A Mind at Peace

by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

  He occasionally wondered, “Do we love each other or the Bosphorus?” At other times, he attributed their state of satisfaction and lunacy to the exuberance induced by Ottoman music. “These alchemists of old have us wrapped around their little fingers ...” he’d said, trying to conceptualize a distinct Nuran or to locate her hermetically within her own aesthetic. But the fusion wasn’t as superficial as he’d thought, and Nuran, by unexpectedly entering his life, illuminated things that had been present within him for a considerable time and constituted the lion’s share of his spirit, and she’d established her sultanate in contexts that were more or less prepared to accept him; as a consequence, there was no possibility of extricating Istanbul, the Bosphorus, Ottoman music, or his beloved from one another. The Bosphorus contained a prearranged existential framework through its history, the hours of the day it regulated, at least in certain seasons, and through its diverse beauty that bespoke vivid memories. As for Ottoman music, its Dionysian effusion, writhing through rigid arrangements and unleashing a tempestuous deluge of roses, inspired one to be the prey and sacrifice of an absolute thought or desire, to burn in its forge, only to resurrect and again burn to ash; likewise, the satisfaction music provided the couple in seeking each other among age-old and virtually forgotten splendors, while inducing them to inhabit a prearranged existential framework opulent enough to confront any and all eventualities, demonstrated how this might be accomplished, and finally primed them emotionally to make themselves at home there.

  But Ottoman music wasn’t an art form that dispensed with humanity or depleted it by imparting a sense of devotional awe. All of those saintly souled and humble virtuosi, no matter how lofty the pinnacle of their art might be, were pleased to remain within society and to live communally with others.

  Due to these two enabling forces that clung tightly to Mümtaz’s identity, Nuran became an enigmatic being returning to live as the mortal substantiation of the historical, the sublime, and the vital; she became a spectacular presence vanquishing time through urge and beauty; and through her, he deciphered the logic of his aesthetic and emotional realms. Being next to Nuran, embracing her, and loving her assumed the quality of a force transcending the limits of her person.

  Mümtaz was exhilarated by the semblances of fable and faith adopted by her in his imagination over these nocturnal returns.

  When Mümtaz said that he’d experienced a mi’raj through Nuran’s love, or declared that he’d seen visions of her distinct personas, like variations of the divine incarnate, in the ever-changing ornament and progression of the arabesque of Itrî’s Nevâkâr song, in the Rast semâis and melodies of Hafız Post, and in the great gale of Dede Efendi, whose cantus firmus would forever accompany Mümtaz, he genuinely, as it were, approached the true architects of this territory and culture, and Nuran’s mortal presence actually became the miracle of a reincarnation. Within the figure of the beloved, Mümtaz craved the concentration of the cosmos and the gathering of a mode of compassionate love specifically Turkish, descendant from forebears whose moral code even reappeared as a carnal and bloody dream, at least in the most visceral folk songs. Synthesized within this mode were evliya folk saints as well as türküs of Istanbul, Konya, Bursa, and Kırşehir that recounted romances of efe militants and youngbloods and also, resonating through forgotten years whenever he cocked an ear toward his childhood, adventures of murder and vengeance in sonorous strains, Bingöl and Urfa dialects and Trabzon and Rumeli türküs filled with yearning, desire, and the urge for self-depletion.

  Under the effect of such a bloody and violent phase of Creation, Mümtaz wasn’t stifled by having limited himself to a single love or to the corporeal splendor of, in a phrase borrowed from the French, “a petite mademoiselle,” but rather witnessed the construction of his own inner world stone by stone through their romance.

  They’d finally get out of the rowboat either near the Vaniköy factory or at one of the empty waterfront quays on the outskirts of Kandilli. The last of Mümtaz’s pleasures was to walk the remainder of the way back, sharing the weight of Nuran’s fatigue in his body.

  She often remained oblivious to Mümtaz’s thoughts over these walks, made even more solemn and unendurable due to the advanced hour and the silence, his nerves frazzled by pleasure.

  Soon, confronted by the high wall surrounding Nuran’s house, he’d part from her company before the door that led to what seemed like the flip-side of fate.

  Mümtaz detested his solitary returns despite the vivid and splendid memories of the previous twenty-four hours.

  Dread filled Mümtaz every time he accompanied Nuran home, thinking it might be the last. He believed the human soul tolerated contentment the least of all emotions, most likely because nothing lay beyond it; one was obligated to endure contentment ignorant of its duration. One could forge through anguish, striving to escape it as if picking through brambles, hobbling down a rocky path, or trying to break free of a swamp. But one carried contentment like a burden until it was involuntarily laid down at the edge of a road or elsewhere.

  Take prisons for example, or comb court proceedings or newspaper collections where daily misadventures are recorded in columns of minuscule type; there’s no shortage of malefactors who’ve cast off burdens of joy simply because they’ve tired of shouldering them.

  Aware of this, Mümtaz also knew that they were content; therefore he feared the impending loss of delight. The postponement of their marriage despite Nuran’s open desire to live together filled him with misery. The actual meaning of separate homes was separate obligations, pleasures, and strifes. Nuran lived two lives at once, between which she maintained a precarious balance. The balance could suddenly tip against him through any randomly placed counterweight.

  Even so, he believed that she regarded their summer as something exceptional. He discerned in her an outlook that quite simply anticipated the best from the march of time: “The summer’s all ours, Mümtaz; we can engage in all manner of madness.” Under the anxiety of losing her, this declaration assumed a thousand and one shapes in Mümtaz’s head.

  Each of these cruel and fleeting thoughts came with their opposites, and Mümtaz quickly cast them off. After Nuran had fully entered his life, she’d changed character a number of times in his mind. To be exact, beside the Nurans that inspired fear and awe respectively, a third Nuran emerged through sacrifices she’d made solely for him and the way she’d divided her life into hemispheres without any complaint. This Nuran, both loftier and deeper than desire, love, and adoration, as well as removed from any individual anxiety, was the Nuran of compassion that rose like endless inner tidewaters. Even when apart, Mümtaz wished for her happiness and holistic harmony of soul. His discovery of this emotion marked a genuine salvation, a maturation of sorts. He thus stopped regarding his contentment as solely limited to his own self, and his soul opened to human fate in new ways.

  Toward the ides of October, their joy ever so gradually began to wane. Each felt inwardly and indeterminately that their contentment now suffered from mummification due to its dormancy. They discussed this at Kanlıca’s İsmail Aǧa coffeehouse on one of their most beautiful days together. They’d trysted at the yalı and toward noon crossed the Bosphorus to Emirgân. By evening they’d gone down to the ferry landing. Emirgân Square and its coffeehouse were cool and tranquil.

  When they left the European shores of Emirgân, the sun had descended significantly, casting the Asian shore under the direct sunbeams of evening. It was a nostalgic, warm radiance that seized one, stuck in one’s throat, and weighed on one’s chest like an age-old türkü. Moving toward this radiance over a sea agleam from horizon to horizon, unlike the regular workaday trips they made, was like hurtling toward a land of promise.

  Neither Mümtaz nor Nuran quite recalled ever before seeing the cerulean cast of the frequently cresting waves. A final wave that mixed deep mosaic gold and gemstone dust into a phthalo blue reminiscent of a Fra Angelico canvas – the wave infused by like like a downpou
r of divine absolution – virtually tossed them onto the Kanlıca ferry landing. One gunwale edge of the rowboat remained all but hooked onto the quay.

  Mümtaz had never in his life seen such a carnivalesque setting. This was no projection of the felicity of his inner self. Maybe all Creation, including people, houses, trees, the phalanx of Bosphorus shearwaters that soared past sipping the sea, pigeons and cats, the watermelons and casabas piled off to the side, had been roused from a deep hibernation. In the twilight, the sea bream dangled on the fishing line held by a policeman as if experiencing a peak moment and flopped along with the to and fro of the line, appearing quite satisfied to be a pendulum ticking out the remainder of its fleeting life. The officer, perhaps astounded by the jubilation of colors or pleased by the joy in Nuran’s expression, with a solemnity that didn’t in the least match his unbuttoned collar or unbelted overcoat, made a salutation by waving his pole above them, along with the scaly, titanium white symbol of forbearance and tolerance and said, “A hearty welcome to you both; your arrival has brought good luck.”

  Laughing at this semiformal and, with the sea bream gasping for life on the line, well-nigh tragic greeting, they took seats before İsmail Aǧa’s coffeehouse. Opposite them, two ladies waited for the ferry; behind them, a few aged gentlemen savored the evening in silence.

  Something smiled through the surrounding objects quite separate from their radiance, their edges, their volume, and their attributes: a force superseding all of that. It was in effect the memory of previously lived time. The fullness of its warmth rose from the depths like nostalgia. Mümtaz paraphrased Yahya Kemal’s then popular couplet: “Behind us, the old men of Kanlıca are preparing for autumn ...”

  Nuran slowly recited the couplet verbatim:The days foreshortened, agèd men in Kanlıca One by one conjure memories of past autumns

  And she added, “I’m in awe over the way one poet could vanquish a city through verse this way. Every time I hear this couplet, Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais comes to mind ...”

  Mümtaz rounded out her thought: “The couplet captures something grand, an essence that will never change.” This autumnal hour could only be described in such a manner. All indications were that summer had ended. This thought alone filled them with a feeling of foreboding within which they took in their surroundings.

  Summer’s end saddened them. A few days beforehand, Nuran had pointed out an early flock of swallows passing south overhead. And this morning, he’d arrived at the yalı with three crisp oak leaves collected en route. Worms of death had gnawed the leaves along their edges and had slowly traced a path toward their centers within the cerise of an evening. The once pliant leaves had assumed a hardened, calcified form, as if plucked from nighttime itself.

  The song of a solitary bird sounded two or three times in stark yearning, the way a flute solo might bestir among violins and violas in an orchestra. They contemplated the likely tragedy that had caused this affect, yearning doubtless linked in some unspecified measure to the accident that fed it and gave it poignancy. At present in sprawling woods, trees sensed their sap gradually recede and longed to link their branches and huddle together for warmth while their desiccated leaves fell from the slightest tremor. The panorama was as variegated as springtime. The mastic trees of autumn had turned red like the Judas trees of spring, though more sorrowfully.

  “Early one morning let’s go to the Emirgân woods. It’s exquisite the way the trees virtually shiver as they wake.”

  A cloud set into motion by a small wind kicking up out of nowhere first became a rose garden then, breaking into thin wisps, progressed until it was overhead, spreading out like a carpet before the forelegs of a fiery-maned black stallion.

  Rising, they sauntered away. The shadowy road between the hills and yalı walls, under the twilight, resembled the tunnel of an ancient temple. Within this tunnel, from among the canopy of branches, they observed the nocturne that ambled together with them.

  At this hour, when everything struggled under its own weight, they walked until Anadoluhisarı, holding hands and harboring intense intimations of fate. There they entered the small coffeehouse to the right of the pier. Night had completed its thorough descent. The dock was crowded with rowboats returning from bluefish runs. They watched their customary evening’s entertainment as if it were a rather exotic ritual. And if at that moment someone had asked whether they trusted life, both would have responded, “Nah, but we’re happy this is the way of the world!”

  “Nah, but what difference does it make? We’re happy now.”

  On the way back they mostly talked about the small apartment they’d just rented in Talimhane, near Taksim. Nuran’s mother had declared that she’d be unable to remain in Kandilli this coming year. And Tevfik’s rheumatism had flared up. Maybe the bluefish outings hadn’t done the old man any good. For this reason, they were to move to Istanbul proper. Mümtaz said, “Not for the world would I ever live here alone!” Even if they’d stayed in Kandilli, the wintry silence and serenity permitted no possibility of their comfortably rendezvousing as in summertime.

  The apartment satisfied them. Thanks to Nuran’s frugality, it didn’t end up costing much. When furnishing the place, Mümtaz gauged the degree to which foreign furniture had entered Istanbul at one time. Every sofa shop displayed furniture of every sort and style. As Mümtaz roamed with Nuran, he thought about Istanbul’s changing standards of taste and lifestyle.

  “There’s no doubt that our minds are this way also.”

  Later they discussed Fatma’s condition. All of Nuran’s sorrows focused on this one point.

  For days now Mümtaz had been anticipating an evening dinner invitation at Nuran’s house in Tevfik’s good company. Before she moved out of Kandilli, Mümtaz assumed she wanted to expose him once again to her everyday life in the house she’d occupied before they’d met, if for no other reason than Mümtaz, a man of daydreams, knew how to live in various dimensions at once and liked doing so. Thus, while they took supper in the garden, amid a conversation with Tevfik, or responding to Nuran’s mother, he might readily contemplate Nuran’s childhood dreams or the visions in little Nuran’s sleep inspired by the rattling windows and rustling leaves over lengthy autumn nights. But Fatma’s petulance made these phantasies irrelevant.

  From the moment he arrived, the girl began her defiance, although she did nothing specific in opposition to Mümtaz. But she disappeared often, sending everyone into a frenzy of worry. She was unruly and always found an excuse to interrupt Nuran’s conversations with Mümtaz. She nevertheless addressed Mümtaz in a hospitable manner, describing her new school and her friends there.

  “I’m a big girl now. I’m tired of dolls. I want a pet like a cat or a dog to play with.”

  When Mümtaz said that he’d make a present of a puppy if she so desired, she abruptly furrowed her brow. How could she possibly play with a puppy he’d given her? It’d be like allowing the friend of one’s enemy into the house. “No, I don’t want that ...,” she said. When others within earshot insisted, “Is that any way to talk, dear? Why don’t you say thank you?” she was taken aback. Being reprimanded before Mümtaz was more than she could bear. Lips trembling, she said, “Thank you ...,” and disappeared again.

  Had Mümtaz been permitted to leave at this juncture, perhaps his life would have taken a different shape. But fate dictated that he stay. Besides, he wasn’t a man who’d been born with an instinct for self-preservation. Any misadventure in life might find him like a deer startled in the middle of the road. That’s just what happened. He couldn’t bring himself to part from either Nuran or Tevfik. He’d been invited to dinner and he would stay.

  Toward eight o’clock, they sat at a table of hors d’oeuvres accompanied by rakı. Old Tevfik had spared none of his skill in the orchestration. Even Yaşar, when he set eyes on the table, dispensed with all his health concerns and decided to indulge in a rakı or two. The evening began pleasantly enough. Despite the persistent rains, it was warm outside
. Something about this evening of delights affected Mümtaz as he sat in the garden under a pomegranate tree and a solitary lantern, letting the gloam of the autumn night descend around him. Everyone was jubilant. Even Nuran seemed to have escaped the troubles that had plagued her as of late.

  Fatma’s arrival at the table, however, changed the atmosphere: “Let me sit with you, please, don’t make me eat by myself ...” Within a short time, she couldn’t tolerate the way Mümtaz and Nuran sat facing one another. These were reactions they’d long been accustomed to; the coffeehouse storyteller’s yarn that Tevfik spun persisted through her moody interruptions. On the third round of drinks, Fatma left to get something she’d misplaced but didn’t return. She’d gone and invented a game for herself at the mouth of the well: a combination of dancing and running. Raising her hands ever higher toward the newly risen moon, as if to catch a ball she herself had tossed, her face revealed bizarre elation as she grinned, exposing her teeth. They watched her from where they sat. Her laughter increased and her movements quickened. At each turn, she slapped her hands back down to her sides before raising them again, stretching her entire body toward the golden ball of the moon.

  Mümtaz, astounded by the rhythm in this child’s maneuvers, said, “Just let me take you under my wing, and I’ll be sure you get the proper instruction!”

  He cherished her with odd insistence as Nuran’s daughter and because he somewhat sympathized with her suffering. Besides simply liking children, Mümtaz recognized traits in Fatma reminiscent of his own childhood. Her sorrows and jealousies evoked the solitude of his own youth, despite its different manifestations. If he were to one day grow jealous of Nuran, he knew with certainty that he might resemble Fatma – moody, sullen, and overly melodramatic. Anyway, it was impossible to watch her in the short blue dress, her spindly legs turning at the rate of her own glee, as if preparing for a voyage to un-attainable spheres, without adoration and fondness. Despite this, a troubling unease had begun. Her laughter and jerky movements rather resembled a bout of hysteria, and as they intensified, the balanced maneuvers appeared to be forestalled moments of collapse. Her grandmother, Nuran, and the rest certainly noticed, for they began to shout, “Enough, Fatma, you’ll fall ...” But as they shouted, the girl increased her velocity. Mümtaz, to prevent the disaster that he foresaw, darted from his seat. But he was too late. Fatma lay stretched out fully at the base of the well. As Mümtaz raised her up, Yaşar came to his side. No indication of injury on the girl’s body was apparent, though her knees were scraped slightly. The hysteric laughter had condensed into an tight knot of sobs, her body stiff as a board.