Madonna in a Fur Coat

Madonna in a Fur Coat

Sabahattin Ali

Of all the people I have encountered in my life, none has left a deeper impression. Months have passed, and yet Raif Efendi still follows me in my thoughts. When I sit alone now, I see his honest face before me, as he gazes into emptiness and yet is ready to meet with a smile anyone who crosses his path. And yet he was no extraordinary man. On the contrary—he was quite ordinary, without striking features, no different from the hundreds of others we encounter in daily life without noticing them. There was nothing in his life—neither in public nor in private—that could have aroused curiosity. He was the kind of person about whom one asks oneself: “What do they live for? What do they find in life? What logic forces them to go on breathing? What philosophy drives them as they walk over the earth?” Yet we ask in vain if we do not look beyond the surface—if we forget that beneath every surface lies another world, in which an imprisoned spirit circles alone. Perhaps it is easier to dismiss a person whose face bears no sign of inner life. And what a pity that is: a breath of curiosity is enough to come upon treasures we would never have expected. Yet we rarely seek what we do not expect to find. If a hero is sent into the cave of a dragon, his task is clear. But another, greater courage is needed to lower oneself into a well whose depth is unknown to us. Certainly that was not the case with me; if I came to know Raif Efendi, it was pure chance.

After I had lost my modest position in a bank—I still do not really know why; they said it was for the sake of reducing costs, but a week later they had already hired someone else—I spent a long time looking for work in Ankara. My small savings carried me through the summer, but with autumn I knew that the days when I slept on friends’ sofas would soon be over. My meal ticket for the restaurant was due to expire in a week, and I could not even afford to renew it. Every unsuccessful application robbed me of a little hope, even though from the beginning I knew that my chances were equal to zero. Cut off from my friends, I went from shop to shop looking for work as a salesman; rejected everywhere, I wandered desperately through the streets half the night. Sometimes friends invited me to dinner, but even when I sat there, enjoying their food and their wine, the inner gloom did not leave me. And the strangest thing was this: the worse my situation became, the more uncertain my survival seemed from day to day, the greater became my shame and my timidity about asking for help. If I saw a friend in the street—one who in earlier days would readily have told me of new opportunities for work—I hurried past him with my head lowered. Even toward those from whom I had asked for money or a meal, I had become different. If they asked me how I was, I put on a forced smile and said: “Not bad … I keep finding a bit of work here and there.” Then I said goodbye. The more I needed my friends, the more strongly I wanted to flee from them.

One evening I was strolling along the quiet street between the station and the exhibition hall, breathing in the beauty of autumnal Ankara, hoping my heart might rise. The sun was reflected in the windows of the People’s House and pierced the white marble with blood-red patches of light; above the pines and acacias hovered a cloud of smoke, perhaps also steam or dust, and a group of tired workers returned from a building site in bent silence … Everything in this scene seemed content in its place. Everything was in order. Everything was as it should be. I thought: There is nothing more I can do. Then suddenly a car drove past me. When I saw the driver, I thought I recognized him. The car stopped a few steps farther on, and the door opened. My old classmate Hamdi leaned out of the window and called my name.

His long years of work did not protect him from being despised in the office. If our friend Hamdi found even the smallest typing error in one of Raif Efendi’s translations, he immediately had the poor man summoned—sometimes he even came into our room himself to rebuke him loudly. With the other employees he was more cautious; he knew that all of them owed their positions to family connections and did not want to bring trouble on himself. But on Raif Efendi he could exercise his power: he knew exactly that this man would never find the courage to contradict him. Is there a sweeter intoxication than exercising power over one’s equal? It is, to be sure, a rare pleasure, one that must be enjoyed with discretion—and possible only with certain people.

Sometimes Raif Efendi fell ill and stayed away from work. Usually it was an ordinary cold. But an earlier attack of pleurisy had made him excessively cautious. Even with a slight sniffle he shut himself up at home for days, and when he returned, he wore several waistcoats layered over one another. He insisted that the windows remain closed, and in the evening he wrapped scarves up to his ears before pulling the collar of his worn, heavy coat as high as it would go. But even when he was ill, he did not neglect his work: a messenger brought him the documents to be translated at home and collected them again after a few hours. Nevertheless, Hamdi and the director treated him each time as though they wanted to say: “Do not forget how kind we are to you, you wretch! However often you are ill—we keep you on all the same!” When he returned after a few days, they were not content with wishing him recovery, but mocked him: “Well, how are things? Finally beaten?”

By then I too was losing patience with Raif Efendi. I spent little time in the office—mostly I was on the road with a briefcase full of documents, from bank to bank, to ministries, handling orders. Only occasionally did I return to my desk to arrange documents and go through them with the director or his deputy. Yet even then the sight of this lifeless man sitting opposite me and translating endlessly, when he was not reading his German novel, tormented me. I thought: He is too shy to explore his soul, let alone express it. He had, so I believed, no more life in him than a plant. Every morning he came like a machine, did his work, read in his books, bought a few things in the evening, and went home. This numbing routine was, I heard, interrupted only by his illnesses. No one could remember ever having seen him agitated. Even under unjust accusations his face remained motionless. When he asked a secretary to type up a translation and later thanked her for it, he did so with the same awkward smile.

One day a translation was late again—the typists did not attach much importance to Raif Efendi’s work. Hamdi came in, stern as a schoolmaster: “How long are we supposed to wait? I said it was urgent. I was already about to leave, and still the letter from Hungary has not been translated!”

Raif Efendi sprang up: “I finished the translation long ago, sir! The ladies have just not typed it yet. They were given other work!”

“Did I not say that this letter had priority?”

“Yes, sir, I told them that as well!”

Again Hamdi raised his voice: “Instead of contradicting me, do your work!”—and slammed the door behind him.

Raif Efendi ran after him to plead once more with the secretaries.

Meanwhile I thought of Hamdi, who throughout his whole scene had not honored me with a single glance. Soon the German translator returned and bent over his desk again. As always, his composure astonished and irritated me. He took a pencil and began to scribble on a sheet of paper. But it was not the aimless scribbling of an angry man—I saw the hinted, confident smile beneath his blond mustache, at the corners of his mouth. His hand moved surely over the paper; he narrowed his eyes to look more closely, and from this smile I recognized that he was pleased with what he saw. Finally he put the pencil down, examined his work more closely—and I stared at him openly. Now he wore an expression on his face that I had never seen in him before: the expression people show only when they are grieving for someone. My surprise awakened my curiosity. I could not sit still. Just as I was about to get up, he had already sprung from his chair and gone out again, probably to seek out the secretaries. In a single leap I was at his desk, seized the sheet—and froze, speechless.

Later, when I came and went more often, I got to know these children better. They were not malicious—only empty. Completely empty. Their insolence came from that alone. It was the yawning emptiness in them that drove them to mock and deride others—that was their only satisfaction, the only way to feel themselves. I listened to them as they spoke to one another. Vedat and Cihat were the youngest clerks in the Ministry of Economy, yet all they did was gossip maliciously about their colleagues. When Raif Efendi’s older daughter, Necla, spoke, it was only to criticize her classmates. Ceaselessly they made fun of others—of their walk, their clothing—although they themselves behaved in quite similar ways.

“Did you see what Mualla wore to the wedding? Ha ha ha …”

“You should have seen how that girl gave our Orhan the brush-off! Ha ha ha …”

Meanwhile Raif Efendi’s sister-in-law, Ferhunde Hanım, had no other purpose in life than to look after her two children, aged three and four, and—if she could persuade her older sister to watch them—to put on heavy makeup, dress in a silk gown, and go out in the evening. The few times I saw her, she was standing before the mirror of the sideboard in the dining room and pinning a feathered hat into her waved, dyed hair. She could hardly have been thirty years old, yet wrinkles were already forming around her mouth and eyes. Her restless, light-blue eyes reflected an inner restlessness that had probably dwelt in her since birth. Her children were always pale, neglected, and dirty, and she scolded them as if they were the punishment of a cruel enemy—in fear that they might wipe their dirty hands on her clothing before she left the house.

As for her husband, Nurettin Bey—one of the section heads in the same ministry—he was a second version of Hamdi. Not yet in his mid-thirties, he was the type of man who puffs himself up like a barber’s assistant when he combs back his dark, curly hair, and who, when he said a simple “How are you?” nodded meaningfully, as though he had just bestowed a pearl of wisdom. When one spoke with him, he fixed the other person with a superior, mocking smile, as if to say: “What nonsense, as though you knew what you were talking about.”

After graduating from a vocational school, he had for some reason been sent to Italy to study the leather trade—but all he had learned there was a few scraps of Italian and the airs of a self-important man. Added to this was his own philosophy of success: first, he considered himself worthy of high position and therefore entitled to pronounce half-baked judgments on every subject, no matter how little he understood of it. At the same time, by criticizing everyone else, he managed to convince them of his importance. As it seemed to me, the children of the house had adopted this habit from their uncle, whom they greatly admired. Secondly, he attached the greatest importance to his appearance—he shaved every day, made sure that his thinning trousers were immaculately pressed, and spent his Saturdays on extended shopping trips in search of the most fashionable shoes and the “noblest” socks. As I later learned, his entire wages went toward his and his wife’s wardrobe. The two brothers-in-law each earned no more than thirty-five lira, so it fell to our friend Raif Efendi to cover all household expenses with his meager salary. Nevertheless, Nurettin Bey treated everyone in the house like a servant—except himself.

They held Raif’s wife, Mihriye Hanım, in equally low esteem. Not yet forty, she was already old, fat, and shapeless, with a bosom that hung down to her navel. She spent most of the day in the kitchen; the little free time she had she devoted to darning children’s stockings or looking after her sister’s “brats.” She received help from no one—the others considered themselves too fine to be cooked for by her. If the food did not please them, unpleasant scenes ensued. When Nurettin Bey then said: “What is this supposed to be, my dear?” there was irritation in his voice as if he had contributed hundreds of lira to the household. And the two brothers-in-law sat at the table wearing their seven-lira ties and said: “I don’t like this; make me eggs!” or “I am still hungry; make me sausage!” Without scruple they sent Mihriye Hanım back into the kitchen. If they needed eleven kuruş for bread in the evening, they did not reach into their own pockets, but went to Raif Efendi, who lay ill in bed, woke him, and even scolded him because he had not become well in time to go shopping himself.