Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

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…