The Letter Under the Floor — Döşemenin Altındaki Mektup

Deniz had been living in Edinburgh for three years when she finally bought a flat of her own. It was on the top floor of an old stone building, with crooked walls and a view of the castle. The estate agent had called it "full of character", which, Deniz soon discovered, meant that almost everything needed fixing. She spent her weekends sanding doors, painting window frames and arguing with the boiler.

One rainy Sunday in November she decided to replace a loose floorboard in the bedroom. When she lifted it, she found a small envelope lying in the dust between the beams. It was yellow with age and sealed, and it had never been posted. On the front, in careful handwriting, someone had written: "For Margaret. Only if you say yes." Deniz sat on the floor for a long time, holding it. Opening someone else's letter felt wrong, but throwing it away felt even worse. In the end, curiosity won.

The letter was dated the fourteenth of February, 1963. It was written in slightly old-fashioned English by a young man who signed himself simply "Orhan". He explained that he was a medical student from Istanbul and that he would be returning home in the summer. He wrote about the walks they had taken along the Water of Leith, about the cold, and about a red scarf she had knitted for him. In the last paragraph he asked her to come to Istanbul with him and marry him. "If you cannot, I will understand," he wrote. "But I would regret it all my life if I did not ask."

Deniz read it three times, and by the third time her eyes were wet. She kept wondering why the letter had ended up under the floor. Had he lost his courage at the last moment? Had he hidden it and then been forced to leave in a hurry? And Margaret, whoever she was, had she waited for a question that never came? That night Deniz couldn't sleep, and by morning she had made up her mind to find out.

It turned out to be easier than she had expected, and also much harder. The city archives showed that in 1963 the flat had been rented to a Mr Orhan Aydın, a student at the university. The medical school still kept a list of its graduates, and his name was on it. But Margaret was a common name, and there was no surname anywhere in the letter. Deniz posted a photo of the envelope on a local history group online, asking if anyone recognised the story. Hundreds of people shared the post, and dozens of Margarets were suggested, none of them right. After a month she began to accept that some stories simply don't have endings.

Then, one evening, she received a message from a woman named Ayla. "I think the man in your letter is my father," it said. "Could you call me?" Deniz phoned her immediately, and Ayla told her a story that took nearly an hour. Her father had indeed studied medicine in Edinburgh and had worked as a doctor in Istanbul for forty years. Her mother was Scottish, and her name was Margaret. "But that's impossible," Deniz said. "The letter was never sent." Ayla laughed softly on the other end of the line. "My father always said he wrote the letter ten times," she explained. "He was a perfectionist. He must have dropped one of the drafts under the floor." "In the end he didn't post any of them. He went to her house and asked her in person, in the rain."

Orhan had died five years earlier, but Margaret was still alive. She was eighty-four and lived with Ayla in a house by the sea in Kadıköy. The following spring, Deniz flew to Istanbul with the envelope carefully wrapped in tissue paper. Margaret was small and bright-eyed, and she was wearing a faded red scarf. "He kept it for sixty years," she said, touching it. "Now I wear it." She read the letter slowly, smiling at some lines and shaking her head at others. "This version is much better than what he actually said," she announced finally. "In the rain, he was so nervous that he forgot half the words and proposed to me in Turkish." "I didn't understand a single word, but I said yes anyway." Then she folded the letter, put it back in its envelope and handed it to Deniz. "Keep it in the flat," she said. "It belongs to the place where he found his courage."