Madonna in a Fur Coat

Set in 1930s and 1940s Turkey, the novel opens with an unnamed narrator reflecting on the man who left a greater impression on him than anyone else: Raif Efendi, a quiet, unremarkable office worker. "Efendi" is a Turkish honorific roughly equivalent to "Mr." The narrator insists that beneath every ordinary surface lies a hidden inner world, and that his discovery of Raif Efendi's was pure happenstance.

After losing his bank job in Ankara, the narrator endures months of humiliating job-hunting before reconnecting with Hamdi, a former classmate now thriving as an assistant director at a machinery and timber firm. Hamdi patronizes the narrator but arranges a low-paying clerk position, placing him in the office of the firm's German translator, Raif Efendi, whom Hamdi dismisses as "a simple man, and a very quiet one." Despite producing excellent translations, Raif Efendi receives no recognition and never asks for any. Hamdi berates him for trivial errors, exploiting the fact that Raif Efendi will never fight back.

The narrator's view shifts when, after one of Hamdi's tirades, Raif Efendi calmly sketches a portrait that captures Hamdi's essence in a few masterful lines, revealing the fine boundary between cruelty and wretchedness. The narrator realizes Raif Efendi's composure stems not from emptiness but from a penetrating understanding of those around him.

Visiting Raif Efendi at home during an illness, the narrator discovers a household in which everyone depends on Raif Efendi's meager salary while treating him as irrelevant. His wife, Mihriye Hanım ("Hanım" is a Turkish honorific akin to "Mrs."), does all the housework. Her sister Ferhunde and Ferhunde's husband, Nurettin Bey ("Bey" is a Turkish honorific akin to "Mr."), contribute nothing to expenses but command the household. The narrator learns that Raif Efendi periodically becomes agitated and wanders the streets at night; he admits to the narrator that something inside compels him out, though he deflects by blaming household noise.

When Raif Efendi develops pneumonia, he tells the narrator bitterly that his wife and daughter have never truly known him. Sensing he will not return to the office, he asks the narrator to bring everything from his desk drawer. Among the items is a black notebook. Raif Efendi wants it burned, but the narrator pleads to read it. Both men weep openly. Raif Efendi relents, whispering, "Read it! You'll see!" The narrator rushes home and begins reading that night.

The notebook, dated June 20, 1933, opens with Raif writing that a chance encounter the previous day swept him back to a time he thought he had left behind. Born in Havran, in Turkey's Aegean region, he was a painfully shy boy who lived more vividly in adventure novels than in reality. He had a talent for painting but feared self-expression. His father, a wealthy landowner, sent him to Berlin to learn the soap trade.

In Berlin, Raif finds Europe disappointing and drifts until he discovers German literature and the paintings in Berlin's museums. On a dark November day, he visits an exhibition and stops, transfixed, before a self-portrait labeled "Maria Puder, Selbstporträt" (German for "self-portrait"). The woman wears a fur coat and an expression of formidable anguish, her dark eyes searching for something she is almost certain she will never find. A newspaper critic compares the painting to Andrea del Sarto's Madonna delle Arpie, a 16th-century depiction of the Virgin Mary.

Raif returns to the gallery daily. One afternoon a young woman teases him about his obsession; flustered, he lies that the painting resembles his mother, not recognizing the young woman as the painter herself. Days later, stumbling home drunk with Frau van Tiedemann, a Dutch widow from his pension, Raif spots the woman from the painting passing under a street lamp. He chases her, but she vanishes. The following night he trails a woman in a fur coat to the Atlantic, a cabaret, where a young woman plays violin and sings in a deep, reluctant voice. When she approaches his table, she greets him with a genuine smile.

After her set, Maria Puder sits with Raif and reveals she is the woman from the gallery who teased him. She watched him for nearly 20 days without his recognizing her. She proposes friendship, calling him childlike and free of "awful male pride."

They begin meeting daily. Maria is fiercely independent. Her father was a Jewish lawyer from Prague who converted to Catholicism; her German Protestant mother is gentle but dependent. Maria has been in charge of the household since age seven. She declares she does not love Raif and perhaps never will, despising male entitlement and wanting a man who could love her as an equal. Over weeks they grow deeply intimate as friends, visiting galleries, museums, and the opera. Raif desires Maria completely but fears losing what he has. Maria oscillates between warmth and withdrawal.

On New Year's Eve, they go drinking and dancing. Maria disappears; Raif finds her outside in the snow. He takes her home, where she confesses she loves him. They spend the night together. The next morning, Maria withdraws, saying their intimacy destroyed the openness they shared. She asks him to leave. Raif walks for hours, reaching the Wannsee, a lake where the poet Heinrich von Kleist died by suicide, and concludes he is worthless.

For five days Raif searches for Maria before learning she has been hospitalized with pleurisy, a lung condition. He visits Charité Hospital daily for 25 days. When she is released, he becomes her sole caretaker. One evening Maria asks what he did during their days apart; Raif tells her everything with calm detachment. The next morning she confesses that she could not believe anyone loved her that much, and that this inability, not any deficiency in Raif, prevented her from loving him. She declares she will never let him go.

A telegram arrives: Raif's father has died. He must return to Havran. Maria leaves first for her mother near Prague. At the station she says she will come whenever he calls. He promises to call.

In Havran, Raif discovers his brothers-in-law have plundered his inheritance. He exchanges letters with Maria, who hints at good news she can share only in person. Then her letters stop; his last is returned stamped "unclaimed, return to sender." Convinced that the one person he trusted had deceived him, Raif retreats into total withdrawal, marrying without love, fathering children, and working mechanically.

Ten years later, on June 19, 1933, Raif encounters the former Frau van Tiedemann, now Frau Döppke, on an Ankara street accompanied by a quiet girl of about eight or nine. Frau Döppke reveals that Maria died approximately 10 years earlier, in October of the year Raif left Berlin. After returning from Prague, Maria discovered she was pregnant but refused to name the father. Her health deteriorated, compounded by earlier pleurisy, and she died in a coma a week after giving birth. The child beside Frau Döppke is Raif's daughter.

Raif learns nothing about his daughter, not even her name, before the train departs. He writes that for 10 years he loathed a dead woman, doubting the one person who was his life without considering that death might explain her silence. Maria's face, suppressed for a decade, returns in vivid detail. He resolves to imagine a life for his unknown daughter, walking beside her in his dreams, and to hide the notebook. The final words read: "Everything, everything. But especially my soul."

The frame narrative resumes. The narrator finishes reading at dawn and goes to Raif Efendi's house, where wailing confirms Raif Efendi has died during the night. Unable to bear seeing the man reduced to an empty vessel, the narrator steps back into the street. At the office, he sits at Raif Efendi's empty desk, places the black notebook before him, and turns back to the first page.