...The ancient knowledge of the female woke in her body alongside desire...The ancient knowledge whispering to her that the feelings of the noble soldier of the British Empire and of the female citizen of the Turkish Republic, could only be as one when their bodies were far apart...As soon as their bodies united, the man's emotions would fade away.  Nefise would become an Oriental shawl, to be worn out, in the hands of the uniformed aristocrat, who thought the world belonged to his kind.  No, she would not even remain untouched like a silver souvenir.  No, no...She would not be a Turkish carpet to be trodden on until threadbare...

A slender image, carved out of time and pain, shimmered in the moonlight.  It was the image of the English authoress Virginia Woolf.  Nefise, along with Vicdan, had listened to her paper at the conference in Cambridge a few months earlier.  Woolf talked about things they had not thought about before, speaking of insights they had not sensed through spine or brain before.  She talked about time and womanhood.  About the crushing weight of centuries that had rolled over the female sex.  The knowledge and the exquite taste of all these centuries had filtered through the sediment of pain and guilt they bore, and imbued the writer's sensitive features.  A sad woman...A great woman...A lonely woman...How could it be otherwise...They had felt it...

They had sensed it...Woolf's eminence and independence were not enough to defeat pain...That insight menaced Nefise and Vicdan.  It was just not enough...Neither Woolf's nor Great Britain's eminence and independence were enough to defeat the pain of womanhood.

Nefise wiped away her tears.  She had to go back to her country.  She had to heed the summons of that other man who offered her a country, a homeland, the man whose picture hung beside her bed, whose love was in her heart.

Nefise's heart and mind, full of the dauntless energy of youth, strove to find a way out throughout that sleepless night, while her whole being suffered torments in the traps of passion.

Nefise did not recognise the femininity enshrined in her tense muscles, the sexuality that quivered with instinct, intuition, inspiration...What stood for Nefise's knowledge of manhood was a female figure crouching, frightened and vindictive, bearing the marks of slaps and kicks on her skin and deep in her heart, bleeding secretly in lavatories.  Nefise did not want to be like this...She had to obey the champion who held out a magic staff, carved out of wisdom and exquisite taste, for her to grasp and leap over the centuries.  Could she do it?  She did not know.  She had to try.  She had no other choice, no other ray of hope to lighten the dark and crushing doom the centuries had heaped on the womanhood of her country.  She had to trust this champion and her taciturn people who sometimes frightened her.  She had to hold on to the faith and trust in the beauty she had lately started to find in the folk songs, poems, and ballads of the silent, sad, submissive people of Anatolia.  The way out for Nefise was Turkish, her mother tongue.

Nefise would become one of those great writers, poets, translators who create their own tongues.  She would link the nomadic freedom, the steppe-like simplicity, the eastern tranquillity and the Moslem patience of the Turkish language with the refinement, the riches, the dynamic vitality of the West.  This would be her contribution to the great Anatolian revolution that gave her, Nefise Celal, born in the small town of Karaman, in central Anatolia, her role in life; and it would also be the expression of her gratitude.  Nefise had no other mission, no other independence, no other identity...She had not...and she would not have...She had to return to her country and to her hero...when the time came...

But tomorrow I must go to the green fields, to the heart of the England that I love...Heart-ache is best soothed there, in the fields kissed by the sun, among the willow trees, feeling the coolness of the breeze, where 'separation' does not exist...