Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

“Does the East even comprehend this?”

“Whether it does or doesn’t, it’s conveyed the idea, hasn’t it, my son?”

The small, stray girl spared from sacrifice had seemingly arrived just in the nick of time to turn on the light. As soon as Mümtaz entered behind the doctor, he saw the objects that he’d left an hour ago again in the same position within the illumination of the mirror, with the same blithe invulnerability of an hour before, pleased to simply be themselves, gathered and glimmering. Oh, the way these objects simply wait, as if for an opportunity to leave us. .

The world exists even without me. It exists on its own. It persists. I’m a small trace of this persistence. . But I exist, and I find the strength to persevere in the consciousness of continuity… Through that continuity, I move from my genesis toward eternity…

With the demeanor of a man pleading for grace from tyranny, Mümtaz looked about. For he knew that he wouldn’t persist eternally, and perhaps this minute, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps a few days hence, one day his presence within this continuity would cease and be usurped by other presences, and he knew he wouldn’t be the way he’d been in the past, and he wouldn’t sense the same shudders, and furthermore whether or not he would shudder. Eternity was a nebulous light into which his intellect at times shone. And not even to such a great depth. Only to a part of his being that fleetingly shifted toward the arcane. Meanwhile, reality amounted to this stone foyer that he perceived in a glance through his doubled existence and, as always, through his past; it amounted to the stairs he climbed, and İhsan’s room, whose staleness — comprised of the odor of medicines, sweat, and illness — he sensed before even entering; yes, reality was the suffering present there. Other unseen realities also existed that he couldn’t sense with his flesh yet that stabbed and twisted into him like a knife: Nuran’s disposition of a solitary lily in the white nightgown that they’d selected together; the tree branches that spilled over the garden walls of the house; the stunted fig tree that all but came to life on moonlit nights; the small chinar before the door; the nocturnes through which he passed; and the small table and chairs where he so longed to sit with her and have morning tea — a table whose cloth, left in place instead of gathered up, made the possibility of this pleasure more tangible. .

But there were other realities. Things he’d never seen, of whose existence he was uncertain, that he sensed had settled into him in light of recent events, infecting him. Telegraph operators conveyed breaking news from one office to another while thinking of their wives, children, and homes; typesetters aligned letters and type with scorched fingers; housewives roamed through their houses aimlessly, feeling as if they’d forgotten something, opening, for maybe the twentieth time, the luggage they’d prepared, yet unable to add anything useful or new that would help confront the unknown; they did nothing but abandon broken smiles, pitiful prayers, and the grasp of their fingers before letting the suitcase close yet again. . Train whistles, songs of separation… These, too, played within him like a knife blade. No, he wasn’t in the realm of the eternal but of the worldly. The world resided in everybody. A world that existed at times in a corner of our beings, at times as a single soul in totality, at times a world we forgot about during our workaday lives, though we carried it with us, in our very blood; a world that, like it or not, we sensed in the weight of this evening upon our shoulders. And beneath this burden, beside the patient, the wrestler’s physique of the physician seemed slightly diminished.

İhsan was a little better, but he was dazed. On the taut skin of his forehead were drops of perspiration that seemed foreign to it, giving the impression that he couldn’t relax. By the looks of his chest, which appeared more puffed out and powerful under the force of his respiration, and his sweaty ruddy face, rather than a sick man, he resembled a swimmer who’d just vanquished the waves that he’d been struggling against for hours, and now waited for his pulse to return to normal where he sat resting on the shore. Had he actually vanquished them, however? His face resided in such an eerie region of remoteness. The worst of all possible prognoses resurfaced in Mümtaz’s mind.

“The good lady saved the patient just in the nick of time… I’d guessed as much besides. There was no recourse but to increase the sulfamide dosage. Now I’m going to prescribe eight sulfamide capsules. And we’ll closely monitor the results. In addition we’ll need a bit of syrup and another heart medication. Mümtaz, I’m afraid we’re going to have to trouble you again.”

From the forest of a life of fragments, İhsan looked at Mümtaz as if to say, “And where did you find this specimen?” Then he extended his hand to hold the physician’s and uttered perhaps his first words of the night: “What d’you say, doctor? Will it happen? Will they proceed with this madness?”

The physician immediately answered his patient: “You concentrate on getting well!” Though his eyes said, “I share your concern!”

Once out on the street, Mümtaz found himself more relieved than on his prior excursion. Almost no trace remained of the thoughts that had made his head swell. Strangely, he walked with a sprightly spring that he’d never before felt. He seemed not to be bound by the laws of gravity. If I had wings, I could fly. He was astounded by this state: such a stark contrast to the gravity of the circumstances in which he found himself. For he still saw everything just the way it was. Perhaps war would begin this very night. İhsan’s condition was still serious. He’d progressed so far down the passageway between life and death that his return would be difficult. Nuran was to leave this morning and her departure meant devastation. With her absence, everything would end. All these realities that had been pressing down on him only an hour ago now felt like distant events unrelated to him or his own world. He regarded them all from beyond the threshold of death.

He felt at ease. I wonder why? I’m so prone to contemplation, my thoughts form knots inside me and keep me pacing till morning. Why is it that now I can’t think of anything? But even this thought wasn’t enough to overwhelm him. Or am I not in this realm of existence? Have I left the world? Or maybe the world has left me? Why not? Like any old liquid emptying from a container… Despite this, he was aware of the task at hand. He knew the route that he would take, and he hurried to bring İhsan’s medicine back as soon as possible; furthermore, his mind recorded everything it encountered with a lucidity that seemed improbable even to him.

The landscape was ensconced in shadows as if the retaining wall holding brightness at bay had cracked in an unspecified locale. Grasses glimmered in the illusion of a greenish patina sprayed over them. The surroundings pulsated.

This was the hour when the dawn tuned its instruments. Soon the empyrean of Creation would be remade. In the foyers of houses, and in rooms, the first morning lights were lit. In the murky weather these lights fostered the artificial glow of the stage. A woman opened a window, her half-naked body stretched against the fading night, and straightened her hair, her arms bare. A dog slowly rose from where it had slept and ran toward Mümtaz, the morning sojourner, but just when it came close, it changed its mind and darted on to the base of a saint’s türbe where candles burned behind a shut window. A milkman, comfortably seated cross-legged above the copper ewers that he’d hung on either side of his mare, passed beside him at a near gallop. In the distance a car horn sounded.