A Mind at Peace

by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

  “There’s a battle raging over S. You’ve got till tomorrow. But don’t stay too late, there’s a flood of refugees on the way.”

  Then they quickly spurred their horses with nothing so much as a farewell. Where were they going? What were they doing?

  Mümtaz went back upstairs where he discovered the newcomer, a girl of eighteen or twenty, stretched out beside his mother, sobbing open-eyed and stone-faced. Moving aside, his mother had made a space for her. Mümtaz lay next to the young woman for only a few hours, but in his sleep on subsequent nights, he relived bodily the sensations roused by her nighttime proximity. Even long after the fact, he’d awaken as if he were in her arms, her hair veiling his face, her breasts pressed against his chest, and her sultry breath on his forehead – as he’d actually experienced a few times that night. She wrenched awake sporadically. During such intervals, she moaned with halting, nearly inhuman sobs perhaps as heartrending as his mother’s silence, but the moment she nodded back to sleep, she’d clasp Mümtaz with her arms and legs as if forcefully prying him from his mother’s bosom, and her face would graze his in a full tumult of tresses and panting, or she’d draw him toward her, pressing him against her torso. As Mümtaz arose to these frequent embraces and groans, it surprised him to find her body, teeming with bewildering and mystical desires, entwined with his own; and this body, willing, with every iota of its being, to die a separate death from the one he’d experienced the night before, alarmed him, as did her sweet breath, which seemed to melt everything it contacted into soft ore, as did her eerie and tense face, and Mümtaz tightly shut his eyes to avoid the incognizant glint of hers in the light of the still-burning lantern.

  Carnal desires churning by themselves, burning embraces, and moans that filled their barrenness in opposite proportion contained a sorcery unknown to him. He couldn’t manage to free himself from her embrace and simply abandoned himself to that peculiar twinned state of one weary of body who’d fallen asleep in warm, aromatic water, afraid of drowning on one hand, yet unable to resist the numbness of sleep on the other. Never before had he experienced this. His body, which had previously felt nothing beyond simple arousal, opened as if to an entirely new realm; within a state of intoxication, moments of pure delight continually settled in utterly mysterious and unfamiliar vertices of his body. Internally, he felt a delicious feeling of being expended that recalled certain final stages of sleep, and what’s more, these hot embraces and caresses themselves bore desire for depletion. The moment it reached its pinnacle, one of consciousness lost, when he practically merged with his surroundings, his body, ravished by fatigue and anguish, suddenly slipped into unconsciousness. Oddly, as soon as sleep overtook him, he always had the dream of the previous night, when he’d passed out, and he saw his father with the large crystal lantern; but since the dream occurred within the torment of an initial experience, it roused him frequently and violently. Thus his inner suffering united with the ecstasy emanating from the woman’s figure and overwhelmed his whole being, and he became a grotesque creature doubled in body and meaning.

  Toward daybreak he awoke fully to find himself in the arms of the woman, his jaw resting against her diminutive chin, in complete command of his senses with every ounce of his being, when her eyes suddenly opened with unnerving insistence. To avoid her gaze, he shut his eyes again, and rolled anxiously toward his mother.

  His second memory wasn’t as convoluted. Around midafternoon, the carriage they rode left the rest of the column far behind. He was with his mother, three women, and two younger children. She was also there, crouched just behind the sprung seats.

  The carriage driver announced that they’d approached B., constantly glancing inside the wagon. Mümtaz realized quite well that the driver’s need to chat and provide details had to do with her. But she didn’t say a single word either to him or to the mounted gendarme, who wouldn’t alter his horse’s gait beside them, or to anyone for that matter. Her moans of the previous night had ceased. Mümtaz was delirious with the desire to look at her, but because he didn’t dare turn his head, he couldn’t even see his mother. As night fell, he was intimidated by the woman’s presence, and from time to time, as she let her shoulder press against his, the sensation became rather merciless.

  The contact was startling, devoid of the warm intensity of the night before, yet laden with memory; involuntarily, Mümtaz wanted the heat to approach, and within such anticipation, his shoulder nearly went stiff. During one spell of anticipation, his eyes fixed on the driver’s turquoise-beaded leather whip, waiting emptied of thought, he remembered his father with a distinct agony that far exceeded anything he’d ever felt, agony ready to hurdle every separation, diminishing every distance between them. He’d never see him again. He’d withdrawn from life forever. Mümtaz would never forget the moment of this epiphany. Everything lay spread before his eyes, in plain sight: The turquoise beads on the tip of the rawhide whip glimmered gloriously as they caught the autumn sunlight, some of them midair, some of them on the haunches of the horse before him. The horses sauntered, tossing their manes. From the top of a telegraph pole ahead, a broad-winged bird took to the air. Everything was mute in the washed-out landscape except for the sound of the wagons and the cries of a three-year-old girl; he sat next to the driver; the woman from the night before, who’d held him until morning and ignited mysterious desires in his naïve body, sat behind him; and just opposite her was his mother, who had no idea what was transpiring or, what’s more, what would transpire.

  Unexpectedly, he saw his father, an imago before him, and this vision reminded him that he would never lay eyes on him again, that he’d be separated from his presence in perpetuity, with the sharp and insurmountable pain of departure, of never again hearing his voice, of never again being a part of his existence.

  The village woman, perhaps realizing that Mümtaz verged on fainting, supported him from behind so he wouldn’t fall. The amazing sensuality of the night before united anew and inextricably with his father’s death. He felt deep inside that he’d sinned irrevocably; he felt guilty of unnamed transgressions. Had they interrogated him at that moment, he might have said, “I’m the one responsible for my father’s death.” It was a horrendous sensation that made him feel utterly deplorable. This paradox of mind would plague Mümtaz for years and trip him up at every step and turn. Even after he’d reached adolescence, Mümtaz wouldn’t be able to escape these feelings. The images that filled his dream-chambers, the confounding hesitations, anxieties, and the array of psychological states that comprised the agony and the ecstasy of his existence were all bound to this chance convergence.

  The woman parted company with them at B. The carriage stopped within a vast stain of sunlight on one of the city’s half-ruined streets. Without uttering a word or looking at anyone, she leaped from the carriage. She dashed swiftly in front of the horses to the other side of the street, from where she glanced at Mümtaz one last time. Then, running again, she turned down an alleyway. For the first and last time, Mümtaz saw her luminous face. A freshly healed knife wound ran from her right temple to her chin. The scar lent her face a queer harshness; yet, while gazing at Mümtaz, her expression softened and her eyes smiled.

  Two days later at twilight, Mümtaz and his mother arrived in A., at the house of a distant relative.

  IV

  The Mediterranean: Mümtaz later learned through books how the White Sea embraced humanity with a life of leisure; how the sunlight, the crystalline weather, and the clarity – extending to the horizon and emblazoning each wave and crest into one’s vision – refined the self and filled the soul; in sum, how the quality of nature here permitted grapes and olives, mystical inspiration and rational thought, or the staunchest desire and the anxiety over individual satisfaction to coexist. Not having cognizance of these things at that age didn’t mean that Mümtaz failed to savor his experience of them. His sojourn here, despite life’s continuing misfortune, constituted a season of exception.

  The feverish
state that had scorched a stretch of their lives in S. persisted here as well. Each day the city was shaken with news; today there would be fearful word of a great rebellion to the north; tomorrow news of a victory would fill the streets with a celebration to be forgotten by nightfall. On almost every street corner raged heated debates, and at night the clandestine transport of troops and matériel continued. Daily, the hotel opposite their house filled up and emptied out anew.

  Yet this all occurred beneath a sun as luminous as a diamond, within the intoxicating perfume of orange blossom, honeysuckle, and Arabian jasmine, and before a lapis lazuli sea that accepted him with his thousand frailties, transforming with him, a sea whose wrath, serenity, long bouts of listlessness, and delight always accompanied him.

  No matter how angst-ridden he might be, before long the luminance would find a crack in the misery, through which it slithered like a golden serpent. Sunlight released him from his inner confines and described an array of possibilites as if recounting a fable, as if to say, “Have faith in me, I am the source of all miracles, I can do anything, I can turn earth to gold. I grab the dead by the forelock to rouse them from sleep. I can easily soften thoughts and make them resemble my essence. I am the efendi of life. Where I am there can be neither despair nor depression. I am the elation of wine and the sweetness of honey.”

  Any life-form heeding this advice chirped and twittered merrily above every sorrow. Each day the cargo and passengers carried by one or two steamships, a horde of camels or beasts of burden were deposited in front of the hotel opposite their house, bundles were opened and repacked and reloaded, crates nailed shut, and metal straps cinched around wooden chests; travelers satin chairs before the entryway, conversing; as in a Futurist painting, simply an eye or a sole ear and its curiosity, or an eager female head, protruded through windows; out of idleness, brazen Italian soldiers of the Allied occupation played with children in door fronts for hours, calling out to them with repeated cara mios, carried trays of raw pastries and baklava prepared by housewives to hot bakery ovens, and when they got a little fresh and met with a scolding, they bowed their heads as if quite ashamed and walked away jeering openly before wandering down a backstreet to reemerge. In front of the depot, enormous dromedaries, the world’s most pacific animals, were made to wrestle; everybody was gratified to see nature’s disproportioned and tranquil creatures succumb to the mind of mankind. At night boys and girls went to the Palisades district, or to other places beneath the moonlight or in pitch-blackness to route water to the gardens of their houses. Life was restricted, but nature was vast and inviting.

  On only the second day of his arrival, Mümtaz had made numerous friends. He’d wander together with the boys of the house to the citrus groves and to the Karaoǧlan district. They’d even go as far as the walnut groves on the outskirts of the city. Much later he’d come to like the Kozyataǧı neighborhood in Istanbul because it reminded him of this walnut orchard. But for the most part they’d spend their days at Mermerli or at the seaside on the wharf, and toward evening they’d go up to the bluffs of Hastaneüstü.

  Mümtaz liked to spend the twilight hours perched on boulders between the road and the sea. The sun above the Bey Mountains girded the hilly undulations in golden and silver armor as if arranging the rites of its own death by preparing a sarcophagus of gilding and indigo shadows; then the arc that had descended and toppled backward spread open like a golden fan, and large swaths of light, bats of fire, fluttered here and there, hanging from the rocks. The ineluctable modality of the visible was as bountiful and lush as a season. The boulders, during the daytime, were only seaweed-covered blocks of stone that wind and rain had eroded with holes like sponges, but because they abruptly came to life in twilight, Mümtaz was besieged by a horde of fabulous beings whose numinous powers and physical forms were superior to man’s, who were mute like fate itself, only communicating through echoes of their existence within mankind. And his small body in their midst – an understanding of life expanding inside him – Mümtaz tried not to be scattered by that astounding gust of apprehension whose origins extended deeply into the past and whorled about his entire being. It was the sea mated with the sun ... the hour when all things were reborn in a new form, when voices augmented, when humanity receded as it moved toward the infinite under a firmament that deepened and lost its warmth and friendly countenance, when from everywhere nature declared, “For whatever reason did you go and become the plaything of dreary suffering? Come, return to me, dissolve in whole synthesis, you’ll forget everything, and sleep the comfortable and blithe sleep of dumb matter.” Mümtaz sensed this calling until it reached his vertebrae, and to avoid lunging at the invitation, whose meaning he didn’t fully understand, his tiny being stiffened and recoiled.

  At times he did go farther, to the rocky outcroppings that overlooked the sea from the heights; there, at the edge of the precipice facing seaweed patches, he observed how the placid water exposed itself to the last bounty of the evening like a viridian and porphyry mirror, gathering shards of light and harboring them like a maternal womb before occluding them gradually. After the muffled rasping of waves, moving to and fro far below, after the fleeting pianissimo, the whispers of love, the fluttering of wings, the splashing; in sum, after the enunciations of mysterious beings living only for the twilight hour filled quiet interstices between dusk and nightfall, he was summoned by vast invitations with scalloped edges and colorful spectra, by the articulations of thousands of life forms dormant in who knows which mother-of-pearl shell, fish scale, rock hollow, moonbeam, or starlight. Where were they inviting him? Had Mümtaz known, maybe he would have rushed to the occasion. For the sound of the sea is mightier than the sough of love and desire. In darkness, the roar of water spoke in tongues of Thanatos.

  With a telltale tremor that showed he was ready to accept the roaring invitation, Mümtaz sought out friendly visions of his as-of-yet incipient life in this black mirror; he sought out the chinar under which his father made his eternal repose, as well as the blithe childhood hours that he’d abandoned abruptly and the black-eyed village girl at the inn, a deep inoculation into his innocent skin; and when he realized this was only a blank mirror, he stood and tried to escape the gigantic shadows of the boulders as if from a nightmare – staggering and stumbling at each stride.

  The boulders might very well come alive as he passed them, it seemed, or a hand might verge on reaching out to grab hold of him, or somebody might toss his mantle over his head.

  The crowded rockscape made him shudder even in broad daylight. Rather than being a living part of nature, the stones resembled life-forms that had frozen still in the midst of some unspecified cataclysm. But truly horrifying was their appearance during the arrest of his imagination. At such moments they would be ousted from life, eternally alien to him and rejecting him. They seemed to declare, “We are removed from life. Outside of life ... That all-nourishing, life-giving sap has withdrawn from us. Even death is not as barren as we.” Verily, next to these rocky outcroppings how vibrant was a lump of clay, clay that he so loved to play with as a boy and would always love. Its soft, malleable existence might take any form or surrender to any will, or any idea. Yet these solid fragments of stone were forever removed from life; the wind might blow, the rain might fall; atom by atom they’d erode, deep lines and furrows would appear on their colossal bodies, but none of it could rid them of the state in which they were formed by the hands of some primordial apocalypse. Inasmuch as they had no apparent inquiry to make on life’s trajectory, they were crude and coarse symbols issuing from infinite time, posing all questions at once.

  Occasionally a bat would dart from where he’d stepped, and in the distance another winged beast would call to its fledglings. Once free of the rockscape, he felt relieved. On the flat macadam road he slowed his pace and affirmed his resolve: I won’t be coming back here again! But tastes of the unfathomable are seductive, and the next evening he was back again, or at the seaside, or simply crouched on a boul
der beside the road. For the sake of experiencing this titillation alone, he even made excuses to take leave of his friends before nightfall.

  The day came when his companions took him to Güvercinlik, to a grotto between Hastaneüstü and Konyaaltı quite some distance from the city. They rambled along the coast for a while, then turned in to the boulders, and finally went underground through a tunnel. Shuffling and crawling on hands and knees in pitch-darkness didn’t appeal to Mümtaz. But at the end of this passage everything was suddenly illuminated, as if the sun were shining through lush, verdant leaves, and within this luminescence they entered a sea cave. Despite their hands and knees being covered with cuts and sores, the light, shifting between deep turquoise and naptha green, excited Mümtaz. When the waves ebbed inside the mass of rock that the sea had hollowed out, there remained a calm, somewhat deep body of water, like an artificial rocaille pool similar a natural pond, with a small island of stone, whose waters were clear enough to reveal fish swimming in its depths and crabs and crustaceans along its rocky edges. This part of the grotto was accessible by sea. Behind it, the part through which they had entered was wider and constituted a slightly elevated, largish cavern filled with rock fragments. When a wave struck and sealed the mouth of the grotto, all was suffused in verdigris light. Then, in a series of odd, seemingly subterranean sounds, the water emptied out, and everything was illuminated again through refractions cast by the sunlit sea. Hands on his chin, Mümtaz watched the chiaroscuro play of light and shadow silently for hours from the perch of a boulder.