A Mind at Peace

by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

  Here two opposing and difficult-to-imitate polarities of life, which didn’t appear without latching on to one’s skin or settling deep within, actually merged: genuine poverty and grandeur, or rather, their castoffs ... At each step, remnants of out-of-fashion entertainments and the traces of old and grand traditions, whose origins and means had been forgotten, could be found heaped together. In one of these narrow, contiguous shops, old Istanbul, veiled Anatolia, and even the last remnants of the Ottoman Empire’s heritage would glimmer in the most unanticipated way. Vintage outfits that varied from town to town, tribe to tribe, and period to period; old carpets and kilims whose locale of weaving he’d be sure to forget even once reminded, yet whose motifs and colors he’d remember for days; a store of artwork from Byzantine icons to old Ottoman calligraphy panels; embroidery, decorations, all in all, caches of objets d’art; jewelry that had adorned the neck and arms of some forgotten beauty from a lost generation or two; all of it, in this humid and crepuscular world, could keep him in its thrall for hours with the allure of a by gone age and the appeal of the mysterious added in for good measure. This represented neither the traditional nor the modern East. Perhaps it was a state of timelessness whose very clime had been exchanged for another. When Mümtaz left this setting for the hubbub of the Mahmutpaşa street bazaar, he felt the inebriation of a man who’d gotten drunk on laced wine in a cellar before stepping into direct sunlight. And the satisfaction imparted seemed to be quite a middle-aged pleasure for a man his age – like an addiction.

  On this occasion, he relented again. First he watched the pigeons. Then he gave in and fed them. While he did so, he was prodded by an urge to make an appeal to Allah, as he used to do in his childhood. Mümtaz, however, no longer wanted to mix everyday matters with his personal conception of the divine. The divine should be like a fountainhead, unencumbered by humanity, robust, removed from all types of experience, and should simply provide the resilience to endure life. He didn’t think this way solely to resist the pagan superstition that often reared its head during times of trouble and had recently established a vast shadowy realm within him. Perhaps he wanted to remain faithful to the notions that preoccupied him. About a month ago, a friend of his whom life had staggered rather profoundly had told him how society filled him with revulsion, how little by little the ties that bound him to the community had loosened. He was in fullscale revolt: “The social contract won’t continue, it cannot continue,” he raved.

  At that time, Mümtaz tried to explain to his friend the absurdity of the connection he’d arbitrarily made between his experience and his ephemeral mental states. He said, “Just because things have taken a bad turn, let’s not blame the gods. Our affairs are always susceptible to the betrayal of circumstance and to trivial mishaps. Things might even go wrong for a few generations. The breakdown and disorganization shouldn’t alter our relationship to our inner beliefs. If we conflate these two distinct things, we’ll be left naked and exposed. Furthermore, we shouldn’t assume that success is granted by the gods, either. Matrices of probability contain failure. What’s the relationship between the postponement of your uncle’s trial and our historic rights over this nation? Between your sister’s marriage and the morning prayer called at the Süleymaniye Mosque or to your birth to a Muslim father? Or between the real estate broker who swindles you of your money and the values that constitute our inner character or the colossal realities that make us who we are? Even if these realities ultimately rest in society, they shouldn’t incite us to inkâr, denial of ourselves, but to change the conditions in which we find ourselves. Of course there are countries and citizens more content than us; of course we feel in our lives – rather, in our flesh and blood – the vast fallout of two centuries of disintegration and collapse, of being the remnants of an empire and still unable to establish our own norms and idioms. Allowing this suffering to drive us to nihilistic inkâr, in effect, would be to accept even greater catastrophe, would it not? Motherland and nation are cherished because they are the motherland and the nation; religion is disputed, rejected, or accepted as religion, and not based on the ease it purports to bring to our lives ...”

  As Mümtaz spoke, he realized that his expectations of others were high. He knew that when the social idiom changed, people changed and the faces of the gods paled. Yet he also realized it shouldn’t always be this way. While he fed the pigeons, he contemplated such thoughts; at the same time he noticed that the fine grain coating his palm irritated him like an aperture shutting somewhere in his person.

  No, he wouldn’t ask anything of Allah anymore. Mümtaz wasn’t going to confront Him with his fate or the missteps of his life, because were his plea ignored, his loss would be twofold.

  The pigeons, indifferent toward the grain in the midafternoon heat, approached reluctantly, hovering close to the ground and gliding in one at a time. Like the hand of a magician producing a bright blue handkerchief out of thin air, they still made surprising and illusive movements as they flew, but they didn’t flock and crest all at once with the swiftness of a wave under a southerly breeze as they did when in full feather and hungry; they didn’t pivot in the airy void as if there were a whirlwind above them; and they didn’t lose all speed in the aether and plummet as if they’d come to an unseen pier or the wall of a manor by the sea.

  They made a rather tranquil arrival, sluggish and languid. Some of them looked dubiously – almost with pity – at the grain on the ground from the wall of the opposite building where they’d perched in a line. Yet, beneath them a small, oneiric flock gathered and pecked, each detail of its movements depicted separately and as an isolated form, like seas issuing from the brushwork of the Fauvist Raoul Dufy.

  Despite their avarice and exploitation of one’s affection, they were beautiful creatures. Especially in the way they trusted, they were beautiful. Humans were this way, they delighted in being trusted. This sensation deeply satisfied man as master and singular, eminent creator of life. Despite man’s brief and tormented life, his absurdity and selfishness, this hobbled and deficient deity recognized such trust as the sole expression of worship toward him. But he took pleasure in betraying those who trusted in him. Because he liked to change, and he enjoyed the cognizance of himself during different moments and situations. Because he was narcissistic, yet the conversation within him wasn’t merely one-sided.

  He sprinkled the grain from above, raising his hand over his head in a circle so that the pigeons might rise and he might sense the winged flutter about him. But none of them moved the way he desired; a few feeble and sporadic attempts resulted in a fluttering ascension of a half yard above ground before the momentum died.

  For Mümtaz, the pigeons were a vice of sorts in Istanbul, like lures that attracted men to women of ardor. They might also be compared to the fables children spun to magnify themselves, to fill their inner worlds, whose mysteries we couldn’t fathom; and like a fable of this nature, this large tree and this Ottoman architecture – whose gilded door was visible within a purple shadow each time he turned his head back – might even have conjured this covey. A coffeehouse apprentice swung a pendant tea tray to the fullest extent as he purposefully passed through the pigeons so they’d flutter about. The apprentice was a handsome youth of about seventeen. The slow and plodding walk that he affected didn’t strip his body of its agility. He wore a navy blue and white striped flannel shirt, and behind one ear he kept a pencil stub, certain to be replaced, maybe tomorrow, by a cigarette. Despite this catalyst, the fairy-tale ship and the wave cast by a lodos southerly that Mümtaz so desired still didn’t manifest. Instead, the interconnected, circular lines of the compact cerulean waves suddenly separated, and the primitive depiction of the sea, gradually, with an offhand, virtually dampened sound of applause, moved farther onward, flying low and landing at the feet of another man sprinkling seed. One of the pigeons nearly grazed his forehead as it flew, perhaps alarmed by such a close encounter with a human being.

  The woman selling the seed sai
d, “The hawker there has sick relatives at the hospice. Help her out by buying grain from her too; it’d be a pious deed.” Her voice, rather than imploring, verged on sarcasm. Then Mümtaz noticed her face. Her eyes stared intently from a face unable to conceal its bloom beneath a black head scarf – eyes foreign to all notions of piety. With a hostility toward men seen only in common folk-women, her eyes momentarily bared themselves, exposing her entire body naked in the sunlight. Before this gaze, Mümtaz, heart in tatters, handed her his money and entered the Sahaflar book market.

  The small alley was a narrow passageway where in summer all the smells of the bazaar floated by the square and its environs. The season subdued this alley with aromas. Yet before the door, Mümtaz’s previous desire faded. What would he see after all? A bunch of peculiar though familiar oddities. Not to mention that he was anxious, his mind was divided into two, even three, parts. The first Mümtaz, maybe the most vital, dreading fate and trying to suppress his thoughts, stood beside İhsan’s sickbed, staring at his unfocused eyes, chapped lips, and rising and falling chest. The second Mümtaz tore himself apart trying to reunite with Nuran on each and every Istanbul street corner where she might appear; he tossed a scrap of himself to every gale that arose. A third Mümtaz marched into the wilderness of the unknown and the harsh whims of fate behind the military detachment that had caused the streetcar to stop suddenly. For days now he hadn’t contemplated politics. For him, the train whistles that had increased over recent nights were enough of a portent.

  Such a conundrum proved to be comforting in one respect: Thinking of three things meant thinking of none. Terrifying was the abrupt union of all three, the potential formation of an absurd and distressing synthesis, a dim, and malformed terkip.

  The heart of the book market was quiet; at the entrance, a small shop that had landed here like a splash from the old Egyptian spice market displayed a petite, pitiful vestige of the old, opulent Orient and of vast traditions whose roots extended deep into oblivion leading to long-dead civilizations; herbs and roots whose benefits were certified over centuries, regarded as the sole panacea for fading harmony of life and health along with spices that had been pursued vehemently over the seven seas, sat in dusty jars, in long wooden boxes, and in open cardboard containers.

  As Mümtaz looked at this shop, Mallarmé’s line came to mind: “It’s ended up here through some nameless catastrophe.” Here in this dusty shop from whose walls hung handmade tricot stockings ... In neighboring shops with wooden shutters, simple benches, and old prayer rugs rested the same luxurious and, when seen from afar, arcane insights of tradition, in an arrangement eternally alien to the various accepted ideas of classification, on shelves, over book rests or chairs, and on the floor, piled one atop another as if preparing to be interred, or rather, as if being observed from where they lay entombed. The Orient, however, couldn’t be authentic anywhere, even in its grave. Beside these books, in open hawker’s cases, were lapfuls of testimonials to our inner transformation, our desire to adapt, and our search for ourselves in new contexts and climes: pulp novels with illustrated covers, textbooks, French yearbooks with faded green bindings, and pharmaceutical formulas. As if the detritus of the mind of mankind had been hastily exposed in this market, books mixed and intermingled, texts on reading fortunes in coffee grounds alongside classicist Mommsen’s vision of Rome, remnants of Payot editions, Karakin Deveciyan Efendi’s treatise on fish and ichthyology, as well as subjects like veterinary medicine, modern chemistry, and the techniques of geomancy.

  Taken as a whole, it constituted a bizarre accretion that appeared simply to be the result of intellectual indigestion. Mümtaz realized that this omnium gatherum had been engaged in a hundred-year struggle and a continuous sloughing of skin.

  An entire society grew despondent, strove, and suffered through anomie and birth pangs for a century so that digests of detective novels and these Jules Vernes might replace copies of A Thousand and One Nights, Tûtinâme: Tales of the Parrot, Hâyatülhayvan: Animal Fables, and Kenzülhavas: The Treasury of Pleasantries.

  A book merchant of his acquaintance made a welcoming sign. Mümtaz approached with an expression indicating “How are things?”

  The merchant gestured with his hand toward a series of old leather-bound books, stacked and tied with twine, on one end of a wooden bench. “A collection of old magazines, if you’d like to take a look.”

  He untied the twine and handed Mümtaz the volumes, dusting them as he did so. Most of the leather covers were warped, and some of the bindings had cracked. Mümtaz sat on one edge of the bench with his feet dangling. He knew that the bookseller would no longer bother him; in fact, the man had put on his glasses and turned back to the handwritten manuscript on a bookrest.

  Mümtaz examined the volumes that looked as if they had been slowly and gradually roasted by fire, and he remembered the last time he’d come to this shop, last May – bliss was in that spring to be alive. An hour had remained before he was to meet Nuran; he’d stopped here to pass the time and chat with the old bookseller, purchasing a handsome and nicely bound Şakâyık-ı Numaniye, a sixteenth-century Ottoman biographical encyclopedia by Taşköprüzade with its addendum. That day he’d gone with Nuran to the two Çekmece lakes. Though he’d explored all of Istanbul with her, they hadn’t yet visited the lakes. He thought of the supper they’d shared at the smaller lake, at the restaurant nearly atop the water that invariably recalled Chinese floating houses, of the time they spent together in the stream-side garden of the hunter’s coffeehouse at the foot of the bridge reached by a wooden stairway. In the vicinity, fishermen caught striped mullet as they shouted from rowboat to rowboat in piercing voices. A chorus of cries rose abruptly and men naked from the waist up made several direct and determined movements before the net strung between two boats gradually emerged from the water, glistening like a shield of abundance, with little quicksilver sparkles flailing along its perimeter, and the great haul shone like a mirror held to the sun. On the ground, at their feet, a street dog that had just befriended them wagged its tail and flattened its ears as it begged. From time to time, it strayed from its spot and roamed about, making the rounds, before turning back.

  Recently arrived swallows frantically prepared nests at a distance. Rapid, twittering exchanges, whose meanings escaped them, passed at the edges of the bridge and in the eaves of the coffeehouse. Now and then, a swallow, hovering with rapid wing flaps, not unlike a swimmer treading water to keep afloat, let itself drop into the void of the boundless cerulean sky, before soaring up to great heights in a vertical maneuver; then, from a point that the naked eye could no longer discern, glided downward; and just when this trajectory aroused the anxiety of its deadly follow-through, the swoop abruptly straightened along the horizon, tracing curves and spirals upon itself, and as if proving an unsolved geometric theorem, a series of abrupt and interrelated maneuvers followed one after the other, and at last, after escaping this web of its own weaving with a final flap, the swallow arrived at its frenetic and merry nest. Mümtaz brazenly observed the broad shoulders of his dulcinea, her neck, which gave her head the poise of a delicate blossom, and her narrowed eyes, which had become a line of radiance. Last May... when his world was more or less intact.

  One of the assembled texts was a divan poetry collection by the thirteenth-century mystic Yunus Emre that had been copied in an amateurish hand; the annotations, however, contained gazels by Ottoman poets from Bâkî, Nef’î, and Nabî to Shaykh Galip. Toward the end, on a few leaves, in various hands, appeared a number of remedies calling for black pepper, cardamom, rhubarb, and the like. One of them written in kermes crimson ink was entitled “Lokman Hekim’s Medicinal Taffy.” Another involved filling an onion with cloves and heating it over an open flame to make an “Elixir of Life.” The other text was a songbook: Melodic makam progressions and composers’ names were penned above the songs; all of them contained the intervals without omitting a single note or syllable; they’d been transcribed onto pink, blu
e, white, and yellow leaves, with the chalk lines still visible, in an orderly pointed script like tongues of fire. Near the end, some amusing couplets had been recorded. Next came a series of recorded births and deaths beginning in the year of the Hegira 1197, or A.D. 1783. What naïve attention to detail and ceremony. In A.H. 1197, Abdülcelâl, a son of the owner of the volume, after being indisposed for two days, passed away on the seventeenth night of Rebiülâhir toward dawn; thank heavens a few months later his daughter Emine was born. These personal events made for an extensive year; the same man opened a saddle-and-harness shop for Emin Efendi, his “milk brother” breastfed by the same wet nurse; as for him, he was appointed to the Kapanıdakik directorship after being passed over for years. The most significant event in the next year was the initiation of his son Hafız Numan Efendi into the field of musical arts. Their neighbor Mehmet Emin Efendi would oversee his practice. Who were these characters? Where did they live? Before lives he saw no need to pursue further, Mümtaz closed the volume.

  More peculiar was the third volume, most of whose pages were blank, giving the impression that it might have belonged to a child. Toward the middle beneath a title written in an odd and amateurish hand, indicating an illustration of an ostrich or “camel bird” in a tree, was a picture that resembled neither camel nor bird; and beneath it, a convoluted design smudged out by wetted ink. Many dates were listed here as well. But none of the writing made any sense together. Perhaps it was a workbook for practicing penmanship in script; and in all probability it’d belonged to an older man who’d learned to read and write late in life. Almost every line was repeated a few times in an unskilled cursive: “To our guide in pilgrimage to Holy Mecca, the Water Bearer Esseyd Muhammet Elkasimi Efendi.” Later on, the address became more detailed: “To His Excellency Esseyd Muhammet Elkasimi Efendi, one of the caretakers of the Sacred Kaaba, son of Jeweler Mesut Efendi of Bâbünnebi in Holy Mecca.”