We still hadn’t spoken about anything. But I no longer wondered at this. Wasn’t his silent existence, his endurance, his looking at people’s weaknesses with compassion and at their rudeness with amusement, a sufficient will? When we walked together, didn’t I feel with all my strength that the person walking beside me was a human being? During these times, I understood why speech wasn’t necessarily required for people to seek each other, find each other, and observe each other’s interiors, why some poets constantly searched for someone to walk beside them without speaking in the face of nature’s beauty. Although I didn’t know exactly what I learned from this man who walked beside me without opening his mouth, who worked across from me without making a sound, I was certain I learned far more things than I could have learned from someone who taught me for years.
I felt that he too was pleased with me. That shy and timid manner he showed toward every person and toward me when we first met was gone. Only on some days he would suddenly turn wild, his eyes would lose all expression, would shrink, and when addressed he would answer in a soft voice that nonetheless forbade any approach. During such times he would also neglect translation, very often setting his pen aside and watching the papers before him for hours. I sensed that he had now withdrawn behind all distances and time and wouldn’t let anyone in there, and I made no attempt to approach. Only an anxiety filled me: because I had noticed that Raif Efendi’s illnesses, by a strange coincidence, usually followed such days. I learned the reason for this quite quickly, but in a very sad way. But I’ll tell everything in order.
One day in mid-February, Raif Efendi again didn’t come to the company.
When I stopped by his house in the late afternoon, his wife Mihriye Hanım opened the door.
“Come in, is it you?” she said. “He just fell asleep… I’ll wake him if you like!”
“No! Don’t disturb him… How is he?” I said.
The woman took me to the guest room:
“He has a fever. This time he’s also talking about pain!” Then she added in a complaining voice: “Oh my boy, he doesn’t take care of himself at all… He’s not a child… When there’s nothing wrong, his nerves suddenly turn… I don’t know what happens… He doesn’t sit and talk with a person… He takes his head and goes… Then he ends up laid out in bed like this…”
At that moment, Raif Efendi’s voice was heard from the adjoining room. The woman quickly rushed there. I remained in astonishment. Could it be possible that this man who paid such attention to his health, who knew how to protect himself in wool undershirts and scarves, would commit any carelessness?
Mihriye Hanım returned saying:
“He woke when the door was knocked. Come in!”
This time I found Raif Efendi’s condition somewhat worse. His complexion was very yellow, his breathing very rapid. His usual childlike smile seemed to me more like a grimace that tired the muscles of his face.
His eyes too, behind the glasses, seemed to have retreated deeper.
“What happened to you again, Raif Bey, get well soon!” I said.
“Thank you!”
There was a slight hoarseness in his voice. When he coughed, his chest shook considerably and wheezed.
To quickly satisfy my curiosity, I asked:
“How did you catch cold? It must be a cold!…”
He stared at the white cover of his bed for a long time.
A small iron stove squeezed between his children’s and wife’s white beds had made the room too hot. Despite this, the person across from me appeared cold. Pulling his quilt up to his throat:
“Yes, I seem to have caught cold!” he said. “Last night after dinner I went out for a bit…”
“Did you go somewhere?”
“No… I just wanted to walk around a little… I don’t know… I was probably bored…”
His saying he was bored with anything surprised me.
“I walked a bit too much… I had gone toward the Agricultural Institutes… I came to the bottom of the Keçiören slope… Whether I walked fast or what… I got hot… I opened my front… The weather was windy too… It was spitting snow a little… I must have caught cold…”
Walking for hours at night, in snow and wind, on deserted roads, with his chest and breast open, was not what one would expect from Raif Efendi.
“Were you upset about something?” I said.
He answered hastily:
“No, not at all… It happens from time to time… I like to walk alone at night. Who knows, maybe the noise of the house bothers me or what!…”
Then, as if afraid he had said too much, hurriedly:
“I suppose people get like this as they age!” he said. “The wife and kids, what’s their fault!”
Outside, noise and rapid conversations had started again. The elder girl, returning from school, came in and kissed her father’s cheeks:
“How are you, daddy?”
Then turning to me, she shook my hand:
“Sir, he’s always like this… From time to time it occurs to him and he says, I’m going to the coffeehouse for a bit, then he either catches cold there or catches cold on the way or what, he gets sick… It’s happened so many times… I don’t know what’s at the coffeehouse!”
After pulling off her coat and throwing it on a chair, she immediately went outside. She seemed accustomed to Raif Efendi’s states and didn’t attach much importance to them.
I looked at the patient’s face. He too had turned his eyes to me, and in them was no explanation, no astonishment. I wondered not why he told this lie to the household, but why he told me the truth, yet I also felt a bit of pride in it: The pride of being closer to a person than others.
As I went out and took the road home, I fell into thought. Could Raif Efendi really be a simple man with an empty interior? It was certain that he had no purpose, no ambition in life, that he felt no interest in people, even those closest to him… So what did he want?.. Wasn’t it this emptiness inside him, this purposelessness of his life, that drove him into the streets at night?..
At that moment, I saw I had come to the front of the hotel where I was staying. Here, in a room barely large enough for two beds, I was staying with a friend. It was past eight o’clock. Since I didn’t feel like eating, I thought about going up to my room and reading a book a bit, but I immediately gave up: The gramophone in the coffeehouse below the hotel raised its voice to the maximum at exactly these hours, and the Syrian bar artist living in the room next to us sang the shrillest of Arabic songs at these times while getting ready for work. Turning back, I walked in the Keçiören direction on the asphalt with muddy edges. On both sides of the road there were first automobile repair workshops, low shabby coffeehouses. Then on the right side, houses climbing toward the hill, on the left, in a slight hollow, gardens with their trees stripped of leaves began. I raised my collar.
A fast and damp wind was blowing; inside me was a terrible desire to walk and run that I felt only when drunk. I thought I could go for hours, for days. I had forgotten to look around, had advanced quite far. Because the wind increased, it was almost as if someone were pushing me from the chest, and struggling forward against this force gave me pleasure.
Suddenly I thought about why I had come here… Nothing… There was no reason… I had walked and come without deciding. The trees on both sides of the road were moaning from the wind and clouds in the sky were running and going with great speed. The black and rocky hills ahead were still somewhat light, and the clouds crawling and passing over them seemed to leave pieces of themselves there. I was advancing with my eyes closed, drawing the wet air into me.
The question I had torn from my head appeared again: Why did I come here?.. The wind was very much like last night’s, perhaps in a little while snow would start spitting too… Last night here another man, his glasses fogging, his hat in his hand and his chest and breast open, was walking almost running… The wind was entering between his short and sparse hairs, giving an external coolness to his head burning God knows how. What was inside this head? Why had this head dragged this sick, this old body here? I wanted to imagine how Raif Efendi walked in that dark and cold night, what shape his face took. I had now understood why I came here: I thought I would see him and what passed through his head better here.
But here I was, seeing nothing but the wind wanting to blow away my hat, the howling trees, and the clouds taking many shapes as they ran and went. Living where he lived, living like him didn’t mean… One had to be very naive and only as heedless as me to suppose this.
I returned to the hotel quickly. The coffeehouse gramophone and the Syrian woman’s song had stopped. My friend was lying on his bed reading a book. He glanced at me sideways:
“What, coming from gallivanting?”
How well people understood each other… And here I was getting up in this state wanting to analyze another person’s head, to see his straight or complex soul. Even the world’s simplest, most wretched, even most foolish man possesses such a tremendous and complex soul that will drop a person from wonder to wonder!.. Why do we flee so much from understanding this, and why do we suppose the creature called human is among the easiest things to understand and pass judgment on? Why do we avoid saying a word about the qualities of a cheese we see for the first time, yet pass our final judgment on the first person we encounter and move on with an easy heart?
I couldn’t sleep for a long time. Raif Efendi was lying in his white-covered bed, in fever, smelling the air spreading into the room from his daughters’ young bodies and his wife’s tired limbs.
His eyes were closed and his soul, who knows where, where was it wandering?..
This time Raif Efendi’s illness lasted rather long. It didn’t resemble a simple cold like usual. The old doctor Nurettin Bey brought recommended mustard plaster and prescribed cough medicine. I stopped by every two or three evenings and each time found him a bit more collapsed. But he himself didn’t panic much and appeared not to attach importance to his illness. Perhaps he was afraid of alarming the household. Mihriye Hanım’s and Necla’s states were truly such as to worry a person. The woman, who seemed to have forgotten even to think from doing work for years, was going in and out of the patient’s room in great confusion, dropping towels or plates from her hands when putting mustard plaster on his back, always forgetting something inside or outside and constantly being sought. I still see her running in all directions in crooked heelless slippers on her bare feet, and I still feel on me those gazes catching and holding on as if asking help from every person they encountered. Although Necla hadn’t lost herself as much as her mother, she was in great distress.
In recent days she wasn’t going to school and was waiting for her father. When I came to check on the patient in the late afternoons, I noticed from her reddened and swollen eyes that she had been crying shortly before. But all this seemed to upset Raif Efendi more. In times when we were alone, he complained about this, and once even said:
“Hey, what’s happening to them? Am I dying right away?” “So what if I die… What’s it to them? What am I to them?..” Then, in a more bitter and merciless manner, he added:
“I’m nothing to them… I was nothing… We lived together in the same house for years… They didn’t wonder who this man is… Now they’re afraid I’ll go away…”
“Please, Raif Bey,” I said. “What kind of talk is this… True, they’re panicking a bit too much, but interpreting it this way isn’t right… Your wife and daughter!”
“Yes, my wife and daughter… But that’s all…”
He turned his head to the other side. I hadn’t understood anything from his last words and hesitated to ask anything else.
Nurettin Bey brought an internal medicine specialist to calm the household. After a long examination, this man said the illness was pneumonia, and seeing the astonishment of those around him:
“No, come on, it’s not that serious… Thank God his constitution is strong, his heart is sound too, he’ll get through it. Only one must be careful… Don’t let him catch cold. In fact, it would be better if you moved him to a hospital!” he said.
When Mihriye Hanım heard the word hospital, she completely let herself go. Sinking into one of the chairs in the hall, she began crying at the top of her voice. Nurettin Bey too, wrinkling his face as if his dignity had been touched:
“What nonsense?” he said. “At home he’ll surely be looked after better than at a hospital!”
The doctor shrugged and left.
Raif Efendi at first wanted to go to the hospital, saying “At least there I’ll rest my head!” It was obvious from his every state that he wanted to be alone, but when he saw how strongly those around him rejected this, he too stopped making a sound. With a hopeless smile on his face, he murmured: “They won’t leave me in peace there either!”
One day, I still remember, on a Friday evening, I was sitting on the chair at Raif Efendi’s bedside, not speaking at all, watching him breathe with his chest wheezing. There was no one else in the room. A large pocket watch standing among the medicine bottles on the nightstand beside him was filling the room with a metallic sound. The patient, opening his eyes that had retreated into hollows:
“I’m a bit better today!” he said.
“Of course… It won’t continue like this forever…”
Then, almost in a distressed manner:
“But how much longer will this continue?..” he asked.
I had understood the true meaning of his question and was horrified. The weariness in his voice showed what he meant.
“What’s happening to you, Raif Bey?” I said.
Looking into my eyes, he insistently asked:
“But what’s the need? Isn’t it enough now?..”
At that moment Mihriye Hanım came in. Approaching me:
“He’s quite good today!” she said. “Thank God he’s gotten through this one too!”
Then she turned to her husband:
“Laundry will be done on Sunday… If the gentleman would bring that towel of yours!”
Raif Efendi nodded his head in agreement. After searching for and taking some things from the wardrobe, the woman went out again. The small improvement in the patient’s condition had taken away all of his wife’s panic and excitement. Now her head was filled with household worries, food and laundry work as before. Like all simple people, she was passing from sorrow to joy, from excitement to calm, and like all women, she was quickly forgetting everything. In Raif Efendi’s eyes was a sorrowful and deep smile. Indicating with his head his jacket hanging at the foot of the bed:
“There, in the right pocket there should be a key, take it and open the top drawer of my desk. Bring the towel my wife mentioned… It’ll be trouble but…” he said.
“I’ll bring it tomorrow evening!”
He stared at the ceiling in silence for a long time. Suddenly he turned his head to me:
“There, bring everything that’s inside the drawer!” he said. “Whatever’s there… Our lady probably sensed that I won’t be able to go to the company again… Our journey is to somewhere else now…”
His head was buried in the pillow again.
