A Mind at Peace

by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

  A gentleman of rare experience, he facilitated Nuran and Mümtaz’s appreciation of Bosphorus bluefish outings and their understanding of the role of ardor in human experience. From the very first day, he’d taken Mümtaz under his wing, diminishing the atmosphere of animosity in the household created by Fatma’s jealousy – which had found a most fertile ground under Yaşar’s wardship. Mümtaz was quite cognizant of the part Tevfik’s friendship played in his amicable reception by Nuran’s mother in the Kandilli household. Even when most resistant toward Mümtaz’s visitations, she couldn’t withstand her brother’s enthusiasm and was oftentimes swayed by him.

  That this salty philanderer regarded their love so earnestly astounded Mümtaz. Tevfik’s profligate life contained little that might indicate his admiration for such passion. At first Mümtaz assumed that Tevfik’s mask of approval concealed expressions of mockery toward his inexperience, or that he took Mümtaz seriously only out of respect for the feelings of his dearest beloved niece. Later, as Tevfik gradually entered Mümtaz’s life, he realized that his rakish, extravagant, and at times brutal existence obscured bewildering pangs of nostalgia. One day Nuran’s uncle casually confided to him that most ladies’ men – objects of envy during a reckoning of one’s life, or whilst one wallowed in depression after a missed opportunity for gratification due to a bankrupt phantasy – hadn’t had the chance to love a woman fully or had lost this chance and attempted to make up for it by chasing after contingencies, an ideal, or an array of tired repetitions of the same experience ... In short, men like Mümtaz who lived through a single beloved were the objects of genuine envy.

  In Tevfik’s estimation, it was impossible to be in love before a couple knew each other’s physical natures. Most novelists made the mistake of concluding stories where they ought to actually begin. Genuine love was predicated on the experience of the body and persisted through it. People who’d been betrayed by fortune in their first experiences of the flesh would fumble through frustrating ventures till the end of their days should the inaugural experience remain untempered by others.

  It pleased Mümtaz to find variant strains of his own ideas in Tevfik’s notions of romance, although he didn’t confuse this business with metaphysical colorings the way Mümtaz did; he saw only the realities.

  This was like a human soul reincarnated in the body of a turtle that nonetheless continues to bear and recollect his former condition without ever revealing so in form, habit, or need. As with men in political and social life who goaded genuine ideals despite a base and carnal existence, there were those who goaded feelings of the eternal in matters of romance while nevertheless knocking on every available door.

  It was likely Tevfik was one such profligate, though still bound to aesthetic beauty, the eternal, the pure, and the decent.

  He more or less admitted this himself: “Don’t end up like me, I’m stranded between forking paths.”

  As he spoke, sorrowful life experiences could be intimated in the shadows of his face. He was a man who’d paused at least once before every wellspring, overcome by the phantasy of cooling himself only there, but as soon as his lips touched refreshing waters, without even slaking his thirst, he trotted off, saying, “She wasn’t the one, it must certainly be another.” Like a wayward soul condemned to chase his own body in the indeterminacy of an ârâf windswept by chill breezes, he possessed body after body without remaining beside any for long, and now after the collapse of ventures, he’d come to warm his bones at the aşk burning between Mümtaz and Nuran.

  For a decade, as he’d formerly done, Tevfik hadn’t ventured out onto the Bosphorus properly, hadn’t crooned aloud, hadn’t attended reveries of debauchery, and hadn’t sent letters of invitation here and there to the inhabitants of Bosphorus residences. Such dedicated renunciation in a man with such a weakness for social diversions surprised one and all. Some attributed it to the misery he suffered upon his wife’s death; some claimed, “He’s suffering from a guilty conscience,” and others, within the justified incredulity arising from his decade of reclusion, were prepared to completely whitewash the past of which he boasted furtively and recollected with relish, concluding, “Maybe they’ve mistakenly accused the poor man and wrongfully slandered him. Could a man so bound to his wife commit such indiscretions?” According to the former group, Tevfik hadn’t refrained from a single act of cruelty against his wife. The latter group, however, believed he was nothing but a victim of gossip and slander. Actually, Tevfik hadn’t ever really loved the long-jealous, overly sensitive, and haughty wife who’d gifted him with Yaşar’s psychological impairments – it was his son after all – and who’d been self-sacrificing and steadfast in her attempts to exact compensation a thousand times over for every act of decency. And he’d only mourned her passing as much as any stranger despite their long, shared life. He performed the traditional rituals of benefaction in homage to her soul within the spiritual security created by knowing that she resided in a distant place of no return. Had she been willing to live apart from him as he’d so desired, he’d have spared no expense to ensure her comfort and contentment, and thus in like manner, he made outlays for her lamented memory. When his wife was alive, Tevfik would have entertained any price for a separation, and he recognized such deliverance as a blessing – even if it had only effectively come toward the end of his days – repaying it as fully as he possibly could. But where the dear lady presently resided, she didn’t need one red cent. And each year the few diligently arranged recitations of the Koran or recitals of the Prophet’s birth epic were negligible expenses compared to the money he’d once set aside.

  Tevfik’s decade-long seclusion, his withdrawal from the world of dalliance and diversion, arose for different reasons. Due to old age, he didn’t want to be relegated to the secondary, tertiary, or lesser tier of a lifestyle in which he’d once reigned supreme. Tevfik, who’d always lived in moderation despite his wanton social life, gave himself an age limit when he noticed his waning prowess, and of his own volition chose to recuse himself. Like a Roman consul who’d emerged victorious from battles to later step down from his post and busy himself with vineyard and orchard in a secluded village, Tevfik lived in the Kandilli household through his reminiscences. Now, in the new atmosphere fostered by Nuran and Mümtaz, a completely different Tevfik once again went out on bluefish outings, wandered along the seaside, and at least observed from the sidelines the diversions that he’d once so loved.

  The day Mümtaz realized this he also understood that the sparkle of satisfaction shining in Tevfik’s eyes as he frequently groomed his whitened mustache with the back of his hand contained a complete life philosophy. This gesture, a glyph of silence, amounted to erasure of the self and simple withdrawal when nothing remained to be accomplished. Whenever he straightened his mustache in this way, he said for better or worse that he’d lived his life and could now distance himself. Because this Don Juan didn’t disappear amid lightning and gale in a climax befitting his past grandeur as in the tragic legend, he’d simply interred himself in nothing but this curt and curious gesture.

  The husband-and-wife residents of the Kanlıca house – “relatives, one on Nuran’s father’s side and the other on Tevfik’s wife’s side” – couldn’t seem to fathom these newfound traits of Tevfik’s; they still regarded him as a distressed and downcast widower, and they spared no effort in putting him at ease by avoiding any reminders of his anguish. For this reason they’d even considered preventing him from staying in the quarters their son-in-law had first shared with their daughter when he’d moved into the house as a bridegroom. Clearly it’d be agony for Tevfik to stay in a room that harbored such sweet memories. But they were stunned when Tevfik boomed at the top of his voice, “Enough of this foolishness, I know that room, and it’s the best one in the house.”

  In counterpoint to the bluefish season’s opera of light, a sly comedy played in the Bosphorus residence. Mümtaz and Nuran met this farce with laughter, whereas Tevfik regarded it at times rathe
r gravely, but more often than not in feigned bouts of ire.

  Since good old Tevfik imposed himself at will upon others – his sister excepted – the established customs of the household were immediately broken.

  Till then, they cultivated a life of tranquility and ever so timid gestures meant to avoid anyone’s disturbance. Mukbile and Şükrü had no desire in life but horticulture. The lion’s share of their days passed in the back garden and hothouse.

  They filled the remainder of their time by culling seeds at the table, writing and responding to famous flower and bulb companies as far away as Holland, Italy, England, and even America, and instructing and advising neighbors and acquaintances who’d adopted their hobby. Since their tenants, a family of three living in another part of the house, had taken up the same hobby over the eight or nine years they’d lived there, the flowers made up a communal garden.

  By the start of summer, the household routine had changed anyway through frequent visits by Nuran and Mümtaz. No longer did anybody make polite apologies for an unintended disturbance in the night or because someone had drawn open the shutters of his room before others; instead of initiating every conversation with, “Excuse me, I believe I might have bothered you just then!” all was relinquished to a “How are you?” With the arrival of Tevfik, the issue spun completely out of control. Evenings, the old man’s rakı and hors d’oeuvre table was laid out on the waterfront terrace by the Bosphorus. Neighborhood fishermen could no longer pass by without stopping to chat, and the radio played without permission being granted individually by each resident. In this way, the owners of the residence and their tenants had embarked upon a brave new life.

  Nuran and Mümtaz dined at Kanlıca or at the tavern in İstinye; or rather, they brought their food out onto rowboats. Under Tevfik’s insistence, one night on the rowboat, in keeping with bygone revelries by moonlight, they’d quaffed their fair share of spirits.

  When Nuran grew tired of fishing, she joined in the melody being hummed by her uncle, and upon notice of his niece’s accompaniment, Tevfik raised his voice and the bluefish run became a reverie of musical delights.

  Old Tevfik was friends with all the boatmen, the oldest of whom had known Nuran since childhood. And she’d become friends with them all. Boatmen aware of her imminent marriage to Mümtaz had even begun looking for vacant residences nearby. Mümtaz, pleased by such undertakings, because he believed they’d hasten the marriage protocol, noted down addresses so he could scout them out once the tenants had vacated in the fall; Nuran, on the contrary, took the opposite view so that the dreams she’d nourished regarding the Emirgân house, its garden and decor wouldn’t just evaporate: “Hold off for now!” she said. “I can’t spend day after day thinking about all that again.”

  The caïquier in his sixties who’d said, “Nuran won’t be able forgo the proximity of the sea ... Her father had a great affinity for it as well,” added, “When you find a yalı and settle down there ... just wait and see how I’ll tend to you with a cornucopia of fish.” If it’d been within his power, the obliging man would have presented the entire Bosphorus to Tevfik’s niece as a wedding gift.

  The couple admired the sensitivity of this old salt. Some nights he stepped aboard their rowboat and described old reveries with a spirited rhetoric that came from first-hand experience.

  In his turbulent life he’d met with great success and gained vast experience; he’d both lived it up and fallen on hard times. Since the sea constituted the measure of what he loved, he could never consider himself down and out as long as he kept its company: “My grave, should I die with my wits about me, will be nothing less than the sea.” Following the illness that he’d suffered at winter’s end, after doctors informed him that he’d no longer be able to venture out to sea, he descended to the shoreline early one morning without attracting anyone’s notice, set off in his caïque, and vanished after surrendering to the currents, a stone lashed to his ankles. Mümtaz, later informed of the death, mourned as if he’d lost a close relative, though he was heartened that the old man hadn’t perished through some mishap far from his one and only love. In this abiding passion, the caïquier had discovered a trait befitting his character and fortune. With the quip, “I’ve gotten used to poverty, but not to old age ...,” he displayed an ease of life held over from an era when wages amounted to less than a silver coin but tips could be worth upwards of twenty – or perhaps even a golden lira. While he described fetes held at the Egyptian khedive’s yalı, boat revelries by moonlight on the bay, and Bebek reveries, the attentive couple felt that they themselves were reliving them.

  To be certain, he saw in Nuran’s beauty a reflection or memento of time past: “I’ve seen many things in this world, but never a lady as beautiful as this bride-to-be.” Such adoration coming from beyond Mümtaz’s milieu gave him childish pleasure. As the caïquier admired his beloved, Mümtaz believed that in this one respect he’d been reunited with a once-familiar world, his usual distance from which filled him with misery.

  But the true marvel rested with Nuran herself. The way she waited silently, fishing line in hand, gave Mümtaz a taste of the precocious maturity of children.

  To Mümtaz, Nuran’s interest in her surroundings seemed astounding given her casual demeanor, her focus solely on the line she held. The rowboat lantern illuminated her face and brisk movements, which, within the waves, bobbed to and fro, at times straight toward him out of the watery depths as if from enigmatic realms and back, to affect him like alchemy that resolved problems beyond cerebral solutions. Mümtaz would thus leave the ambience cast by her petite, puerile, and coy vision to face the exigencies of his psyche.

  At the first tug of the line Nuran’s face hardened into clarity, and later, when the fish emerged, she began worrying about its quality. She made a childlike, headlong lunge toward everything that drew her admiration. Her excitement, or rather impatience, filled Mümtaz with delight.

  Mümtaz, fully aware that this opulence emerged from his own imagination, knew nonetheless that some trait in Nuran sent his nervous system into a frenzy.

  Time would come when his adulation would reach such a pinnacle that Mümtaz found his mortal jouissance excessive, and he began to worry about the consequences. Mümtaz’s imagination might readily believe, for example, that in a chariot drawn by enormous sea serpents, a sea-foamsplashing Poseidon would take Nuran by the hand and abscond with her to an undersea castle like the ones found in Andersen’s fairy tales, around which gathered radiant sparkles and curled scaly shadows of every velvety hue and shade, as if a multicolored taffy were being spun from pliant, mingled seaweed.

  Doubtless, this amounted to a figment of the imagination. But during such nights, a mood in Nuran that drew his curiosty gave these phantasies prominence. At certain times, while standing before him, Nuran might seem completely withdrawn from his life. And this phenomenon raised the possibility, in accordance with Mümtaz’s own mental states, that he was viewing her through a death shroud or across the space of oblivion.

  His fantasies and anxieties bore a hint of truth; Mümtaz in essence lived in a dreamscape.

  By means of their friendship, Nuran discovered a season of exception where possibilities flourished. Her every desire, every action, every thought, her passing annoyances, flirtations and overindulgences, and even crassness amounted to diversions as wondrous as art, drawing mysteries and aesthetic beauties to her, and transforming life’s order through happy-golucky discoveries. Beneath Mümtaz’s enamored gaze, it seemed that Nuran perpetually created herself and the objects in her midst anew: the response of the beloved, who senses ardor, to the lover’s affections. Those outside the alchemy could never hope to understand this esoteric exchange. Nuran later discovered these separately experienced moments still present within her, involuntarily recollecting each in order to reexperience them.

  She wove the weft of their days with vivid beauty and creativity.

  On their return, after Tevfik had parted from them at Kan
lıca, they enjoyed gliding before yalıs whose waters assumed the colors of naphthahued atlas silk, yalis interred in the dark density of a laurel forest, a few of whose leaves were varnished by light; that is, they plied silhouette, arcana, and silence. This voyage to a semiemotional realm progressing by lunges from light to light cast from a balcony, kitchen door, or the windows of a house whose residents hadn’t yet retired, was disrupted by the moon and its luminance in a suddenly yawning cove; and within the eerie serenity that the Bosphorus assumed after midnight, a ferryboat searchlight occasionally caught them atop a swell, focusing insistently on them as if rehearsing the tableau of a mi’raj quite different from accounts of the known variety – yearning to spirit them to lofty heights of the esoteric.

  Through a matrix of phenomena that went unnoticed when Mümtaz wasn’t present, Nuran grew alarmed under the illuminating fishnet of radiance approaching them, and she cuddled up to him: “If I’m frightened by a dream when we’re together in bed, I’ll cuddle up like this.”

  At times their surroundings became nothing but quiet sparkle, as if they existed within vast turquoise. The dark seawater filled with large gem clusters extended by the stars, and the silhouettes on one shore sauntered by as if chasing after rowboats on the other side.

  During daylight hours, the oneiric mood in which inlets, hilltops, and copses manifested in perspicuity, as if each edge and curve had been individually embellished under luminous sunlight, became a mirage or phantasy of which the two of them became a part; for Mümtaz, this wasn’t just ephemeral exuberance; it might simultaneously be an epiphany of aesthetic secrets approximating alchemy. Whenever he remarked, “This resembles a passage through your soul,” he, too, realized how three distinct modes of beauty – that is, the aesthetic order, the cherished order of the natural world, and the feminine order of undiminished allure – mingled together in his soul, and how he existed in a peculiar dimension of sorcery and dreamwork.