What I longed to do, as is customary when sitting across from a stranger, was to size him up, and with stolen glances to form my first – and of course, mistaken – impressions. But he, I saw, had no such desire; he just bent down over his work and continued as if I weren’t even there.

This continued until noon. By now I was staring at him openly, and without fear. He kept his hair cut short, and it was thinning at the top. The skin between his neck and his small ears was wrinkled. His long, thin fingers wandered from document to document as he conducted his translations without any sign of impatience. From time to time he’d raise his eyes, as if in search of the right word and, when our eyes met, he’d offer me something akin to a smile. Though he looked like an old man when viewed from the side, or from above, he looked enchantingly, and childishly, innocent when he smiled. His clipped blond moustache only added to the effect.

On my way out to eat, I saw him open a desk drawer to pull out a food container and a piece of bread wrapped in paper. ‘Bon appétit,’ I said, and left the room.

After sitting across from each other in the same room for many long days, we still hadn’t spoken much. By now I’d come to know some of the clerks from other departments well enough to go out with them to a coffee house in the evenings to play backgammon. From them I discovered that Raif Efendi was one of the longest-serving clerks in the firm. Before the firm was established, he’d worked as a translator at the bank it now used. No one remembered when he’d started there. It was said that he had a large family to care for and that his salary only just covered his costs. When I asked why the firm had not raised his salary, seeing as he was so senior, and in a firm that was throwing away money, left and right, the young clerks laughed. ‘He’s a slouch, that’s why! We’re not even sure how good he really is at languages!’ Later on, though, I discovered that his German was excellent, and his translations both accurate and elegant. He could easily translate a letter about sawmill machinery or spare parts, or detailing the qualities of a shipment of ash and pine timber bound from Susak Port in Yugoslavia. When he translated contracts or specifications from Turkish into German, the director sent them off without hesitation. In his free moments he would open his desk drawer to read the book he kept there, never rushing and never removing it from the drawer. So one day I asked, ‘What’s that, Raif Bey?’ He reddened as if I had caught him doing something wrong, and stammered, ‘Nothing … It’s a German novel, that’s all!’ At once, he closed the drawer. Despite all this, no one in the firm was willing to credit him with mastery of a foreign language. And perhaps not without reason, for there was nothing about the man to suggest he might know one. No foreign word ever crossed his lips. He never spoke about knowing other languages, never carried with him foreign magazines or newspapers. In sum, he bore no resemblance to the sort of man who makes it his life’s main business to let the whole world know that he understands French. This was underlined by the fact that he had never asked for his worth to be confirmed with a rise in salary. Nor did he make any effort to seek out other, better-paid work.

He came to work punctually, ate lunch in his room, and in the evening he would pick up a few things at the store and head for home. I invited him to the coffee house a few times, but I couldn’t get him to come. ‘They’re waiting for me at home!’ he’d say.