“Isn’t love the same in every part of the world always?”
“Yes and no ... That is, not at all in terms of the physiological! Just think of the differences between insects and mammals. Think of the wretched reproductive habits of fish and crustaceans or the variations between humans and other mammals, not to mention the disparities between tribes, clans, societies, and civilizations.” With a chuckle he quipped, “For instance, had you been a praying mantis, on the first day you’d come to Emirgân you would have devoured me.”
“And as a matter of course I would have died from indigestion.”
“Thank you, my dear ...”
Mümtaz gave open regard to her unrestrained elation. Standing, they conversed on the grounds of the former manor whose grandeur and frequent guests Sezai Bey had detailed in his memoirs. The entirety of the distant Istanbul horizon, including tulle shadows of hüzün and a seascape gradually appropriating the twilight, became an enchanted backdrop for Nuran’s visage! “Among elevated classes, an entire realm of culture, discernments, and web of associations serves to transform that fleeting moment of ecstasy, that physiological act, into divine pleasure. In contrast, conditions of life or ignorance in our vatan leave some of our own people bereft of the simple pleasure of a kiss.” Then he added, “Everything from trendy boutiques or the demands of modernity, from sexual etiquette or feelings of shame, from the fear of engaging in sin to literature and the arts is a factor in this act of intimacy.”
“What’s the upshot?”
“Who knows, maybe it is just what it is. For in life, everything’s a facsimile of all else in a certain respect. The female kangaroo carries its young in a stomach pouch. Anatolian women wrap their newborns to their backs as they work. And you carry Fatma in your head.”
“I might be preoccupied with my daughter, but you’re meddling with corpses seven centuries old.”
Mümtaz was startled by the harshness of her retort. He’d only wanted to say something amusing to make her laugh.
“Are you upset?”
“No, but was there any need to mention Fatma?”
“I was reminded of how she never much cared for me and – ”
“Then try to make yourself likable.” Her tone was cross.
Mümtaz shook his head in despair. “Do you think that’s possible?” Nuran didn’t reply. She, too, knew how difficult it would be.
“As for the corpses in my head, they’re certainly just as manifest in you. You know what’s really depressing? We’re their sole guardians. If we don’t give them a modicum of our existence, they’ll lose their only right to life. Poor forefathers, maestros of music, poets, and everyone else whose name and influence has reached our day, they wait with such longing to enrich our lives ... and accost us in the most unexpected places.”
They lumbered along, boarding the Kısıklı trolley. Nuran had forgotten about their squabble. She dwelled only on two comments: First the praying mantis, that is, the female that eats its mate, and then Fatma? I wonder, is this how he perceives me?
Even Mümtaz was surprised by these two comparisons that had come to mind. Why on earth did I recall this insect? Or am I suspicious that she’s a woman who considers only her own pleasures? Maybe she finds me to be overly sentimental and a know-it-all. She’s justified in doing so; I hold forth on so many topics ... but what am I to do? Since she represents everything to me, I’ll submit to her with all my being! At the trolley stop, a young couple – they were eighteen or twenty years old – was having a fiery argument. The woman’s face in the twilight was a picture of despair, and the man, as was evident from his bearing, pressured her, displaying a formidable posture. Mümtaz and Nuran fell silent upon seeing them. Love-stricken on the streets ... Or was his caravan of poetry, his thoughts, all of it, in fact, nothing more than what these juveniles were doing? For the first time he felt the anxiety that he was wasting his days for Nuran’s sake.
Nuran had been gradually growing tired of his life and thoughts. The anxiety that he was confined to an absolute idea, to an orbit of sterility that took him outside of existence gnawed at him like a worm. It represented a vein of decay that would only grow with time.
Even if not in this way, uncertainty overwhelmed Mümtaz. The anxiety of losing her settled within him. For no reason, fate and the bewildering isolation with which he’d been acquainted since childhood resurfaced.
Their summer nonetheless persisted as the paradise of their worldy sojourn. The day after this outing, Nuran asked to be alone with him in Emirgân till evening. She wanted to sketch out the garden.
Half-recumbent on the sofa, she sketched repeated designs on a sheaf of paper held atop a sizable book on her knees. Her amateur, even childlike, line indicated each detail. She listed the names of flowers and palettes of colors in the margins. “Colors not to mix!” she wrote. A cluster of flowers, for example, was purely ruby or heliotrope. Each season, would boast a few swaths of color. The idea had come to her from seeing poppies sprouting in a fallow artichoke field. Only the roses would be distinct, burning like multi-armed, solemn torches, like lanterns and lamps left aflame.
Nuran, an avid enthusiast of roses, was mad for the velvety variety known as Dutch Stars, which were a sultanate all to themselves. Let my clothes be démodé so long as exquisite roses bloom in my garden. Next came chysanthemums. She found tulips to be too rigid; instead, she adored violets. When Mümtaz mentioned that there had once been a violet garden at Keçecizade Fuat Pasha’s Bosphorus-side yalı in Büyükdere, she became enthralled by this Tanzimat-era vizier. Besides roses, her favorite flowers were the blossoms of fruit and nut trees. Thus, the garden required plenty of almonds, plums, peaches, and apples. Though they bloomed briefly, lasting for only five days, they conjured visions lasting the entire year. Along with her love of flowers and trees, she also had an interest in keeping chickens. How might both be managed together? In the end, they agreed to have a largish coop made at the far end of the garden, a chicken house along with a small open space enclosed by wire.
Since coming to know Mümtaz, Nuran had dreamed that she’d live out the rest of her days in Emirgân. As Mümtaz became aware of her desires, he sought a means to purchase the house. But one way or another he hadn’t been able to corner the landlady to negotiate. She didn’t come to Emirgân. The pain of having lost four children in succession prevented her from visiting the neighborhood, not to mention the house she’d first occupied as a bride, and where she’d lived within splendor unimaginable to either Mümtaz or Nuran amid maidservants and adopted handmaids, saz-lutes and genteel conversation. He left his rent with the coffeehouse proprietor from whom an old servant from Rumelihisarı took it and sent it onward to the island of her residence.
Toward evening they continued to Büyükdere, eating dinner at a small restaurant there. Being the thirteenth of the month, they’d be able to make a mehtap outing beneath August moonlight. As soon as the moon rose, Mehmet arrived. Mümtaz found the youth’s face pale and wan. He revealed strains of annoyance. Mümtaz had known for some time that Mehmet was in love; maybe his beloved lived here in Büyükdere. Chance had cast their lives in the dual plot of a Molière farce. Considering the affair of the Boyacıköy coffeehouse apprentice and Anahit, the story line was actually tripled. Do what he may, or wander in whichever sublime or unattainable climes that he might, Mümtaz was relegated to living by the laws of humanity and existence. Likewise, there was Mehmet, a man who could love without having known Tab’î Mustafa Efendi or Dede Efendi, without having been awed by Baudelaire or Yahya Kemal.
The difference between them was that Mümtaz perceived his beloved through a matrix of abstractions. Some Nurans traipsed along the Bosphorus seafront at the Kanlıca residence in shorts or a bathing suit; others struggled against sail and gale in a caïque, or slept beneath the sun with eyelashes fanned downward, their firmly ripened faces fruits, deep within whose flesh swirled rejuvenating and redolent essences; still other Nurans floated face up in the sea, clambered
aboard a rowboat, spoke, laughed, and plucked caterpillars off tree branches; yes, a plethora of Nurans congregating as a multitude of figures with experiences spanning the centuries entered into Mümtaz’s imagination.
Some of these figures, like poses and fleeting facial expressions, emerged from her deportment at any particular moment. Others, meanwhile, belonged to the consecutively manifesting identities in Nuran’s living presence, through the awakening of a surplus of legacies inherited from her forebears. Had he never seen the photograph of Nuran wearing a Mevlevî outfit that İclâl had once shown him, Mümtaz would have still compared the seated Nuran, legs folded beneath her as she listened to a gramophone record, to miniatures of an Orient even farther east than Istanbul.
During any ordinary moment, in her comportment, her clothes, her changing expressions during acts of love, his beloved had a variety of personas conjuring figures that had passed before her into the immortal Mirror of Ars; personas evoking, with augmented intensity and perhaps in an agonizing way, Mümtaz’s near obsession and the pleasures of her possession. Renoir’s portrait of a reading woman was one such figure. Beneath a radiance falling from above, illuminating her hair like a golden spray, the flaxen dream burgeoning like a posy of roses between the dark naphtha green background and her outfit of ferrous black cloth, with pink tulle concealing her neck, served as one of the most faithful aesthetic mirrors to certain passing hours of his ladylove through a handful of similarities including the pleasant calm of her face, the dark line of her lowered eyelids, the abrupt gathering of the chin into a small protrusion, and the sweet, almost nourishing smile upon her lips. Mümtaz’s imagination, within its obsession for Nuran, at times took her resemblance to the Renoir even further, and uncovered in her figure a likeness to the exuberance of flesh depicted by venerated Venetian masters of the Renaissance.
Tonight, however, against the backdrop of the gilded night issuing from the open window, within the wide décolleté of her gown, the woman with bare, sunburned arms and her hair parted down the middle ever so hastily after leaving the hamam of the sea was not the lady of intimate hours – evening light dripping like honey into a room with drawn curtains – pursued by so many poets and painters from the 1890s onward and captured by Renoir after repeated attempts. Presently, through the harsh cognizance and intense vivacity of her half-shaded face and head, and a keenness in her eyes that threatened to devour her entire face, Nuran more closely recalled the Florentine woman in Ghirlandaio’s Presentation of the Virgin at the Temple, recalling the semiancient earthly glory that flowed through her entire being and into the piazza receding to a distant vanishing point, her left hand perched upon her hip and her head cocked gracefully, highlighting the slight protrusion of her temple and the dimple on her chin which all but touched her shoulder.
Semblances of Nuran, transforming from moment to moment, became the young man’s agony and ecstasy. These medallions, or labryses, warranted individually by a momentary thought, a feeling of pleasure, a sudden sensation, or a gesture didn’t leave him in hours of solitude but emerged through a recollected sentence, a page in a book, or an idea. The most poignant pleasure, however, and naturally the sharpest anguish, came with Nurans that came to life within a piece of music heard out of the blue. These semblances manifested abruptly within the arabesque of the melody or the golden rain of the musical ensemble, they appeared and disappeared there, and they glared and jeered at Mümtaz from a measure of time transcending everyday experience, and consequently, the mode of the memory altered and became an echo of prior existences stirring awake.
The venture of living augmented exponentially through the enchantments of seeking Nuran in his surroundings and his past, discovering traces of her seasoning in all experiences, and seeing her before him in the legends, faiths, and arts of centuries – essentially through different personas yet always as herself.
Nuran, in his perspective, represented the golden key to time past as well as the seed of the private fable that Mümtaz considered the first condition for all forms of art and philosophy.
Mehmet’s beloved, whom he never saw, neither passed through the ring of these personas nor did he digress in his private fable, which was omnipresent in all things.
Mehmet adored and thought of his girlfriend without seeking in her the traces of any literary heroine, without savoring her bouquet in any chance chalice of music, and he approached her with the virility of a primal man who satisfied everything, every pleasure, through his body. The pleasures Mümtaz sought across centuries were for Mehmet satisfied solely by the flesh.
Likewise the Boyacıköy coffeehouse apprentice didn’t regard Anahit as a presence whose semblance might be found in the heavens. He neither sensed his own fate in the depths of her eyes, nor thought the rites and rituals of a forgotten faith had revived as he burrowed in her flesh. He didn’t fear that she’d leave him, and when she was away, he rested by laying out his tired body on the dusty stones of the quay or the fishing nets heaped before the coffeehouse, or he teased the neighborhood housekeeping girls; and later, when he understood within his being that he needed her, stretching slowly, he cast off the torpor that had overwhelmed him and called for her, placing beneath the customary stone the key to his single-room inside the old fortress walls so that she might easily enter; and knowing that she’d rouse him when she arrived, he slept heartily without giving it another thought.
Tonight Mehmet was downright irritable and doleful. Mümtaz had grown accustomed to reading like a book the face of this youngblood who’d worked for him for three years now. He must have certainly argued with his girlfriend. Or else he’d caught sight of her hereabouts in a garden or restaurant with another. Maybe this was the cause of their quarrel. In any case, Mehmet’s manner of enduring anguish varied completely from his own.
Mehmet represented a facet of undaunted humanity. He found resolve in his own self. Alone now before the restaurant, he puffed out his chest like a fighting cock. This conveyed respect and adoration for his physicality. Essentially it amounted to a primitive narcissism of sorts such that he only accepted a woman’s body as a mirror, and when his reflection became slightly blurred therein, he cast it aside contemptuously and took up with another. Women were capable of the same. Nuran might one day act similarly toward him.
This thought, descending upon Mümtaz, assumed such cruel proportions that Nuran took notice: “What’s happened? Is something wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said. “A bad inclination of mine. The tendency to mull over an idea until it assumes its cruelest possible form.”
“Tell me more.”
Mümtaz explained, somewhat mocking his own state of mind. Why should he conceal something from Nuran relating to her? She listened, at first with ridicule, and later through a changed expression.
“Why don’t you live in the present, Mümtaz? Why do you either dwell in the past or in the future? The present hour also exists.”
Mümtaz had no intention of denying the present hour.
He experienced it distinctly through Nuran’s face and imagination, and through the nocturnal Bosphorus that had become her earthly peer. Presently, her sweet state of intoxication merged with the benighted Bosphorus. Nuran’s face gradually assumed intensity by internal surges and radiated inner light just like this blue nocturne.
“It’s not that I’m not living in the moment. But, you came to me at such an unexpected time, when my experience of women and life was so slight; I’m at a loss as to what to do. Intellect, aesthetics, and lust for life all intersected in you. All of it merged through your person. I’m afflicted by the disease of being unable to think beyond you.”
Nuran indicated the rising moon with a smile.
The ridge of one of the opposite hilltops reddened. A fine shimmer of radiance appeared, resembling half of a fabled fruit, and at once the deep cerulean clarity of the nocturne transformed.
“Whereas you’d once maintained that one had to separate existence from other notions. You said it w
as the inaccessible section of the house. Neither love nor other realms of life could intrude upon it.”
Mümtaz abandoned the fabled fruit sliver: “That’s what I’d once said. But with you it changed. I no longer think through my head but through your body. Your body is the abode of my intellect now.”
Then Mümtaz explained the game he’d once made up as a boy: “One of my greatest pleasures is the refraction of light, and its variations. When I was at Galatasaray, I’d peer through my curled hand like a telescope and watch the light refracting from the ceiling fixture. It happens on its own, of course, all over the place, all the time. But making it happen pleased me to no end. Rare are the jewelers who could make ornaments of this kind. Certainly many hierograms and religious symbols have their origins in light and its refraction. To me, it was a poetics of illumination, like gemstones or even certain glances. You know the way a light source changes from brilliance to the glimmer of polished steel, to violet, pink, and pale purple flashes, and to sparks that needle and mesmerize us through the faculty of sight? An essential secret of art rests here: it’s a dream conjured in the simplest way, almost mechanically. Now, for me, all Creation refracts prismatically through your body, which I madly crave.” He thought momentarily, adding: “Nevertheless it doesn’t constitute art per se, it constitutes something approximating art; that is, they’re analogous.”
By the time they’d stepped back outside, the moon, encircled by a faint halo of mist opening out in spectral shades, had risen considerably.
The equivalent of this night could only be found in Ottoman music; a nocturne attained through musical arrangement and orchestration. Here, everything was a repetition of all else in measures of the infinite. Yet these successive refrains, when one paid careful attention, mingled with each other to such a degree that separating or culling them was impossible. Mümtaz and Nuran floated in the rowboat. The entire panoply was in a state of perpetual becoming with golden seaweed, lucid undulations of waves, aggregate shadows in the peripheries like truths of unfathomable mystery, streams of radiance, and abysses deepened by darkness. In effect, creation, as Shelley wrote, had become a flowing power. Or rather at the threshold of reason, like a very bold idea, and hence not yet come to final fruition, Creation loomed in a state of ambiguity, that made its every feature more alluring.
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