man whose name they can’t utter, smiling in bewilderment. But the Mary in Sarto’s painting was a woman who had learned to think, who had formed her judgments about life and had begun to look down on the world. She wasn’t looking at the saints standing on either side as if in worship, not at the Messiah in her lap, not even at the sky—she was looking at the ground, and she was certainly seeing something.
I set the reproduction down on the table. Closing my eyes, I thought of the painting at the exhibition. Only at that moment did it occur to me that the person depicted there actually existed in real life. After all, since the artist had painted her own portrait, this marvelous woman was walking among us, turning her black, deep eyes to the ground or toward whoever stood before her, opening her mouth with its slightly larger lower lip to speak—in short, she was alive. It might be possible to see her somewhere... When I thought of this possibility, my first feeling was a great fear. For a man like me, who’d never had any adventure in his life, encountering such a woman for the first time would be truly terrifying.