Anyway… That’s not what happened. Maryam came from a poor family. Her uncle Artin, a furrier, had settled in Beirut a while before. Maryam did not know that her father and uncle had been corresponding for some time and that her uncle insistently summoned her father to Beirut, to be his dependable assistant in this foreign land. One Sunday evening, her father announced his decision. They were not getting anywhere in this country. He was fed up of working himself to the bone. That is why the whole family was to go to Beirut and share in uncle Artin’s work. Although that night Maryam cried until the morning thinking of Aziz Bey, she was quickly seduced by the postcards, photographs, the smartness of her cousins and the happy smiles that came from Beirut during the week following this decision.
Maryam used to say, ‘It will only be a few months before we come back, my father won’t be able to cope there.’ She convinced Aziz Bey too. She indicated a vague departure date – today or tomorrow – but never a precise day and time, making it obvious she did not want to say goodbye.
One morning, when Aziz Bey least expected it, as he was going to the office, a horse and cart suddenly appeared in front of him in the street where Maryam lived. Goods sold to the rag and bone man were being loaded onto the cart. He took shelter in the shade of an apartment at the top end of the street and watched the armchairs, coffee tables, thin mattresses, quilts, tinned copper pans, samovar, and even old coats and winter boots being loaded onto the cart. His eyes brimmed with tears. Without moving, he watched the commotion of this family, a member of which was also the girl he loved, preparing to leave for a new country. Then Maryam, her mother, father and sister, hands akimbo, glanced at their home from outside, and loaded a few shabby old cases, tied tightly with washing line, into a chequered taxi. Waving to their neighbours, they got into the taxi with smiling, hopeful faces and departed.
That day Aziz Bey was hurt for the first time. Even if Maryam had not told him about her departure, he thought she would have been sad, tearful and reluctant; she would have turned and gone into the house a few times. In the image of departure he visualised, Maryam would sit, crying in front of the front door, her mother tugging her up by the arms, her father kicking the taxi’s wheels and shaking his index finger furiously at Maryam, while her mother stepped in front of her husband in order to stop him beating her, while her sister whispered in her ear, begging. Maryam should not have been able to get up and go at all, as she gazed towards the end of the street, looking for Aziz Bey.
That’s not what happened. Maryam, like the others, bustled in and out of the apartment, carried belongings, and never once turned her head to look towards the end of the street. Had she looked she would have seen Aziz Bey’s eyes filled with tears, his hurt, unhappy, besotted state.
Ruling out events such as his quarrels with his father and his grandfather’s death, this departure was the first disaster in Aziz Bey’s life. The subsequent tragic events were added to this first large ring and thus Aziz Bey’s life became a very long chain woven from sad times. The good and happy days in the interim were not able to change this melancholy mood one little bit. Whenever Aziz Bey looked back on his life he saw that all that was left from all those years that had been lived, were just a few melancholy and fractured stories.
If that departure, which felt like a nail being separated from his flesh, had not taken place, this love would not really have been love. Aziz Bey went crazy with love; he was too young. He thought that there could never be a greater torment than this and that he would end up dying in the streets deliriously calling Maryam’s name. However, he did not know that there are very few moments when the body does not betray the soul: no matter how much one would love to waste away and die after great grief, one cannot succeed. The soul struggles to rise to the heavens donning a black halo but the body is worldly; it eats, drinks and lives.
Aziz Bey did not die; he could not die, but he was no longer able to notice the looks of mature women who enjoyed escapades, hooked on his dark and sharp features; he could no longer read the desire in their trembling nostrils. He lost weight; he grew pale. While his mother feared that he would contract tuberculosis, his father knew, as did the whole neighbourhood, and was proud of the mass of love affairs. He thought that this too was a passing affair of the heart and did not take any notice, saying simply, ‘such things happened to me too, he’ll recover,’ and thereby reminding his wife of his former lovers and probably breaking her heart for the umpteenth time.
After this departure, Aziz Bey began to think that it was not worth believing in love and falling under its power. Just as he had decided to be more ruthless towards women, a long letter arrived from Maryam. It was sincere, touching and extremely romantic. All Aziz Bey’s views on love changed in a trice. Man needs to love someone, and to love passionately.
He began to write long and poetic letters to Maryam. His writing was atrocious; even he had difficulty in reading it. Every morning when he arrived at the office he looked with envy at the writing of the accountant filling unnecessary ledgers with beautiful letters; even though he thought about getting him to make a fair copy of these long and extremely private letters, he was too embarrassed to suggest it. So it took him several nights to write a letter. While the light in his room shone, his father muttered angrily remembering the electricity bills and grumbling in a loud voice, ‘If you’d had your light on that much when you went to school, you’d have become a somebody by now.’
Just as Aziz Bey feared that being so far out of sight would also be reflected in Maryam’s mind, he would receive a new letter; and strangely enough, those letters arriving from a hot and distant city did not become less frequent or shorter.
However, if Aziz Bey had paid a little more attention he would have been able to see in the answering letters, written on wafer thin pink paper with painstaking writing slanting to the left with the tails of the y’s rounded and tiny circles dotting the i’s, that these letters were based not on love but on an insatiable curiosity for what was left behind. If someone not in love read these clichéd lines taken from films and novels, he or she would have easily realised that Maryam was one of those women who took pleasure not in love itself, but in the devastation it left behind. But Aziz Bey did not understand this at all. In fact he was not altogether to blame. Just as Maryam was one of those women who took pleasure from the ruined lover she left behind, so Aziz Bey was one of those men who believed that there was no woman who would not fall in love with him. The countless women who had entered his life since his youth were the reason for his self-confidence. Of course it was impossible for Aziz Bey’s distant sweetheart to forget him.
Maryam’s letters always begun with the words, ‘your days spent without me…’ and were full of questions passionately picking at the sincere feelings of the lover she left behind. Yet there was the air of an experienced mature woman rather than that of a young girl who was forced to go far away and who was impassioned by a childish love. This sweetheart whom Aziz Bey imagined biting the top of her pen while writing letters full of innocent and inquiring questions, described in the same long letters everything about her new home, its magnificence and beauty; she wrote that even though it was very beautiful, they were, in this country as hot as hell, only able to breathe at night, that their situation was rapidly improving, and she invited Aziz Bey to this new prosperous country with very sincere sentences whose reality had not been tested.
‘You come too,’ said Maryam. ‘Without you, days drag on…’
As Aziz Bey received this heartfelt invitation he trembled, little realising these sentences looked good only