Kürk Mantolu Madonna

  I never received much attention from my wife or my children – or from anyone in my family, for that matter. But, equally, I never expected it. That cloak of worthlessness that had first settled over me on that strange New Year’s Day in Berlin – it had now become my skin. What use was I to these people, beyond providing the loose change they needed to buy bread? What we crave from others far more than money or material assistance is love and attention. A family man who receives neither is not a family man at all: he is merely putting a roof over the heads of strangers. How I longed for the day when they no longer needed me, and all this would come to an end! Over time my life came to be defined by that faraway hope. I lived almost like a convict, dragging myself from day to day. If I also treasured each passing day, it was because it took me closer to the end. I lived like a plant, unconscious and uncomplaining and without a will. Emotion was beyond me. I felt neither sadness nor joy.

  How could I feel anger towards people? The one I had deemed most precious, splendid and beloved had served me up the cruellest fate, so how could I expect anything else from the others? I could no longer love, or risk any form of intimacy, for I had been deceived by the one person I’d trusted and believed absolutely. After that, how could I trust anyone again?

  When I thought about the future, I imagined years of tedium, until at last the longed for day arrived and it all ended. I wanted nothing more. Life had dealt me a bad hand. But there it was. Best not to blame myself or anyone else. Best to accept that this was how it was, and would needlessly continue to be, and find some way to endure. I found life tedious, but that was all. I had no other complaint.

  Then one day … yesterday to be precise – Saturday – I came home and undressed. My wife told me that we needed a few things for the house: ‘The shops are closed tomorrow, so you’ll need to make one more trip to the market!’ Reluctantly I got dressed. I walked as far as the fish market. It was a fairly hot day. There were plenty of people wandering the streets, waiting for the cool of evening to dispel the dust. I’d finished my shopping, and I was walking towards the statue with my packages under my arm. I decided to return home on the asphalt roads instead of the twisted back streets, even though it took a little longer. A giant clock hanging outside one of the shops read six o’clock. Suddenly someone took my arm.

  A woman bellowed into my ear: ‘Herr Raif!’

  How shocking, to hear someone address me in German! I was seized by the urge to flee. But the woman had a tight grip on me.

  ‘No, I am not mistaken. It is really you, Herr Raif! Good Lord!’ she cried, as passers-by looked askance. ‘Can a person really change that much?’

  Slowly I raised my head. Though I didn’t need to see her face. I knew who she was from her voice and her great bulk.

  ‘Ah, Frau van Tiedemann, I never would have thought of seeing you here in Ankara,’ I said.

  ‘Not Frau van Tiedemann … it’s Frau Döppke! I sacrificed a ‘van’ for a husband, but I’m doing nicely, nonetheless!’

  ‘Congratulations … so …’

  ‘Yes, yes, as you might imagine … not long after you returned to Turkey we left the pension … naturally together … we went to Prague …’

  At the mention of Prague, a knife went through my heart. Impossible to suppress the thought. But how could I ask her? She knew nothing of my relationship with Maria. If I asked after her, what would the woman think? And then, wouldn’t she ask me how I knew Maria? What would she say next? Wouldn’t it be far better for her never to know? So many years had gone by – ten years, indeed, even a little more. What use would there be in her knowing the whole story?

  Noticing that we were still standing in the middle of the street, I said: ‘Come, let’s sit down for a moment. We have so much to talk about … I still haven’t got over the shock of seeing you in Ankara.’

  ‘Yes, it would be very nice to sit for a while, but our train is leaving in less than an hour … We can’t miss it … I would certainly have called you if I’d known you were in Ankara. We arrived last night. And we are leaving tonight …’

  I had finally noticed a quiet little sallow-faced girl standing beside her. She was about eight or nine years old. I smiled: ‘Is this your daughter?’

  ‘No, a relative … my son is finishing his law degree.’

  ‘Are you still recommending him books to read?’

  For a moment she seemed confused, but then she remembered and smiled: ‘Yes, you’re right, but he doesn’t really pay any attention to what I recommend. He was still so young then … twelve years old or so … oh, dear God, how quickly the time flies!’

  ‘Yes … but you haven’t changed at all!’

  ‘And neither have you!’

  Her earlier words had been more truthful, but I chose not to mention this.

  We made our way down the hill. I had no idea how I was going to ask after Maria Puder and so I chattered needlessly about matters that had nothing to do with me.

  ‘You still haven’t told me why you’ve come to Ankara.’

  ‘Ah yes, well, let me tell you all about it … we are just passing through. Stopping over for the night.’

  She agreed to sit for five minutes at a lemonade stand where she continued her story.

  ‘My husband is currently in Baghdad … As you know, he trades in the colonies.’

  ‘But Baghdad is not a German colony!’

  ‘Oh, I am aware of that, my dear … but my husband specializes in food from the warmer climates. He’s in Baghdad to deal in dates!’

  ‘Was he trading dates in Cameroon as well?’

  She gave me a look as if to say: now, don’t be foolish.

  ‘I don’t know, why don’t you write him a letter and ask for yourself. He doesn’t like women meddling in his business affairs.’

  ‘Where are you travelling to now, then?’

  ‘To Berlin … both to visit the homeland and …’ She gestured to the sallow-faced girl beside her. ‘And for the child … she has a frail constitution so we brought her out with us for the winter. Now I am taking her home.’

  ‘So you travel to Berlin often?’

  ‘Twice a year.’

  ‘So I take it that Herr Döppke’s business affairs are going well?’

  She smiled and wiggled flirtatiously.

  Still I could not bring myself to ask. Now, I knew that my hesitation was not because I didn’t know how to pose the question, but rather because I feared what I might learn. But was I not already resigned to my fate? I was drained of all passion. So why was I afraid? Maria might have found a Herr Döppke of her own. Perhaps she was still unmarried and racing from one man to the next, searching for the one she could believe in. Most likely she would not even recognize my face.

  When I thought about it, I could not remember her face and for the first time in ten years I realized that neither of us had a photograph of the other … How shocking! Why hadn’t we thought of that before parting? Yes, we’d believed that we would soon be reunited and yes, we trusted the power of memory, but why had I not thought of this until now? Had I never felt the need to conjure up her face?

  I remembered how I’d once known every line in her face – how during the first months I’d been able to conjure up that vision in a moment, without any difficulty whatsoever … Later … when I’d realized it was all over, I’d gone to great lengths to keep myself from seeing, or rather imagining, her. For I’d known I’d not be able to endure it. A single fleeting vision of the Madonna in a Fur Coat would have undone me.

  Now my memories had lost their power to hurt me, but when I tried to cast my mind back, searching for her face, I found nothing … and I did not even have a picture of her …

  Why would I need such a thing?

  Glancing at her watch, Frau Döppke stood up. Together we walked to the station.

  She was quite fond of Ankara and Turkey in general.

  ‘I have never seen a country embrace foreigners so warmly. Think, for example, of Switzerland, a country tha
t owes its well-being to all the foreigners passing through. People there look at foreigners as if they might burgle their homes … but here everyone seems eager to help a stranger in whatever way they can. And Ankara was truly lovely.’

  The old woman was prattling on. The young girl was five or ten steps ahead of us, passing her hand over the trees lining the road. We were nearly at the station when at last I found my courage. Doing my best to feign indifference, I asked: ‘Do you have many relatives in Berlin?’

  ‘No, not many … I’m actually from Prague, a Czech German … My first husband was Dutch. Why do you ask?’

  ‘It’s just that during my time there I met a woman who told me that you were relatives …’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In Berlin … We happened to meet at an exhibition. I think she was a painter …’

  She was suddenly all ears. ‘Yes … and then?’

  Hesitating, I went on. ‘And then … I don’t know … we must have spoken just once … She had a beautiful painting … and that’s how we …’

  ‘Do you remember her name?’

  ‘I think it must have been Maria Puder … That’s it! Maria Puder! That was the name signed on the bottom of her painting. And in the catalogue …’

  She did not answer. I mustered my courage again: ‘Do you know her?’

  ‘Yes, but how did she come to tell you that we were related?’

  ‘I don’t know … I suppose I told her about the pension and she must have said that she had a relative there … or was it something else … now I can’t quite recall … it was ten years ago.’

  ‘Yes … ten years is a long time … Her mother told me that she’d once had a Turkish friend and that she’d talked about him all the time and so I’m wondering if you are the very same person. But isn’t it strange that her mother never once met this Turk that her daughter so admired … She’d gone to Prague that year and that’s where her daughter told her that this Turkish student had left Berlin.’

  We had arrived at the station. Frau Döppke was walking over to her train. I feared that if the topic of conversation changed I might not ever learn what I truly wanted to know. So I looked straight into her eyes to make clear my interest in hearing more.

  After she dismissed the hotel attendant who had stowed her luggage in the train compartment, she turned to me and said: ‘Why do you ask? You said you hardly knew Maria?’

  ‘Yes … but she must have left a strong impression … I was very taken by her painting …’

  ‘She was an excellent painter.’

  With a sudden concern I could not understand, I asked: ‘You said she was a good painter? Not now?’

  She looked around for the young girl. Seeing that she had already climbed into the compartment and found her seat, Frau Döppke leaned closer: ‘Obviously not … because she is no longer alive.’

  ‘What?’

  I heard the word whistle through my lips. People turned to look at us. The little girl stuck her head out of the window to watch me wide-eyed.

  Frau Döppke gave me a long, searching look. ‘Why such surprise?’ she said. ‘You look so pale. You said you didn’t really know her.’

  ‘Nevertheless. It’s a shock to hear that she’s died.’

  ‘Yes … but not recently … it happened maybe ten years ago.’

  ‘Ten years ago! Impossible …’

  She gave me another searching look, and pulled me aside. ‘Now I clearly see that you are intrigued by Maria Puder’s death. So let me quickly give you the story. Two weeks after you left the pension to return to Turkey, Herr Döppke and I left as well and we went to visit relatives who had a farm on the outskirts of Prague. That’s where we happened to see Maria and her mother. Now I don’t get along well with her mother, but that’s another matter. Maria was looking frail and wan, and she told us that she had suffered a grave illness in Berlin. Sometime later, mother and daughter went back to Berlin. Maria seemed to have recovered. By then we’d moved to East Prussia, my husband’s homeland … When we returned to Berlin that winter, we heard that Maria had died at the beginning of October. Naturally I overlooked my disagreements with her mother and paid her a visit. She looked exhausted, like a sixty-year-old woman. Though she wouldn’t have been more than forty, forty-five then. She told me that after they had left Prague Maria began to feel certain changes in her body and they went to the doctor who told them she was pregnant. Initially she was pleased, but despite her mother’s entreaties she never told her who the father was. She always said that she would soon find out and she spoke of an imminent journey. In the final months of the pregnancy, her health took a turn for the worse and the doctors told her that she was at risk and that although it was late they wanted to intervene, but Maria would not allow that, and then suddenly she fell terribly ill and was taken to hospital. I suppose her albumin levels were very low … her body was only just recovering from everything she had gone through before … Even before she went into labour she lost consciousness several times. So the doctors did intervene and they managed to save the baby; but Maria continued to have seizures and one week later she passed away in a coma. She’d confided in no one. She never thought she was going to die. During her last moments of clarity, she told her mother how shocked she would be when she heard the whole story, but that in the end she too would rejoice. But she never gave her the father’s name. Her mother remembered how her daughter often spoke of a Turk. But she had never met him, and didn’t even know his name … The child was in and out of hospitals and nurseries until she was four, after which she went to live with her grandmother. She’s a rather frail and quiet girl, but thoroughly charming … don’t you think?’

  I thought I might faint. My head was spinning, yet somehow I managed to keep standing and smiling.

  ‘This girl?’ I asked, nodding in the direction of the train window.

  ‘Yes … she’s sweet, isn’t she? So quiet and well behaved! Who knows how much she misses her grandmother?’

  She watched me carefully while she said all this. The glimmer in her eyes was almost hostile.

  The train was about to leave. She climbed inside.

  A little later the two of them appeared in the window. Smiling carelessly, the girl cast her eyes over the station, and occasionally she looked at me. The plump old woman beside her did not let me out of her sight.

  The train lurched forward. I waved, as Frau Döppke threw me a final, vicious, smile.

  She pulled the child inside …

  All this took place just last night. Only twenty-four hours have passed since all this happened.

  I did not sleep a wink last night. I just lay on my back, thinking of the child on the train. I could almost see her head, receding with the rattling train. And her hair … she’d had a good head of hair, but I could not recall what colour hair she had, or the colour of her eyes. I hadn’t asked her name. I’d paid her no attention. Although at one point she had only been a step away from me, I’d not looked at her closely. When saying goodbye, I’d not taken her hand. And so I knew nothing – dear God – I knew absolutely nothing at all about my own daughter. No doubt Frau Döppke had sensed something … Why had she looked at me with such malice? No doubt she had made inferences … and then left with the girl … They are travelling now … the wheels of the train are rolling over the tracks, gently tossing my daughter in her sleep.