#firdevs

To take the story first from Bihter’s perspective, Adnan is her Eden. She cannot create herself as an entire woman until she has escaped from her mother, but once she is in Eden, she is dissatisfied; ‘she want[s] such a love that it would leave an intoxicating faintness in her soul’. She feels the knowledge of love calling to her and Falls first not to Behlül (the one who laughs, but also not dissimilar in sound to Belial, another name for Satan— I cannot discover whether this tracks into Islam and the Turkish language, so I may be wrong to suggest this one), but to herself, when she makes that discovery of what love is:

Suddenly, in this semi-dark room, amid the slumbering silence of this house, as the tinted glass of the lamp above her head rained colourful shadows and seemed to enliven the furniture around her with an unfelt breeze, she shivered to find herself so naked, and feared the loneliness. No, this was such an emotion that it was closer to shame than to fear. She was ashamed, as if she had done a great wrong, ashamed that she had sinned unthinkingly against her virtue. She had fallen into the arms of an unknown lover who entered the privacy of her chamber secretly, and her first sin of passion had been committed in an irresistible nervous trembling. (Chapter 8)

Note how the room is ‘semi’ dark, how Bihter has been standing in the window, occupying liminal spaces that could represent her in-between state, the precipice of the Fall.

Bihter’s second Fall is more traditional. Behlül becomes a tempter, as he has tried and failed with Peyker, but unlike Satan, he lacks magnitude. He is opportunistic, casual. His Falls are more like flights of fancy and his temptations are boyish, almost innocent. They are in the room that serves as an entryway to his bedroom, neither completely sequestered in his private quarters, nor in the general space of the house and much of the action between them takes place in this in-between space. ‘[T]he red eyes of the stove were lowering their eyelashes’; ‘white snowflakes were falling’ (emphasis mine); Bihter is Falling.

The second Fallen figure I would like to consider is Behlül himself. Behlül is not someone who Falls once or twice, but someone who seems doomed to Fall over and over again. He seems to Fall for almost every woman he meets, but his two particular Falls are for Bihter and Nihal.

In a second Behlül had gone so far that it was now no longer possible to turn back (Chapter 10)

At last, the little love stories of his life had been closed, now a long love story, with all its passions, desires, fevers, happinesses, had begun. He was finding all the old memories petty, lowly. They had become like rough drafts that had been scribbled over as a child, which one, embarrassed, wanted to tear out and throw away, to burn to ashes.  Now he was going to write a perfect chapter of his love life, and after this chapter, he could end his love story. (Chapter 11)

He is insistent on the uniqueness of this, the irreversible romance of each Falling, yet his feelings for Nihal are almost identical:

Before this tableau of the old dream, he was thinking of his own life, of the life whose final page would perhaps be closed tonight, with one word from Nihal, of the life that would resemble just this view, turned into an abandoned ruin with its faded lines, its washed-out planes. Already that life seemed to have grown distant through an interval of long years; all those faces, even Bihter, all those memories belonging to yesterday, had been buried in the ruins of that old dream, far away, beyond such a wide sea. Now beside him, a fresh flower of hope was promising him the horizon of a new life with its shy glances. (Chapter 19)

He does not learn; after the close of the novel, it seems he may well have disappeared from Adnan Bey’s Eden to Fall again. He is a man; he may do so.

Last of the main three, but certainly not least, Nihal’s Fall is more complex and more gradual, less borne of single instants than Bihter and Behlül’s. The entire narrative encompasses her Fall, a Fall of a thousand moments. If Adnan Bey is Eden, then so too is Nihal’s childhood and his fatherly state. The more Nihal learns of love— at the wedding (noticeably we follow Nihal and the bride in that strange part of the day where the wedding has begun but the marriage has not, that precipice of Fall), by observing Bihter, by wearing sheets, by releasing Bülent, whose removal from the room is an acknowledgement of their adult genders— the more she edges towards her Fall. Even when she consents to marry Behlül, the Fall is not complete. It is not complete until she literally falls down those liminal stairs and lands at the bottom with Behlül and Bihter, the Fallen. She knows what love is; she knows what love can do. Adnan Bey carries her back upstairs, reclaims her for Eden, but this cannot last. The novel closes uneasily, ‘ a fear [...] passing through her mind’ as Nihal knows that Adnan Bey cannot live forever and she must one day leave Eden. She seems almost to resolve on death to escape passage into the next stage of life; a key parallel to Bihter.

I turn now to Firdevs. Is she not the epitome of the Fallen Woman? She Fell before the tale began, she seems determined to keep Falling until it kills her. Yet she is Paradise. What Paradise can this woman represent?

If my understanding is correct, Halit Ziya was familiar with Western traditions; likely familiar with Felix Culpa or the happy mistake. This is a view which suggests that the Fall is not actually a bad thing, but rather the only way humans could truly understand good and evil in the way God does and fulfil their destinies. 

Firdevs has lived with her mistakes and she suffers for them, a kind of purgatory or barzakh. Perhaps she will attain Paradise because she is willing to live with herself in a way that Bihter and Nihal are not. It’s interesting that Behlül is the one most willing to sympathise with Firdevs; he is the one who leaves Eden and lives, the one who seems most likely to follow her path in life.

Bihter and Nihal will not wait for the Paradise of Heaven; they will not wait to become Firdevs. The Fall is too much for them and the loss of Eden too terrifying.

Beşir’s position in this reading is particularly interesting. He is the one who brings revelation, ‘the one who brings good news’. Ostensibly, the news is hardly good, but it is truth. He becomes almost a stand in for the God of Adnan Bey’s Eden. He even potentially redeems Nihal from her Fall, a Christ figure, sacrificed for the sins of the others.