It might be a crisis eliding everything at a single stroke, like Istanbul’s rainy and misty mornings that deadened all color. No matter how much Mümtaz struggled to draw open the multilayered shroud, he’d fail to see anything familiar. Beginning with the consciousness of his existence, ashen muck, like a river whose flow was barely detectable, would carry everything away; a kind of Pompeii buried beneath lava and moving at the rate of a life span.
At such times nothing “good,” “bad,” “pretty,” or “ugly” existed for Mümtaz. Through an effectively isolated eye whose connection with the nervous system that sustained it had been lost and whose potential for analysis had been interrupted, an objective eye experiencing final moments of hermetic perception, Mümtaz would stare dumbly at the living visions in this garden of death, and at everything that broke free from the ashen muck and accosted him, as if he were staring at reflections of a realm of nothing but echo and aftershock.
At times, seized by an anxiety that shook the entire framework, rattling everything from the windows to the foundation, Mümtaz would be agitated by all things in a frenzy that pushed the limits of his mental faculties. No accident at sea could damage a ship on the verge of sinking down to the last stave, dislodging its every nail.
He turned toward the old Bedesten of the Grand Bazaar. The auction hall was empty. But the double-sided display cases and the rooms had been prepared for tomorrow’s great auction. In one of the cases, a single antique piece of jewelry, rumors of which had spread through Istanbul for the past two months, glimmered like a cluster of stars, rawly and savagely, yet not without beauty.
Within the jewel, a truth ignited and blazed in its own vast and deep essence. Only sublimity of sorts, a consciousness that had attained the utmost lucidity, or beauty that had killed off the human within it and freed itself of all weakness, could emit such light.
He tried fleetingly to imagine it adorning Nuran’s neck. But he failed; he’d forgotten how to conjure visions of happiness. Mümtaz had no chance of owning this piece. Besides, it seemed to him an impossibility to meet her again in that old mind-set and for them to be drawn to each other. This impossibility unified the inhuman sparkle of the ornament before him with the beauty of the woman in his thoughts.
By distancing herself from his life, Nuran had been cleansed of all her faults and all they’d shared, assuming the radiant hardness of this diamond in an inaccessible stratum of existence. Separation had thus transformed her into a mythical presence beyond Mümtaz’s realm of being.
Had I only ever experienced her at a distance like this, so alone, inherently beautiful, and removed from everything ... Thus he’d be spared from stings of conscience and memories that bore into him like an auger. Perhaps this was one of the personas the woman who’d abandoned him assumed sporadically in his mind’s eye. Yet alongside it, there was the woman with whom he’d broken and shared his daily bread for months, his beloved Nuran, a being who’d suffered so much for him, who’d shared all his hopes, who’d lived, temporarily withdrawn from all else, only with Mümtaz and for Mümtaz. But there was more. An array of Nurans wallowing in trivial episodes – whose contexts and colors were taken from inadequacies in Mümtaz’s soul – which she’d all but shattered to shards and stuck into his flesh; Nurans who sought an opportunity to escape from submerged depths where they’d been trapped, surfacing to control Mümtaz’s life. Each of them individually, like the characters in a Wagnerian opera, appeared with its own special mood and manner of possessing him. Each of them subdued him, agitating his person and his nerves to different degrees. Some of them left him in the same distressed psychological state for days, dragging him back and forth between anger and vengeance or the blackest death, then with the slightest cue or under the simplest pretext, she’d relinquish her place to another persona; and Mümtaz’s face, tense with jealousy, his pulse racing with fury, would be transfigured, and an irresistible compassion would tear him asunder, his shoulders would droop under the weight of the sins he assumed he’d committed, and he’d believe he was cruel, insensitive, and selfish – increasingly ashamed of himself and his life.
These personas seemed to prolong jealousy, affection, regret, desire, and desperate devotion; they churned and multiplied within him and his flesh like a great tempest from the netherworld, leaving him without the smallest site to anchor or even breathe, and they incarcerated and depleted him in the very realm where they’d given birth to him; in sum, they comprised his successively changing lifeworlds.
Every outside entity depended on the order Nuran established. They adopted her color, fawned over her, grew and shrank in her radiance to such a degree that Mümtaz, especially in recent days, didn’t have an independent life. He existed in a state of paradox, his conflicting natures pursuing each other; he thought, looked, and felt through their mediation. Meanwhile, time itself had quieted many aspects of this inner tempest and, according to its own rationale, had cast off numerous unnecessary contingencies. In certain respects, within the context of their separation, Mümtaz now related to his beloved through quite different personas more closely resembling his own. He no longer grew jealous of her as in the past. The cruelest and most dishonest of her semblances, the blameworthy, cruel, and mercilessly indifferent presence that obeyed only its instincts, had withdrawn. Now his thoughts and feelings reintroduced another aspect of her with a relatively more calm and remorseful countenance, a Nuran who accepted blame, whom he could envision without her listing his faults.
Above these follies and foibles of every hue hovered the image of a woman who’d absolved him – malcontent martyr to a miscellany of misunderstandings – of his every act of idiocy and inanity; a woman who’d shrouded all of the torments of his life with her beatific grin. Because this smile veiled such enormous, catastrophic, and bleak shortcomings of his, concealing a heart that had been lanced repeatedly by her malevolence, a soul that had lost its trust in people and had forsaken everything in desperation, because this grin revealed nothing, masking and eclipsing all, it became the most horrendous of weapons.
The grin resembled a mirror held aloft so he might observe aspects of his inner self, his faux pas, his guilt-ridden transgressions, and even facets of himself he didn’t yet understand. Mümtaz was no stranger to the way Nuran, in moments of despair and finality, resorted to this smile that sublimated to an unrecognizable degree the woman he knew and loved, making her a foreign beacon on his horizon for the duration she wore it; he was no stranger to how she made use of muteness, which gave her the bearing of an idol whose every line and curve had been culled and created through the visions of centuries; he was aware of the way she took refuge, by degrees, behind this forced smile and quiescent poise, and how from that coign of vantage, distressed and distraught, she peered out over the landscape and over their lives, overcome by the desolation of a poignant epiphany.
During such times, were Nuran to even recognize her surroundings, she wouldn’t have recognized her self.
This final vision summoned by separation and his suffering usurped the places of several Nurans. Many awe-inspiring characteristics of this lady of his intimacy had simply vanished, so the sharp dagger that played directly upon his liver, or the draught that caused him to writhe in agony without killing him outright, might be poised or properly balanced to its utmost effect. None of the childish glee that made him ecstatic remained, none of that lush springtide known only to joyous women, none of that heightened consciousness of being in the thrall of love, of existing within a realm created by being enamored, none of that sense of security, of those always creative leaps of intelligence and élan, none of it whatsoever remained. Bliss was a glass goblet lying in shards. Confronted by the hardness of the diamond before him, the nearly overwhelming flourish of a lush spring had withered. Most pitiful was how Mümtaz hoarded these memories so none of the paths he’d once traversed would vanish. In the mirror of her serene smile his imagination perpetually revealed aspects of paradises lost.
Indeed, a so
ng, a dapple of light that played on the sidewalk, a single sentence uttered midconversation, a florist’s shop along his path, another’s reveries of the future, the resolve to begin work, everything, through a vision of the past, transported him back to the previous year, wherein he was roused to consciousness.
Truth be told, Mümtaz lived a twinned life, like the cobbler in the story from A Thousand and One Nights. On one hand, remembrances of halcyon days never left him, but as soon as the sun rose, the nighttime of separation spread within him in all its torment. The young gentleman, who effectively lived in his imagination, bore heaven and hell together. Between these two boundaries, he lived the life of a sleepwalker, punctuated with violent awakenings along the edges of an abyss. Between these two opposing psychological states, he conversed with those around him, taught his courses, listened to his students, explained their assignments, helped his friends, and argued when he was backed into a corner; that is, he forged through his everyday life.
At each step, Mümtaz suffered the tribulations of trying to live fully amid the distracting crowd.
Intermittently, his life consisted only of avoidances. Forlorn, he wandered the streets of Istanbul like a ghost ship. Shortly after arriving at some destination where he’d longed to be, a gale rising from within drove him onward; involuntarily, anchors were weighed, sails billowed, and he sailed ahead.
If not for an inclination toward the cerebral that accompanied his sentimentality, Mümtaz would have long been obliterated. But this twinned nature that had been so destructive to his relationship while in love was his saving grace now. Despite his devastation, from the outside, if only at whiles, he appeared to be more or less powerful and productive. Since he peered out over his context from a state of yearning, from a rite of passage that had deeply affected him, he better understood what he saw and knew how to adjust his perspective. That is, it was only in his personal life that he was condemned till death to remain naïve, clumsy, afflicted, or immature.
Mümtaz walked apace with the disposition of one who’d resolved not to think. From the bazaar, he exited out onto Nuruosmaniye Street. From there he descended below. He wanted to visit the tenant as soon as possible. He had to complete his errands posthaste. If only İhsan returned to health. around on a wheeled board fastened to his underside, propelling himself with wooden bath clogs on his hands. His legs, thin and cocked like a spider’s, hung over his shoulders and he pulled long drags from a cigarette placed between the toes of one foot. If not for the pallor of his face, his disheveled appearance, and the impact of disease that first overcame him, rather than a disabled beggar Mümtaz might have resembled a contortionist making involved and astounding maneuvers, a master ballet dancer who, within the ferocity of the dance and the rhythm, now became a spider, now a comet, mimicking first a swan and later a seafaring boat.
Pale and gaunt, he evidently drew great satisfaction from inhaling the cigarette smoke. His age was apparent mostly from the down of his whiskers. He took the money extended by Mümtaz, who waited as if convinced the man would transfigure himself, assuming a more astounding pose in gratitude or demonstrating another of his talents. Instead, he bowed his head, concealing his face, and pulled another breath through his cigarette before propelling himself by pushing off with his clogs, as he kept his legs wound about his shoulders and torso like spindly branches, swiftly passing to the opposite sidewalk to lean against the base of a sunlit wall with newly applied stucco. In this pose, he was nightmarish, a half-formed idea. Under sunlight, he waited like a permanent fixture of the street.
Mümtaz focused on the surroundings. Beneath the sun, the ruined, blazing white road, with its dilapidated houses, gaping doors, projecting oriel windows, and laundry-strung balconies, was long enough to instill the anxiety of infinitude, stretching onward in the brightness as if it were sloughing its skin. Here and there, weeds sprouted at the edges of the sidewalk. A cat sprang from a low garden wall, and as if awaiting this signal, a circular saw whirred in a lumberyard.
An afflicted road, he thought; a meaningless thought. But, like that, it’d been planted in his mind. An afflicted road, a road that had succumbed to leprosy of sorts, which had putrefied it in places up to the walls of the houses aligned on either side.
Whenever he raised his head, he noticed that a few passersby had stopped and were staring, and he understood that he must be experiencing a bout or episode. His distress forced him to lean against one of the leprous walls of the houses. The road continued onward, its skin being flayed by the sun.
A boy approached: “Would you like water?” he said. Mümtaz was only able to utter, “Nah!” If only he could get off this road. But the road had to stop sliding beneath his feet and stay put so he might walk. Was this the end? The termination ... deliverance ... the conclusion of everything and the lowering of the curtains? That great and mitigating release? To shout, “It’s quitting time!” to all the dissonance that cluttered his mind, to open the gates and set it free, to chase away each iota of each memory, vision, and concept, to become nothing but an ordinary object, a lifeless and unconscious presence, like a shiny snake skin, to join the street, whose one end rose up, or the walls and houses, which the sunlight had gnawed away in spots like leprosy; to leave the circle of existence; to be delivered of every last paradox.
VI
With the aching distress of a cat giving birth, the tenant roamed about his diminutive shop wringing his hands as if hoping for salvation from something: the walls, the sacks and bags of hardware, the nails in bins, and the clusters of junk suspended from the rafters.
The shopkeeper narrowed his eyes as soon as he saw Mümtaz, his way of preparing to greet a visitor. Over the long years that he’d spent at his desk, he’d gotten into the habit of squinting at others this way from the hovel in which he found himself.
“Come, welcome, my fine young man. I was just expecting you.” This was so in keeping with the usual routine that if not for this last sentence, Mümtaz would have thought the man’s repeated messages to them had amounted to someone’s practical joke. In the midst of this thought, he responded to the tenant’s questions:
“He’s doing just fine, it’s kind of you to ask. He sends his regards. He’s feeling a bit under the weather ... thank you.” As they spoke, Mümtaz understood that this wasn’t the same old tenant, that at the very least mechanisms of anticipation and hope were now churning within him, nailing him up onto long, high scaffolds with little taps of the man’s own heart.
“Of course you’ll have a coffee or perhaps something cold to drink?”
Mümtaz declined. The shop, the sacks and bags of junk, distressed him. The man had no intention of insisting anyway. Due to the stomach cramps he’d suffered over the past two decades, the shopkeeper knew quite well how eating or drinking anything between meals could disturb the healthy balance of one’s digestion. After this polite offer, like a freight wagon rolling in the wake of a luxury passenger train, he turned to the business at hand with astounding alacrity: “The contracts have been drawn up, both for the retail store and the storeroom.”
Without allowing himself to be alarmed at the metamorphosis of this out-of-the-way shop into a “retail store” and at the dank cellar, which stunk up the neighborhood, into a “storeroom,” the man spread two contracts before Mümtaz. “Of course, you have your aunt’s seal in your possession?”
Indeed, he did. The contracts were in good order. Mümtaz endorsed them in his aunt’s name. The man pulled out his wallet, said, “I’ve prepared a full year’s rent,” and removed an envelope.
Has he gone mad? thought Mümtaz.
Mümtaz took the blue envelope with a glance revealing that he expected it to contain anything but banknotes. At that moment the telephone rang. The man was seized by frenzy, which infected those around him. The onlookers, who knew both parties in the conversation, stiffened. Mümtaz, too, stood abruptly in the fear that something had happened to İhsan; they’d be able to reach him here.
“G
et tin, I told you, tin and rawhide ... that’s all. As much as you can find. Just forget about the rest. Tin and rawhide.”
His voice did away with everything on the face of the earth besides these two materials with a resolve that Mümtaz had never witnessed before. Then a hint of doubt mingled into his tone.
“What do we know about motors? Do what I said.”
He hung up the phone. He sat back down. He was somewhat bothered that his conversation had been overheard. For the sake of doing something, anything, he put on his black glasses. From a great distance, he asked Mümtaz:
“Everything’s in order, is it not?”
Mümtaz slid the blue envelope into his pocket. His eyes stared at the telephone as if to ask, “Anything else you’d like to tell us?” and he bid farewell to the shopkeeper. Swept by a peculiar feeling of embarrassment, he wasn’t able to look at the man’s face.
No political discussion or dossier could have informed him about current affairs as did this conversation, only half of which he’d heard. War was imminent. He ambled, staggered and distraught, wiping his brow frequently.
“There will be a war,” he said. This was different from any ordinary mobilization; it was more certain, more decisive. Determination of one hundred, one thousand percent. Within all these shops, such silent preparation continued; telephones were answered and instantly tin, rawhide, paint, and machine parts were sucked out of the market; numbers changed, zeroes multiplied, and opportunities decreased. The imminence of war. We’ll be going, all of us will go. Was he afraid? He assessed himself. He believed he wasn’t.
At least what he felt at the moment couldn’t be called fear. He was only disturbed. Some colorless and formless entity, a creature whose nature he didn’t yet know, had coiled within him. He’d have to wait to determine what it was exactly. I’m not afraid of death. I’ve lived so close to death my whole life . . . There’s no reason to fear it. War, however, even for those sent to the front, wasn’t just death. Death was simple. At times one could even see it as a last resort. Mümtaz had repeatedly seen it as a land of salvation, a far shore that had to be reached, just like a swimmer who thinks his fatigue will end after the remaining five or ten strokes and his feet touch ground. In all likelihood, most people thought this way. No, death itself wasn’t terrible, relative to the way it grew difficult along with everything else; to the way this fundamental event, this prearranged agreement, became a knotted ball of yarn incapable of being undone so that five or ten strokes of water filled with a thousand obstacles. Away, alone, alas, a love, all my suffering will end there, at that threshold . . . Do we all think so? Are we the children of death or of life? Which of these two forces winds our clockwork: the hands of the seasons or the fingers of eternal darkness? Death is an absolute. But considering that my own mote of humanity hit the lottery of life, seeing that all Creation down to the tiniest element has come to life for me, in that case, in this terra lucida, this paradise of feelings and senses, this preposterous Walt Disney production, let me live my lot to the utmost! No, he couldn’t conceive of it like this, either. This was too simplistic as well. It amounted to remaining external, to living on surfaces. We don’t just remain at the door, we enter the abode, and take ownership of it, adopt it, declare that it’s ours, we desire it, and we take pleasure in doing so. We weep after those who have left us, falling at their feet to say, “Do not leave!” We don’t simply let things separate from us.
A Mind at Peace Page 7
