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Magdi not only suffered from Reynaud that she contracted in prison but also from Crohn disease,
an incurable illness very difficult to live with. It is another mystery how she coped with it. All we
know is that she joked about it being her husband and said, “Welcome Mr Crohn,” when the pains
arrived. In 1990 she went to Switzerland for seven months when she went through a number of
operations. She was on very good terms with the surgeon who operated her even though it was six
times. He had asked for a concert piano to be brought in for Magdi to play. This was the last time she
was playing in Switzerland.
The little boy who had started playing the piano with Magdi before she had to leave for
Switzerland was to become a concert pianist later. How much did he know her? What people really
knew about her was so little. They mostly knew about their own experience with her, not her
experience as a pianist. She was the “piano teacher” from whom this contemporary Turkish pianist
took his first lessons before she got ill. So, I contacted him.
This pianist whose name I am withholding for the time being since our correspondence was
curiously hindered was very excited when I told him about the Gattiker‐house concerts. Apparently,
he and his brother who was also Magdi’s student would give concerts at her house some weekends.
“She was the one who made me love music” he said. I wondered if his piano teaching career had its
roots in this relationship. They had heard about her as a piano teacher from a neighbour. I knew their
neighbour Barış Erman 29 from Magdi’s house. Now we work at the same university. He is another one
of Magdi’s students to whom she appears in dreams:
Magdi woke me up tonight. We were deciphering a musical sheet that was handwritten. It was a
work about a woman’s life. She scolded me for having put down a fermata on a wrong place. “Shame
on righteous men like you,” she said. Actually, the reason for my not being able to write the
paragraph you asked for is not because I’m too busy with my work; it is because I dare not face with
my guilty conscience. The last time she was in my dream, she was seated in front of me on a bus.
Turning back to me, she said, “You’ve not been around for a long time, you haven’t called me.” “It
wouldn’t make a difference any more, even if you called. It’s too late” said she. I could not reach her
when I called her the next morning, she was in hospital. I got in a cab at once, heading the hospital.
On the way the phone rang: we had lost her.
We would not talk of politics or of law with Magdi. Once she had got really angry and said that she
had difficulty in understanding how some people could commit crimes for their superficial ambitions.
Magdi had not found out about humanism through reasoning like I did. She was a born humanist;
had lived as a humanist, taught me about humanism. Perhaps this is why she has become the voice
of my conscience, or rather my guilty conscience. Whenever I caught myself as being unjust, unfair,
playing a note wrongly, it was her voice that brought me back to reality. But wasn’t it also her who
had said what mattered the most was producing the right tone; playing the notes wrongly did not
matter as much.
When I find the right tone, I promise I will write her story as fiction.
Keywords: Magdi Rufer, Pianist, Humanist, Sabahattin Eyüboğlu, Swiss
Leylâ ÇAPAN
Lecturer. Yeditepe University,
Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Department of English Language and Literature.
Notes
1
Sabahattin Eyüboğlu (1908‐1973) is a Turkish writer, well‐known as a translator of classics, an art
critic, an essayist and one of the first producers of archaeological documentaries.
2
Türkân Saylan (1935‐2009) was a medical doctor, a social activist who has also authored many
publications.
3
Ali Uğur et al., eds. Magdi. Istanbul.There is no publication date on it and it was special edition,