For a few months I wandered around like a vagabond. Most of my friends had disappeared. My father decided to send me to Istanbul. He didn’t know where I would go either; he said “Find a school, study!” Although I had always been a somewhat clumsy and shy child, my father’s saying this to me was enough to show how little he knew his son. Whatever the case, I felt certain secret desires within me toward certain directions. There was one subject in which I had won my teachers’ appreciation at school: I drew rather well. The idea of entering the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul would sometimes cross my mind and make me dream sweet dreams. Besides, since childhood I had been a quiet child living more in the world of imagination than reality. There was a timidity in my nature so extreme as to be called meaningless, which very often caused me to be misunderstood by my surroundings, to be taken for stupid, and this upset me. Nothing frightened me as much as the obligation to correct an opinion about me. Although a misdeed committed by my classmates in class was always blamed on me, I never dared defend myself with even a word; when I returned home I would hide in a corner and cry. I remember my mother and especially my father frequently saying to me: “Hey, you were supposed to be a girl but you were born wrong!” My greatest pleasure was to sit alone in the garden of the house or by the stream and plunge into daydreams.
These daydreams were bold and vast enough to create a great contrast with my actions: like the heroes in the countless translated novels I read, I would ravage everything with my entourage who obeyed my every word without hesitation, I would kidnap a girl named Fahriye who lived in a neighborhood over and aroused sweet desires in me whose shape I couldn’t quite define, with a mask on my face and double pistols at my belt, to my magnificent cave in the mountains. I would imagine how she would first be frightened and struggle, then, seeing the people trembling before me and the unparalleled wealth in the cave, how she would fall into great astonishment, and finally when I removed my face, with a joy she couldn’t hide, how she would cry out and throw herself on my neck. Sometimes I would travel in Africa like great explorers, have unprecedented adventures among cannibals; sometimes I would become a famous painter and tour Europe. All the books I had read—Michel Zevaco, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Ahmet Mithat Efendi, Vechi Bey—had taken indelible places in my mind.
My father would be angry at my reading so much, sometimes taking away and throwing out novels, sometimes not letting light into my room at night. But when he saw that I found a solution to everything, that I read “The Mysteries of Paris” or “Les Misérables” in ecstasy under the light of a small wick oil lamp, he had given up his pressure. I would read everything I could get my hands on and fall under the influence of everything I read, whether it was the adventures of Monsieur Lecoq or the history of Murat Bey.
When I read in an old Roman history that an envoy named Mucius Scaevola, during peace negotiations with the enemy, in response to the threat that he would be killed if he didn’t accept the proposed conditions, put his arm into the fire beside him and burned it to his elbow, and during this time calmly continued the negotiations, showing he couldn’t be frightened by such threats, I was seized by the desire to put my hand in a fire the same way and test this fortitude in myself, and had burned my fingers rather badly. The image of this man who endured the greatest pain while maintaining the smile on his face has never left me. At one time I too had tried writing, even scribbling little poems, but had quickly given this up: the fear of expressing what was inside me in any form whatsoever, this meaningless and unnecessary timidity prevented me from writing. I only continued drawing. This work didn’t seem to me like giving something from within. It appeared to consist of taking the outside and reflecting it on a paper, of being an intermediary. Indeed, when I understood the matter wasn’t like this, I gave this up too… All because of that fear…
I learned on my own in Istanbul, at the Academy of Fine Arts, without anyone’s help, that drawing was also a kind of expression, an inner expression, and I stopped attending school. Besides, the teachers didn’t find much in me either. Among the things I scribbled at home or in the studio, I could only show the most meaningless ones; I hid with great fastidiousness and was ashamed to reveal drawings that expressed anything about me, that contained anything from me. If these happened to fall into someone’s hands by chance, I would be astonished like a woman caught naked and private, turn beet red, and flee.
I wandered around Istanbul for a long time not knowing what to do. These were the armistice years; the city had become shameless and chaotic beyond what I could endure. I asked my father for money to return to Havran. About ten days later I received a long letter. My father was resorting to a final measure for me to become a useful man.
He had heard from somewhere that because of the loss of money’s value in Germany, foreigners lived very cheaply there, even for less money than in Istanbul; he was telling me to go there and learn “soap-making, especially perfumed soap-making,” and informed me he had sent a sum of money for travel expenses and other costs. I was extremely happy. Not because I felt enthusiasm for these crafts or anything, but because I was happy that the opportunity to see Europe, which had come alive before my eyes in a thousand and one shapes since childhood and had been the subject of many of my dreams, had emerged at such an unexpected time. In his letter my father said: “If you come back after learning this business in a year or two, we’ll expand our soap factory here, reform it and give it to your management; you too will enter commercial life and become happy and prosperous by virtue of your golden bracelet!” But I wasn’t even thinking about this aspect of the matter…
I estimated I would learn a foreign language, read books in this language, and most importantly, find in this “Europe” the people I had only encountered in novels until now. Besides, wasn’t one reason for my distance from my environment, for my wildness, that I couldn’t find in my environment the people I had met and adopted in books?
I prepared in a week and departed by train through Bulgaria to Berlin. I knew no language at all. Thanks to five or ten words I memorized from a conversation book during the four-day journey, I went to a pension whose address I had written in my notebook while still in Istanbul.
The first weeks passed with learning enough language to manage myself and walking around the city looking around admiringly. The confusion of the first days didn’t last long. This too was ultimately a city. A city with somewhat wider, much cleaner streets, with blonder people. But there was nothing there to make a person drop and faint from astonishment. I didn’t know myself what the Europe in my imagination was like and what shortcomings the city I now lived in had compared to it… I hadn’t yet realized that nothing in life would ever be as wonderful as in our heads.
Thinking I couldn’t start any work without learning the language, I began taking lessons from a former officer who had been in Turkey during the Great War and learned some Turkish. The landlady, Madam, was also devoting her free time to chatting with me and helping. The pension’s other guests too counted it an opportunity to make friends and were annoying me with nonsensical questions. The crowd gathered around the table at dinner was quite colorful. Among them especially Frau van Tiedemann, a Dutch widow, Herr Camera, a Portuguese merchant who brought oranges to Berlin from the Canary Islands, and old Herr Döppke were friendly with me. This last was a man who had done business in Germany’s Cameroon colony and after the armistice had abandoned everything and taken refuge in his homeland. Living a rather modest life with the amount of money he had been able to save, he spent his days going to political meetings, which were quite plentiful in Berlin at that time, and telling his impressions in the evenings. Very often he would bring along newly acquainted demobilized unemployed German officers he had just met and would argue with them for hours. According to what I understood half-brokenly, they found Germany’s salvation in a man of iron will like Bismarck coming to power and beginning to arm without losing any time, correcting injustices with a second war.
Sometimes one of the pension guests would leave and immediately another guest would come to the vacant room. But in time I had gotten used to these changes, to the dining room’s always-burning red-shaded electric light, to the various cabbage smells never absent at any time of day, to my table companions’ political arguments—in fact, I had even begun to tire of them. Especially these arguments… Everyone had their own idea for saving Germany. But all these ideas truly depended not on Germany, but on each person’s own personal interests. An old woman who had lost her fortune due to currency depreciation was angry at the officers; the officers found the striking workers and soldiers who didn’t want to continue the war at fault; the colonial merchant cursed the emperor who had started the war out of nowhere.
Even the maid who tidied my room in the mornings would try to talk politics with me, and in her free time would immediately start reading her newspaper. She too had her own fervent convictions, and when talking about them her face would turn completely red and she would clench her fist and wave it in the air.
I seemed to have forgotten why I had come to Germany. I would remember the soap-making matter whenever I received a letter from my father, writing that I was still occupied with learning the language, that I would soon apply to an establishment of this kind, comforting both him and myself. My days passed exactly like one another. I had toured the whole city, the zoo, the museums. That this city of millions could be exhausted in a few months almost gave me despair. I would say to myself: “This is Europe! What’s here anyway?” and judged that the world was essentially quite boring.
Usually in the afternoons I would wander on the main streets, in the crowds, watching women returning home with seriousness on their faces particular to people who have done very important work, or hanging on a man’s arm, scattering smiles around with languid eyes, and men still maintaining military steps in their walk.
Not to have completely lied to my father, with the help of a few Turkish friends, I applied to a luxury soap firm. The German employees of the establishment, which belonged to a Swedish group, received me very well with an interest given by the comradeship in arms not yet forgotten, but they hesitated to show me the deeper aspects of this profession than what I had learned by observation at our soap factory in Havran, probably because it was the firm’s secret.
Perhaps because they saw no great enthusiasm in me for this work, they did this so as not to waste time in vain. Slowly I stopped going to the factory, they didn’t ask where I’d been, my father lengthened the intervals between his letters, and I continued living in the city of Berlin without ever bringing to mind what I would do, why I had come here.
Three evenings a week I took German lessons from the former officer; during the days I watched paintings in museums and newly opened galleries, and I smelled cabbage even a hundred steps before the pension. But after the first months passed, I began not to be as bored as before. I was slowly trying to read books and gradually getting more pleasure from this work. After a while this almost became an addiction. I would lie face down on the bed, open the book before me, put the old thick dictionary beside me, and stay for hours. Very often I couldn’t even endure looking up words in the dictionary; I would pass through sentences giving meaning through context. It was as if a completely new world was opening before my eyes. This time what I read wasn’t talking only about heroes, extraordinary people, and unprecedented adventures like the translated or original books of my childhood and early youth. In almost all of them I found a piece of myself, my surroundings, what I saw and heard. I would suddenly remember things I hadn’t understood or seen although I lived in them before, and thought I was now giving them their true meanings. Those who had the most effect on me were Russian writers. I would sometimes read Turgenev’s huge stories to the end in one sitting. Especially one of them had shaken me for days. The girl who is the heroine of this story called Klara Milich falls in love with a rather naive student, but without saying anything about this to anyone, with the shame of loving such a fool, she becomes the victim of her terrible passion and perishes. For some reason I had found this girl very close to myself; I likened her to myself in not being able to tell what went through her, in hiding her strongest, deepest, most beautiful parts with terrible jealousy and distrust.
The old painting masters in museums were also now giving me the possibility to live without being bored. I would sometimes watch a painting in the National Gallery for hours and then keep the same face and landscape alive in my head for days.
It was about to be a year since I had come to Germany. One day, I remember very well, on a rainy and dark October day, while leafing through newspapers, a critical article about an exhibition opened by new painters caught my eye. I didn’t understand much from these new ones. Perhaps because the excessive pretension in their works, the tendency to catch the eye in any way, to show oneself, was contrary to my temperament, I didn’t like them… Indeed, I didn’t even read the article in the newspaper. But a few hours later, while taking one of my daily walks by randomly wandering the streets, I noticed I was in front of the building where the exhibition mentioned in the newspaper had opened. I had no important business to do. Obeying chance, I preferred to enter, and wandered for a long time, watching the many large and small paintings on the walls with indifferent eyes.
Most of the paintings made one want to smile: angular knees and shoulders, disproportionate heads and breasts, nature landscapes tried to be shown with sharp colors as if made from craft paper. Crystal vases as shapeless as a piece of broken brick, flowers as lifeless as if kept between book pages for years, and finally, terrible portraits resembling those taken from a criminals’ album… But whatever the case, one was entertained. Perhaps one should have been angry at people who tried to accomplish such great works with so little effort. But when one thought that they almost morbidly and willingly accepted the punishment of not being understood by anyone and being ridiculous, there was nothing to do but pity them.
Suddenly I stopped in front of a wall near the door of the large hall. I can’t describe my feelings at that moment, especially after so many years have passed. I only remember standing as if nailed before the portrait of a woman in a fur coat. Those passing by looking at paintings were pushing me left and right with their bodies, but I couldn’t move from where I was. What was in this portrait?.. I know I can’t explain this; only, there was a strange, somewhat wild, somewhat proud and very strong expression I hadn’t seen in any woman until then.
Although from the first moment I knew I had never seen this face or its like anywhere, at any time, I was seized by a feeling as if there were an acquaintance between us. This pale face, these black eyebrows and the black eyes beneath them; this dark brown hair and especially this expression combining innocence with will, infinite melancholy with strong personality, couldn’t be foreign to me. I knew this woman from the books I had read since I was seven, from the fantasy worlds I had built since I was five. In her were pieces of Halit Ziya’s Nihal, Vecihi Bey’s Mehcure, the Chevalier Büridan’s beloved, and from Cleopatra I had read about in history books, even from Amine Hatun, Mohammed’s mother, whom I imagined while listening to mevlit. She was a composition, an amalgamation of all the women in my imagination. Inside a fur from wildcat skin, there was a small piece of neck whose dull white color was evident despite being in shadow; above this was an oval human face turned slightly to the left. Her black eyes were looking at the ground as if immersed in incomprehensible, deep thoughts, almost wanting to search with a last hope for something she was certain she wouldn’t find. Despite this, the sorrow in her gaze was mixed a bit with disdain. As if to say: “Yes, I won’t find what I’m searching for… But so what?” This expression of disdain took a completely clear form in her somewhat full lips, the lower one slightly larger. Her eyelids were slightly swollen. Her eyebrows were neither very thick nor very thin, but a bit short; her dark brown hair surrounded her angular and rather wide forehead and extended downward, mixing with the wildcat’s fur. Her chin was slightly curved forward and pointed. She had a thin long nose with slightly fleshy wings.
Almost with trembling hands I leafed through the catalog. I hoped to find details there about this painting. Toward the end, at the bottom of the page, aligned with the painting’s number, I read these three words: Maria Puder, Self-Portrait. There was nothing else. It was understood that the painter had only a single work in the exhibition, her own portrait. I was also somewhat pleased by this. I was afraid, thinking that other paintings by the woman who made this wonderful picture wouldn’t have such a great effect on me, that they might even perhaps diminish my first admiration. I stayed inside until late. I would walk around from time to time, look at other paintings with unseeing eyes, and then quickly return to the same place and watch for a long time. Each time I seemed to see new expressions on the face, a life gradually revealing itself. I imagined the eyes looking downward were secretly sizing me up, that the lips were moving slightly.
No one remained in the hall. A tall man standing by the door was probably waiting for me. I quickly pulled myself together and went outside. A light rain was drizzling. Contrary to every evening, I returned to the pension without lingering on the roads at all. I was burning with the desire to eat my dinner immediately, withdraw to my room and bring that face before my eyes alone.
I didn’t speak at all at the table. The pension owner Frau Heppner said:
“Where did you tour today?”
“Nowhere… I wandered, then I toured an exhibition of modern painters!” I answered.
Those in the hall immediately began talking about modern painting; I quietly went to my room.
While undressing, a newspaper fell from my jacket pocket to the floor. As I picked it up and placed it on the table, my heart suddenly began beating. This was the newspaper I had bought in the morning and in which I had seen the article about the exhibition while sitting and reading in a coffeehouse. To learn what was in this article about that painting and its painter, I opened the pages almost tearing them. I myself was astonished at such haste from a person as slow and unemotional as me. I skimmed the article from the beginning. Toward the middle, my eyes were nailed and remained on the words I had seen in the catalog: Maria Puder…
It spoke at length about this young artist exhibiting a painting for the first time in an exhibition. It said that the woman painter, who appeared to want to walk more in the path of the classics, possessed an astonishingly great expressive ability; that the “beautifying” or “stubbornly uglifying” tendencies seen in most artists who make their own portraits weren’t found in her; after many technical considerations, it finally claimed that the woman in the painting, in terms of her posture and her face’s expression, as a strange coincidence, resembled astonishingly closely the depiction of the Virgin Mary in Andreas del Sarto’s Madonna delle Arpie; and with a half-joking expression, wishing success to this “Madonna in a Fur Coat,” it moved on to speak of another painter.
The next day my first task was to go to a store selling famous copies and search for the Arpie Madonna. I found it inside a large Sarto album. Although the rather poorly printed copy didn’t show much, the article writer was right: the face of this Madonna sitting in a high place with the holy child in her lap, looking at the ground as if not noticing the bearded man on her right and the youth on her left, the way she held her head, the expression of melancholy and hurt clearly visible in her gaze and lips, resembled exactly the painting I had seen yesterday. Because they sold this page of the album separately, I immediately bought it and returned to my room. When I looked carefully, I judged that there was a great particularity in this painting from an artistic standpoint. I was seeing such a Madonna for the first time in my life: in the depictions of the Virgin Mary I had encountered until now, there was an innocence expression emphasized a bit more than necessary, even carried to the point of meaninglessness; while looking at the baby in their laps, they resembled small children wanting to say “Did you see? What God bestowed on me!” or servant girls staring in bewilderment and smiling at children they had borne from a man whose name they couldn’t say. Whereas the Mary in this painting by Sarto was a woman who had learned to think, had passed her judgments on life, and had begun to despise the world. She was looking not at the saints standing as if worshipping on either side, not at the Christ in her lap, not even at the sky, but at the earth, and certainly she was seeing something.
I left the picture on the table. Closing my eyes, I thought of the painting in the exhibition. Only at this moment did it occur to me that the person depicted there actually existed in reality. Yes, since the painter had made her own picture, this wonderful woman was walking among us, turning her black and deep eyes to the earth or to the person across from her, opening her mouth with its slightly larger lower lip to speak—in short, she was living. It would be possible to see her anywhere… When I thought of this possibility, the first feeling I felt was a great fear. For a man like me who had never had any adventure in his life to encounter such a woman for the first time would truly be terrible.
Although I was twenty-four years old, no woman adventure had happened to me. A few debaucheries we had done in Havran through the mediation of some neighborhood friends older than us were nothing but drunkenness adventures whose meaning I couldn’t possibly understand, and the timidity in my nature had prevented me from desiring to repeat them. Woman, for me, was a creature distant from materiality, unapproachable, who spurred my imagination, who participated in the thousand and one kinds of adventures I lived when I lay under olive trees on hot summer days. Although I had relationships with our neighbor Fahriye, whom I had secretly loved for long years without telling anyone, relationships that in imagination very often went as far as shamelessness, when I encountered her on the street I would suffer palpitations violent enough to knock me to the ground; my face would turn like fire and I would look for a place to escape. On Ramadan nights, to watch her going to tarawih prayers with her mother, a lantern in her hand, I would escape from home and hide across from their door; but as soon as this door opened and black-cloaked bodies appeared in the yellowish light striking outside, I would turn my head to the wall and begin trembling, thinking they would notice I was there.
