A Mind at Peace

by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

  Tevfik wasn’t overly complaining about his son’s pharmaceutical obsession. Despite poisoning himself each day by recommended or excessive doses, for better or worse, Yaşar forged through life. Moreover, since he’d succumbed to hypochondria, he’d been liberated of many exigencies related to his career. He no longer grew out the nail of his right pinky “a length of four elifs,” and he no longer discussed the young contessa and her very charmante mother he’d met in Toledo, the straight, pristine boulevards of Bucharest, or the extraordinary beach at Varna. He neither boasted of his second secretariat in Paris, when he’d been honored to make an evening visit to that exquisite pied-à-terre of French singer-actress Mistinguett accompanied by her maidservant, nor the boardinghouse right behind Wilhelmstrasse where one midafternoon he’d suddenly come nose to nose with Swiss actor Emil Jannings, cigarette in mouth, a large canine behind him, as he stepped from his front door. He’d even forgotten about the large-eyed blonde at this boardinghouse, whose pointed eyelashes dripped blue mascara, about her mad infatuation with Wagner, the way her voice trembled when she recited Heine by heart, the incredible trip they took to the Tyrolean Alps, the folk songs they listened to beneath moonlight, and all the rest, forgotten. Likewise, the weeklong vacation he’d passed in the château of an old countryman of ours located a few hours from Budapest, those high-backed armchairs, horses, thoroughbred hounds, and threshing sites that resembled sets prepared for Marta Eggerth’s operetta-like films rather than a real harvest; in short, the thousand and one delights of pleasant music and cheap sentimentality, Viennese cafés, ladies of delicate comportment, and cocktail-party trivia about Mozart had all been elided from memory. Nowadays, Yaşar returned to the house every evening with a tightly wrapped, elegant parcel, undid its packaging as if removing a fruit from its rind, unfolded its thin prospectus, and within a radiance but seen shimmering on the lips and in the eyes of full-fledged devotees of the faith when they beheld the ordered workings of Creation like clockwork, read, stunned and grinning.

  Mümtaz knew of Yaşar from his friends in Paris, including İhsan, and somewhat from chance encounters at Adile’s apartment. Nature had all but compensated this foreign affairs officer, who held the promise of the brightest future in ’25 and ’26, with hypochondria since he’d lost a midlevel ambassadorship due to the betrayal of a family friend; that is, since being sent to some Balkan town as head secretary in place of assuming a vacant central post as part of an embassy.

  This obsession had occupied his entire life for the past half-dozen years, and it was not to be taken lightly. Yaşar resembled a man who’d been appointed by irade to the captaincy of a dreadnought, and just as such a captain would be preoccupied with the inscrutable workings of the vessel, Yaşar was occupied with his bodily workings, whose secrets, potential, and governing laws escaped him. His primary preoccupation was to synchronize numerous anatomical systems of disconcerting mystery and to coordinate their functions, preventing a matrix of probable disruptions through small and precisely timed interventions. In brief, Yaşar’s body remained in dry dock under the scrutiny of his own eyes. His hypochondria had increased, particularly after a careless physician had one day declared that he couldn’t actually be suffering from heart disease based on the vital signs of his own body, but added that perhaps his other systems were strained, resulting in some slight discomfort, and his life began to pass in pursuit of an elusive orchestration of bodily function. One could say that the unity known as the body had been lost for Yaşar, to be occupied by a perplexing collusion made up of independently working organs that resembled a governmental cabinet whose seats were occupied by ministers of different parties. From the intestines to the stomach, from the liver to the kidneys, and from the sympathetic nervous system down to the endocrine glands, each part functioned independently and to separate ends. Thus, Yaşar, who strove to lead these distinct apparatuses to a single coordinated goal, was something of a prime minister condemned to struggle against the impossible. In his efforts, he had but one single recourse: pharmaceuticals.

  Whoever happens to write the history of this century will most certainly be mindful of the proliferation of pharmaceuticals. Yaşar was one of the biggest casualties of this epidemic. In addition to a few pharmaceutical warehouses in Istanbul, he’d also made direct contact with pharmaceutical factories, or their representatives, who’d gradually begun sending him, as they did with doctors, varieties of their latest product samples.

  The medications weren’t just the victory of modern-day medical science and chemistry. They also came with individual aesthetics, and even literatures. With their meticulous packaging from the most elegant covers and imitation morocco cases down to boxes resembling the most provocative and expensive perfumes, powders, and toiletries, in every size, shape, and color, some petite, graceful, and friendly, as if exclaiming, “I’m as useful as an idea and what’s more, I’m easily carried!” and others with their squat bottles promising all variety of discretion like solemn confidants, they’d instigated a distinct transformation in daily life, or at the least, in urban and street life, with wadding as shiny as velvet and packaging that satisfied one like a new leather bookbinding, its fine linty fuzz shimmering in the sun. These pharmaceuticals wouldn’t just remain the products of a few major factories, they represented initial steps toward turning consumers into the ideal of a brave new humanity. With the artificial ease that they brought, they’d secure the gradual death of nature in mankind. To be sure, Yaşar sensed this lofty ideal, embracing it heart and soul. Thanks to six years of patient research, many involuntarily physiological functions occurred as an effect of Yaşar’s pills. He slept using pills, he attained the clarity of wakefulness with the few aspirin he took upon waking, he worked up an appetite with pills, he digested with pills, he defecated with pills, he made love with pills, and he desired with pills. Companies like Roche, Bayer, and Merck were the mainstays of his life. He wrote the long reports that he presented each month to the Ministry with the help of the tonics from these factories that multiplied human endurance exponentially. The top of his nightstand held a riot of bottles of every imaginable design, decorated with symbols, some wordy with allusions to minerals, mythology, and cosmology, while others sufficed with intimation and innuendo, like the titles of poetry collections. Thanks to these bottles and packages, the long shelf of his dresser was as dazzling as an American bar, and when Yaşar spoke of these medications, he used the most hyperbolic language. Instead of saying that he’d taken vitamin C, he’d say, “For eighty-five cents, I bought a million oranges!” Describing a bottle of Phanodorme or Eviphane that he’d removed from his waistcoat pocket, he’d declare, “Behold the poet laureate of the ages! Each capsule contains at least twenty visions that would never under other circumstances visit the imaginative faculties of a single author!” The hours of the day were divided according to the drugs he took. “Please don’t let me forget, at three o’clock sharp I take my pepsin ... It seems I’ve forgotten to take my Eurotropin. May Allah grant that no harm befalls me.”

  Yaşar loomed as a true neurotic side effect caused by the cooperation between modern science and marketing for the betterment of mankind.

  IX

  The pleasure of welcome at Nuran’s house signified a peak of satisfaction for Mümtaz. Unfortunately, Fatma’s tetchiness poisoned this delight.

  Since her father had left, Fatma’s natural disposition was a state of insecurity with respect to others – the phobia of losing whatever belonged to her. That is to say, she nurtured jealousy of Mümtaz. And other contingencies made her jealousy more distressing.

  The girl couldn’t manage to find any rapport with Mümtaz. First she wanted to be indifferently cool or simply polite; a while later she’d become malicious and spiteful; and in the end, as if to relinquish her world, she’d abandon their company and withdraw, but since the thought, What’s going on downstairs? pestered her, five minutes later she’d appear again, moody and spoiled. Since word of marriage frequently passed
in the house, Fatma knew Mümtaz’s status in Nuran’s life. This was the reason her demeanor toward her mother had changed over the past ten days.

  None of this could dispel Mümtaz’s joy at being present in Nuran’s house among the things she’d lived with and enjoyed as a girl and adolescent.

  Consequently, for Mümtaz, thoughts of Nuran’s home became a separate source of satisfaction. When his beloved went away, leaving him alone, or on days she said she wouldn’t be leaving her house, he got in the habit of conjuring her. Now familiar with the most important framework of Nuran’s life, thoughts of her never left him. Imagining her at the base of the pomegranate tree in the garden or at the breakfast table, or thinking of her in flower beds that she tended by hand, her hair gathered atop her head with randomly placed hairpins, her white morning gown draped in folds recalling Pompeiian frescoes as they clung to and roamed the curves of her body, amounted to delights that filled his hours of solitude.

  Nuran’s acts and attitudes as evoked by Mümtaz’s imagination were implausibly sublime: how she cast open the shutters of her bedroom; boiled Turkish coffee for aging Tevfik; brought medicines to her mother; read a book in the garden, head in hands; or served tea to guests in the small parlour room, a haunt since childhood, while seated in the armchair once occupied by grand vizier li Pasha, who’d come to pay a get-well visit to her grandfather; how she pointed out the framed verse by Nâilî – “Through the favor and munificence of the exalted Lord we were delivered” – that İbrahim Bey had in time made as a memento of his ten-day detainment at Yıldız Palace; and how she showed off the decorative plates and vases in the window whose ornamentation he’d made with his ink pots of gold and other colors, his hair-tipped pens and fine brushes, as well as those “menageries of glass,” as Nuran put it – a turn of phrase that augmented her grace through the je ne sais quoi of childhood elation.

  For Mümtaz, a personal fable of sorts was gradually woven out of Nuran’s time away, and he began to embellish the hours of Nuran’s day – just like medieval painters who illuminated the prayer books of such and such duchess or king around a château with depictions of daily life, seasonal and astrological figures, or scenes from the Sacred Book – through a plethora of visions, through sparkling and multihued bacchanals conveying a wealth of potential like unstrummed lutes.

  In this variegated realm, this music of silence that appropriated its every curve and arc from her ordinary movements and from the figures she boldly presented to the moment and span of her inhabitation – the actual Nuran, through an image conjured by her name – “twin lights of the sun and moon” – a vision of golden chalices pilfered from the banquet of the sun, or of water lilies blooming white in the gardens of dawn, like a fecund season, she came, went, thought, listened, and spoke while her presence flung a multitude of secrets and splendors upon the landscapes over which she trod.

  To imagine her at any moment of the day, anywhere, yielded an always boundless jubilation, whether Mümtaz evoked her waiting for the ferry at the landing, selecting buttons or lace at the seamstress’s, describing a dress model, speaking with her friends, whether nodding her head “yes” or shaking it “no.”

  Two Nurans manifested. One was removed from him, such that her every step transformed her material self a bit more, and through the alchemy of desire and yearning, in effect became a substantiation of the soul, and by bequeathing countless traits of her own to other things, she made all distances and wherever she roamed into a realm of transcendence above the everyday, though she nevertheless lived as always in the center of this realm, constituted by nothing more than kaleidoscopic reflections of her self.

  The house in Kandilli was the most striking and wondrous of Nuran’s realms, and most transformed into abstract reality by this miraculous phenomenon, down to the open hall’s wood siding interspaced with laths. And her transformative alchemy, beginning here, incrementally radiated throughout his life.

  Then there was the second, the Nuran of his company, who, by her material presence, diminished his phantasms to nothing but infantilism, who, from afar, in one stroke erased whatever he’d conjured. As soon as she made her entrance, the instant she appeared at a prearranged rendezvous, a ferry landing or street corner, Mümtaz’s imagination sputtered and ceased.

  Mümtaz tried repeatedly to ponder the emotions raised by her approach. Her approach, he decided, constituted a sort of mesmerism of the intellect. Everything seemed to vanish the instant she appeared at the top of the street. Anxieties evaporated, apprehension abated, and even exhilaration lost its former radiance. The proximate Nuran focused the bewitching aura emanating from her presence onto one single entity, one individual, Mümtaz, whom she took into her palms and formed into luculent clay.

  Even Mümtaz ceded his fundamental conception of the real whenever confronted by Nuran; Mümtaz, who in previous relationships belittled the fairer sex with near derision, who found his own exuberance laughable, and even amid the most poignant pleasures, in flagrante delicto, carefully tracked his bestial stimulation with a cerebral facet of his yet-lucid mind as if observing the workings of an automaton he’d cranked up himself, and who, beyond visual stimulation, received no purity of pleasure from the female figura.

  True, this wasn’t just a figment of the imagination. He didn’t think this way because a lunatic had taken over the asylum of the intellect, either. Even had he not lost his mind, her mystery would survive in his delirium. Thus, whether near or far from Nuran, no wisdom or established truth could provide succor. Neither the Old Testament, which never left his side at one time, nor the philosophers or mentors he admired offered anything that might counter his agitation. These thinkers wrote of the dangers of women, carnal desire, and lust. In Mümtaz’s esteem, his escapade with Nuran was of another magnitude entirely. Nuran was the fountainhead of life, the maternal source of all realities. Consequently, even when fully satiated by her, he still hungered for his beloved, his mind didn’t turn away from her for an instant – as he sunk into her, he achieved wholeness of being.

  On occasion Mümtaz attempted to explain his affection for Nuran through an absolute cellular affinity, and through the sensual chemistry they shared, he learned about the vast enigma nature had instilled within them. Perhaps what Plato had said was true, and in the circle of being, fate, by means of their love, had again reunited the halves of a singular presence rent asunder. Mümtaz, in other words, believed he was living through a Mi’raj of Being and an Exaltation of Eşya.

  So fully did he feel the forces of Creation in his flesh, during certain nocturnal hours he wondered why he wasn’t indeed conversing with rocks, birds, and blades of grass in the garden. The secret of this enigma again rested with Nuran. She was no ladylove of sterile contentments, hidden and jealous. Complete abandon issued from her person. Nuran depended on a minimum level of selfhood. She lived through her milieu. Despite attempts by both to avoid burdening each other with the tribulations of their lives, Mümtaz understood how at times she pitied him on account of people she’d never met.

  Twice per week they met for morning trysts. Nuran quite liked his house in Emirgân. “I no longer feel the incline, that’s how I’ve gotten used to it. It isn’t exhausting because I’m approaching you.” Hearing this surprised Mümtaz; Nuran, who discussed everything thoroughly, who revealed all of herself, hadn’t imparted a single word about their relationship. She’d even found the question “Are you happy?” superfluous. For her, love wasn’t the expenditure of emotions through words, but the complete surrender of herself to the tempest in Mümtaz’s soul. Perhaps, captive in his arms, she assumed he could read her every thought from her face. This proved to be somewhat true. In the changing expressions of her countenance, he could read everything except the ciphers of feminine nature, the elements of the esoteric present even in Nuran.

  Not a single spot existed on her small face with which he wasn’t familiar. For Mümtaz, her face became his panorama of the soul: the way it blossomed to love like a flo
wer, closed definitively upon a despairing smile – the metallic radiance burning in her eyes asquint – and not least of all the way her face changed by degrees like a daybreak over the Bosphorus. Nuran spoke, listened, and agreed or disagreed through smiles and gazes, rather than through words.

  She resorted to glances that vacillated from the most radiant jewels to the keenest scimitar glints. Before these various implements, Mümtaz at times found himself in a state of vulnerability more precarious than death. At other times her eyes coronated him with the most opulent of crowns known to the world, spreading at his feet pelts of reverence that destiny deemed unfit for the soles of others. With a look, she dressed him up and stripped him down, at one moment turning him into a pitiful, forsaken malcontent with no recourse but Allah, and at the next into the very master of his fate.

  Day in, day out, Mümtaz harbored Nuran’s glances and the sounds of her laughter, which resembled sobs of embrace and ecstasy. Her gaze and gaiety confronted him at every turn. His soul – tirelessly diving into the sea of her eyes – at each moment discovered new sources of strength and anguish in this ocean of riches. Her smile left a series of gardens blooming on his skin, in his blood, and throughout his being. Endless gülistans drove him mad with pleasure such that they almost provoked him, more than once, to breathe in the bed upon which he lay, the objects he touched, and the lifeblood coursing through his veins. Inanimate objects accepted a godly visitation, coming to life through the memory of encounter, and in transitory but wistful moments of enlightenment, became cognizant of the past, the present, the future, and the immediate environment.