A Mind at Peace

by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

  A peşrev overture of the moon. A prelude breathed through innumerable lips into metaphysical ney flutes. Fragile chalices of light shattered, elixirs of bejeweled essences were quaffed in doses, quick and bedazzling, and archetypal gems were hurled to sea as if the rites of sacrifice were being performed.

  As if chasing the moon, a group of dolphins passed, sewing their paths into the sea. Farther ahead, a ferryboat searchlight illuminated to yet another degree of lucidity locales where lights had already gathered. As if elucidating an ancient and exquisite manuscript, all ambiguous glimmers attained vivid clarity. Wherever the currents pooled, swans by the hundreds experienced a lifetime of momentary dread. This fragile translucent world of glass fell into its own music, into the strange state of expectant listening wherein principal instruments played perhaps in a nethermost region of unlikeness.

  As Mümtaz placed his jacket over Nuran’s shoulders, he said, “Behold the Ferahfezâ Peşrev of the Moon.”

  Truly, as with Dede’s Ferahfezâ Peşrev, they’d entered a world that issued leaf by leaf from invisible neys. Like the melody of a ney, their surroundings constituted a mirror reflection of gentle, profound, and unattainable mysteries. They rambled as if through the consecutive ripples of a numinous idea or of a love that had vanquished every defect, and they passed through a proliferation of unadulterated springs.

  “We’re on the verge of entering the universe of Neşâtî’s couplet:O Neşâtî, we’ve been burnished to such extent That we’re secreted in mirrors purely radiant

  Nuran laughed, “Fine, but the material world of eşya exists, and we, too. Our bodies are material, aren’t they? I mean, as is true for everybody.”

  “Praise be to God a thousand times over ... but in my opinion, yours isn’t like the rest.”

  “Blasphemy.”

  “Call it blasphemy or the shortest route to Allah. Don’t forget that tonight we’re in the divine body of the godhead: Vahdet-i Vücut.”

  A fish leaped from the sea beside them, tracing an arch of brilliants in the air. Later, a little farther onward, within the steamy blue illumination of the sea, a whiteness of sorts frayed open.

  Their satisfactions were beyond doubt. Despite their minds working furtively in contrary directions, they were happy to abandon themselves to the present. Mümtaz seriously doubted whether their love constituted the shortest possible route to Allah, or to any other destination for that matter. Despite acknowledging the lofty and central place love held in life, he also recognized it as a single emotion that didn’t minister to one completely. Also, he no longer worried about his naïveté being a source of annoyance to her. Besides, Nuran had accepted his manner of expression and thought. She’d forgotten her spite from the prior evening at Çamlıca. She’d only become irate with him because he’d shattered life’s serenity. She’d confessed this to Mümtaz that morning: “Any woman is a little lazy when it comes to such matters. But I prefer being with you to my own comfort. I’m happy to accept you as you are.”

  With Mümtaz by her side, she found herself to be a submissive, naïve woman who went wherever her man took her. She trusted him. Despite his youth, he had stature, strength, and a distinct character, one that challenged others. In the face of life, he exercised the fortitude of one forged by a singular idea. She told herself, Let him give my life some direction, and that should suffice ... The rest was her business. She could follow her man to the end. A warm surge of twofold trust emanated from her entire person, because sharing the thoughts of the man she loved and accompanying him was another variation of love itself. And, like the other variety, it involved being reborn from a state of depletion without potential, being pregnant to a world in womb and body. In her affection for Mümtaz there existed a maternal feeling, love, adoration, and a modicum of gratitude. He’s discovered aspects of me ... she mused.

  They fell silent. Mehmet turned the bow of the rowboat away from Sarıyer. House lamps and streetlights, within shadows inaccessible to the moonlight, appeared tragically more crimson. The lights burned independently like selfish and envious souls that weren’t part of the talismanic totality of Creation.

  “You know what would happen to me at times when I was a girl? Maybe it’s something that everyone experiences. In certain absentminded moments, summers at Libadiye or while sitting lazily along the Bosphorus, I’d have the sensation that I’d suddenly left my body. It approximated floating in emptiness. Strangest of all, it happened one night while I was dreaming. Again, I’d left my body. And I knew very well that I’d left it. I was extremely cold. For some reason, however, I didn’t want to rejoin it. I awoke in that agonizing state, my teeth chattering wildly. You know that when I die, you’ll no longer be attracted to my body.”

  “Who knows? I find death to be a matter of unthinkable ugliness. But you’ll live on in my thoughts, ... of course, if I don’t go mad first.”

  “You’ll fall in love with another. Your thoughts will settle in other abodes. The way we frequently moved houses in our childhood ... it was so strange. At first we’d find it alienating. We’d always think of the former house. We weren’t able to fit either our evenings or our mornings into those new rooms and halls. Later we’d grow accustomed to it.”

  As if embarrassed by this sentimentality, she began to describe her girlhood. The house in Süleymaniye, the inner courtyard with a fountain and pool in Aleppo, the splashing of water, the ice cream at the Aleppo bazaar, the commedia dell’arte performances of a boisterous royal comic named Behçet in the tumbledown theater next to the hotel, the way her rather devout grandmother once stormed out in the middle of the show; then later, the frenzied exile, jam-packed trains, terror, crowds, the wounded abandoned en route, the anguish of leaving everything behind and heading away, of painful recollections like an amputated limb after surgery; then later, the house in Bursa, the ekirge road ... the beauty of the Bursa plain, and the manor house in Libadiye. Elementary school, the year spent in Sültantepe ... Every detail revived before Mümtaz’s eyes in ablur as if all of it constituted inseparable parts of their lives. A multitude of memories and sources merged through their relationship ...

  As Mümtaz listened, he thought about his historical novel on Shaykh Galip. The outline or the sections he’d written hadn’t satisfied him. It needed further revision. He wanted to proceed through a resolute idea, not through trivial, amusing passages. As the moonlight spilled into the sea in the Kanlıca inlet like a golden channel, he explained to Nuran: “There are too many digressions. I don’t want it to be that way. Listening to you talk now, I sensed the need for a kind of organization beyond the synthesis of an ordinary plot structure. Does a novel have to start at one point and end at another? Do the characters have to move rigidly like locomotives on fixed rails? Maybe it’s sufficient if the story line takes life itself as a framework, gathering it around a few characters. It’s enough if Shaykh Galip appears in this framework amid these people through the effects of his outlook and a few biographical scenes.” Then, looking at the opposite shore, he added, “Under one condition ...”

  “Under what condition, Mümtaz?”

  “The narrative should describe us and our contexts.”

  The Kanlıca inlet reveled in bygone moonlit nocturnes. Almost no other boats remained. The night had progressed significantly. Lingering sounds of radio programs coming from open windows gradually fell silent. Only the moon reigned: her realm of golden dreams along with the music of silence and themselves. The melody slowly increased its intensity, overwhelming him like an obsession.

  Nuran repeatedly let her hand dip into the water, tugging and straining one corner of the sapphire silk cloth that the moon had pulled tightly around itself – only then did Nuran understand the oneiric and phantasmic nature of the night.

  “Only this way can I avoid getting stuck on the page. Like the flesh of fruit that clings to the pit, the essential idea ...”

  Nuran said, “I’ve got it! The entire Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara, Istanbul, the seen
and the unseen, and all of us are like the fruit around the pit of the moon. We’ve always clung to it. Just look at these hilltops.”

  One by one, everything in their surroundings received the moonlight. The setting declared with almost feminine instinct, “Come, transform me, work me, transfigure me into something else, polish my leaves, turn my shadow into a harder and darker element.” And the moon proceeded to draw it all inward from the casing, the sheath, or the face, appropriating it into her own being. Nuran’s face sparkled like a fully splendent crystal bowl. The oars of the rowboat passing beside them dipped into and out of the sea within the glimmer of objects made of brilliants. Creation was a halved fruit around whose lunar kernel everything coalesced.

  “Your so-called essential idea, what is that?”

  Mümtaz fell silent; truthfully, what constituted the essential idea?

  “The hidden face of life that smiles within us,” he said. “Eros.”

  The night grew increasingly colder. From time to time slight winds blew, forming a spring of pure essences over the surface of the sea out of the floral scents wafting from hither and yond, forming a garden of visions. Waves fluttered and peaked in spots along the dilapidated quayside and where the currents met.

  “The garments of the moon are being washed,” said Nuran.

  They existed in a world of pure sapphire: a misty, translucent blue along with a gilded deluge dispersing mote by mote, leaf by leaf, and flowing in wide runnels; ney melodies sounded by hundreds of unseen mouths, sheathed by an accompaniment of proliferating silence that transformed and progressed with the music.

  Through the nocturne, street lamps, indeed all sources of light except the moon, assumed a bizarre torpor. In silence, being nothing more than what they were, lights extended columns, arches, and portals of golden fringes over and into the Bosphorus. At times these lights grew attenuated, nevertheless merging into one another like patches of golden seaweed.

  The moon in the midst of all, the kernel of a fruit beginning to shrivel, drew about itself this exquisiteness at the height of its ripeness. A stunning sultanate reigned. All things exposed themselves to its rule, accepting its 214 authorial order, and in kind, the order transformed each entity intrinsically, recasting it as the reverie of a vast and mysterious substantiation.

  “The arc of genesis has descended over us. We’re part of a single unified realm.”

  Before them, the village of Bebek obscured a large swath of the Sea of Shadows. The coastal lights, however, even those shining all the way from the opposite shore, jutted into this nexus of shadows, working prodigiously toward a future of inscrutable intent ...

  XI

  Wandering through Üsküdar had given Nuran the desire to know Istanbul more intimately. An oppressive heat notwithstanding, they descended into the old city a few days in a row. Beginning with Topkapı Palace, district by district, they visited mosques and medreses. Toward evening they rested in Beyoǧlu cafés or parted company to run separate errands before meeting at the ferry landing again.

  Awaiting Nuran at the landing or focusing on the face of the clock when she failed to appear gave Mümtaz deep pleasure. It surprised him that men complained of the tendency women had of making others wait, a favorite fallback for comedians. Waiting for his beloved was delectable. Anything promising her presence was delicious.

  As Nuran further came to know Istanbul, she felt Mümtaz was justified in his perspective. One day she’d asked, “Lambie, at your age how did you ever come to admire all these historical things?” Mümtaz didn’t hesitate to describe İhsan. He explained that during İhsan’s youth in Paris, he’d set out on the path of socialist Jean Jaurès for a time; and later how he’d abruptly changed his tune upon returning to Istanbul during the Balkan Wars; how İhsan had wandered through the foundations of our Turkish presence here, and how he never tired of reliving it as part of his subjective experience.

  “İhsan’s influence on me is immense. He’s my true mentor. Thanks to him, I was spared such unnecessary intellectual exhaustion. İhsan’s greatest virtue is that he points out shortcuts.”

  Nuran’s desire to meet İhsan grew in proportion to Mümtaz’s stories.

  “In that case, let’s go pay them a visit, or invite them to Emirgân. I want you to meet them anyhow. Truth be told, we’re a little late as is. I refer to him as my older brother, but I consider him a surrogate father.”

  Nuran thought it over, then came to a decision, “Forget about it. It’s annoying to be introduced as a fiancée at my age. In any case, we’ll meet each other sometime and I’m sure I’ll like him and Macide as well.”

  They returned to the topic of the sites they’d visited that day. They’d wandered through the Cerrahpaşa neighborhood. Nuran was stunned by abandoned medreses, those dens of the destitute, weeds flourishing in their courtyards, roofs collapsed, by the ruins of the Tabhane district, and the gemstone design of the Hekimoǧlu Ali Pasha Mosque.

  On this August day, these areas of Istanbul were worn down by filth, dust, and heat. The piquancy of ruins, the fatigue augmented by heat, an array of sick and exhausted faces and the physiological collapse overwhelmed them. The city’s inhabitants bore an uncanny resemblance to the city itself. Tired glances or bodies complemented houses squeezed into an area of four or five square yards, their boards bruised purple, their terra-cotta shingles broken, and their corpuses listing alee; had Mümtaz and Nuran not recognized this as the city of their birth, they might have taken it for a motion-picture set.

  Like the private automobiles and luxury cars brushing and bumping the throngs on the street, occasionally an old white-and-sesame-hued manse appeared like an astonishing remnant of bygone wealth or of the luxury of life’s bloom beside dilapidated, semicollapsed houses gnawed by neglect down to the window-box geraniums. Most houses were unpainted. From open, bare windows poked heads of desolation incongruent with these relics of the past.

  Adjacent to them were twenty-year-old brick houses of indistinct architectural style, exceedingly tall or squat, that could never be part of any archetypal pattern, neither one matching the next, backs turned insolently to the aesthetic character of the neighborhood, their walls painted with blue-hued lime-wash.

  Among the disarray of this poverty and filth, among the crippled and tired men and women who clogged the street, clothes in tatters, unkempt or having darted out without the luxury of a moment to comb their hair, in an unexpected place, its gilded stones cracked, sparkled a fountain of time past like a vamp who overcame her disheveled dress with her gaze, her figure, or through the intensity of her persona, a seductress who gave others no option but to focus on her face; farther ahead, a tomb with a collapsed dome maintained its integrity through an orderly and dignified façade; later still, a medrese appeared, a melee of children’s voices emanating from within, its white marble columns toppled over, a fig or cypress tree sprouting from its roof; and naturally, an as-yet standing mosque with a broad courtyard welcomed passersby to go beyond the bounties of this world.

  By the time they’d arrived in Koca Mustafa Pasha, they were exhausted. First they sat at the coffeehouse before the mosque, drinking tea. Next they paid a visit to the nearby sixteenth-century saint’s mausoleum. Nuran quite adored the protective railing that had been placed around the dead chinar, the story of the tree, whose circumference was etched in Yesarî script, as well as the history of the site.

  To Nuran, Sümbül Sinan still sat under the shade of this chinar. The care shown in the maintenance of the desiccated tree gave this garden of death the profundity of a masterpiece.

  Along with this, the mausoleum, devoid of architectural style, housed a body that had influenced life from where it lay for four centuries. Supplicants placed hands onto walls and railings and offered their prayers. The saint cured the sick, opened doors of hope for the disconsolate, pointed out sources of light transcending death to unfortunates whose world had collapsed, and taught patience, renunciation, and perseverance.

  “What k
ind of man was he?”

  “All of these saints believed in spiritual causes, went through a degree of spiritual training, and learned to supress worldly desires. Therefore, they were exalted after their deaths. Sümbül Sinan is a little different from the rest. To begin with, he was a noteworthy scholar. Not to mention that he had a sense of humor and a sharp tongue.”

  Mümtaz paused for a moment and added with a chuckle, “Each of them has a few distinguishing characteristics. D’you have any idea how the man resting here got the nickname ‘Sümbül’? He used to place blossoming geraniums in his turban. He was so in tune with our own sensibilities that he adored the Istanbul seasons.”

  “What about his contemporary Merkez Efendi? What was he like?”

  “He was of a completely different nature. He wouldn’t harm even the vilest of creatures. Despite having a great affection for cats, he wouldn’t keep them in his house because they pestered our friends the mice. Could you imagine that a sultanate of the soul could be so easily established?”

  Nuran thought and said, “I wonder if such men exist today?”

  “They must exist, considering that neither the notion of salvation nor the door to sainthood has come to an end ... The paths to Allah are always open.”

  Nuran stared at her companion as if she’d glimpsed one of his hidden faces. She’d expected to hear a modicum of derision, even disparagement or denigration. Meanwhile, Mümtaz had expressed himself in rather unanticipated terms.

  Mümtaz felt the urge to explain himself: “I wouldn’t say that I’m exactly religious. At this moment I’m certainly quite bound to the world. But neither would I intervene between Allah and his subjects, nor would I question the greatness and potential of the human soul. Not to mention that both constitute the roots of a national life. Just consider how many days we’ve spent in Istanbul and Üsküdar. You were born in Süleymaniye and I in a small neighborhood between Aksaray and Şehzade. We’re both familiar with the inhabitants there and the conditions under which they live. They’re all orphans of a civilizational collapse. Before preparing the formula for a New Life for these unfortunates, what good does it do to destroy previous forms that have provided them with the strength to persevere? Great revolutions have long experimented with this, and they’ve served no purpose besides leaving the masses naked and exposed. Not to mention that everywhere, even in societies of extreme wealth and comfort, existence contains myriad relics and is full of interruptions and half-formed lives. Sümbül Sinan and others like him are mainstays for these fragmented people. Just take a look at this elderly lady.”