A Mind at Peace

by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

  And a few pages farther, beneath a rather extensive register of expenses, appeared the following: “Being the date of His Excellency the Benefactor Naşit Beyefendi’s appointment as fifth secretary of the private royal chambers ...” And farther on: “On this morning, His Excellency the Benefactor Naşit Beyefendi, whose appointment to fifth secretary of the private royal chambers has been announced by imperial writ, bedecked in the uniform of the office, embarked toward the imperial palace for the sake of initiating his obligations. May Allah, Exalted and Almighty, forthwith bestow His glorious divine guidance and assistance.” A full musical ensemble from the mid-nineteenth-century reign of Sultan Abdülmecit blared within Mümtaz’s mind. Farther down the page, in a very thick pen and in a hand that couldn’t quite keep control of itself, appeared a couplet:Where is the rose, where is the nightingale? The petals of the rose do scatter and pale.

  Next came a magick potion prepared by boiling in the middle of the night the shell of a baby turtle, the water of seven springs collected in a glass bottle on the fifteenth of the month, forty pomegranate arils, saffron, and black pepper; the concoction was to be stirred with a freshly cut cherry twig while reciting an incantation, before letting it sit under the sun for forty days. And after that, he read an incantation meant to be recited forty times for forty days to enable one to wander about unseen.

  On the facing page appeared six words in crimson ink that didn’t belong to any recognizable language: “Temâgisin,” “Begedânin,” “Yesevâdin,” “Vegdasin,” “Nevfena,” and “Gadisin.” An explanation below stated that repeating these words seven times before bed would cause one to dream of an object of desire. And further down the page was a long description of the pronunciation of Keldanî script. Mümtaz muttered: “Temâgisin, Begedânin, Yesevâdin, Vegdasin, Nevfena, Gadisin.”

  It saddened him that he wouldn’t be explaining these absurdities to Nuran. Mümtaz was Nuran’s purveyor of esoterica. He loved to bring her resolute skepticism and steadfast rationalism face to face with odd anecdotes he’d culled from here and there. Had it been last year, Mümtaz would have told her how he’d opened his mind to forces from beyond regarding some or another issue, then he’d have gone on to describe the dream that came to him after having repeated this incantation seven times. In conveying such nonsense, Mümtaz was forced to maintain complete sincerity without a smirk or guffaw. The charade would continue in all seriousness to the end amid Nuran’s demure smiles and expressions of astonishment, and eventually, annoyed, she’d either put a swift end to the joke – opening up a delicious horizon of remorse sometimes lasting for hours – or else she, too, would simply join in the game.

  Thinking this now verged on the pathetic.

  He suddenly stopped at a juncture in his thoughts. Why am I mocking these people? Is my anguish preferable to their lives, filled with countless opportunities for escape? But did such means of escape actually exist as he’d assumed? Were they living the wealth of possibilities described in these books and others like them? Even if this were the case, wasn’t he himself escaping? Wasn’t merely sitting in this shop at this hour an escape? Amid a widening web of troubles, he did indeed want to steal this hour, and he’d stolen it in plain sight from İhsan and his family. Granted, Mümtaz hadn’t been living a regular life since the beginning of summer. Particularly in recent days, his sleep had been disrupted. The few hours that he could sleep with difficulty passed in eerie, nightmarish dreams, and he woke from his slumber even more tired. Worst of all was the difficulty he had maintaining his train of thought. As each idea inched forward, it became a vision of agony. Today even, as he walked down the street, he realized he was spontaneously making hand gestures. During such times Mümtaz’s companions suggested that he was trying to purge himself of certain paradoxical thoughts through actions and terse mutterings.

  He examined the volumes, recalling again the May morning of a year ago. Summer flourished within him like an apocalypse. Next came the days he believed had poisoned his entire life, including Nuran’s exasperation, his own fears and anxieties, and his feeble and exhausting insistence, each with its particular memories and moods. He knew he couldn’t stay here any longer. But he couldn’t stand, either. All he could do was gaze about as if asking whether a more excruciating form of this torment was to come.

  The bookseller raised his eyes from the manuscript: “The outlook is pretty bleak, isn’t it?”

  Mümtaz didn’t have the wherewithal for a long conversation: “We’re tending to a sick relative at home ... It’s been a week now that I haven’t been able to read a newspaper properly.” He was lying. It wasn’t that he hadn’t read the paper. He’d just lost the strength to contemplate the news. Without even forming any opinions, he simply memorized chronologies of events as if learning a lesson by rote. Interpreting, not to mention discussing, incidents that occurred in such rapid succession was an exercise in futility.

  They’d talked for years already anyway. Everybody, everywhere, at every opportunity, for years, had discussed this possibility. All variety of opinion had been expressed and all eventualities explored. Now all of humanity faced a reality of horrendous proportions.

  “I don’t know if you’ve seen the banks? They’ve been packed full for days now.” As if it had just occurred to him, he asked, “Who’s sick?”

  “İhsan.”

  The shopkeeper shook his head: “He hasn’t stopped in for quite some time. It isn’t just coincidental then. I hope he regains his health soon.” He was visibly upset, but he didn’t ask about the illness. Mümtaz mused, I guess he considers this a family secret. As if to explain that a person without troubles didn’t exist, the shopkeeper said: “Both our children were called up.” He sighed. “Honestly, I don’t know what to do. I’m at a loss. My brother-in-law fell from a horse back home and cracked his ribs ... My wife’s in such a state.”

  Mümtaz knew from firsthand experience about the endless sympathy of men who wanted to console others through tales of woe.

  “Don’t worry, things will improve, it’ll all get better,” Mümtaz said as he left.

  These were among the stock expressions that he’d learned from a past generation. Maybe for this reason, with a curious stubbornness, he’d been reluctant to use them for years. But now, in the presence of this man’s misery, they came to the tip of his tongue. One civilization’s philosophy of everyday life, he thought. Each experience invites one of another variety. That means our heritage not only contains miseries and sorrows but also consolations and methods of perseverance . . .

  Çadırcılar Street was bewildering as always. On the ground before a shop whose grate usually remained shuttered, waiting for who knows what, were a Russian-made samovar spigot, a doorknob, the remnants of a lady’s mother-of-pearl fan so much the fashion thirty years ago, a few random parts belonging perhaps to a largish clock or gramophone, together with some oddities that had ended up here without breaking or crumbling to pieces somehow. A traditional coffee grinder of yellow brass and a cane handle made of deer antler were prominently displayed. Leaning against the shop’s rolling shutter rested two sizable photographs in thick, gilt wooden frames: pictures of Ottoman-era Greek Orthodox patriarchs from the reign of Sultan Abdülhamit II or a little afterward. Their medals, garments, and emblems were identical to those that appeared in the newspapers. From behind well-polished glass, through the vantage of time past, they gazed at the objects spread out before them and at the street crowds temporarily obscuring them at each surge. Perchance they were most pleased by the roar of life sounding so many years later – by the therapy of sun and sound.

  Mümtaz wondered, Did the photographer nudge and prod them the way the man who takes my photos does?

  He sought traces of such primping in the folds of their loose-fitting robes and in their expressions, which had striven for years to merge grace with representational grandeur.

  Above them hung a handsome Arabic calligraphy panel in a kitschy plaster frame: Hüvessemiulalîm, �
�the One who discerns and knows all.” The rigid plaster hadn’t destroyed the vitality of the script. Each curve and curl articulated its message.

  The peculiar quirks of this little street, however, weren’t limited to just a few. A Nevâkâr song from a Darülelhan conservatory record being played in a shop a bit farther down revealed and concealed its own numinous world like a rose garden under a deluge, while a fox-trot blared from a gramophone across the way. Mümtaz stared down the full length of the street, which seemed to rise vertically, searing his eyes under the midafternoon sun. Heaps of castoff items, bed frames, broken and worn-out furniture, folding screens with torn panels, and braziers were aligned and stacked atop each other in phalanxes along either side of the street.

  Most regrettable were the mattresses and pillows, which constituted a tragedy simply by having ended up here. Mattresses and pillows ... the array of dreams and the countless slumbers they contained. The fox-trot dissolved in the snarl of an unwound spring and was immediately followed by an old türkü one would only chance to hear under such circumstances. “The gardens of Çamlıca . . .” Mümtaz recognized the singer as Memo. The full sorrow of the last days of the reign of Sultan Abdülhamit II persisted in the memory of this singer, a cadet in the military academy, who’d drowned in the waters of the Golden Horn. His voice overspread these remnants of life like a grand and luminous marquee. What a dense and intricate life the alley possessed. How all of Istanbul, including every variety and assortment of its fashions and its greatest intimacies and surprises, flowed through here, composing a novel of material objects and discarded life fragments. Or, rather, everyone’s quotidian life had gathered here entwined arm in arm as if proving that within our separate workaday lives, nothing new under the sun existed.

  Every accident, every illness, every demolition, every tragedy that occurred in the city each day and each hour had cast these objects here, eliminating their individuality, making them public property, and forging an aggregate arranged through the hand-to-hand cooperation between chance and misery.

  What a fine custom it was in some ancient civilizations to burn or bury one’s possessions together with the deceased. But one didn’t relinquish things only when dying ... Two months ago Mümtaz had made a gift of his favorite pair of cuff links to a friend. A fortnight ago he’d forgotten in a taxi a book he’d had newly bound. Was this all? A few months earlier the woman he loved decided she wanted to live apart and left him. İhsan lay bedridden. For nine days now pneumonia had taken him captive and had slowly dragged him to that quiet interstice where he rested today. Something catastrophic could happen at any moment. No, one didn’t just vanish and leave things behind at death. Perhaps over his entire existence, moment by moment, many things had been leaving him. They would just crust over and through a very subtle, unseen process, separate from whatever surrounded them. Do we leave them or do they leave us? That was the question.

  The gathering of so many antique objects on this street that played the full range of the sun’s lutes was powerful enough to make him forget about actual life and experience.

  A soldier approached and grabbed a trinket that caught his eye from the hodgepodge. A shaving mirror. Next came an elderly man, short, thin, well-kempt, yet wearing outdated clothes. He took up the mother-of-pearl fan; like an inexperienced adolescent, he spread and shut the fan a few times tentatively, inspecting the item that his ladylove had entrusted to him during a dance, turning it over and over in his hands furtively, with a feeling of adoration surfacing as if he were stunned that it actually belonged to her; then he returned it with an evident feeling of relief, and asked about the cost of the carved antler handle. Because Mümtaz didn’t enjoy speaking casually to Behçet Beyefendi, a one-time member of the old Ottoman Council of State, he stepped to the side and, filled with utter desolation, watched the old man’s rather puppetlike movements. You would not know by looking at him, but this unfortunate soul was in love with and jealously coveted a woman for nearly twenty years ... and in the very end ...

  Behçet had loved, and was jealous of, Atiye, his own wife of twenty years. First he grew jealous of her, then of Dr. Refik, one of the first members of the Committee of Union and Progress, and as a result, he made an illicit denunciation of Dr. Refik through a secret police report to the Ottoman palace; but even after the doctor’s death in exile, Behçet couldn’t save himself from fits of jealousy. As he’d told İhsan himself, when he heard the lady softly singing the “Song in Mahur” on her deathbed, he struck her in the mouth several times, and thereby had maybe hastened her death. This particular “Song in Mahur” was a ballad by Nuran’s great-grandfather Talât. The ordeal and many like it had given Behçet the reputation of being bad luck by several factions in their old Tanzimat-era family, which had flourished through a series of well-arranged marriages. Yet, the haunting ballad remained in people’s memories.

  The “Song in Mahur,” in its simplest and shortest version, resembled a visceral cry of anguish. The story of the song was strange in itself. When Talât’s wife, Nurhayat, eloped with an Egyptian major, Talât, a devotee of the Mevlevî order, had written the lyrics. He’d actually wanted to compose a complete cycle of pieces in the same Mahur mode. But just at that time, a friend returning from Egypt informed him of Nurhayat’s death. Later he learned that her death coincided with the night he’d finished composing the piece. In Mümtaz’s opinion, “Song in Mahur,” like some of Dede Efendi’s compositions and traditional semâi songs or like Tab’î Efendi’s “Beyâtî Yürük Semâi,” was a piece with a distinctive rhythm that confronted the listener with fate in its profundity. He distinctly remembered when he’d heard Nuran sing the song and tell the story of her grandmother. They were on the hills above Çengelköy, a little beyond the observatory. Massive cumuli filled the sky and the evening descended like a golden marsh over the city. For a long time Mümtaz couldn’t determine whether the hüzün of inexplicable melancholy falling about them and the memory-hued twilight had emanated from the evening or from the song itself.

  Behçet replaced the cane handle. Yet he couldn’t pull himself away from the folding fan. Obviously the small feminine accessory cast him – a man whose entire intellectual life had frozen like clockwork stuck at his wife’s death, and who resembled a living memento from 1909 in his outfit, necktie, and suede shoes – far back into time, to the years when he was the fine gentleman Behçet, when he was enamored and grew jealous of his beloved, and, not least of all, when he’d been the catalyst of her and her lover’s deaths. Presently, reminiscences long forgotten were being resurrected in the head of this living, breathing remnant of things past. I wonder which of life’s fragments he sees in these paving stones he stares at so intently?

  An old shrew struggled to follow behind the used mattresses she’d purchased, perhaps up the street. The street porter she’d hired was overwhelmed by the top-heaviness of the burden on his back more than the weight itself. Mümtaz didn’t want to spend another second here; today neither the book market nor the Çadırcılar street market was of any consequence. He turned into the flea market.

  The market was cold, crowded, and cacophonous. Almost everywhere in the small shops hung an array of clothing, prepared life-molds, like selfcontained fates. Buy one, put it on, and exit as a new person! Crammed on both sides were dresses, yellow and navy blue worker’s overalls, old outfits, light-colored summer wear whose tacking was visible above the sewingmachine seams, cheap women’s overcoats that sheared dreams of life to zero with unseen scissors from where they hung. They were displayed by the dozens on tables, small chairs, couches, and shelves. A cornucopia! No shortage of thrift and misery as one might have thought; just disrobe from life but once and be certain to find desperation in every imaginable size!

  He stopped short before a display window: A small, broken mannequin had been dressed in a wedding gown that had somehow slipped down too far; on the bareness of her neck, above the décolleté, the shopkeeper had pasted the image of a betrothed couple cut f
rom a fashion magazine. The prim and stylish couple, located under hair tinsel and veil and above the white gown, before a landscape fit for silver-screen lovers, made this watershed moment bursting with bliss an advertisement for life and love that subdued one like a season – as would happen in the mind of the woman who might wear this gown. A small electric bulb burned over this contentment-on-sale, as if to clearly emphasize the difference between thought and experience. With no need to look any longer, Mümtaz began to walk briskly. He made a series of turns and crossed a number of intersections. He wasn’t looking anymore; he knew what to expect. After having seen what rests inside me. For months now, everywhere, he’d seen only what existed inside him. And he realized, as well, that there was nothing so surprising or fearful in whatever he saw or stood before.

  The market was a fragment of this city’s life; forever and a day it would confide in him somehow. All the same, what affected Mümtaz was not what he saw but rather his own life experiences.

  Had he found himself before a good canvas by Pierre Bonnard, one of Les Nabis, or had he gazed at the Bosphorus from atop the Beylerbeyi Palace; had he listened to a piece of music by Tab’î Mustafa Efendi or to The Magic Flute, which he so admired, he’d still have these same feelings. His mind resembled a small dynamo stamping everything that passed beneath its cylinder with his own shape and essence, thereby obscuring and disposing of its actual meaning and form. Mümtaz had termed this phenomenon “cold print.”

  Mümtaz’s relations with the external world had been this way for months. He perceived everything only after it had passed through the animosity between him and Nuran, spoiling its mood, coloring, and character. His person had been secretly contaminated, and he related to his surroundings only in accordance with the changing effects of the poison.