Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

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 said, “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.