On summer nights under a starry and windless trembling sky, on a sea whose shoreless infinities seem to touch eternity, delicate and gilded with the reflection of stars, I always consider steamer voyages to be a field of adventure, a stage of love. And I always buy a cabin ticket for first-class passengers. Many of my acquaintances accuse me of not observing that tasteless and cold law of economy which in their opinion is so obligatory to obey. But the few hundred francs to be given for this first class secures successes that a few thousand francs couldn’t obtain for a person. I’m absolutely certain of this. This confidence of mine goes back to my school days. Because in that noble, respectable—that is, hypocritical and artificial—salon reserved for first-class passengers on the Messagerie, especially in summer, one inevitably encounters a few beautiful and coquettish women coming from the West, a few artists searching for adventure with all their spiritual and physical activity. This is unavoidable.
When travel days approach, I feel a light excitement, an unknown joy. The sweet dreams I spent in the concealing and respectful embrace, in the tender official cradle of that moving and stimulating salon suddenly come before my eyes. Ah, very old memories… My terrible and violent crises at seventeen… First success in love… Now again I remember those dull and large eyes, those artist limbs extraordinarily thinned by difficult and various dances, those meaningful hands that stand like the perceptive Bizet, those sweet and exciting arms, those small and inviting lips that laughed at me saying, “With your red fez I liken you to a champagne bottle!”
Ah, youth’s intoxicating and dawn-bringing spring that will never return again!… How enterprising, how brave, how heroic I was. With this artist who first started joking with me and whose name I didn’t even have time to learn, I had completely passed through, completed within twenty-four hours all the particular details of the radiant ages of love that innocent, lazy, sick, dreamy, ignorant, foolish poets couldn’t finish telling—even the story and description of—in ten years.
Yes, real natural and valuable love is these accidental travel loves. There’s no possibility of the involuntary danger of forming a tiresome, distressing bond resembling marriage—which is rumored to have been invented by profit-seeking Jews completely deprived of natural sensibilities and contains nothing but torture and suffering. Within two or three days one meets, becomes acquainted, loves, then separates contentedly and with complete affection, never to meet again eternally. Only a sweet memory remains on both sides. This memory is exactly love. The hatred, weariness, regret, distress that all bonds lasting more than a week will undoubtedly produce don’t exist in it. It is relatively supernatural and imaginary, as the poet babbles and sings. It’s a dream. Like dreams that last briefly and are half-perceived, it’s supra-sensible, exciting and delicious.
**
…A few months ago I was leaving Istanbul again. I was in the cabin reserved for first-class passengers. Not counting the men and elderly naturally, there were six passengers. One strongly attracted my attention: a body with a coarse and fat lower part, a delicate upper part, but certainly very regular… Thin, long eyebrows, a pale and nervous face, a gentle beauty characteristic of serious women—for example like teachers, nuns—a sad beauty… Black eyes seemed to shine more behind the lenses of gold glasses. She was thoughtful and despairing; she wasn’t talking to anyone. She was alone. No, she wasn’t alone. Beside her was a medium-sized burgundy-colored dog, a bulldog. They always walked together, sat together. When sitting, the dog would definitely sleep, and his mistress would either read a book or think.
I began to walk around her. I was looking for a small opportunity to talk, to establish a relationship, and unfortunately couldn’t find it.
We passed the Athos coast. We were going under a cloudless and dull sky. The weather was extremely pleasant and stimulating. Still no success. I was getting bored and distressed. My journey was in danger of remaining fruitless and barren. As if the ugly bulldog, whose face seemed squeezed, kneaded by a harsh, nervous, dry and coal-like hand, left in black wrinkles, was attracting my anger.
I ate breakfast with the inappetence of a troubled and tormented man. After drinking my coffee, I went out to walk on the deck. At the stern, I saw her stretched out on a deck chair. The bulldog resembling a disgusting bag was in her lap again. I was terribly annoyed. How could such a beautiful and young woman take this dirty dog in her lap and love it? I passed before her. I passed again. I was pretending to stroll. The bulldog, in his mistress’s lap that was who knows how soft and warm, was sleeping with his black and disgusting face completely wrinkled. My annoyance was transforming into an ambiguous anger. Wasn’t this unnaturalness, vulgarity? I wanted to go to her, forcibly take this ugly and dirty dog from her lap, beat it well, then throw it into the sea, and thinking of the result, I was almost deciding to do it. What would happen? She would sue me for damages. What else? Nothing. But I would have taken revenge for this affection of irrational love that this dirty dog undeservedly obtained. I reconsidered. I expanded my reasoning. I was undoubtedly jealous of this dog. This interpretation was undeniable. “How strange!” I said and suddenly gave up this assault. But my involuntarily increasing anger didn’t pass. I wanted to throw this woman’s unnaturalness in her face. If I reasoned, perhaps I’d give up this too. But I hurried. At that moment I had a gambler’s courage. My hands in my pockets, in the position of a distracted and informal traveler, delicate and smiling, I stood before her.
“Excuse my rudeness, madam,” I said, “if you permit, I’ll ask you something.”
The dog woke up. It raised its head. Both of them, with deep, very deep wonder, looked at me as if to say “What kind of inappropriate fellow is this?” While the dog was smacking its lips, blinking its rheumy and teary eyes and preparing to bark, the woman answered with a delicate and unexpected coquettish smile:
“Ask, perhaps you’ll get an answer.”
“I thank you for your kindness. To ask something about your personal life when I don’t know you at all is indeed great impudence. I know this. But I’m extremely curious, madam. I want to understand now why you show so much affection to this dog, this ugly, dirty dog. Is it an old memento from your deceased and revered parents? Or is it the memory of a lost happiness?”
I said, and I assumed a simple-hearted manner, an innocent attitude that should please Western women who are tired of and hate the cunning, intelligence, tricks, and quick transitions they’re constantly exposed to.
The young woman, looking at me with her black bespectacled gaze that seemed to suddenly shine with her coquettish smile, trying to calm the dog’s anger by caressing its head with her soft hand, said “No, neither a memento from deceased parents nor a memory! I love it especially because it’s a dog. And I thank you for understanding the intensity of my love. Yes, I love it purely because it’s a dog. I want to love all dogs, kiss them, worship them. But is this possible?… Necessarily, as in everything, one must be content with one or a few…”
“I’ll be intrusive, forgive me, but the reason for your love?”
She laughed. “The explanation of this reason is long,” she said. “But do you definitely want to understand?”
“I definitely want to understand. If you kindly tell me, I’ll be grateful.”
She laughed again and, adjusting her glasses with the thin and soft hand she raised from the dog’s head, said “Dog, dog—the founder of today’s humanity. The cause of today’s material and intellectual civilization, of progress, of sciences, arts, philosophy—in short, whatever we see old and new, existing and exalted, all is the active cause of its formation and growth through existence. We owe our today’s perfected humanity, the superiority of our species over all creatures and beings, to the dog… Ah, if there were no dog…”
My astonishment equaled a billion times the mutual astonishment that she with her dog showed toward my informal and inappropriate exhaustion a minute ago. I suddenly judged that this woman was insane, crazy. It was necessary to flee, to leave this poor woman with her dog and her ideas and flee. I became confused with an involuntary manner characteristic of fools who find themselves in a difficult position. She apparently understood this confusion and my interpretation from my eyes. With the never-fading coquettish smile of her lips, she continued:
“If there were no dog, you wouldn’t see humans on earth today. Wait. Since you insistently wanted to learn, I’ll give you a lesson. I know you won’t believe it. You’re an Easterner, you belong to this old and sorcerer East which is the absolute cradle of Western ideas, of foolish-deceiving delusions. Although the West has been struggling for more than a century against ideas and beliefs that came like a plague wind from the East and took root, it still hasn’t prevailed and won’t. However, you Easterners live so self-sufficiently that you see absolutely no need for knowledge of and debate about all scientific and technical truths. You insistently attribute the foundations of the Western sciences you learned half-heartedly to yourselves and claim they were also derived from heavenly sources, and you show such strangeness and stupidity as to try to prove your Western beliefs to us with our sciences. Not a single word from writers and thinkers like Hegel, Buchner, Darwin, Novel, Rabod, Karl Vogt, Romansi, Rossi, Sanson, Skodler, etc., who explain most of today’s existing truths to humanity, has passed into your language. Even their names are considered blasphemy by you. You’re completely unaware of natural sciences and knowledge. Because knowledge of these would contradict your old Western beliefs, for you they’re more forbidden and terrible than the most terrible explosive and destructive materials. You have no idea about the formation of elements and evolution. Your newest ideas are at least ten centuries old. You’re completely deprived of the inclination to search for truth. All of you, great and small, are strongly convinced that you’re made from clay like a vase, a pitcher, children of one father…”
I was seeing that this beautiful and exquisite infidel’s oratorical nervousness was going to connect to a terrible and great sin. It was necessary to cut off her words. Laughing with the confident Turkish smile assured of its strength and victory: “Just like your Western Spaniards, right?…” I said. My throwing the revered name of the pious and blessed Spaniards in the face of this beautiful and strange woman, who from her disconnected, nonsense, confused words was undoubtedly an enemy of monasticism and old Western beliefs, had the effect of a dirty and rough glove. She suddenly blushed. And the constant smile of her lips went out.
“Oh, leave the Spaniards,” she said, “they’re the West’s stain, darkness…”
I immediately answered: “Then you too leave the Easterners. Fulfill your promise. Tell us how the dog established humanity, please.”
“I was going to tell that anyway,” she began, “but first I wanted to make a small introduction to prove to you that you won’t believe, to repeat to you exclusively the reasons affecting your disbelief. Since you don’t want it, there’s no need anymore. Yes, the dog is the founder of humanity… Look how: The first humans were very weak and deprived of the tools and judgment to defend themselves. They were living in virgin forests, in wild and uncultivated valleys in small and bestial societies. And unbearable cold, terrible storms, continuous floods, omnipotent lightning were destroying them. But the terrible beasts in the fearsome darkness of those endless forests, the predatory animals, tigers, wolves, snakes, had adopted man, this weak creature with delicious flesh, as the most excellent food for themselves. For example, when a tiger sensed a small human community hidden in a remote corner of the forest, it would mercilessly attack, eating what it caught to fill its belly. Humans didn’t yet have perception. Language hadn’t formed. They were expressing their primitive and bestial feelings with monosyllabic sounds. They had no defensive tools, no brains evolved enough to devise tricks against the terrible beasts accustomed to their delicious flesh. They only ran away, that’s how they escaped. But the animals that found the places they hid at night with their superior sense of smell didn’t despair, they made night raids, continuing their predatory lives to the detriment of poor weak humanity. Just as in the evolutionary ages of the earth’s crust, many weak animal species that couldn’t run away and hide became food for those stronger than themselves and were destroyed and extinct, humans too were completely exposed to this danger of extinction. Decreasing and decreasing, like other weak animal species, they would end one day, not even their fossils would remain. But at this time, a wild animal, even a meat-eater with extraordinary need for human flesh, subdued its appetite with who knows what feeling. It separated from the merciless enemy of humanity in the forests, the carnivorous predatory beasts. It came to humans who were still fruit-eaters. It became their friend, their companion, their slave. This was the dog… Barking to announce an approaching predator, thanks to it humans would run away and escape destruction. The dog faithfully accompanied them for centuries. Until they made stone and bronze weapons and began to defend themselves, it was their guard and defender at the cost of its life. Under the peace given by its companionship, sacrifice, and compassion, humans generally escaped destruction and extinction. Their brain growth and development progressed. Yesterday’s terrible beasts they ran away from, today they were attacking and destroying with their primitive weapons, slowly becoming masters of the forests, of the earth. Then societies began to deal with each other. The dog still wasn’t left without duty. It guarded the horses and sheep that humans caught and domesticated, protected the caves, the newly constructed dwellings from invaders. As the human brain went through its evolutionary ages, the loyalty of its old friend the dog was also increasing, its duties were multiplying; its devotion was transforming into moral and spiritual sacrifice. As the countless years of evolutionary ages passed with their eternal speed, languages, imagination and reasoning, somewhat more organized families, tribes, peoples, governments, laws were formed. The dog entered humans’ perceptive societies too with the same original loyalty. It guarded castles at borders, streets in cities, towers in mountains. Even today it guards our sheep, our farms, our villages, our summer houses. Today it searches for, pursues, and finds the criminals and recidivists who are enemies of civilization and humanity. It serves the police of humanity in civilized cities more than a human. But most humans who surpass all creatures in intelligence and perception don’t know that this dog is their main cause of victory and existence. They undertake to insult it, even to beat it. This devoted, this loyal old lover who licks the hands of those who beat it instead of biting them—they don’t show the compassion that the morals and beliefs that undoubtedly formed and were determined thanks to it as a result require. Ah, they don’t know, they don’t know. Without the dog, there would be neither these societies, nor these countries, nor these peoples, nor this happiness and wealth, nor these institutions and railways. In the primitive ages, the human race, the embryo of soul and intelligence, would be extinct, and the beauties and meanings of perception wouldn’t rule on earth. The dog saved humanity when it had neither mind nor strength. With the peace of life it granted it, it ensured its brain evolution, its complete victory. Ah, if there were no dog…”
With complete excitement she began to kiss the disgusting and dormant bulldog’s black, wrinkled face. I was disgusted. These things I heard, resembling the ravings babbled by a sick, nervous schoolgirl in a fever bed, aroused in me a feeling of regret more than wonder. I was calculating what a terrible loss I had made by spending the very valuable twenty-four hours in vain pursuing this inappropriate woman. And I was feeling a sudden deep and unknown, hereditary hatred toward this woman whose mind was ruined by that famous and important confusion produced by natural sciences, toward this theory-worshiping exquisite body whose sacred false beliefs had failed so much, and I finally left. Tomorrow at five o’clock my journey will end. If I can’t establish a relationship within seven hours, I’ll leave the ship exceptionally without love and adventure. I’m already defeated by an unknown and irresistible anger and wanting to say inside: “Curse! The philosophical knowledge that separates us from our old sacred beliefs, from the delusions and imaginations that spoil our pleasures, from love and envy, from invented lies and evil inclination! Curse natural sciences and knowledge…”
Ömer Seyfettin
