The Love of Talat and Fitnat

Şemsettin Sami — known in Albanian as Sami Frashëri — first published this short novel in a newspaper in 1872–1873. It has thirteen chapters, told here in two episodes. The retelling follows chapter-by-chapter accounts of the original text; the closing pages, which could not be consulted directly, follow scholarly accounts of the ending. The heroine, and her mother in the story-within-the-story, are very young in the original; their love stories are therefore told without romantic scenes. The English is my own.

I. Preface

In a small but neatly furnished room in Aksaray, a woman of about fifty-five sat on a cushion, sewing. Her beauty had faded; her eyes were on her work, but her mind was far away. Old people, when they remember the past, grow melancholy: they grieve that their happy days will not return, and the memory of their sorrows opens old wounds.

Opposite her sat her son, Tal'at Bey, a handsome young man, his head resting on his hand, a book lying open beside him, staring at the wall. On a chair near them sat the old nurse, Ayşe Kadın, an African woman who had been carried off as a child by slave-dealers and had grown old in that house; she looked from the mother to the son in bewilderment.

"What is the matter with you today?" said the mother. "You always read to us. The nurse is waiting to hear the end of the story." Tal'at said that he did not know what had come over him: his head ached, he was dizzy, and there was something else he could not name. His mother wanted to send for a doctor; but the nurse would not hear of it — doctors, she said, had nearly poisoned her once with their pills, and it was a holy man of Koca Mustafapaşa who had cured her of her fever with a charm, which she still wore on her arm. Tal'at did not believe in charms; and his mother said that young people never do.

II–IV. Saliha's Story

Love, says the author, is a natural impulse in every human being, whatever their sex, their age, their wealth, their wit or their upbringing; a person may be foolish, cruel, or wicked, but no one is without love. It sleeps, until some attraction wakes it.

Ayşe Kadın had guessed that Tal'at was in love, and she said it was time to find him a wife. His mother, Saliha Hanım, would not hear of choosing a bride for him whom he had never seen; and, sometimes weeping and sometimes laughing, she told her own story.

Her parents had married young, and had waited many years for a child; she was born when her mother was forty. At five, her father sent her to school, and she studied so well that in four years she was the first girl of her class, and then a second teacher in the girls' school. At school there was a boy, Rifat Bey, the best and eldest of the pupils; they grew up together, studied together, walked to school together every morning, and grew deeply attached to each other. When they were older and were parted, they wrote to each other, through a little servant girl of Rifat's mother, named Gülzar; and so years passed.

The letters of the two young people are not retold here.

Then her parents decided to marry her to another man, a rich suitor. Saliha, in despair, wrote a last letter, resolved to die rather than be married against her heart; and she gave it to Gülzar to carry. But her mother met the girl in the hall, took the letter, read it, and carried it to Saliha's father. A moment later her mother came running back, weeping, and took her in her arms: "Take heart; I met Gülzar just in time; your wish will be granted. We will give you to Rifat Bey." A month later Saliha married Rifat. Her father-in-law, a man who had neglected his family, died a year later; Rifat's mother, Kamile Hanım, who had loved her dearly, three years after that; and then her own parents, and at last Rifat himself. Of all her family, only Tal'at remained to her.

"Poor lady," said Ayşe Kadın, and went off to the kitchen.

She loved her son so much that if he came home a little late, she was beside herself; but she took care not to spoil him. Spoiled children, says the author, turn out badly.

V. Fitnat Hanım

On his way to his office and back, Tal'at Bey used to stop at the shop of a tobacconist, Hacı Mustafa, whom the neighbourhood called Hacıbaba, to buy his tobacco. Above the shop, behind the lattice of the bay window, he had seen a face; and since then he had known no peace.

Some fourteen years before, Hacıbaba had married a widow, Zekiye Hanım, who had a little daughter a year old; the mother had died about a year later, leaving the child to him. That child was Fitnat Hanım. No one knew who her father was: it was said that Zekiye had first married a clerk from the provinces, serving in Istanbul, who had died a few months after the wedding, when she was already expecting her child. The author warns the reader that the truth was otherwise, and will be told in its place.