Madonna in a Fur Coat
Sabahattin Ali
MADONNA IN A FUR COAT
Translated by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe
Contents
Madonna in a Fur Coat
Follow Penguin
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
MADONNA IN A FUR COAT
Sabahattin Ali was born in 1907 in the Ottoman town of Egridere (now Ardino in southern Bulgaria) and was killed on the Bulgarian border in 1948 as he attempted to leave Turkey. A teacher, writer and journalist, he owned and edited a popular weekly newspaper called Marko Pasa and was imprisoned twice for his political views.
Of all the people I have chanced upon in life, there is no one who has left a greater impression. Months have passed but still Raif Efendi haunts my thoughts. As I sit here alone, I can see his honest face, gazing off into the distance, but ready, nonetheless, to greet all who cross his path with a smile. Yet he was hardly an extraordinary man. Indeed, he was rather ordinary, with no distinguishing features – no different from the hundreds of others we meet and fail to notice in the course of a normal day. Indeed, there was no part of his life – public or private – that might give rise to curiosity. He was, in the end, the sort of man who causes us to ask ourselves: ‘What do they live for? What do they find in life? What logic compels them to keep breathing? What philosophy drives them, as they wander the earth?’ But we ask in vain, if we fail to look beyond the surface – if we forget that beneath each surface lurks another realm, in which a caged mind whirls alone. It is, perhaps, easier to dismiss a man whose face gives no indication of an inner life. And what a pity that is: a dash of curiosity is all it takes to stumble upon treasures we never expected. That said, we rarely seek that which we do not expect to find. Send a hero into a dragon’s den, and his task is clear. It is a hero of another order who can summon up the courage to lower himself into a well of which we have no knowledge. Certainly this was not the case for me; if I came to know Raif Efendi, it was happenstance, pure and simple.
After losing my modest post in a bank – I am still not sure why, they said it was to reduce costs, but within the week they had hired someone else – I spent a long time seeking work in Ankara. My meagre savings kept me going through the summer, but as winter approached, I knew that my days of sleeping on friends’ sofas would soon come to an end. My restaurant ration card was to expire within the week, and even this I could not afford to renew. Every failed job application drained me of all hope, even when I knew from the outset that my chances were nil; cut off from my friends, I would go from shop to shop seeking work as a salesman; rejected by them all, I would wander the streets in despair for half the night. From time to time, my friends would invite me over for supper, but even as I sat there, enjoying their food and drink, the fog refused to lift. And here was the strangest thing: the more my situation worsened, the less I could be sure of surviving from one day to the next, the greater my shame and my reluctance to ask for help. I would see a friend in the street – a friend who in the past had been more than willing to suggest where else I might look for work – and I would rush past him, head bowed. I was even different with friends whom I had openly asked for food, or happily borrowed money from. When they asked me how I was doing, I would flash an awkward smile and say, ‘Not bad … I keep finding bits of work to do, here and there.’ With that, I’d take my leave. The more I needed my friends, the more I longed to run away.
One evening, I was ambling along the quiet road between the station and the Exhibition Hall, breathing in the beauties of an Ankara autumn, in the hope that they might lift my heart. The sun reflected in the windows of the People’s House had punctured this white marble building with holes the colour of blood; hovering over the pine saplings and the acacia trees was a cloud of smoke that might also have been steam or dust, while a group of bedraggled workers returning from some construction site or another moved in hunchbacked silence over the skid-marked tarmac … And everything in this scene seemed content to be where it was. All was well with the world. All was in its proper place. There was, I thought, nothing more I could do. Just then a car sped past me. Glancing at the driver, I thought I recognized him. The car came to a halt a few paces ahead, and the door flew open.
1 comment