A Mind at Peace

by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

  He walked, watching this illumination within the nocturne, noting the darkness it disrupted, the glistening faces and clothes and the shadows that sank further into the night as he slowly approached the scene of figures. The light embellished each movement one after the next onto the night and, within a reigning shadow, gradually and confidently completed the forms. In this way, an everyday undertaking came to life boldly.

  When he reached them, one of the workers requested a cigarette. “We’re all out of ’em,” he said. Mümtaz left his half-smoked pack with them and continued.

  He forged through the summer’s night, the sounds of hammers, the susurrus of trees, and the rumbling passage of empty trolleys testing rails in the distance.

  Beneath the luminance of two electric lamps, the municipal complex at Beyazıt, within that peculiar and overwhelming starkness specific to this type of official building, slumbered, stealthily poised. And it woke quickly. First a policeman on duty emerged from nowhere, his collar undone, cap in hand; then a janitor appeared in a corridor along with the chair on which he slept. The chair and its partner awoke together: One shape approached Mümtaz, while the other skipped backward.

  The doctor wasn’t available. A short while beforehand he’d been summoned to a difficult birth. He’d telephoned to say he’d be delayed.

  Tonight a child had been born. Mümtaz’s mind registered this fact without attaching much importance to it, like a newspaper tidbit. Shocked by his failure to find what he sought, he gazed at the faces of the two men standing before him. The police officer mumbled, “Doctor . . . doctor . . .” Finally he meticulously described the route to the house of a military doctor a short way past Soǧanaǧa: “He’s an exceptionally good man; he’d help you even if he were in the most dire situation, but I can’t be sure if he’s at home.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “His children have gone to their summerhouse. But he stays here certain nights.”

  To let a little coolness and an echo of the sea into this stifling night, Mümtaz inquired, “Where do the children go?”

  “To Çengelköy, on the Asian shore . . . They have a villa there ...”

  To Çengelköy . . . How Mümtaz would have loved to find himself in Çengelköy or any spot on the Bosphorus removed from the anxieties of recent days. How he would have loved the feel of a rocky road beneath his feet, the treetops of Kuleli above his head, to find himself in the spot where those shadows conjured a realm unto themselves in the dark waters, and farther on; he’d chat with the factory guard, then he’d slowly walk from Vaniköy toward Kandilli, and at the crest of the hill, he’d sit on a boulder and watch the Bosphorus, and take in the scents of the enormous black rose of the night. And he’d think about Nuran and the following day’s tryst.

  Nuran’s name coursed through his body like a feverish shiver. But pleasures of reminiscence weren’t as innocent as they’d previously been. Intermingled with them was the anxious guilt of having neglected İhsan. Meanwhile, he’d made it here almost in a run. He realized he was covered in sweat. But he’d continue to run. This was something like one’s fate as determined by the stars. Those guilty by birth were fated to run this way throughout their lives, bearing torment. Mumbling, “And me, throughout my life . . . poor İhsan ...” Mümtaz turned into a narrow alley.

  IV

  A private, cleanly dressed Istanbul youth opened the door. When Mümtaz inquired after the doctor, the soldier gestured upstairs before vanishing. He came back down immediately, indicating that Mümtaz could go up.

  A sizable parlor: Two of its windows faced the Bosphorus. In a corner rested a broad divan with two chairs beside it piled with seventy-eights, and nearby a gramophone played. Without so much as a glance at the doctor’s face, Mümtaz recognized the piece being played. The violin concerto approached conclusion. On the bed, the doctor, wearing gaiters, trousers, and an undershirt that clung to his body from perspiration, listened without disturbing his peace. Mümtaz, within the astounding transfiguration of the musical motif, which gave one the sensation of being in a dream, could all but observe himself approaching his own essence. Before his eyes, a seed that had only just been sown grew rapidly, branched out, and foliated.

  What unanticipated crescendos, soaring strains, proclamations of self, fits of hesitation, and finally, an arrival like the discovery of truth, repeating its concise development within subtle variations like an autumn cornucopia, before once again vanishing into the marvel of metamorphosis.

  Silently Mümtaz sat on the corner of the bed in a spot where the doctor had retracted his foot, and listened.

  What was it? Had he been asked such a question, he’d have answered, “Doubtless, one of the things I’m most attached to in this life.” But this still would have conveyed nothing. Was it symbolic of human fate? Did it amount to a complaint or a surrender? Was it the dark dance of memory in the light of unconsciousness? Which of the dead did it summon to life? Which span of time did it resurrect?

  Or was it simply another realm formed outside life by the single-handed toil of a deev in human cloak – a creature unlike man – created for the sole purpose of expending its strengths? Certainly this, too, was a distinct and particular climate like the one he delved into at İhsan’s bedside, with its specific extremes, stifling altitudes, harsh and rejuvenating breezes, and devastating siroccos. And as was the case when one’s pulse reached 120 and one’s body temperature 104, one lived here in a discrete way, facing other challenges of singular intensity.

  Suad had listened to this concerto before his suicide. Even earlier, over and over for an entire day, he’d listened to it alone. This was what he’d confided in his letter without indicating why. And the concerto, in its heavy, tormented progression, didn’t divulge this secret. The music itself was unaware that Suad had listened to it. It simply scattered and spewed its fiery essence.

  Mümtaz gazed at the gramophone as if the entire enigma of Suad was hidden between the small metallic disk of the speaker and the hermetic world of the vinyl record that spun in frozen sparkles. How many times had Mümtaz pictured Suad listening to this piece in his own apartment on that last night? His face must have been very pale . . . And who knows, maybe, like the protagonist of the story that he’d suggested I write, he laughed at everything with a saintly piety of sorts. According to his letter, first he’d listened to this concerto together with that girl, and after she’d left the next morning, he’d played it by himself. And at night, while writing his letter, he’d listened to it again. Undoubtedly he raised his head from time to time, and because he knew it was the last time he would hear it, he surrendered all of his attentions to its agonizing progression. And perhaps, like all people facing death, he was absent and indifferent to everything. Perhaps he was afraid. He regretted what he was about to do. He sought a means to avoid it, looking to the door, hoping that someone would enter and deliver him from this predicament.

  And Mümtaz wondered whether this concerto had played a part in his demise. For it transported the listener to such realms of impossibility . . . Then, abruptly and vaguely, he recalled that he, too, had listened to the same piece that same night. Indeed, the soreness of memory within him at that moment, the helpless awakening, didn’t come from nowhere. But where? I returned home at night. I conversed with İhsan briefly. He felt well. And I was tired. I went to bed. Then, until Macide woke me up . . . The first side of the seventy-eight snarled to a halt. The doctor, with nary a glance at Mümtaz, cued the other side. Mümtaz wiped his brow as if he’d been roused awake. But where? Or else was it in my dream? Of course, he couldn’t have heard the entire piece. But the vivid pleasure of taste, the pain!

  A hand on each temple, sitting on a corner of a man’s bed, a man whose acquaintance he’d only just made, Mümtaz tried to recollect his dream. No, he hadn’t listened to the concerto, but he did dream of Suad. And in a very bizarre way. I was at the Bosphorus, on the quay of a yalı. Before me, the evening was being erected just like a theater set. Fi
rst large boards were carried in – but in an array of colors. Purple, red, navy blue, pink, and green . . . Then these were nailed together.“We’re going to hang the sun here,” they said. I was shaking my head, saying, “The sun doesn’t shine in a dream. Neither sun nor moon. Sleep is the sibling of Death.” But nobody heeded my words. Finally they raised the sun with ropes and pulleys. Only it wasn’t the sun. It was Suad. Yet how stunning and multihued he was. As the ropes cut into his flesh, the smile on his face grew more intense. Then they stretched him out over the evening that they’d built. He must have been the setting sun! Then pulleys and other mechanisms that I knew nothing of were set into motion. The ropes that bound Suad grew increasingly taut. I realized that th ey were cutting into his muscles, and I was frantic with his suffering from where I watched. But Suad continued laughing, as if he felt no pain; he was surrounded by color and brilliance. The more he suffered, the more he laughed. Next, I’m not sure how it happened. Suad began tossing down part of himself that had been rent asunder. It was as if he’d become a shadow puppet whose binding strings had snapped. In the seawater before me, I could see the colorful body parts that he’d cast away. Suddenly a voice sounded beside me: “See? See what a fate I bear? Suad threw an arm at me!” I turned toward the voice. It was Adile. She was doubled over laughing. Then I woke up. Macide came in and informed me that I˙hsan’s condition had worsened.

  Mümtaz wiped his forehead and looked about. I wonder what the doctor will think of me? Here I sit, listening to music. Who knows what kind of crazy gestures I’ve made? Then he returned to the subject of the dream. Maybe that was the voice of the sea . . .

  When the seventy-eight finished, the doctor let the remainder of the concerto resonate. But when he noticed Mümtaz’s woebegotten face, he said, “Tell me then, what troubles you, my young man?”

  Mümtaz implored, “Please, let’s be on our way, doctor.”

  “Going is easy, my son. But where are we going, just tell me that . . .”

  “Wouldn’t it do if I told you on the way, good doctor?” he said.

  Smiling, the doctor put on his jacket, which had been hanging on the wall. He grabbed his cap and walked toward the door without fastening any buttons. In wardly Mümtaz said, What a strange night, Allah. What an endless, inexhaustible night. It’s as if I’m trying to fill a bottomless pit.

  As soon as they entered the street, the portly doctor began breathing heavily. Mümtaz briefly explained İhsan’s condition, the attack he’d suffered that night, and the injection. The doctor translated huile de camphre as if wanting to satisfy the spirits of ancestors: “Camphor oil . . . camphor oil . . . camphor oil is one of the remedies that has done honor to the field of medicine. But only for the heart. Meanwhile, you didn’t need to let the matter go this far. My good man, some colleagues are reticent to take responsibility. With sulfamide, pneumonia can be inhibited from the start. You could have done this as well. Eight Ultraseptil every four hours . . . It’ll clear up the affliction. Nonetheless, we’ve set out on our way. Let’s have a look at him. Who’s the patient in question?”

  “My cousin on my father’s side. He’s older than I am and like a brother to me. Others expect a great deal of him.”

  “Does he have any relations besides you?”

  “His mother, wife, two children . . . But his wife . . .” Mümtaz hesitated about whether to tell him, as if Macide, wearing her usual expression, had appeared before him and, with a finger over her lips, said, “Don’t divulge my secrets!”

  “What happened to his wife?”

  “Since the day an automobile struck their oldest child . . .” When he stumbled upon the phrase “mental faculties,” he was able to finish easily. “She’s not quite in control of her mental faculties, or rather, from time to time she’ll suffer a lapse.”

  “Was she pregnant at the time?”

  “Yes, in the last days of the pregnancy . . . Then the fever started, and the child was born in that fever.”

  The doctor turned into a housewife reciting a recipe: “Slight and persistent melancholy, endearing attention to detail and a childlike demeanor, extended silent withdrawals, abrupt bouts of elation ... My good man, trivial and profound lapses of memory. Oh, the telltale symptoms of that puerperal pyrexia!”

  He’d declared this last phrase bombastically, his chest puffed out, as if emulating a Vefik Pasha translation of Molière. Then, without invitation, he hooked arms with Mümtaz.

  “Slow down, slow down. The time you’ll save by having me rush, I’ll cost you by sitting down on the first step of the stairs. I’m not a bad man, but despite my large size, I have modest whims.” He fell silent for a time. He removed his hand from Mümtaz’s arm, and Mümtaz found life a little more bearable once he’d been relieved of this burden. The doctor searched his pockets before unfolding the layers of a broad colorful handkerchief. He wiped his sweat and took a deep breath. “I don’t tire of working. But this weight. Even Varashilov’s apple diet didn’t do me any good . . . First, mind that a condition doesn’t become chronic ...”

  Mümtaz understood that the topic would now turn to politics. “Mind that a condition doesn’t become chronic.” What a horrible judgment. Yet the doctor changed the subject as if he didn’t have the courage to pass through a door he himself had opened.

  “I see you’re a connoisseur of music!”

  “Indeed.”

  “Only European?”

  “No, Turkish as well. But not as the same person.”

  The doctor looked at Mümtaz’s face as if to say he appeared to be something of an odd bird. “My child, you’ve expressed a genuine truth,” he said. “So very true. The matter goes far beyond music. East is East and West is West. We wanted to merge the two in Turkey. And we even presume that we’ve discovered something new in this. Meanwhile, the attempt has always been made and it has always given rise to creatures with two faces.”

  Mümtaz imagined himself, at this pre-dawn hour, as a Siamese twin, one face looking East and the other West, with two bodies and four legs, scuttling sideways.

  “Isn’t it terrible, doctor? But,” he added, “I don’t think with two heads, only with one.”

  The doctor had also conjured an image like the one that came to Mümtaz. Grinning, he said, “But you think in two ways. And even more astounding, you perceive in two modes. Pitiful, isn’t it?

  “Just as we will always have our Mediterranean aspect, we will also always have an Eastern aspect, one exposed to the sun, ex oriente lux. Forever sensing the sharp prod of piercing mirror shards in one’s soul. . . .”

  “This is our country’s paramount issue, I suppose.”

  “And it also emerges from geography, that is, from the genius of history. It existed before us and will exist afterward. Does your cousin love his wife?”

  “Insanely so. But it isn’t possible not to love Macide. After the illness they had another child.”

  “Their situation has returned to normal then.”

  The doctor followed the train of his own thoughts: “A life of normalcy within abnormality. You’ve seen firsthand how many things in the world that we think are impossible do indeed happen. Should there be war, in the midst of this conflagration, it would be something like the continued presence of the sick and needy, of prisoners who are obligated to complete prison terms, of our hunger at regular intervals.”

  “Do you think it’ll happen?”

  “As one looking at events from the outside, I don’t give much credence to the idea of an immediate war . . . But the world is so fraught and prepared to accept this catastrophe . . .”

  He stopped and took a deep breath. “It’s a strange state of affairs ... How should I put it? I don’t give much credence to the outbreak of war. It seems unlikely to me because it’s so sinister and devastating; I think that almost no one, even the most crazed, the most bloodthirsty, the most robotic, the most inhuman, or the most deluded (phantasies about ourselves are the most insidious), will have the courage, but
will refrain from engaging at the last minute; and will suddenly toss the torch away from the stoked hearth of death. Do you know what the last hope is? Often, the last hope rests in expressing the impossibility of the intention!” He stopped again and took a deep breath. Mümtaz noted with sorrow and remorse that they were still only at Vezneciler; yet, he listened to the doctor with rapt attention. “Let me give you an indication of how weak this hope is. For years, all of our hopes were focused on the ones instigating this jingoism, the politicos deliberating as if obsessively over an arithmetic formula. Just think: For years they’ve prepared for this outcome as if concocting a pharmacological formula, prepping an operating room, or staging a theatrical performance. First they stamped each natural phase of life, every cause and effect as a ‘crisis’ to find excuses to increase their strength and scope by multiples of three or four . . . Now what are we taking stock in? Nothing short of a miracle: The possibility of a sudden about-face by the same warmongers who have provoked the crisis and made matters so untenable; the abrupt return to peace and quiet after unprecedented instigation; and an organic understanding of things instead of through the lenses of vested interest ...

  “What’s truly frightening is that all the players, that is, adversaries, each espouse distinct states of mind and spirit. Some are overcome by the luxury of comfort, inaction, or implausible ideals; some are seduced by the insanity of absolute action. Or, you know, leaders who think that only their own acts of courage can resolve the dilemma... Who supports that mind-set?”

  This time the doctor wiped his brow with the back of his hand, and, as if afraid of leaving his thoughts incomplete, began to speak rapidly. Mümtaz noticed that the night had clouded like a chalice whose contents had been mixed with another substance.