On 'Madonna in a Fur Coat'

Sabahattin Ali’s novel "Madonna in a Fur Coat" takes the reader on a complex journey that goes far beyond a simple love story, leading into the deep-seated dynamics that exist beneath seemingly ordinary lives, their manifestations on the surface, and their ebb and flow. The narrator, through his friend Hamdi, finds a job where he meets his office roommate, Raif Efendi, the novel’s true protagonist. Beyond working as a German translator at the company, Raif Efendi is a man whose presence or absence goes almost unnoticed, who does not react to his surroundings, and whose knowledge of German is therefore even called into question. Raif Efendi is an ordinary man. He comes to work every day, does his translations, reads books, and, in harmony with the quiet that greets him in the evening, does his shopping and returns home. Days pass with a machine-like rhythm. What the narrator initially witnesses in the workplace is precisely this machine-like Raif Efendi: someone who does not react, who does what he is told, and who remains unresponsive even when subjected to insult.

As the translations that Raif Efendi is required to complete are sent to and collected from his home due to his frequent illnesses, the narrator begins visiting the house, thus stepping into the second space of Raif Efendi’s life. Here, too, there is no apparent difference in Raif Efendi’s outward existence. Just as in the workplace, he lives at home disconnected from the space’s core dynamics, performing only the functions related to the narrowly defined tasks assigned to him – ignored, yet seemingly indifferent to this treatment. His engagement with life is limited to what is expected of him, and only at a minimal level. In addition to his wife and daughters, his brothers-in-law also live in the house, and he endures living like an unwanted lodger in the cramped space. What they make him feel is deeply painful: “Yet at the same time they were convinced that he was nothing, an insignificant and worthless zero...”

Raif Efendi’s indifference toward life in these two spaces – work and home – where he spends his entire life, gradually begins to convey a great deal to the narrator, who has been able to speak with him only very little in both settings. Within this indifference, the narrator discerns a firm will. During his visits to the house, he also learns that this seemingly indifferent man takes solitary walks in the evenings. This brings him a step closer to understanding Raif Efendi, and, through Raif Efendi’s example, he laments how prone we are to passing harsh and hasty judgments about people whom we do not truly understand.

At this stage, as Raif Efendi’s illness drags on, he asks the narrator to bring him the items from his desk at the office, wishing to leave nothing behind. The narrator does as requested and brings the items home, including a notebook. Raif Efendi asks that the notebook – containing writings that begin with the date June 20, 1933 – be burned. In response, the narrator asks for permission to keep the notebook for one day. Perhaps Raif Efendi grants this permission because he senses that the narrator is someone capable of understanding what is written in it. For the reason behind his long-standing indifference toward his surroundings is already clear. Thus, with the feeling that he has finally found someone who might understand the notebook, he allows the narrator this opportunity. Returning to his hotel, the narrator begins to read the notes in the notebook, embarking on a love that will grant him access to the inner truth behind what he had previously perceived only on the surface.

The notebook opens with notes on the events, uncertainties, and chaos experienced in Havran in the aftermath of World War I. Raif Efendi’s father is a wealthy businessman who sends him to the Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi in Istanbul. Raif Efendi not only reads the novels and classics of the period but is deeply affected by them. Yet, he does not reflect this influence in the outward world; rather, he lives and struggles with it inwardly. Books seem to offer Raif Efendi the possibility of living in a separate world, and his indifference to the real world begins at this point. For this reason, Raif Efendi understands painting as a form of inner expression. He shows his teachers only the most insignificant of his works, deliberately lowering expectations about himself and thus securing the opportunity to retreat further into his inner world. While Raif Efendi appears so aloof and accommodating toward his surroundings, there is an intense dynamism in that other world of his, which remains closed to people incapable of understanding it: “I had not yet realized that in life things would never be as extraordinary as they are in our minds.”

Just like Havran, Istanbul is also going through a period of turmoil. For this reason, Raif Efendi’s father sends him to Germany with the hope that it will, in the long run, allow him to expand his business, and in particular so that Raif Efendi might learn the craft of soap making. Settling into a boarding house, Raif Efendi spends his days learning German and drifting aimlessly. He continues to read, especially Russian writers, because in their novels he finds characters who lend legitimacy to his own condition. Klara Milich, in particular, stands out: “I likened her to myself in her inability to express what passed through her mind, and in the way she guarded her strongest, deepest, most beautiful sides with fierce jealousy and mistrust.”

After spending a year in Germany in this manner, Raif Efendi is astonished when a portrait of a woman in a fur coat that he sees at an exhibition triggers a violent tremor in the hidden world within him. He begins to visit the exhibition every day, spending long periods of time standing before the painting. The reflection of what he sees in the painting within himself is profoundly deep: “I had known this woman from the books I had read since the age of seven, from the worlds of imagination I had constructed since the age of five. In her there was something of Halit Ziya’s Nihal, of Vecihi Bey’s Mehçure, of Knight Buridan’s beloved, and of Cleopatra whom I had read about in history books, even of Âmine Hatun, the mother of Muhammad, as I had imagined her while listening to the Mevlid. She was a synthesis, a fusion of all the women in my imagination.”

In an article about the painting, he reads that Maria Puder’s work had been likened to "Madonna in a Fur Coat" because of its resemblance to the depiction of the Virgin Mary in Andrea del Sarto’s "Madonna delle Arpie." In both paintings, the woman was looking not at her surroundings but at the ground. A sense of aloofness and indifference toward the world could be felt in their gaze. Since such a painting so rich in meaning for him – must have been created by someone like-minded, the very existence of this person stirred in Raif Efendi the hope of finding the human being he had long been searching for: “As long as I can remember, I had spent all my days, without realizing it and without confessing it to myself, searching for a single person, and for this reason I had fled from all others. That painting convinced me, if only for a while, that finding the person I was seeking was possible, even that I was very close to her, and it awakened within me a hope that could never again be put to sleep.”

Raif Efendi finally meets Maria Puder. In fact, Maria is the woman whose gaze he had repeatedly avoided – the one who approached him at the exhibition he visited every day, at a time when the artists had begun to notice the man who came so persistently to see this painting, and who tried to speak with him about the work, while Raif Efendi himself avoided communication with those around him. A highly controlled relationship begins. Like Raif Efendi, Maria is indifferent to her surroundings, inwardly shaken by deep storms, and either closed off from the external world or dismissive of it. Although Raif Efendi has at last found his Madonna in a fur coat, he is afraid of losing her. For this reason, during the time they spend together and in the places they visit, he refrains from speaking too deeply. Even if he cannot speak as much as he longs to, simply being together, intoxicated by the feeling of having found the person he was searching for, is enough for Raif Efendi. He now understands that his indifference to the world had not been meaningless until then; he has discovered his soul: “Maria Puder had taught me that I possessed a soul, and I, in turn, was discovering for the first time among all the people I had encountered that she, too, possessed a soul... A soul emerged only when it found its likeness, without even feeling the need to consult our reason or our calculations. Only then did we truly begin to live – to live with our soul.”

As the months pass in this way, Maria eventually calls a halt to this intensity and cuts off contact. Raif Efendi endures painful days until he learns that Maria has been hospitalized due to her illness. He accompanies her at the hospital and, once she is discharged, does not leave her alone. During this period, however, Raif Efendi does not return to his boarding house. When he finally goes there for a reason, he receives a telegram informing him of his father’s death. Raif Efendi finds himself in another dilemma: to return home because of his father’s death and separate from Maria, or to remain with Maria and remain indifferent to his father’s passing. Maria resolves the problem. Raif Efendi will return to Türkiye, while she will go ahead of him to Prague to stay with her mother. Raif Efendi promises that once he has put his affairs in order, he will call Maria to Türkiye.

Raif Efendi does not find good prospects awaiting him in his hometown. The family has fallen apart, his brothers-in-law have seized the property, and what remains to Raif Efendi is of little value. While he struggles to put his affairs in order so that he can summon Maria, their correspondence continues for a time, but eventually it is cut off, and the letters he sends are returned. On the one hand, the weight of the conditions he is living under, and on the other, the severed bond with the woman who had, for the first time, set his soul in motion, deepen Raif Efendi’s indifference and inner conflict. Believing that Maria has abandoned him, Raif Efendi no longer resists the flow of life. Life simply goes on as it will. In time, he marries and has children. He moves to Ankara and takes a job as a German translator at the company mentioned by the narrator.

We return once more to the beginning. Raif Efendi is living a life in which he no longer feels his soul. For this reason, he withdraws into himself again. Yet this time, the pain he endures is far more intense than the suffering he experienced before knowing Maria. From this point on, neither did Raif Efendi expect anything from anyone, nor did anyone expect anything from him. After Maria, his pain enters a different phase, intertwined with a sense of utter uselessness: “From that moment on, I believed in my own superfluousness, my uselessness.” Then, one day, by sheer coincidence, he encounters a woman he had known from the boarding house in Germany, who is also a relative of Maria’s. From her, he learns that Maria had had a child and had died after childbirth. The reason the letters were returned was not that Maria had cut off her relationship with Raif Efendi, but, on the contrary, her death.

In short, "Madonna in a Fur Coat" is not only the tragedy of an unfinished love, but also the tragedy of our habit of reading people solely through their outward attitudes. Raif Efendi’s silence is not a deficiency; on the contrary, it is the distance that a deeply lived inner experience places between itself and the external world. A life that initially appears indifferent ultimately turns into a silence filled with meaning. Through Raif Efendi, Sabahattin Ali reminds us that every judgment passed without penetrating a person’s inner world is incomplete and cruel. At the same time, the similarity between Maria Puder and Raif Efendi serves as an important reminder that human beings can recognize themselves only in those who resemble them. Both characters are distant from the world, indifferent to crowds, and choose invisibility as a way of protecting their inner lives. For this reason, Maria functions as a mirror in which Raif Efendi is able, for the first time, to recognize himself. What Raif Efendi finds in Maria is not merely love, but his own existence – one that he had suppressed on the surface and allowed to live only within his inner world until that moment.