A Mind at Peace

by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

  “Go on!”

  “No, I’ve forgotten what I was going to say. Only you’re right on one point. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Each injustice condoned gives rise to greater injustice.”

  “There’s another point: avoiding injustice while fighting injustice . . . This war, if it comes to pass, will be a bloodbath. But the torments suffered will all be in vain if we don’t change our methods . . .”

  I shouldn’t be seeking peace through Nuran, but through myself. And this will only happen through sacrifice. He stood.

  “I’m worried about İhsan,” he said. “Please excuse me. And purge yourselves of these thoughts. Who knows, maybe there won’t be any war! Maybe we won’t get involved. We’re a country that’s lost so much blood, we’ve learned many lessons. The circumstances might just permit our neutrality.”

  As Mümtaz took leave of his friends, he realized that they hadn’t discussed the stages of such a war, were it to happen. Inwardly, this pleased him.

  Will it actually come to pass? The voice accompanying him said, “Don’t worry about it,” then added, “Well-spoken, you’ve put yourself at ease! That’s all you need to do, nothing more!” He ran and hopped onto a streetcar, perhaps to escape Suad’s derisive voice.

  III

  İhsan lay as sick as ever, his gaunt face ruddy from fever. Occasionally he tried to wet his cracked and drawn lips with his tongue. This was no longer the former İhsan; perhaps he verged on becoming a memory. Seeing him in this state meant encountering him halfway on that foreordained path. This was precursor to becoming a remnant, existing only through Mümtaz and other acquaintances. Should his persona grow a little more exhausted, a little more attenuated, it’ll pass into us, persisting only in our memories.

  He gazed at İhsan’s hands. His distended veins looked as if they had been roasted. But they were alive. Alive as if they’d been conquered by another dimension of existence and were now living in another climate. A climate of 104 degrees. But that wasn’t all. The temperature alone didn’t create this environment. An array of small organisms, microbes, known as bacilli, observed through special instruments, isolated in tiny vials and in thin test tubes, introduced into a variety of laboratory animals, and thereby regenerated; for whose preservation and proliferation special methods were implemented, for whom hot and cold extremes were established, concerning whom a variety of tests were undertaken for their extraction from hosts, who were dyed in the most inconceivable ways, and preserved in fluids ranging in color by shades from blood red to dull green; these microbes had certain codes, and these microorganisms, along with the programming they carried, transformed this temperature between 102 and 104 degrees into a clime between life and death quite separate from our own context, transforming it into an unimaginable altitude or a suffocating, noxious quagmire, into the thin air found at a height of thousands of feet or into something like the maw of a volcano active with the admixture of unknown gases.

  The afflicted man’s chest rose and fell like a poorly working bellows that couldn’t manage to find an adequate breath of salvation or preservation; he gulped air hungrily, and exhaled furtively and imperceptively like a tire leaking air; however quickly and noticeably he inhaled, his exhalation was indeterminable to the same degree.

  One could hardly recognize this wheezing anatomy as a human torso – reduced to its most basic functions, rising and falling in its own inadequacy. The half-shaded light on the bedstead illuminated this mass of misery in greater clarity. Uncanny was the light of the room of the afflicted: It pointed out everything through idiosyncrasy, delineating certain objects in the foreground and others in the background. It was a light that declared, “I am awaiting a state of distinction, a zone between 102 and 104 degrees, a final threshold. That is all that I illuminate, nothing more.” But this enunciation, according to Mümtaz, existed to some degree in all the assembled objects: the bed had swollen along with the patient and had taken on his suffering. The drapes, the wardrobe mirror, the silence of the room, the tick of the clock whose pace gradually increased, and all else demonstrated what a bizarre, mean, rough-going passage the interstice between 102 and 104 constituted – leading from the manifest to arcana, from a numeric quantity to zilch, and from cognizance to absolute inertia.

  Here reigned a sultanate. Over a period of nine days, this sultanate had been established in the corpus of the man lying here, whose hands twitched as they’d never before done in the normal atmosphere of 98.6 degrees, who sought oxygen to cool his lungs at the altitude of his ascent only by incessantly working his chest, his drawn lips waiting before countryside fountain spouts through which water hadn’t gushed for years, lips chapped like the earth longing for one burst of water and serenity, with eyes that regurgitated light, with a face that receded from within, a man of affliction whose very being declared, “I’m no longer what I once was!” In the course of nine days, he’d been removed from his old self, from resembling others, and had been relegated to the margins of existence, where only if one paid close attention could one discern his astonishing slow and steady metamorphosis.

  What remained in this room of the man he used to know? Besides the suffering of his material being, practically nothing. Not even the light in his eyes was a sign of a life recognizably human. Any material object catching any reflection would elicit this much luminance, Mümtaz decided. But no, the eyes of ailing İhsan shone differently. It was as if İhsan could still read Mümtaz’s thoughts from the limits of extremity he occupied. Why do I always succumb to pessimism like this? Why am I this cowardly? he thought, and leaned toward İhsan to speak. But the man of affliction closed his eyes when Mümtaz took up his hands; he didn’t want to speak. Silence of the ephemeral. Silence the likes of which he hadn’t experienced before.

  One couldn’t call this silence, either, because the table clock churned as if all had been relinquished to its command.

  With gradually increasing momentum, the clock marked another time, one between zaman that could be considered external to humanity and the intrinsic zaman of human existence; the time of a being that had traversed half the road, of a terrible metamorphosis that would conclude shortly in a single lunge. The clock represented, if not the exact hour of this abstraction, an impending metamorphosis – a shedding of human skin, the approach of death.

  This was a time that had internalized the metamorphosis of a larva into a chrysalis and of a chrysalis into a butterfly, a time that had established such rhythm that it was regulated internally. This was that strain of time. What difference was there between the one who lay here tonight and the creatures that changed character and form this way?

  İhsan opened his eyes; he wet his lips as much as his strength allowed. Mümtaz gave him water with a teaspoon, then leaned downward, happy that he’d been delivered from this nightmare, and asked, “How are you, Ağabey?”

  With his hand İhsan made a gesture that might mean anything. Then, as if reluctant to make any determination about his state, he rolled his tongue in his mouth with difficulty to inquire, “How are you?” He stopped. He attempted to pull himself up but failed. His chest constricted. His hands hastened their tremors. His face reddened as if he were choking.

  “Let’s call a doctor, Mümtaz. I’m afraid.”

  Mümtaz knew that tonight was a fateful night. But he hadn’t guessed that the crisis would be so severe. He gazed at İhsan’s worsening condition in genuine surprise. Frightening possibilities collided in his mind. What if something should happen while I’m gone?

  Stunned, he imagined how he might act with the physician. That dourfaced neighborhood doctor, whom he disliked, passed before his eyes. All the others, the ones that he knew, were off on vacation. Could they be blamed? Would he himself have been here in the midst of the sweltering season had it not been for this illness? Before his eyes, the diamond-spire road from Vaniköy to Kandilli came to life through the lights of fishing boats, the shimmering of stars, through the sounds of birds and bugs, just like those visions t
hat were pure sparkle and a palette of colors reflected on the panes of grand yalı windows with shades drawn at night; Mümtaz – in the event of a turn for the worse – could see himself plodding along this well-lit Bosphorus road with a doctor who would be of no use.

  He understood that his imagination, despite such terrible possibilities, still existed in another dimension and that a majority of it was only occupied with Nuran. He stood, ashamed of himself and his selfishness. Macide knew how to administer injections. But how could he entrust her with such a difficult task? He looked at İhsan writhing in a fit of breathlessness. Macide brushed aside Mümtaz’s hesitation.

  Standing, she said, “I’ll give the injection.” This was a Macide with whom he wasn’t familiar, a ghastly pale woman who dispelled every objection with intense eyes, who’d decided to rescue her husband, and by making this decision, vanquished all doubts in her mind. Mümtaz bared İhsan’s arm, and Macide, to avoid losing time, simply swabbed the tip of the needle with alcohol before attaching it to the syringe and holding it to the half-light . . . After, as if she couldn’t believe her own eyes, she indicated the ministered arm to Mümtaz.

  Mümtaz saw a thin trail of blood on the broad athletic form of İhsan’s arm tracing a path over his still suntanned skin. With a stunned expression, İhsan’s mother stared in horror at what had occurred. She had no stomach for medical interventions. But İhsan had responded to the shot, and had relaxed.

  “Please, Mümtaz, call a doctor.”

  Had Nuran or his aunt said this? Nuran was far away. She had no inkling of the fear and apprehension that reigned in this house. She’d be heading to İzmir tomorrow. Maybe she was now busy preparing her bags. Or perhaps she was at home conversing with Fâhir, making plans for the future.

  He stood within the bizarre and disorienting understanding of one who has slipped out of a dream. The threadlike trail of blood had disconcerted him. But what was blood after all? Something we all carried in our bodies by the pint.

  “Do you think it’s an absolute necessity?”

  Macide concurred with her mother-in-law.

  “To be safe,” she said. Mümtaz walked toward the door to get the physician.

  Calling for a doctor was de rigueur. Whether the patient was improving or not, the doctor must be summoned. Neither life nor its doppelgänger death could take place without a doctor. Death, in particular . . . In today’s world it was all but shameful to die without the presence of a doctor. This only happened on battlefields, when people died en masse by the thousands and tens of thousands. For death was quite costly. But at times its price would drop and it’d become available to one and all.

  In that case, without the need for a physician, pharmacy, medicines, or compassion, people died huddled together, embracing, entwined, and sharing their greatest intimacies with one another. But dying an idiosyncratic death at home in one’s bed had a set protocol: a Koran chanter and recitations, a priest, a doctor, a pharmacist’s mortar and pestle, shed tears, blessed water, the peal of bells . . . Only through these acts and signs could death come to fruition. These were accoutrements that the human intellect had appended to the order of nature. This is how things transpired among humans. In fact, nature was ignorant. It knew nothing of the existence of these addenda. Death in nature was entirely different: Sensing the scattering turbine of cosmic time spinning within one’s body and soul, losing incrementally first one’s memories, then memory itself, then one’s sense and sensation, scattering into countless elementary particles that skitter away from each other into the eternal void in proportion to the speed of this whirling blade; this, then, is death in nature.

  Through Macide’s unblinking courage, this turbine spinning within İhsan had stopped, just like the momentary pause of the ceiling fan above the wardrobe when switched to reverse – a veritable winged creature on the verge of taking flight – it had stopped in an act of no small significance.

  Mümtaz again gazed at İhsan’s face, and making an ambiguous sign, left the room. He moved slowly, as if wading through water, amid thoughts that he himself didn’t quite understand.

  Numerous diaphanous membranes separated him from material objects. Or maybe the realm in which he moved, thought, and spoke was not the same realm in which he physically lived . . . as if he engaged his surroundings through a persona that was purely observational. He perceived, registered, and contemplated his environment. But this perception, cognition, and even communication transpired through an identity that had lost its mass and had all but atomized.

  He turned on the light in the foyer and, as always, stared into the mirror. Mümtaz never passed up the opportunity to look into any mirror. For him, mirrors were symbols of human fate or the potential of the intellect before the unknown.

  He gazed into the mirror; the light settled into the flat, crystalline glass with a slight tremor, taking in the entire foyer. Mirrors were strange; they set to work instantly. Mümtaz had the appearance of somebody who’d just woken up. At the other end of the foyer rested four pair of shoes belonging to İhsan. On the wall hung a thick-handled umbrella. Would he be able to use these items again? Why not? Stopping the momentum of the scattering turbine was sufficient to live. Then one could pass from cosmic time to the plane of people and life. This was a restorative place where all wounds were healed, all flaws smoothed out, where the hours of the clock were friends to mankind.

  Four pairs, two of which he’d just purchased at the start of summer. A black and a yellow pair of the variety that could be worn in winter. When Mümtaz teased, “Aǧabey, you’ve bought winter shoes in summer!” İhsan replied with the seriousness he displayed at such times, “I’m a prudent man.” A prudent man! Had he been prudent, would he have come down with pneumonia?

  Mümtaz stared at the shoes. In this world, how little we’re able to appropriate the objects around us. These shoes, this umbrella, the things in this house, the house itself, like everything else, belonged to İhsan. There were the things that were his and the things he shared with others. But tomorrow, Allah forbid, if something were to befall him . . .

  All of it would be released from his possession. If only somebody who remembered, or a mnemonic source, would appear. Genuine preservation only occurred with others and through others. The human intellect, the human heart, the human soul, the human memory . . . When the human component withdraws, nothing remains at the center. The center cannot hold. Granted, certain animals, too, never forget their owners or where they live ... But this was a trait that had passed from humans to animals. He switched off the light. The four pairs of shoes, the umbrella, the items purchased that evening and left on the little table, the stove-like brazier, everything disappeared. The glass of the mirror became the realm of certain borderless, even formless, shadows beneath the indeterminate light filtering in through the window. How quickly everything had vanished. With the comportment of a scientist performing an experiment, he switched on the light. Again, on the flat mirror surface that reflected part of the foyer more brightly, as well as in the entryway itself, objects came alive in sharp clarity, through shapes and sizes gathered one atop the other and within silent, relative positioning – vivid, harmonious, cognizant of their substantiation, and overjoyed to exist together, to complete an arbitrary totality. These things exist without me as well! The presence of light is sufficient. Light, that is, any medium of stimulus, and under its command, cooperating with it, consciousness or memory . . . In that case, I am indeed necessary! Me or anyone else . . . even the last man, if you like.

  He closed the door with the same care with which he’d descended the stairs. The street, despite the desolate night, gradually filled with some luminance and evening sounds. Certain details were enough to evoke the summer nocturne: the peep of a few frogs, the buzzing of insects, and, in the distance at the head of the street, the gushing spout of an old fountain, which appeared like a scale laid aground, situated between the alley and the larger road onto which it opened.

  Onto the spott
ed and green nocturnal backdrop, which resembled a frog’s back, rumblings of empty streetcars and indeterminate sounds leaped like flames before sputtering out. This was the hour when poets claimed that everything slept. A kitten sheltered in a neighbor’s doorway suddenly – startled like a wild animal – arched its back at Mümtaz, puffing up as if to pounce. Mümtaz glared at the feline – they usually unsettled him – threatening to teach it a good lesson. It seemed there was a correlation between this kitten’s fear and the way everything he’d observed for days in his life, in the omnium gatherum of his thoughts, and in his mind’s eye, assumed the form of a tormenting idea. For months now I’ve been in turmoil . . . Had I remained by myself, everything would have returned to normal. At least we wouldn’t have separated on bad terms . . . Trying to the best of his ability not to think, he quickly turned onto the boulevard of streetcars. He walked, searching up and down both sides of the street for an empty taxicab. The physician’s house wasn’t far; it was within walking distance. Hopefully he’d be at home, open the door, and return to the house with Mümtaz.

  But the doctor wasn’t home. The man who’d said, “I’m at your command always, it’s my duty!” had vanished by eight P.M. . Not just him, the entire household . . . Mümtaz rang the bell at length and pounded the door. But not a peep could be heard. Has the entire household entered into the slumber of death? Finally the door cracked open, and a servant in unkempt clothes stated that the doctor and missus had decided to make an overnight visit at a late hour.

  “Who goes on an overnight visit after eight?”

  “If one has the means, one goes after eight as well – ” The servant, afraid sleep would escape her should she speak for another second, shut the door without finishing.

  With no other recourse, he went to Beyazıt and called on the state physician. From the moment he’d left the house, his anxieties had multiplied. With each passing moment he grew more afraid that catastrophe would strike should he be delayed any longer. No one was on the street. Only far in the distance, at a bend where, from his perspective, the street appeared to end, a group of trolley laborers gathered over a node of heliotrope light, which appeared more poignant in the night, repairing streetcar rails within a chiaroscuro play of light and shadow that recalled Rembrandt’s canvases.