A Mind at Peace

by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

  Afife’s voice: Macide, you can’t imagine what I’ve suffered. Just think about it ... for nine years ... Suad’s voice: My entire life has passed at a remove from you so that I could establish some stability. But I haven’t succeeded. You’ll come see me, won’t you? I’m in such need of refuge ... Afife’s voice: A month will go by and he hasn’t once looked at the children’s faces. Let him just get well, I wish for nothing else!

  This was disturbing. He could observe Suad’s life from two opposing perspectives, one represented by Nuran and the other by Afife. This doubled perspective should have removed Suad from the equation entirely and dispelled him. Yet Suad continued to be. Feverishly, he ogled the bodies of the nurses sashaying in and out of his room, and when he improved a little, he smiled at the youthful ones to spark their friendship, tried to caress their arms and cheeks, addressed them in a haughty tone meant to reveal his masculine pride, asked about their work, teased them with meaningful innuendos, and listened to their responses with a cocked eyebrow. When his health improved somewhat, he’d receive an earful from these nurses, and maybe in a quiet moment a slap. But this was on the sly, for when he met with doctors, he’d most certainly request that they address him as “sir,” and he’d hold forth in a sonorous voice on politics, human rights, and public affairs.

  For nine years . . . With a desire honed by nine years of disease, Suad had struck here and there contemplating young and voluptuous bodies; he’d sought mature women or he’d weighed and considered the possibilities of trysts like an engineer making complicated assessments about a tunnel or railway system, concluding, “There’s nothing to be had with this one, but the other one there is just right!” or, “This one demands patience; as for that one, friendship is an absolute precondition”; he’d come up with schemes to dance with them or get them alone in a room or apartment.

  Suad did exist. Yes, he existed in his hospital room, in Mümtaz’s thoughts, in his wife’s swollen eyes, in his children’s thin necks, in the women’s lives he entered like a hand under cover of darkness, feculent filth dripping from grimy, tacky fingers, padding through and besmearing a closet of pristine laundry; women, each of whom he stained with a fondle, yes, in all things he existed. And to add insult to injury, this Suad was a man of Mümtaz’s acquaintance.

  Beneath hard rain, he strode aimlessly. Once in a while clouds separated and everything on the street shone brightly down to the terra-cotta shingles; the fleeting presence of shimmering droplets on the electrical wires and the leaves of the municipality’s freshly planted saplings, tops cropped à la garçon, conjured a vision of pearls; everything and everyone was bathed in childlike jubilation. Then the downpour began anew, children with jackets pulled over their heads scattered, older pedestrians took shelter in this or that nook, and the street, the houses, everything vanished. A blackish, murky shroud resembling ashen muck encompassed everything; the material world became the prisoner of rain. It pelted everything with a great clangor, emitting loud sounds from the tops of streetcars, the wood boards of police booths, rooftops, and shingles as if they were grand organs or harpsichords; at whiles lightning flashed, and this thick, pasty muck abruptly, but in a disconcerting way, lit up temporarily before the redoubled descent of webs of fine thread.

  Mümtaz walked, head exposed. He’d never before felt such anguish. Everything revolted him. All of it was absurd. Everywhere he saw Suad’s filthy hand and Yaşar’s gray hair, framing his fresh “guard of the harem” expression. This is how it’s going to be then. One could transform in twenty-four hours’ time to become the sworn enemy of two people, two wretches. Two souls, say a despised tenant and an unwanted guest, could just move into one’s life from where they might spew poison through their presences alone, by simply respiring under the sun, by looming and using words approximating one’s own while describing their feelings and thoughts.

  A taxi stopped short. With the affection of a kiln-fired roughneck, the driver said, “Let’s ferry you along, young man ...” Mümtaz looked around. Unawares, he’d come all the way to the mosque of Sultan Selim ... a little beyond it. For a moment he wanted to disappear into the cool serenity of this old cathedral mosque. Beneath the downpour, however, everything was so miserable and sorrows of such intensity writhed within him that no matter where he went he’d be endlessly distraught.

  Before the car door, which the driver had pushed opened, Mümtaz asked under his breath, “Fine, but where to?”

  With the same cadence, the driver said, “Wherever you’d like to go, sir ...”

  “In that case, to the Galata Bridge.” His head spun; he felt nauseous. He hadn’t eaten anything. He wanted to go home immediately. But in this rain, what would he do at home? Nuran was gone today; had she come even, she’d have left by now. He imagined his writing table, lamp, and his books. He gave his seventy-eights some consideration. All of it bored and taxed him. Often, life could be endured by clinging to something. At this moment Mümtaz couldn’t locate such a miraculous locus of attachment anywhere.

  His thoughts resembled a disk whose diameter gradually decreased each instant, heading toward zero, toward nothingness. In this dizzying vertigo, everything shriveled and shrank, changing color and character until it became a strange accretion like the disgusting stuff of Suad’s miserable and contaminating presence; the muck absorbed everything of note along his route, spinning and turning it in a tacky mass, and taking it all to nil.

  It was a disgusting jumble ... and he didn’t want to enter his house with it. As a matter of course, this meaningless distress would end in a short while. Or else it would deplete everything like the emptying of a mill sluice.

  He loitered on the bridge. No, it was futile. He wasn’t able to return home. He felt intolerable agony imagining his garden, the melancholy of flowers and branches beneath rains that beat, briskly whipped, then bore down with great gusts upon the large chestnut in back and the clusters of trees in the distance.

  “I’m afraid of loneliness,” he said. “I’m afraid of loneliness.” Actually, it wasn’t just loneliness, he was afraid of entering into the circle of Suad’s existence and instabilities. He turned and sought out the taxi. The cabbie hadn’t yet gone.

  “Take me to Beyoǧlu,” he said.

  As they passed Şişhane, clouds parted momentarily. Above the Süleymaniye Mosque, sunshine gushed as if from a sluice through a massive, single-hued, nearly translucent cumulus cloud, the likes of which appeared in old miniature paintings. The entire city had become the opulent and ornate decor for a fairy tale of sorts, or a Scheherazade fable. He exited the taxi at Galatasaray. Under the pure, make-believe golden light, he at first wanted to walk up toward Taksim Square. But in the dread of running into an acquaintance, he turned back. He walked toward Tepebaşı. There he entered a small bistro. The rain had quickened again. Through the dirty window, he stared at the rain pelting the façades of the apartments opposite, pondering the immense radiance he’d just witnessed.

  In the empty establishment, the garçon, bored from lack of business, repeatedly cued the gramophone with dance tunes. Mümtaz ordered beer and some food. The cold drink brought his wits about him; he looked around the sleepy setting. Despite appearing ordered from the outside, the tables and chairs whose paint and patina had flaked, and the multihued bottles of alcohol crowding the old shelves slumbered head-to-shoulder. Such a strange somnolence reigned, disturbing the ongoing downpour of rain and tango; it overtook them like waves of indifference rising in the wake of longing for the faraway and the unattainable. Nonetheless, he wasn’t the only soul in the place. Upstairs, in a pantry-like alcove, a couple conversed, backs to the door. Amid the patter of rain and music rose a female voice from an indeterminate station of life, confirming its place at a fringe; a voice whose person was face-to-face with fate, perhaps satisfied, perhaps desperate; intermittently, the growl of a deep masculine voice responded in turn. They were any of hundreds of couples one encountered. But Mümtaz’s distraught nerves reacted at once to thes
e sob-like chortles. His emotions anticipated something significant. The vertigo that had turned his surroundings into disgusting muck on the verge of overtaking all Creation had slowed along with everything spinning dizzyingly toward zero about the axis of Suad’s face or name.

  The voices intensified:

  “It isn’t possible, dontcha know? I can’t, I’m afraid, I can’t bring myself to ...”

  “Don’t be insane, we’ll be ruined, Hacer, my sweet, we’ll be ruined.”

  “I can’t do it ... I can’t take my own child. Won’t you divorce her?”

  The snarling gramophone soon came alive. A downpour pelted the windows of the apartments opposite with a longing for the Andes and the Panama Canal, through the yearning of Singapore shipmen and Shanghai fishermen, the longing for things and people removed and estranged from the here-and-now, for whomever and however many things lay beyond thresholds of death, far away and alienated. Yet Mümtaz, now indifferent to the longing, couldn’t be drawn back by any invitation.

  The man’s voice strained like the wail of a violin whose strings verged on breaking: “Just think for a second, I’d have no other option but suicide ... If you want to see my demise, that’s different.”

  She paused a while; then her already relenting volition made one final feeble and half-hearted stand: “Supposing something should happen to me, or I should die?”

  “You know as well as I do that nothing of the sort will happen.”

  “What if word gets out ... and it becomes legal?”

  “Did anyone hear of the time in Konya? We know the doctor ... go tomorrow, it should be handled tomorrow, you understand. I’m fed-up enough already.”

  A screeching chair ... and perhaps the perverse affection of the sound of a kiss falling to the ground, then a hysterical sob. With visions of Havana, nothing remained but the ship of hard rain uprooting everything in its path as it churned toward shores of mystery ...

  “Haydi! C’mon, let’s go. I’ll miss the island ferry.”

  Mümtaz withdrew farther into a corner; and from there observed Afife’s husband, the man who’d concealed his love for Nuran for a decade like a beacon of salvation, his back hunched, the skin of his face drawn over its bones as he descended the stairs followed by a thin woman – poorly combed brunette hair jutting out from a mauve hat – trembling visibly under a thin calico dress as she contemplated the misbegotten plans of her life. As the man settled the bill, he thrust his hand into a pocket. He removed and lit a cigarette. “I thought you’d quit,” she said.

  He answered as he wiped his forehead with the backside of the pack, “You never know ...” With him leading, they exited and vanished into the downpour.

  Mümtaz stared from where he sat, the cheapest variety of eau de toilette cloying his nostrils. The windows opposite had begun a new dance beneath hard rain; they spun, centripetal force drawing everything toward them as they jeered at the scene through reflections of death.

  The estimations that he’d been making were correct: it was Suad, Suad who’d been in love with Nuran since before the beginning of time!

  Out of fear of making eye contact, Mümtaz only fleetingly looked into Suad’s face. Fate cast this instant as a revelation. The moment Mümtaz glanced, Suad cackled slyly, wringing his hands as if to say, “We’ve dispensed with that noise, haven’t we now?” His laughter preoccupied Mümtaz for days. To fathom it fully, he’d have to search beyond human will and even conscientious life. This laughter was the suppressed chortle of a beast. No matter how much Suad praised and admired himself, boasting of graceunder-pressure by declaring, “An intelligent man knows how to get out of a tight spot!” his cackle and its bestial gratification belied an instinct less cunning than the fabled fox who purported to be wily though its pelt was to hang in the furrier shop, and this instinct seemed superior and successful because it only addressed what appealed to it directly, as a ready-made solution. No, this instinct was neither a dark temptation around which supernatural mysteries congregated nor a rarefied and rapacious appetite that caught its prey, regardless of the level of the heavens, to tear feather from feather and bone from bone. In Suad, there existed not a single fable or a single wingèd ascension toward decency, the sublime, or loftiness. The way she had resigned herself to defeat demonstrated that she was a bird of the same feather. They’d grappled and she’d lost. Tomorrow they’d separate, each on a distinct path, she in pursuit of dreams of marriage, Suad longing to forget through other conquests the vagrancy he imagined in his soul; in short, they’d entertain various encounters and possibilities before one day meeting again, and amid bygone dreams and dread, they’d reunite, frolic one atop the other, perhaps pay a visit to the doctor again, and by and by another embryo in the nighttime of formation, eyes yet sealed, would be tossed to the city’s sewers without having seen the rays of the sun ... and so on and so forth, till the end, till the woebegotten fruits of the tree of death rotted fully and fell away, they’d live out their fate.

  He stood, paid his bill, and stepped out into the street. He walked slowly. His previous vertigo and nausea had ceased; now, another strain of agony rose within him. He thought about the fetus. Tomorrow the fetus would be plucked from its mother’s womb with a fine set of forceps. It, too, had been appended to Mümtaz’s life through its brief misadventure. Tomorrow it would perish. Tomorrow evening a quivering, bloody clot of being, an anomaly resembling a skinned frog, would float in a cesspool of the city.

  Tomorrow the central operator on Heybeliada would hear a bell. A voice from Istanbul would exclaim, “Sanatorium!” and the operator would plug the cable into the appropriate slot. A conversation would transpire; Suad would be roused from his bed: “Hello, hello, is it you, sir?” He’d ask, “Is everything in order?” and until he received an answer, his brows would furrow, and briefly with his entire being he’d swing between two extremities, before the lines on his face softened, and the perspiration on his forehead dried. “Thank you, good brother, thank you so much. Send her my best regards, I’ll go and see her myself later.”

  It was the last venture of an unborn fetus as would be experienced by other people tomorrow. Later a taxi would be summoned, and a sallowfaced, afflicted woman would return to the home of a relative or a friend as elsewhere the doctor’s attendants sterilized the instruments and washed the basins under copious amounts of water.

  He wiped his brow. He walked from Galatasaray up to Taksim Square along İstiklâl Boulevard neither gazing at the shops nor the throngs inundating him from either side.

  A tiny fetus, an unborn child. This, too, had been appended to Mümtaz’s life. Over a period of forty-eight hours, his life had grown and expanded. What else and who else would yet enter into it, all due to the fact that he loved a woman who loved him in return? A day in the life. Living meant being besieged by others and slowly suffocating. To exist ...

  But the tiny fetus, the children conceived by Suad and that woeful subservient woman wouldn’t live. Tomorrow evening it would perish.

  An urchin begged for alms, his feet, face, eyes, and hands covered in mud to such an extent that his voice seemed to come from a swamp.

  “For the sake of Allah ...”

  Mümtaz verged on asking: “But how quickly you’ve emerged from the cesspool into which you’d been tossed? How have you managed to grow like this?”

  “For the sake of Allah ...”

  His hand went to a pocket. When the mass of dirt and mud before him saw this, it became a bit more animated; its twitching hand closed over the money, and without saying thanks, it went on to approach the man behind Mümtaz.

  “Allah rızası için,” he pleaded again.

  He would die. For the sake of Allah. He would die, tomorrow evening. The perplexing vertigo had begun again. Everything was spinning around him. It spun like a hoop spinning at the speed of light, and as it spun, everything blurred and lost color and shape.

  “Allah rızası için ...”

  A child was to die. Tomorrow she�
��d have to call him. She’d have to say, “It’s all taken care of, it’s over!” This was living. All of it was part and parcel of life. All of it constituted existence: the sea bass marinating in mayonnaise displayed in the window of this restaurant, its membranelike skin before him, the saltfish whose rather frigid eyes lit up like a varnished yellow tin canister – whose extinguished eyes glared with the sheen of unpolished zinc – and the white-frocked waiter stepping on Mümtaz’s toes.

  They surrounded him as if they’d long awaited the moment of Suad’s entrance into his life, and they gradually constricted him in that bizarre vertigo, closer and more firmly, without giving him the chance to move a muscle.

  “What should I do? Allah, how to escape?” A small beam of sunlight shone suddenly. Like the soft angel hair of children, a treetop was illuminated by an iridescent light. Mümtaz stood stark still. He’d undergone an abrupt and astounding transformation. Neither the prior revulsion nor the constricting pressure remained. He looked around as if he’d awoken from a deep, extended sleep. With a feeling of satisfaction foreign to him and in a state of profound longing, he remembered Nuran. His eyes fixated on the radiance atop the tree, as if the wet light led to Nuran, emanating from lands where she resided; staring, he pined for her. Nuran was also part of his life, and as a result, the remainder, the confounding faces that filled the dark side of the medallion of life, had simply vanished.

  But he wasn’t at peace. The torment that had incapacitated him for two days hadn’t dissipated but had only transformed. A profound yearning for Nuran and the dread of having lost her forever rose within him. He felt her absence viscerally as if he hadn’t seen her in ages and he believed that he’d insulted her in unknown ways. He was convinced she despised him. Though he wanted to pursue her, the distances between them were impossibly vast, and it drove him crazy.