From: serdar@fawlty8.eng.monash.edu.au (Serdar Boztas)
Subject: Short story by Sait Faik (in English) 
Organization: Monash University, Melb., Australia.
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 06:08:51 GMT

			LOVE LETTER
			     by
			Sait Faik

		(translated by William C. Hickman)

We were talking about the world situation. You didn't want me to go
into my feelings about you then. Still I don't see anything wrong in
that. Isn't it just what people do when they console each other in hard
times?

During the War of Independence both the Greeks and the Abkhazians
occupied our town. We friends and neighbors would gather in one place,
turn out the lights and sit together, giving each other comfort and
strength. I remember one terrible, stormy night: we were in our own
house. The lightning flashes chased after each other with dreadful
noises. The trees in the garden spoke with an old, otherworldly
language. From a distance we could feel the sea butting against the
rocks and hear the rocks muttering at the sea and the sea at the rocks.
We had come together, all the people in the house, in one large room.
In the blue gleam of the lightning we could see each other's faces. Our
house was in a forest, some distance from the village. Lightning was
flashing all around. With a feeling less of fright than of being
together, with a pleasure, even, which came from never before having
been brought together like this after midnight, I saw those pale dear
faces -- my mother and father, my sister, my aunt's oldest daughter --
blue and very close in the cold brightness of the lightning. If we had
close neighbors, I'm sure we would have invited them too.

But don't suppose that I only want you on stormy nights like that. If I
could, one calm day in a seaside town of whitewashed houses dozing at
noon I would put you in a boat and take you out in it a little way from
the shore, as though crawling along the bottom, the boat only a hand
span above it, with shadows reflecting off the surface of the water from
gardens and hammocks, people sleeping and pine trees bent down over the
shoreline. I would row you about showing how the tiny fish scatter in
the water, how the pebbles on the bottom lose and gain their shapes and
how the moss play in the currents -- green, yellow, reddish brown, and
even white. I would be happy when the scent of you reached my nose in
a momentary breeze. I would show you my face, healthy and without pain,
at that moment growing radiant and convalescing in love, and explain
only with my eyes how much I love you. I would tell you everything
simply through the little wrinkles of pleasure in the middle of my
face. 

But we don't live in such a tranquil, cloudless world. At moments like
this I always imagine myself a hero. Come close to me. Never mind the 
lightning; let me see the color of your eyes, copper tinged in its
light. In this world of war and violence where people destroy one
another, if only they knew, even if they don't see it -- not just two
people but thousands of people -- that far removed from religion and
ideology, far from everything, yet in spite of everything, that they
love one another. Without making grand pronouncements, without saying
"This is the truth," let's do the one thing which man has been doing
ever since he was man, where we have a sense of ourselves in another,
where we understand our weaknesses and our strengths: come, let us have
love.

Perhaps everything is the truth. It may be that in every fight or
quarrel there is a right and a wrong, a just party and an unjust.
But in love there is no right, no just or unjust; there isn't even
any "truth." In love there is only a single thing which "becomes"
out of the absence of those other things : beauty.

I don't believe in anything, my dear. I don't believe in the existence
of you or of beauty -- not "your beauty," that's something else -- but
beauty with a capital B. It would be better though not to say, " I don't
believe," because all the newspapers and magazines, the whole world,
is smirking at us. They call us "the ones who don't believe."

But they are the ones who make war and we are the ones to end it. If I
say so it's not that I don't consider I've put on airs of a great
writer. Still, you expect from me some sort of involvement in the world.
If, like the great thinkers of the day, I can't resist carrying on at
great length to justify myself, I apologise, excuse me. I repeat:

If they are the ones who make war, we are the ones to end it. If you're
content with our not being able to see each other for the whole winter,
then there's no problem. I'll see you again in the summer. Perhaps then
the war will be over. We'll make the outing I promised you.  There aren't 
any white houses along the shore of our island, but there are plenty of
jagged rock cliffs with pine trees clinging to them and the shadows of 
rocks and birds and hilltops and flowers... Since my voice isn't very
good I thought of taking along a record player in the boat.

Don't worry. The record won't be a voice solo. I'll find one with a
chorus singing, the childlike voices of women and the girlish voices
of children all singing together, a happy song.

You don't like vocal solos, do you? What an unpleasant thing. What a
conceit. What a miserable thing, the shouting of a single person on
a phonograph record!


-- 
Inhabited by absurd fears,  they only discuss  the puerilities with which 
every fool is familiar, and dare not, by turning a bold hand to the human 
heart, offer its gigantic idiosyncrasies to our views.     Sade, 'Justine'
Serdar Boztas \\ serdar@fawlty1.eng.monash.edu.au \\ +(61)3-565-5722 
Newsgroups: soc.culture.turkish