A Mind at Peace

by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

  On any given morning of Nuran’s impending arrival, he woke early, heading straight for the sea and returning after bathing. Fully aware that he wouldn’t be able to accomplish a single task, he made the attempt nevertheless, but in the end just waited impatiently before the door as had happened on their first day alone.O Nâilî, whensoever the moonlike beloved nears step by step, Does that not equal world upon world of separations suffered?

  Mümtaz’s most faithful companion at such times was this couplet by the seventeenth-century poet Nâilî. Then, in time, a mysterious force would erupt within him as if announcing the approach of the anticipated presence. When he saw Nuran at the top of the street, his entire being emptied toward her strides.

  “Couldn’t I find you preoccupied with your work just once, Mümtaz? If I could only catch you distracted and unawares.”

  “Only if you were sleeping in the next room or preparing artichoke hearts.”

  “You mean to say that after we’re married I’ll be left to rot in the kitchen?”

  Overwhelmed with apprehension and a guilty conscience as if he’d in fact forgotten her amid quotidian tasks or a consuming idea, filled with the agony of oversights beyond redress, he’d pause to kiss her then and there.

  Nothing matched the surrender of Nuran’s initial kiss. Then she’d say, “Let’s see what you’ve done?”

  Reclining in the armchair between the table and the window, she smoked a cigarette and drank her demitasse.

  The moment of Nuran’s departure, like the hours that passed in her absence, belonged to Neşâtî, another seventeenth-century poet. Nuran repeated the couplet with Mümtaz:And you even left my soul full of yearning Nor could I bear the company of friends without you

  Nuran’s amorousness represented a faith of sorts for Mümtaz. He was its sole devotee, a high priest waiting before the most sacred spot in the temple and keeping the hearth forever lit, the one chosen from among mortals by the goddess so that her mysteries might find substantiation. This comparison contained a measure of truth. The sun rose each day and the entirety of the past replayed its epochs as if for their sake alone.

  Some mornings they trysted in Kanlıca at the Bosphorus residence of Nuran’s relative. Watching Nuran on the quay in her white bathing suit – though only as a friend, due to others in the vicinity – represented an initiation into new tastes and torments. When he couldn’t quite approach her, or if she didn’t remind him at whiles of their intimacy, in his thoughts she’d become an unattainable promised land, a cruel goddess of unfathomable mysteries whose choice of him as mortal prophet hung in the balance; Nuran, a presence harboring the riddle of all potentialities and that of death and birth in her womb, became mistress of seasons, of every creature who plodded in her wake like a compliant slave or a captive beast of burden.

  Anxiety fueled the deepest mechanisms in Mümtaz’s soul. He would later realize that succumbing in excess to his imagination played a primary role among factors poisoning his contentment.

  Over the duration of the summer, however, Mümtaz believed the human soul to be freer than it was – convinced that one could take control of oneself in a trice; that is to say, he was one of life’s motley fools.

  X

  On days Nuran didn’t come to Emirgân, the couple met either at the ferry landing or at Kanlıca, wandered the Bosphorus by caïque, went to beaches, and at times forayed as far as the heights of Çamlıca. Mümtaz always returned from these ventures sated. Continuing the custom begun on their first night, they came up with various monikers for places they admired. The coffeehouse in Çamlıca’s interior was derûn-i dil, their “Heart of Hearts,” because in that setting Mümtaz had listened to Nuran sing, in the Beyatî makam, Tab’î Mustafa Efendi’s offbeat Aksak Semâi: the song that began, “Your endearments, my companion, will not abandon the heart of hearts,” and contained reminiscences that transcended death. In that summer midafternoon among the buzz of insects, the occasional flutter of wings, and the shouts of bored, idle urchins, the panorama, having withdrawn into its beauty as if unsure of what else to do – with its small, sloping hillocks, its gardens on either side rolling down to the sea, its orchards, old manors, and copses whose dusty jade had been brushed on by cypresses amid deep naphtha green, the infinite empyrean overarching all – shrugged off its slumber, ceded itself to the laments of Tab’î Mustafa Efendi resonating through Nuran’s voice, and fused to the skin of lover and beloved. Mümtaz listened often to the piece afterward, never abstracting it from these hours spent with Nuran at the coffeehouse located above the cistern and fountain, remnants of Sultan Mehmet IV’s seventeenth-century hunting lodge.

  Another night, returning to Kandilli from Çengelköy, they’d named the otherworldly shadow cast onto the Bosphorus surface currents by the trees before the Kuleli Military Academy the “Nühüft song.” This was such a realm of inner radiance that its faithful representation could be found only in the dark emerald mirror of the Nühüft, reflecting spectacularly sparkling stirrings of a reclusive countenance.

  By and by, they gave names to locales of their choosing along the Bosphorus, as the Istanbul landscape of their imagination merged with traditional Ottoman music, and a cartography of voice and vision steadily proliferated.

  As Mümtaz slowly gathered around Nuran the things he admired and longed for, he found himself more in command of their powers. Like great novelists of the age, he began to feel that he was truly living only when he relied upon his woman. Before, he’d read widely and had weighed and considered matters; but now he understood that these things had become part of his life with more vitality; through his love for Nuran, they’d now entered into a living and breathing realm. She effectively became a cluster of light between that which rested in his thoughts and that which existed in his surroundings, illuminating everything such that the most disparate elements became part of a synthetic whole.

  Ottoman music was one of these elements. After he’d met Nuran, this art form had in effect thrust open its doors. In music, he found one of the purest and most rejuvenating wellsprings of the human soul.

  One day they roamed together through Üsküdar on Istanbul’s Asian shore. First, to avoid waiting for the ferry at the landing, they visited Sinan’s mid-sixteenth-century mosque of Mihrimah Sultana, daughter of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent and the storied Roxelana. Then they went into the early eighteenth-century Valide-i Cedid Mosque of Emetullah Gülnüş Sultana, the queen mother of Ahmet III.

  Nuran quite admired the türbe mausoleum and the mosque, whose decor resembled the inside of a petite fruit. They’d long missed the ferry. So by taxi they went to Sinan’s sixteenth-century Valide-i Atik Mosque, built in honor of Nurbanu Sultana, queen mother of Murad III, and from there to the seventeenth-century Çinili Mosque of Kösem Sultana, queen mother of Murad IV.

  By coincidence, these four great mosques of Üsküdar had been dedicated to love and beauty, or at the very least to a maternal sensibility.

  “Mümtaz, in Üsküdar a genuine Sultanate of Women reigns ...”

  On the following day, again in Üsküdar, they visited the fifteenth-century Rumi Mehmet Pasha Mosque and the eighteenth-century Ayazma Mosque, and wandered the Şemsipaşa district on foot. Only days later they walked aimlessly beneath scorching sunlight around the area of the Selimiye Barracks, first built in 1800 to house the reformed Nizam-i Cedid army of Sultan Selim III. A confounding nostalgia for the past seized him as he saw the first geometric boulevards made in Istanbul and the handsome streets with window-on-the-past names that conjured a genuine feast of an Istanbul evening.

  “Istanbul, Islambol,” he repeated. “If we don’t truly know Istanbul, we can never hope to find ourselves.” In his soul, he’d now become brethren to destitute masses and houses verging on collapse. He wandered feverishly through the Sültantepe neighborhood. But the place he most loved was the Küçük Valide Mosque, located in the market square, though he wasn’t partial to the tomb.

  “If I had my druthers, I
wouldn’t be buried here. It’s too out in the open,” she said.

  “After death, what does it matter?”

  “I don’t know, even after dying, this much in the midst of everything. Anyway, death can’t be felt ...”

  “But when the mosque was opened, the markets had been closed down so no one would see the arrival of the Valide Sultana and her entourage.”

  Nuran especially admired the mosque and its interior half-light at eventide. She loved the eaves embellished with kilim motifs amid marble and gilt ornamentation.

  As they returned from these excursions, she pressured him about his unfinished novel on Shaykh Galip. This historical novel, set during the turn of the eighteenth-century era of Selim III, contained elements of Mümtaz’s own life. With Nuran in mind, Mümtaz had sketched the characters of Selim III’s half-sister, Hatice Sultana, and his younger sister, Beyhan Sultana. Now, as the young lady read the descriptions in the drafts, she became rather meticulous, as if selecting a pattern at the seamstress’s or organza at a fabric shop.

  “In one you’re with Antoine Ignace Melling; in the other you’re with Shaykh Galip ...”

  This was Mümtaz’s unfinished song: have as many dalliances as your heart desires.

  “You mean I represent all the dead women? A thoughtful gesture, honestly ...”

  Üsküdar, which knew no end, was a treasure. A little distance beyond the Valide-i Cedid Mosque was the sixteenth-century Aziz Mahmut Hüdai Efendi Mosque. This spiritual sultanate from the era of Sultan Ahmet I had entered into Nuran’s family lore. A little farther ahead was the mosque of Selâmi Ali Efendi, who held the reins for a few years during the rule of Sultan Mehmet IV. In the Karacaahmet district rested Karaca Ahmet – tradition tracing him back to the time of Orhan Ghazi, who ruled the House of Osman in the mid-fourteenth century and was the contemporary of Geyikli Baba of Bursa, one of the mystical “Khorasan dervishes,” and maybe a fellow ghazi of his – and in Sültantepe rested Celvetî Bâkî Efendi at his eponymous mosque.

  Nuran was quite curious about the dervish orders, but since neither she nor Mümtaz bore a mystical side, they didn’t dwell upon it. One day she’d said in that girlish tone she assumed when the urge struck, “If I’d lived back then, I would’ve certainly become a Celvetî.”

  But did they actually believe in all of this?

  “This is the Orient, and herein resides its beauty. A lethargic world loath to change, all but embalmed within its traditions; but the East did discover one secret of significance. Though perhaps because the mystery was discovered prematurely, it proved to be harmful ...”

  “And what is that?”

  “The secret of being able to see oneself and all existence as constituting a single entity. Maybe because the East sensed future agonies, it came up with this panacea. But let’s not forget that the world might only be saved by this mind-set.”

  “Do you suppose the East was able to create an ethics out of its discovery?”

  “I don’t think so, but because the East took solace in the discovery, it restricted possibilities of action for better or worse. Within a semipoetic dream, the Orient lived on the peripheries of reality. Needless to say, I don’t find this worldview appealing; it strikes me as plodding and tiresome, like a journey by camel caravan ...” In Mümtaz’s mind, the camel trains of his youth that had once lined up before the hotel in Antalya came to life. And he worried he might not be able to return from that time of agonizing türküs. “How exceptional: the image of a camel-train on the empty horizon during twilight ...”

  “Allah, what a bizarre people we are,” she said. With an intimation that suddenly rose within her, she asked Mümtaz, “Why is it that we’re so bound to the past?”

  “Whether we like it or not, we belong to it. We admire our traditional music and for better or worse it speaks to us. For better or worse we hold this key that unlocks the past for us ... The past relinquishes its epochs to us one after another and dresses us in its clothing. Because we harbor a treasury within ourselves and perceive our surroundings through a Ferahfezâ or a Sultanîyegâh makam, even Lebîb Efendi is a source of art to us.”

  In Mümtaz’s esteem, everything from an Istanbul paysage to the entire Turkish culture, its filth, its decay, and its splendor was contained in traditional music. The Occident roamed dumbly in our midst like a stranger due to its inability to fathom our music. And many a vista appeared before our eyes accompanied by a melody.

  “Not to mention that when a work of art, something of intrinsic value, is underscored by music it is transformed. Strange, isn’t it? In the end human life doesn’t embrace anything but sound. We exist as if passing over material things, as if barely touching them. Yet through poetry and music ...”

  Mümtaz’s obsession with things past gave Nuran the inkling that he wanted nothing more than to be shut up in catacombs. The world certainly offered myriad pleasures and other modes of thought. She liked Üsküdar, but it was dilapidated and its inhabitants impoverished. Among the throngs of unfortunates, Mümtaz forged ahead, blithely spouting “Acemaşiran” and “Sultanîyegâh.” But what about society? Where was the overture to life? Actually doing something, treating the afflicted hordes, finding work for the unemployed, bringing smiles to crestfallen faces, delivering these people from being nothing but relics of the past ... Or had the episodes that he’d confided about his childhood affected him more profoundly than she’d assumed? Am I living in a country vanquished by Death?

  Taking Nuran by the arm, he pulled her away from the front of the ablution fountain. “I know,” he said. “A new life is necessary. Maybe I’ve mentioned this to you before. In order to leap forward or to reach new horizons, one still has to stand on some solid ground. A sense of identity is necessary ... Every nation appropriates this identity from its golden age.”

  Mümtaz nonetheless suspected that he, too, bore traces of ambivalence. Not because he admired time past but because he couldn’t deliver himself from the annoying assault of the consciousness of death.

  Their frenzied infatuation arose somewhat from this realization. The fact that he, and maybe he alone, knew this better than anyone was troubling. Often Mümtaz suffered under the assumption that the disquieting notion of death separated him from others. Didn’t this absolute comprise the clockwork that had regulated his dreams since childhood? In his love for Nuran, didn’t he consider her courage to live and her beauty something like life’s victories? Whenever he took her into his arms, wasn’t he declaring to the afreet of death looming just beyond her head, “I’m on the verge of vanquishing you. I’ve defeated you, here, regard my weapon and my shield”?

  Nuran’s likely discernment of this truth made Mümtaz anxious.

  “We need to separate two things. On one hand there’s a need for social progress. This can be achieved by analyzing social realities and by continually working to develop them. Naturally, Istanbul won’t remain just a place that produces lettuce. Istanbul, and each part of the homeland, requires a reform program. But our attachments to the past are also part of these social realities, because those attachments constitute one of the manifest forms our life has taken, and this persists into the present as well as the future.

  “On the other hand there’s our realm of pleasure. Or, in short, the realm we inhabit. I’m no aesthete of decline. Maybe I’m searching for what’s still alive and viable in this decline. I’m making use of that.”

  Nuran concurred through laughter, “I understand that, Mümtaz. However, at times one risks remaining on the sidelines of life, living through just one single idea. In which case, completely different images come to my mind.”

  “For instance?”

  “You won’t be upset with me?”

  “On the contrary, why should I be?”

  “Something like an ancient corpse interred with all its adored objects, including jewelry, gold ornaments, and images of beloved friends and family. Once entombed, he comes alive and his former life begins. Stars shimmer, lutes play,
colors speak, and seasons produce their progeny. But forever on the other side of death. Always conceptually, like a dream that belongs to another ...”

  “First, like an Isis, a fertility goddess bearing the golden disk of the sun, your image engraved upon a wall comes to life ever so slowly, sloughing off the constrictions of the ancient design, and you lean over my decayed body ... but honestly, genuine art is created in this way. The dead are living in our heads at this very moment. To just live one’s own life through another’s thoughts, or to force time to accept an aspect of your being. Take, for example, the ‘Hunched İmam’ ... the Hunched İmam, what a comical name! But what do we think about when listening to Tab’î Mustafa Efendi through his Aksak Semâi today? To us, he’s a genuine warden of life and death. And just conjure, if you will, his existence for a moment. An unfortunate soul living off alms from a mosque charity in Üsküdar on one of these hilltops, residing in a suffocating wooden house squeezed between the manors of pashas. A casualty of life condemned, after removing his shoes at the threshold, to sit on his knees in a constricted corner at the gatherings of grand viziers from Fazıl Ahmet Pasha to Baltacı Mehmet Pasha. Maybe he wasn’t even able to find his way into such gatherings. He might have spent his days among the lower echelons. Maybe he survived on handouts and small donations. Whenever we recite his songs, however, he makes an astonishing resurrection. He overtakes the roads of Çamlıca through which Sultan Mehmet IV rode his charger bedecked in gold and gems, or rather, he infuses the entire panorama. And suddenly the man waiting for a more cunning compatriot to give him the opportunity to earn an extra five or ten kuruş with a ‘Master, come join us in the mevlûd birth song of the Prophet tomorrow!’ is transformed into one possessed of ample means of admiration and recognition ... and maybe we’ve learned to appreciate each other by these very means.”