I have transported myself back to 1940 where I unlocked a love story that is so deep, it gnawed at my heart.
Mardonna in a fur coat is a beautifully written book by Sabahattin Ali that questions and triggers one’s mind. This book called me out. I saw myself in Maria, just merely different.
On the topic of love, I have never really had enough to say. I have mostly sneered at the idea that a person, a stranger could simply become tangled with you, could know the intricate part of you and become one with you. It is all so absurd, too demanding, I fear I may be too selfish for the idea of intimacy. My heart cannot bear the point of surrendering oneself to the intensity of needing another.
Perhaps, I am merely still in search of someone whom I do not know or may never know.
You see, just like Maria, I have an idea, maybe obscure, of what I want in a man or what I have allowed myself to want. He must be this and he must be that. Yet in all my years, I have not met, not one single man who has made me go, `a life with him might not be bad.`
I have not met a single man who made me long for companionship, where I say to myself that if I don’t end up with him, I might possibly become a person in continued languish and irreversible pain.
But this is not about me. This is about the love story between Maria and Raiff. These two, from different backgrounds, different countries, different ways of being, and mode of doing, decided, in the most pronounced way, to fall in love. A Jewish-German woman and a Turkish man. It is a love that is unusual. A love where you have to thread carefully, yet, in their carefulness, there is a love that knows no bound.
This love did not end well, I must warn you. This is not a happy story. It will rip your heart out. It is a story that begs to differ in the face of societal norms. It is a story that gives insight into loving and losing. Via this book, we see how It is possible to love and be dependent on your lover. To place your life, your affairs, your happiness, your drive and ambition on a person, never minding that love is capricious, that life is volatile.
I do not think it is a good idea to place the possibilities of your life on a stranger. Love is not constant. A person who loves you today could decide, that evening that he has begun to hate you. What then would you do? How then would you evacuate your life and refresh your drive? Does one start to look for a new muse to place it all on? Does this become a cycle where you opt and leave and restart?
This is a very confined way to live. The idea where we believe we become more driven when we are in love is dangerous. It’s a form of codependency that most likely ends tragically. Case in point, Raiff. Here is a somewhat small and weak man, a man who doesn’t look people to their faces, who stutters before getting a sentence out, who flushes red in the face of confrontation. However, as a lover, he is a completely different man. Almost the bravest of all time. Yet we see how this becomes his undoing as the book progresses.
Over time, I have watched individuals become a self depleted version of themselves – It is a woman who decides to love runny eggs because her new lover does. It is a man who becomes somewhat of an alpha male around his friends to prove that he is not one of those weak progressive men. It is a shy teenager who starts to go to outings she has no business being at because her skinny-jean-wearing boyfriend is a party crasher. It is a married woman who goes to her social media account to change her surname as soon as the officiant pronounces her a wife(You could at least wait till the next day, dear.)
Most of all, we bend in the face of love. We morph into a concept. Into an idea until the next person comes in and we begin, all over to alter ourselves until we become a chameleon. Until we become a completely different person, a shell. This is not good.
Madonna in a fur coat is a tender novel. It will stay with me. I will reference it in the journey of my life. Above all, it will serve as a mirror into the lives of lovers in the early 19th centuries and how a people who had known hunger and war could still love in the face of many difficulties and obstacles. There were many people like Maria and Raiff in the 40s. There are many of them in the 21st century. I do not envy people in love. Especially those who lose themselves while at it. It is concerning and sad; this way of living and loving. It is the kind of love that changes you. That wants you to become a theory. A fitting notion.
It remained , regardless, a love worthy of history.
I think it is also important that I note how this book gave me a new eye. I walked out of my house the next day and saw people a little differently than I did the last time, especially women. I saw an old woman on a bike, she looked fierce in her hunter boots, red bold lipstick and short styled hair and she reminded me of an older Maria. I saw a middle aged woman with her little Daugther and her dog, in their cutely wrapped scarf, taking a walk and I wondered if she too had loved and lost. If she had become someone different for the sake of love.
A beautiful middle aged polish woman with weary eyes stood beside me at the bus station and I looked at her unabashedly, without the worry of being a spook. Her eyes were too weary, too sad for her beautiful frame and I became curious as to what her story might be. It could be anything, but she wore her sadness like a badge of honour, as though it had become her second skin.
Also, I wondered what people thought of me. This girl, reading a book on the bus with a stony face even as I look up occasionally to gawk at everyday things from the bus window. Do they think I am sad, too? If so, they are wrong. Do they think I am unapproachable. If yes, they aren’t totally wrong. Perhaps they thought it was performative of me to read in a public space haha.
Do our perceptions of others override who they truly are or what they truly feel on the inside. The beautiful woman with the weary eyes, have I declared her sad when in fact she could be tired from all the work she’s had to do.
This was what this book did to me. Only an excellent book is capable of doing that. Of making one imagine and long and hope and wonder in the presence of many faces.
