Madonna in a Fur Coat Page 5

  But I cannot go on with all this locked up inside me. There are things – so many things – that I need to say … but to whom? … Can there be another soul wandering this great globe who is as lonely as I? Who would hear me out? Where would I begin? I cannot recall saying anything to anyone over the past ten years. I have needlessly fled from society, needlessly driven people away. But what else can I do now? There’s no going back. It would serve no purpose. This can only mean that it was meant to be. If only I could find the words … If only I had someone to confide in … But how would I find him? I wouldn’t know where to look. And even if did, I still wouldn’t. Why, after all, did I buy this notebook? If I had a fleck of hope, would I be sitting here now, going against the habits of a lifetime and writing these words? But sometimes people need to unburden themselves … If only yesterday hadn’t happened … Oh, if only I had not stumbled upon the truth … I might have gone on living as before, with my small comforts …

  I was walking down the street yesterday when I chanced upon two people. One of them I was meeting for the first time, the other was perhaps more distant from me than anyone else on this earth. Who could have imagined that these two would have the power to undo me?

  Enough! If I am to tell this story, I must do so calmly, starting from the beginning … I must, in effect, go back a good few years: ten, to be precise, or twelve … perhaps even fifteen … but visiting them afresh. Perhaps, by wandering through those years, by occupying them fully, the terrors and the trivial details, I can set myself free. Perhaps what I will write will not be nearly as painful as what I have lived and it will bring me some relief. When I come to see how some of it was neither as simple nor complicated as I had thought, I might even find my ardour somewhat shaming … perhaps …

  My father was from Havran. I, too, was born and raised there. I received my early education in the same place, moving on to a high school an hour away, in Edremit. Towards the close of the Great War, at the age of eighteen, I was drafted into the army, but the armistice was declared before I saw active duty. Returning home, I went back to high school but failed to graduate. I’d never been very keen on my studies. The chaos of my year away had drained me of all interest.

  Following the armistice, all semblance of order disappeared. There was no working government, nor was there any sense of shared ideas or aims. Several territories had fallen to foreign troops and suddenly a host of gangs of varying notoriety came to life, some opening up new fronts against the enemy and others plundering local villages; a bandit celebrated one day as a hero was driven away a week later, whereupon it was announced that his body was hanging in the village square of Konakönü, near Edremit. At a time like this, it made no sense to hide away indoors and read Ottoman history or treatises on ethics. However, my father, who was thought to be one of the wealthier men in those parts, remained adamant that I should have an education. Seeing so many of my peers strap on ammunition belts and throw rifles over their shoulders to join rebel units, only to be killed by bandits or enemy forces, he began to fear for my future. The truth is that I did not want to remain idle and was already making my own plans in secret. But then enemy forces took command of our village and all my heroic fantasies came to naught.

  For a few months I drifted. Most of my friends had disappeared. My father decided to send me to Istanbul. He didn’t know any more than I did where I might go. ‘Find a school and study there,’ he said. Which goes to show how little he knew his son. Though I had always been an awkward and reclusive boy, I did have a secret yearning. There had been one lesson in which I had won my teacher’s admiration: I could paint fairly well. I had dreamed, from time to time, of attending Istanbul’s Academy of Fine Arts. That said, I had always been one of those quiet boys who preferred dreams to the real world. I was, in addition, absurdly shy, and therefore often mistaken for a fool, which upset me deeply. For nothing terrified me more than the prospect of correcting a false impression. Though I was often blamed for mistakes made by my classmates, I never dared to say a word in self-defence. I would simply go home to hide in a corner and cry. I can well remember how my mother and – even more – my father would throw up their hands and say: ‘Honestly, you should have been born a girl!’ My greatest pleasure was to sit alone beside the river, or in the far corner of the garden, and let my thoughts waft away. My daydreams were in sharp contrast to real life; they were full of adventures and heroic deeds. Like the heroes in the countless novels I had read in translation, I was possessed of a sweet and mysterious desire; in my case a girl named Fahriye who lived in the neighbourhood next to ours. Gathering around me the loyal comrades with whom I wreaked havoc over distant lands, I would don my mask, strap my two guns to my waist, and sally forth, to sweep her off to a magnificent cave in the mountains. I would imagine how first she would be shaking with fear, but once she saw how my own men trembled in my presence, once she had taken stock of the cave’s unrivalled riches, awe would overcome her, and when at last she looked me in the eye, it would be to throw her arms around me, crying with untrammelled delight. Sometimes I would travel through Africa like a famous explorer, living among the cannibals, seeing lands no eye had ever seen; at other times I was a famous painter touring Europe. Though it was the authors I read – Michel Zevaco, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Ahmet Mithat Efendi and Vecihi Bey – who painted my imagination.

  Father hated my reading all the time, and sometimes he threw away my books. Some nights he refused to let me turn on the light in my bedroom. But I could always find a way, and after he caught me reading Les Misérables or The Mysteries of Paris by the light of a little string-wick lamp, he gave up and left me to it. I read everything I could get my hands on and whatever I read – be it the adventures of Monsieur LeCoq or the history of Murat Bey – it left its mark on me.

  There was, for instance, a history of the Roman Empire, in which an ambassador by the name of Mucius Scaevola, while negotiating a treaty, was told that he was to accept the terms offered, on pain of death: his response was to plunge his arm into a fire and continue with his deliberations, in absolute calm. Inspired by his unflinching courage, I proceeded to test my own powers of resilience by plunging my own hand into the fire, only to burn my fingers badly. I can still see that ambassador, smiling calmly through his pain. There was a time when I tried my hand at writing; indeed, I even scribbled a few little poems, but I quickly abandoned my efforts. No matter what I had bottled up inside me, I was absurdly anxious about letting it out, and so my adventures in writing ended. I did, however, carry on painting. There was, I thought, no risk of revealing anything personal. If I took something from the outside world and brought it to life on paper, I was a catalyst and nothing more. With time, however, I came to understand that this was not the case, and so I gave up painting too … Always that fear …

  In Istanbul, at the Academy of Fine Arts, I quickly – and without assistance – came to the conclusion that painting was a mode of expression, and, inevitably, of self-expression, and after that there seemed no point in continuing my studies. In any case my teachers didn’t see much in me. I only ever presented my most trivial efforts: if my works expressed anything personal, or exposed any personal particularity, I went to extreme lengths to hide them away, lest they ever see the light of day. If someone ever happened to find one, I would gasp like a naked woman caught in an intimate moment, and rush away blushing.

  Unsure of what to do next, I spent some time wandering the streets of Istanbul. Those were the years of the armistice and the city was so unseemly and chaotic that I could hardly bear it. I asked my father for money so that I might return to Havran. Ten days later I received a long letter. It was his last effort to get me to make something of myself.

  Somewhere he had heard that the currency in Germany had tumbled and that foreigners in particular could live there quite comfortably: one could get by on much less than in Istanbul. Instructing me to go there to learn about the soap business, scented soaps in particular, he went on to announce tha
t he was sending me the money needed to cover my expenses. I was overjoyed. Not because I was interested in the art of soap-making – rather, I was delighted because, at the moment I least expected it, I was being offered a chance to visit Europe – since childhood the home of my fondest dreams. ‘Spend a couple of years learning the trade,’ my father had written, ‘then you can come home and work on improving our soap factories. I shall make you a manager. Once you have established yourself in the world of business, you are sure to find happiness and prosperity.’ Yet that was last thing on my mind …

  My plan was to learn a foreign language and read books in that language and, most importantly, discover Europe – meet face to face the people I had so far encountered only in books. For weren’t they the ones who had nurtured my wayward nature and lured me so far from home?

  I was ready within a week. I travelled to Germany on a train that took me through Bulgaria. I only spoke Turkish. Drawing on three or four phrases I had memorized from a pocket language guide I studied during the four-day journey, I was able to make my way to the pension whose address I had jotted down in my notebook while still in Istanbul.

  I spent the first few weeks learning enough German to survive and wandering the streets in a state of wonder. But that didn’t last long. In the end, this was just another city. The streets were a bit wider, and much cleaner, and the inhabitants were blonder. However, there was nothing here to sweep me off my feet. Knowing so little about the Europe of my imagination, I had no way to measure it against the city in which I now lived … I had yet to learn that nothing in this world can ever match the marvels that we conjure up in our own minds.

  Assuming that I would not be able to begin work until I had learned the language, I started taking lessons from a retired officer who had learned a little Turkish during the war. The manageress of the pension was eager to spend her free time prattling to me and this was much to my benefit. The pension’s other guests, meanwhile, found it amusing to befriend a Turk and they bombarded me with all manner of silly questions. There was a lively crowd around the dinner table. Three in particular took me under their wing: a Dutch widow named Frau van Tiedemann, a Portuguese trader named Herr Camera, who imported oranges from the Canary Islands, and the elderly Herr Döppke. He had been doing business in the colony of Cameroon; leaving everything behind after the armistice, he had returned to his homeland. Here he led a humble existence, devoting his days to the political meetings that were all the rage then, and in the evening he would return to the pension to share his impressions. On a number of occasions, he would bring back newly discharged and still unemployed German officers with whom he would speak for hours. From what I could piece together, they were of the view that Germany would only be saved if another man with Bismarck’s iron will came to power to rebuild the army and avenge the injustices of the past with another world war.

  From time to time a resident would leave, to be replaced by someone new. But over time I grew accustomed to these changes of cast. I came to tire of the red lamps that lit the dark room where we took our meals, and the constant smell of cabbage, and the heated political discussions that accompanied every meal. The discussions in particular … Everyone had an idea as to how to save Germany. However, none of these proposals had anything to do with Germany. Rather, they were tied to personal interests. An old woman who had lost her fortune through money-mongering was angry with the officers, who were angry with the striking workers. She blamed the soldiers for Germany’s defeat, while the colonial tradesman for no apparent reason was forever blasting the emperor’s declaration of war. Even the housekeeper started discussing politics with me when she came to tidy up my room in the morning, and whenever she had a moment free she buried herself in the newspaper. She, too, had florid opinions, and whenever she expressed them, she would shake her fists and turn beet-red.

  It was as if I had forgotten why I had come to Germany. Whenever I received a letter from Father I was reminded of the soap trade and I would write back saying that I was still learning German: very soon, I assured him, I would seek a suitable training college. By saying this, I was deluding both him and myself. The days slipped by, each one much the same as the other. I explored every part of the city. I visited the museums and the zoo. In the space of a few months I had, I thought, seen all that this city of millions had to offer, and this plunged me into despair. ‘So this is Europe,’ I said to myself. ‘Why all the fuss?’ From here it was a short road to the conclusion that the world itself was a place of little interest. Most afternoons I spent wandering through the crowds along the broad avenues, watching men heading home, their grave expressions speaking of important business, or women with vapid smiles and languorous eyes, hanging onto the arms of men who still marched like soldiers.

  So as not to tell my father an outright lie, I managed, with the help of several Turkish friends, to present myself to a manufacturer of luxury soap. The German employees of this firm, which was owned by a larger concern in Sweden, gave me a warm reception – they had not forgotten that we had been brothers in battle – but they were reluctant to explain their processes in any detail, as least compared to what I had learned in Havran, and I suppose that was because they were safeguarding company secrets.

  Or perhaps they were like that because they saw no real ambition in me and did not wish to waste their time. Eventually I stopped going to the factory altogether. They never got back in touch. My father was by now writing less frequently, while I carried on living in Berlin without ever wondering what I was going to do next, or why I had come here in the first place.

  I was still taking German lessons from the army officer three evenings a week. I spent my days visiting museums and newly opened galleries. Returning to the pension in the evening, I’d catch my first whiff of cabbage from a distance of a hundred paces. But I was no longer as bored as I’d been in the early months. For now I was slowly learning to read properly in German and this gave me great pleasure. Before long, it was akin to an addiction. Lying face down on the bed, I would open my book and stay there for hours, a thick, old dictionary at my side. In many cases I would not even bother to riffle through it, as I was able to glean the meaning of a word from its context. A new world had opened itself up to me. I had moved beyond the translated literature of my childhood, in which heroic figures embarked on unrivalled adventures. The books I was now reading spoke of people like me, of the world I saw and heard around me. They spoke of things I had witnessed but not really grasped. Now their true meanings began to emerge. I was influenced most profoundly by the Russians. I read all of the great Turgenev’s stories in one sitting. One in particular left my mind spinning for many days. The heroine in the story, the young Klara Milich, falls in love with a naive young man, but she is unable to divulge her true feelings. Instead, she decides to punish herself for falling in love with a fool, and hands herself over to addiction. I don’t know why, but I felt a particularly close bond with this young woman. When I saw how she was incapable of voicing her true feelings, and how fear and envy contrived to suppress everything about her that was deep and strong, and beautiful – I saw myself.

  By then my life had been much enriched by the paintings of the old masters in Berlin’s museums. There were times when, after gazing at a painting in the National Gallery for many hours, I could conjure up that face, or that landscape, for many days.

  I had been in Germany for almost a year by now. One dark and rainy day in November – how clearly I remember it – I was skimming the newspaper when I noticed an article about an exhibition of new painters. In truth, I did not know what to make of this new generation. Perhaps I didn’t like them because their work was too bold, and going to any lengths to catch the eye. I found that mode of self-promotion alien and distasteful. And so I passed over this article without bothering to read it. But a few hours later I was out on my daily stroll through the city when I happened to find myself standing in front of the building where that exhibition was being held. I had no pressing business
. So I took a chance and stepped inside. Slowly I wandered through the exhibition, surveying the paintings, large and small, with no little indifference.

  Most of them made me want to laugh: there were people with cubic shoulders and knees and heads and breasts of disproportionate sizes, and landscapes portrayed in stark colours, made of something like crepe paper. Crystal vases as shapeless as the shards of broken bricks, flowers as lifeless as if they had been pressed inside books for many years, and finally these dreadful portraits that looked like the sketches of criminals … Yet the visitors were enjoying themselves. Perhaps I should have dismissed these artists for presuming they could achieve great height from such little effort. But when I considered the twisted pleasure they might gain from being punished and ridiculed, I could only pity them.

  Suddenly, near the door to the main room, I stopped. Even now, after all these years, I cannot describe the torrent that swept through me in that moment. I only remember standing, transfixed, before a portrait of a woman wearing a fur coat. Others pushed past me, impatient to see the rest of the exhibition, but I could not move. What was it about that portrait? I know that words alone will not suffice. All I can say is that she wore a strange, formidable, haughty and almost wild expression, one that I had never seen before on a woman. But while that face was utterly new to me, I couldn’t help but feel that I had seen her many times before. Surely I knew this pale face, this dark brown hair, this dark brow, these dark eyes that spoke of eternal anguish and resolve. I had known that woman since I’d opened my first book at the age of seven – since I’d started, at the age of five, to dream. I saw in her echoes of Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil’s Nihal, Vecihi Bey’s Mehcure, and Cavalier Buridan’s beloved. I saw the Cleopatra I had come to know in history books, and Muhammad’s mother, Amine Hatun, of whom I had dreamed while listening to the Mevlit prayers. She was a swirling blend of all the women I had ever imagined. Dressed in the pelt of a wildcat, she was mostly in shadow, but for a sliver of a pale white neck, and an oval face was turned slightly to the left. Her dark eyes were lost in thought, absently staring into the distance, drawing on a last wisp of hope as she searched for something that she was almost certain she would never find. Yet mixed in with the sadness was a sort of challenge. It was as if she were saying, ‘Yes, I know. I won’t find what I’m looking for … and what of it?’ The same challenge was playing on her plump lips. The lower lip was slightly fuller. Her eyelids were somewhat swollen. Her eyebrows were neither thick nor thin but short. The dark-brown hair that framed her broad forehead fell down over her cheeks, and her fur coat. Her pointed chin was slightly upturned. Her nose was long, her nostrils flared.