I went out to see to a few trifling matters that I needed to deal with before leaving Berlin, and to give notice at the pension. I was not a little surprised when I got home in the evening and found Maria all packed and ready to leave.
‘What is the point in wasting any time?’ she said. ‘I’ll set out straight away and leave you free to take care of everything before your journey. And then … oh, I don’t know … the long and the short of it is that I’ve decided to leave Berlin before you do … I don’t really know why …’
‘As you wish.’
We said nothing more about it. We had planned to think it over and then decide, but as it turned out we did not say a single word.
She left the following evening by train. We stayed at home all afternoon. Together we sat gazing out of the window. We took note of each other’s addresses. We agreed that with each letter I wrote, I would send her an envelope with my address on it, to be sure her letters reached me. She did not, after all, know how to write in Arabic script, nor did our postman in Havran know how to read the Latin alphabet.
For an hour, we indulged in idle, aimless conversation: how long the winter was lasting this year, how there was still snow on the ground in late February. It was all too clear that she wanted the time to pass quickly, while I clung to the absurd hope that we could stay sitting side by side for ever more.
Nevertheless it surprised me, how we clung to the mundane. Now and then we would exchange puzzled smiles. When it was finally time to leave for the station, we seemed almost relieved. From that point on time flew by with terrifying swiftness. She was adamant that I should not stay with her in the train compartment after we had stowed away her luggage, and that we wait together on the platform instead. There we spent another twenty minutes exchanging foolish smiles, but for me it seemed no longer than a second. A thousand thoughts were racing through my mind. There was no way to do them justice in such a short space of time, so I did not even try. But I’d had a whole day to speak my heart. So why this lukewarm farewell?
Only in the final minutes did Maria Puder seem to lose her composure. This reassured me. I suppose it would have saddened me greatly to see her go without showing any emotion at all. She kept taking my hand then letting it go: ‘It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?’ she kept saying. ‘Why do you need to go anyway?’
‘But you are the one leaving. I’m still here,’ I said.
She seemed not to hear me. She took my arm. ‘Raif … I’m going now.’
‘Yes … I know.’
It was time for the train to depart. A conductor shut the wagon door. Maria Puder leapt up onto the step, but then she leaned back towards me. Speaking very slowly, but lingering on every word she said: ‘I am leaving. But I will come whenever you call for me …’
At first I did not understand what she meant. She paused then added: ‘I will go anywhere!’
Now I understood. I wanted to take her hands and kiss them. But Maria was already inside and the train was chugging forward. Seeing her at the window, I hurried over, then stopped. I slowed down. Waving her goodbye, I cried: ‘I shall call for you … Have no doubt! I shall!’
She nodded with a smile. I could tell from her expression that she believed me.
I felt the sadness of a conversation left unfinished. Why had not we broached the subject yesterday? Even when we were stowing away her bags, we were still talking about the winter and then the joys of travelling. Why had we avoided all mention of the matters most dear to us? But perhaps it was better this way. What would come of all those words? Would we not have come to the same conclusion? Maria had found the best way … of that I was certain … an offer and an affirmation … brief, spontaneous and indisputable! There could not have been a sweeter parting. All those passionate words I’d kept hidden inside me – how bland they seemed to me now, and how feeble …
I was beginning to understand why she had left before me. She would have found Berlin most irksome, had I left first. Certainly I did, even as I rushed around blindly seeing to tickets and itineraries, visas and passports. How strange I felt, every time I happened onto a street down which we had walked together! Even though there was nothing to be sad about. Once I had been back in Turkey long enough to arrange my affairs, I would send for her. As simple as that … I gave my daydreams free rein. I could already see the beautiful villa I would build for us just outside Havran, and the hills and forests we would visit together.
Four days later I returned to Turkey, passing through Poland and Romania. There is nothing of note to say about that journey and my subsequent years in Turkey … Only after I had boarded the ship in Constanţa did I begin to reflect on the events that pulled me back to Turkey. The truth finally sank in: my father had died. It shamed me deeply to know it had taken me this long. There was, in fact, no reason for me to feel any genuine affection for him; he had always been a stranger to me. Had someone asked me if my father had been a good man, I would have been at a loss for words. For I had never been close enough to know how good or bad he was. It was hard even to think of him as a real person: for me he had always been an abstract idea. A father. A bald man with a round grey beard who came home every evening in frowning silence. Who saw no reason why he should pay the slightest attention to his children, or to our mother. How different he was from the fathers I saw in the Havuzlu coffee house, drinking ayran as they laughed and cursed over their backgammon boards … How much I would have liked to have had a father like that … If ever he saw me in the company of such fathers, he would glower and shout: ‘What are you doing here? Go over to that stove and get yourself a hot sherbet. Then go straight back to our neighbourhood and play there!’
Even when I was older and back from the army, he treated me the same. The more I grew in my own eyes, the smaller I was in his. If I happened to share my thoughts with him, he would look away in contempt. If in later years he indulged me in my whims and did not deign to argue with me, it was further proof of his low opinion.
There was, nevertheless, nothing in my mind that could sully his memory. What I felt most keenly was not his empty presence, but his absence. The closer I came to Havran, the greater my sadness became. It was difficult to imagine our home or our town without him.
There is no need for me to go on about this. Indeed, I would rather not speak of the ten years that followed, but I should still allow for at least a few pages about this, the emptiest chapter of my life, if only to clarify certain matters. I did not return to a warm welcome. My brothers-in-law treated me with derision, my sisters treated me like a stranger, and my mother was more miserable than ever. The house was empty, my mother having moved in with my eldest uncle. As I was not offered a place there, I found myself living alone in our enormous house with an elderly family retainer. When I looked into taking over my father’s business, I was informed that his estate had been divided up before his death. And I could not get a clear answer from my brothers-in-law about what had been left to me. There was no talk of the two soap factories; but over time I learned that one had been sold by my father some time ago and the other by my brothers-in-law. No doubt this was because my father had run through all the money and gold that he had generally been thought to be hoarding. My mother knew none of this. When I asked, she said: ‘How would I know, my son? We can only conclude that your late father left this world without telling us where he buried it. Your brothers-in-law never left his side in his final days … Did he know that he was dying? No doubt in his last breath he told them where he had buried everything … What should we do now? We could at least speak to the treasure finder … they know everything.’
And the truth was that my mother visited every treasure finder in or near Havran. Following their advice, we dug around the bases of nearly every olive tree and wall in the area. What little money she had left, she spent on this enterprise. My sisters went out with the treasure finders too, but they were reluctant to spend any of their own money; and I noticed that my brothers-in-law found our endless excavations quit
e hilarious.
The harvest season had come and gone, so there was no income from the olive groves. I managed to procure a small sum by selling some of their future crops in advance. My goal was to get through the summer, and then, with the arrival of the olive season in the autumn, to do everything in my power to set matters straight, after which I would send for Maria Puder at once.
We wrote to each other frequently after my return to Turkey. Those hours I spent reading or responding to her letters offered me some relief from the tedious problems that defined my life during the muddy spring and suffocating summer that followed. I had been home for a month when Maria returned to Berlin with her mother. I sent my letters to the post office in Potsdam Square and she picked them up there. In the middle of the summer I received an odd letter from her. She told me that she had some very good news for me, but that she would only be able to tell me in person when she came to Turkey. (By then I’d told her that I’d be in a position to send for her in the autumn.) And though I asked, in each subsequent letter, what her good news might be, she never told me. She just said it would have to wait until she joined me.
So, yes, I waited – not just until the autumn. I waited for ten long years … only then did those glad tidings reach me … by which I mean, only last night … but let me leave that for now. Let me tell the story as it unfolded.
I spent that summer with my boots on, riding on horseback over hills and mountains, inspecting my olive groves. How shocking it was to know that my father had left me the driest, most inhospitable and inaccessible plots of land. Whereas the olive groves on the fertile plains near our town – where every tree provided more than half a sack of olives – he’d left to my older sisters, or rather, my brothers-in-law. Most of my own olive trees had not been pruned or cleaned for years and had begun to grow wild, and soon enough it was clear to me that, in my father’s time, no one had bothered to go up and harvest them.
Reflecting on my father’s illness, my sisters’ nervousness and my mother’s anguish, I could only conclude that some mischief had gone on in my absence. Yet I kept hoping that by continuing to work as hard as I could, I would put my own affairs right, and every letter from Maria bolstered up my courage and optimism.
At the beginning of October, when the olives were ripening and I began to think it might be time to call for my beloved, the letters suddenly stopped. I’d fixed up the house by then, ordering new furniture from Istanbul, along with a bathtub, for which I’d retiled the old washroom, all much to the shock and disdain of the people of Havran and my family in particular.
I had not seen fit to disclose my reasons, so they dismissed me as some sort of fop, shallowly aping European fashions. Indeed, it was sheer madness for a man in my tenuous position to take the small sum he had scraped together from lenders and the olive harvest and spend it on mirrored bathroom cupboards. I bore their accusations with a bitter smile. They could not, after all, begin to understand why I was doing all this. And neither did I feel the slightest compulsion to offer an explanation.
But nearly twenty days had passed without a letter from Maria and I’d fallen prey to a terrible foreboding. Prone as I was to suspicion and paranoia, I imagined a thousand possible reasons for her silence. I kept writing to her – letter after letter. Receiving no answer I slipped into the deepest despair. Even before her letters had stopped altogether, they’d been coming less frequently. She’d been writing less and, it seemed, with more difficulty … I brought out all her letters and read them all again. In recent months, there’d been veiled, even evasive, passages that were utterly unlike what I had come to expect from a woman as open as she: it was almost as if she had something to hide, something for which she had not been prepared. So much so that I began to ask myself if she really wanted me to call for her, or if – dreading the prospect of having to break a promise – she feared that I might do so. By now I was reading whole volumes into each line, driven to distraction by every joke and unfinished thought.
My letters achieved nothing. My worst fears came true.
I did not hear from Maria Puder again. I did not even hear her name … until yesterday … But I am jumping ahead … A month later, my last letter to her came back with a stamp saying ‘unclaimed, return to sender’. That was when I lost all hope. Even now it still shocks me, to remember how much I changed over the next few days. I could not move, or see, or feel, or think: what had given me strength to live had been swept away, leaving only my shadow.
Now I bore no resemblance whatsoever to the man I had been in the early days of the new year. I had thought myself bereft, but that was nothing in comparison to the desolation that had now overtaken me. For then I’d had a dream to cherish – the hope that we might return to intimacy, the determination to change her mind. But now I was utterly ravaged. The vast distance between us meant that there was nothing I could do. Shutting myself up at home, I wandered from one room to the next, reading her letters and the letters that had been returned to me, lingering over points I’d failed to note until now, and smiling bitterly.
I gave up on work, and on life in general. There was indeed nothing left for me. I stopped shaking the olive trees, stopped taking their fruit to the factory to be pressed into oil. Sometimes I would pull on my boots and head out into the countryside, where I could wander without fear of seeing another human face; returning late at night, I would stretch out on a divan for a few hours’ sleep. Waking in the morning to a terrible ache in my heart, I would wonder why I was still alive.
And so it was that I slipped back into the life I’d led before meeting Maria Puder: my days were just as empty and aimless as before, but also more painful. Because there was a difference: I’d believed, in my ignorance, that there was nothing more to life than this. I was suffering now because I knew that there was another way to live. I no longer took any notice of my surroundings. The joys of life were for ever closed to me.
For a brief while, a woman had pulled me out of listless lethargy; she had taught me that I was a man, or rather, a human being; she had shown me that the world was not as absurd as I had previously thought and that I had the capacity for joy. But from the moment we lost touch, I lost the benefit of her influence. I went back to my old ways. Now I understood just how desperately I needed her. I was not the sort of man who could walk through life alone. I needed her at my side. I could not live without her support. Yet somehow I carried on living … as you can see … If this can be called living, then that is what I did …
I never heard from Maria again. I did write to the pension, but the manageress wrote back to inform me that Frau van Tiedemann was no longer in residence and had left no forwarding address. Who else could I have asked? In one of her letters Maria had told me that she and her mother had moved house after returning from Prague. But I did not have the address. When I thought about how few people I’d come to know during my two years in Germany, I was truly shocked. I had never strayed far from Berlin, but I’d explored its every avenue and cul de sac. I’d been to every museum, gallery, botanical garden, forest, lake and zoo. Yet in a city of millions I had only spoken to a handful of people and only really come to know one.
Perhaps she’d been all I needed. I suppose that is what any of us need: one single person. But what if that person wasn’t really there? What if it all turned out to be a dream, a chimera, a delusion? I had lost the power to hope, and with it the power to believe. My distrust of others was so great, and so bitter, that I sometimes scared even myself. Everyone I met, I met with hostility. Everyone I encountered, I assumed to be full of malice. This attitude did not soften with the passage of time: as year followed year, it became more pronounced. The mistrust I felt for people had turned into spite. I shunned people who tried to get close to me. I was most fearful of those I felt were closest to me, or who I feared might grow closer. ‘Not after what she did to me …’ I’d say to myself. But what had she done? I didn’t know; and this was why my imagination dwelt on the gravest and most dreadful possibilit
ies. That was just the way things were in this world … and what was the point of holding to a spontaneous promise made at the moment of parting? Far better to sever ties there and then, without dispute. My letters had waited, uncollected, at the post office … never to be answered … and now everything I’d believed in was gone. Who could say what new adventure had swept her off her feet? Who could know what greater and more intimate happiness she’d discovered in the arms of another? To leave all that, simply because she’d made a promise to win the heart of a naive boy, to follow him blindly into a life she knew nothing about … In the end, her good sense had prevailed.
Yet why, despite all my careful thought, was I unable to adjust to my new circumstances? Why did I recoil from any new opportunity that came my way? Why was it that when someone tried to get close to me, my first thought was that they might hurt me? There were occasions when I forgot myself and let someone come closer. But then I’d hear that doom-laden voice again, to set me straight: ‘Don’t forget, don’t forget! Never forget that she was even closer … but even so, she left …’ If ever anyone drew close enough to raise my hopes, I was quick to dampen them down: ‘No, no, she was much, much closer … and now there is nothing between us at all … Yes, that’s how things turned out!’ To believe or not to believe … every day – every moment of the day – that was the question that terrorized me. No matter how hard I tried, I remained in its grip … I got married … Even on our wedding day, I knew that my wife was more distant from me than anyone else in the world. We had children … I loved them, always knowing that they would never restore to me what I’d lost …
I was never interested in any of the jobs I took. I worked like a machine, without knowing what I was doing. I allowed myself to be cheated and from this I took a strange sort of pleasure. My brothers-in-law made a fool of me and I did not mind. What property I had left went towards the wedding expenses and my debts. The olive groves were of little value. They were offered for even less to buyers wealthy enough to invest in derelict property. But there was not a single buyer willing to pay half a lira for a stump of a tree that only produced seven or eight liras’ worth of a harvest per year. Only to save me from dire straits and to keep the family wealth intact, my brothers-in-law paid off my debts and bought my olive groves. I had nothing left but a house with fourteen rooms that was in a state of ruin and a few sticks of furniture. My wife’s father was still alive and working as a civil servant in Balıkesir; with his help I was able to secure a position at a firm in the provincial capital. I stayed there for many years. As my family responsibilities grew, I became steadily more detached from the world; for I had utterly lost the will to connect. Then my father-in-law passed away and I was left with my wife’s brothers and sisters. I was unable to support them all on my forty-lira wage. So a distant relative of my wife’s arranged a job for me at a firm in Ankara, where I am still working today. Shy though I was, there was hope that I’d advance quickly in this firm, on account of knowing a foreign language. But nothing of the sort happened. No matter where I was, I failed to make my presence felt. Opportunities abounded. Many different people gave me a fleeting hope that I might start my life over, drawing on my heart’s abundant reserves. But I just could not shake off my cynicism. There was only one person I’d ever believed in. I’d believed in her so deeply that – once deceived – I lost the will ever to believe in anyone again. I felt no anger towards her. I could not begrudge or resent her, or even think ill of her. Rather, I begrudged and resented everyone in the world; because for me she was the symbol of humanity. As the years rolled by and my bond to her persisted, I felt even more aggrieved. She must have long since forgotten about me. Who could say where she was living now, or with whom she spent her time? In the evenings, as I listened to my children’s wailing and my in-laws’ squabbles, and my wife’s slippers as they padded across the kitchen, and the clatter of plates as she saw to the washing up, I’d close my eyes and imagine Maria Puder somewhere. Perhaps, at this moment, she was walking through the botanical gardens with a like-minded friend, admiring the trees’ red leaves. Perhaps she and this like-minded friend were strolling through a sombre gallery, admiring the works of great masters, in the light of the setting sun. One evening I stopped off at the local shop to pick up a few things. As I was stepping outside, I heard the overture of Weber’s Oberon playing on the radio of a young bachelor who lived across from us. I nearly dropped my shopping. This was one of the operas I’d seen with Maria. She’d been especially fond of Weber; when we were out strolling, she’d always whistle this same overture. I felt such a fresh longing for her at that moment that we might have parted only yesterday. The pain of losing something precious – be it earthly happiness or material wealth – can be forgotten over time. But our missed opportunities never leave us, and every time they come back to haunt us, we ache. Or perhaps what haunts us is that nagging thought that things might have turned out differently. Because without that thought, we would put it down to fate and accept it.