To Ali Canip Bey
The calm of convalescence felt after fiery, feverish, violent loves are extinguished under the hot wings of an uninterrupted bond of loyalty that burns and fans, after love’s sweet and destructive excitements, its continuous fevers are satisfied and treated with an eternal and absolute possession of rest… Ah, do you know how sad and sweet this dream-weary state is? We too, with Süzun, this true and young artist, after loving for days, weeks, months, even years, had grown tired, fallen ill, become exhausted. First our beds, then our rooms had separated. Now we would sit together in my room until late at night; I would occupy myself preparing the notes and problems I would give my students to write in the classroom tomorrow; she would always immerse herself in reading her mysterious love and romantic novels to remain excited and delighted. Nevertheless, we couldn’t separate… The memory mourning of our buried passionate love was so sacred to us that a single night’s separation could be a sin leaving an inescapable torment of conscience. We ate our meals facing each other. And if a stranger had seen us at our sincere and simple table, he would certainly have thought us two doddering siblings. Yes, we had grown old with love; our soul was as if paralyzed. So again one autumn evening, in our small dining room, we were eating our simple meal in slow silence. I had taken a large and red apple from the small crystal fruit bowl and was peeling it with my knife. I don’t know how it happened, my eye caught Süzun’s. Her delicate nose, which had begun to seem long to me, seemed even longer; her eyebrows had grown thinner, her neck more gaunt. And she had fixed her eyes on the apple I was peeling with a strange and violent abstraction, staring without blinking; involuntarily I asked: “What are you lost in thought about, my dear…”
“Nothing…” she said. But I understood from her face that she was disturbed by my warning. She began to play with the glass before her. I was still peeling my apple; an empty and hesitant minute of silence passed. Then in a strange and peculiar voice she said: “Doesn’t this apple suggest something to you, my love? Doesn’t it remind you of a precious memory?”
I looked at her face again. She had blushed. With her dull and tired eyes, uncomprehending in my eyes, pleading and begging, as if searching for an answer. The apple… What could this suggest to me? To search my memories, turning back mentally toward my childhood, I lived in an instant the twenty-six years that were now a dark and insignificant past. I thought; there was nothing… In fact, I hadn’t even seen an apple tree in my life!
Süzun was still looking at my face. I felt an ambiguous distress and involuntarily, beginning to eat the apple I had peeled, said: “Yes, toward the end of the seventeenth century in England, in a quiet corner of a secluded garden, there was a solitary apple tree. One day a distracted and contemplative man was lying under this tree. An apple fell from the tree onto this man’s feet. And it awakened a ‘genius.’ That man was the famous scholar Newton, thinking about the equilibrium of celestial bodies that Kepler had newly formulated. He saw the apple fall, thought, worked, and discovered the law of ‘universal gravitation.’ That’s what this apple reminds me of, this scientific and valuable ha…”
She cut off my words: “How ridiculous you are! Please be quiet…”
And narrowing her blue eyes as if about to cry, she frowned her thin eyebrows. I understood she was offended, that I had upset her. But why was she offended… I was going to ask. She didn’t give me time. Fixing her blue and tired eyes on the apple peels in my plate with a painful posture of sorrow I could never forget: “Poor love!” she said. “I thought you would remember the apple you gave me the first evening we saw each other at Madam Arnade’s table, the Musset poem you whispered to me with such excitement and feeling while bending over to give me that apple. But alas…”
Ömer Seyfettin
