Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

At each step, Mümtaz suffered the tribulations of trying to live fully amid the distracting crowd.

Intermittently, his life consisted only of avoidances. Forlorn, he wandered the streets of Istanbul like a ghost ship. Shortly after arriving at some destination where he’d longed to be, a gale rising from within drove him onward; involuntarily, anchors were weighed, sails billowed, and he sailed ahead.

If not for an inclination toward the cerebral that accompanied his sentimentality, Mümtaz would have long been obliterated. But this twinned nature that had been so destructive to his relationship while in love was his saving grace now. Despite his devastation, from the outside, if only at whiles, he appeared to be more or less powerful and productive. Since he peered out over his context from a state of yearning, from a rite of passage that had deeply affected him, he better understood what he saw and knew how to adjust his perspective. That is, it was only in his personal life that he was condemned till death to remain naïve, clumsy, afflicted, or immature.

Mümtaz walked apace with the disposition of one who’d resolved not to think. From the bazaar, he exited out onto Nuruosmaniye Street. From there he descended below. He wanted to visit the tenant as soon as possible. He had to complete his errands posthaste. If only İhsan returned to health. around on a wheeled board fastened to his underside, propelling himself with wooden bath clogs on his hands. His legs, thin and cocked like a spider’s, hung over his shoulders and he pulled long drags from a cigarette placed between the toes of one foot. If not for the pallor of his face, his disheveled appearance, and the impact of disease that first overcame him, rather than a disabled beggar Mümtaz might have resembled a contortionist making involved and astounding maneuvers, a master ballet dancer who, within the ferocity of the dance and the rhythm, now became a spider, now a comet, mimicking first a swan and later a seafaring boat.

Pale and gaunt, he evidently drew great satisfaction from inhaling the cigarette smoke. His age was apparent mostly from the down of his whiskers. He took the money extended by Mümtaz, who waited as if convinced the man would transfigure himself, assuming a more astounding pose in gratitude or demonstrating another of his talents. Instead, he bowed his head, concealing his face, and pulled another breath through his cigarette before propelling himself by pushing off with his clogs, as he kept his legs wound about his shoulders and torso like spindly branches, swiftly passing to the opposite sidewalk to lean against the base of a sunlit wall with newly applied stucco. In this pose, he was nightmarish, a half-formed idea. Under sunlight, he waited like a permanent fixture of the street.

Mümtaz focused on the surroundings. Beneath the sun, the ruined, blazing white road, with its dilapidated houses, gaping doors, projecting oriel windows, and laundry-strung balconies, was long enough to instill the anxiety of infinitude, stretching onward in the brightness as if it were sloughing its skin. Here and there, weeds sprouted at the edges of the sidewalk. A cat sprang from a low garden wall, and as if awaiting this signal, a circular saw whirred in a lumberyard.

An afflicted road, he thought; a meaningless thought. But, like that, it’d been planted in his mind. An afflicted road, a road that had succumbed to leprosy of sorts, which had putrefied it in places up to the walls of the houses aligned on either side.

Whenever he raised his head, he noticed that a few passersby had stopped and were staring, and he understood that he must be experiencing a bout or episode. His distress forced him to lean against one of the leprous walls of the houses. The road continued onward, its skin being flayed by the sun.

A boy approached: “Would you like water?” he said. Mümtaz was only able to utter, “Nah!” If only he could get off this road. But the road had to stop sliding beneath his feet and stay put so he might walk. Was this the end? The termination… deliverance… the conclusion of everything and the lowering of the curtains? That great and mitigating release? To shout, “It’s quitting time!” to all the dissonance that cluttered his mind, to open the gates and set it free, to chase away each iota of each memory, vision, and concept, to become nothing but an ordinary object, a lifeless and unconscious presence, like a shiny snake skin, to join the street, whose one end rose up, or the walls and houses, which the sunlight had gnawed away in spots like leprosy; to leave the circle of existence; to be delivered of every last paradox.

With the aching distress of a cat giving birth, the tenant roamed about his diminutive shop wringing his hands as if hoping for salvation from something: the walls, the sacks and bags of hardware, the nails in bins, and the clusters of junk suspended from the rafters.

The shopkeeper narrowed his eyes as soon as he saw Mümtaz, his way of preparing to greet a visitor. Over the long years that he’d spent at his desk, he’d gotten into the habit of squinting at others this way from the hovel in which he found himself.

“Come, welcome, my fine young man. I was just expecting you.” This was so in keeping with the usual routine that if not for this last sentence, Mümtaz would have thought the man’s repeated messages to them had amounted to someone’s practical joke. In the midst of this thought, he responded to the tenant’s questions:

“He’s doing just fine, it’s kind of you to ask. He sends his regards. He’s feeling a bit under the weather… thank you.” As they spoke, Mümtaz understood that this wasn’t the same old tenant, that at the very least mechanisms of anticipation and hope were now churning within him, nailing him up onto long, high scaffolds with little taps of the man’s own heart.

“Of course you’ll have a coffee or perhaps something cold to drink?”

Mümtaz declined. The shop, the sacks and bags of junk, distressed him. The man had no intention of insisting anyway. Due to the stomach cramps he’d suffered over the past two decades, the shopkeeper knew quite well how eating or drinking anything between meals could disturb the healthy balance of one’s digestion. After this polite offer, like a freight wagon rolling in the wake of a luxury passenger train, he turned to the business at hand with astounding alacrity: “The contracts have been drawn up, both for the retail store and the storeroom.”

Without allowing himself to be alarmed at the metamorphosis of this out-of-the-way shop into a “retail store” and at the dank cellar, which stunk up the neighborhood, into a “storeroom,” the man spread two contracts before Mümtaz. “Of course, you have your aunt’s seal in your possession?”

Indeed, he did. The contracts were in good order. Mümtaz endorsed them in his aunt’s name. The man pulled out his wallet, said, “I’ve prepared a full year’s rent,” and removed an envelope.

Has he gone mad? thought Mümtaz.

Mümtaz took the blue envelope with a glance revealing that he expected it to contain anything but banknotes. At that moment the telephone rang. The man was seized by frenzy, which infected those around him. The onlookers, who knew both parties in the conversation, stiffened. Mümtaz, too, stood abruptly in the fear that something had happened to İhsan; they’d be able to reach him here.

“Get tin, I told you, tin and rawhide… that’s all. As much as you can find. Just forget about the rest. Tin and rawhide.”

His voice did away with everything on the face of the earth besides these two materials with a resolve that Mümtaz had never witnessed before. Then a hint of doubt mingled into his tone.