Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

Here follows the simplest love story ever told, so simple as to recall an algebraic equation.

Mümtaz and Nuran had made each other’s acquaintance on the ferry to the Princes Islands one morning last May. That week an outbreak of illness had afflicted the neighborhood children. Nuran, accepting that she couldn’t ensure that her daughter, Fatma, stayed indoors, resolved to take her to her aunt’s house on the main island, Büyükada. Since divorcing her husband at the onset of winter, Nuran had led an existence solitary and withdrawn. The entire winter she’d returned to Istanbul just three or four times, and then only for necessities. Despite the divorce being the mutual wish of both parties — Nuran had made one last gesture of goodwill, agreeing to Fâhir’s request to initiate proceedings jointly based on incompatibility — the length of the legal process had left her all but exhausted.

The whole affair had been a matter of disgrace besides: seven years after they’d wed, the father of her child, the man whom she’d loved and trusted, abandoning his home and family for two years in pursuit of a Romanian woman of questionable repute whom he’d met while traveling, had gallivanted about before one day informing Nuran that they could no longer be together and must divorce.

Truthfully, this had been no union of contentment from the start. The couple had been extremely fond of one another but shared no physical chemistry; an ornery and jaded Fâhir and a simply resigned Nuran lived like two fluke inmates of fate, side by side yet shut off from each other, though cooperative when it came to matters of everyday concern. Fatma’s birth, at first, seemed to somewhat temper this sequestered and nearly joyless lifestyle. Though Fâhir loved his daughter immensely, domestic life had always annoyed him, and he found his wife’s introversion, silent and docile, forever confounding. In his opinion, Nuran was lazy of spirit. Meanwhile, she’d actually waited seven years for him to rouse her from her stupor.

A feminine life, luxuriant enough to be precarious, pregnant to all possibilities, and fecund in every sense, simply persisted like an overgrown acre within feelings of inferiority in which Nuran blamed herself for the causes of a half-dreamy, half-fallow existence caused by nothing more than the absence of a cultivating force. Fâhir, a man overcome by his sense of possession, stifled all wants and desires. Thus, without having discovered this mine of wealth, he lived beside Nuran almost in sterility, nonetheless awaiting her passionate awakenings that would excite his instincts. And his intermittent returns to his wife, because they weren’t deeply nurturing and because he’d always been superficial with women, passed over Nuran like a wave cresting over a boulder without eliciting the slightest response. This nature of his might be aroused by a love affair focused on matters of the flesh, or rather by an escapade that fell into his lap. Emma, who’d encountered Fâhir on the beaches of Constantsa, entered his life through such a route. This handsome man was incapable of connecting carnally with a woman. However, Emma’s fifteen-year stint as something of a trollop was enough to overcome this lack.

In the throes of jealousy, garrulous scenes, a guilty conscience, and frenzy — in short, improprieties of all stripes — Fâhir began to see himself in a new light. For two years he pursued his mistress, gasping and panting as if in a race, and when he realized that he couldn’t catch or surpass her, he just surrendered the reins.

As a result Mümtaz met Nuran — the woman who would transfigure his life from alpha to omega — at a time when isolation had overcome her. Rather than be interred in the gloom of the lower deck, he preferred to sit on the upper deck, knowing full well that he’d be somewhat less comfortable. But what Istanbulite could keep from wondering who else had boarded the same ferry — especially with no risk of being left without a seat? He couldn’t bring himself to go upstairs without first peeping below, where he happened to see Sabih, a long-lost friend sitting with his wife, Adile; complaining inwardly, Couldn’t you have shown yourselves on any other day? Mümtaz went and sat beside them, and before long Nuran entered, clutching a few packages and a handbag in one hand and a flaxen-haired girl of about seven in the other. This husband-and-wife pair welcomed the new arrival with jubilation, exactly as they’d greeted Mümtaz.

From the very first, Mümtaz admired the young lady’s handsome and well-formed profile, both her figure and face, which conjured a phantasy in white. As soon as she spoke, he thought, She’s most certainly from Istanbul, and when she declared, “One doesn’t easily forgo familiar places, but the Bosphorus does become tedious at times,” he understood what she represented. For Mümtaz, there were two fundamental and requisite criteria for female beauty: principally, to hail from Istanbul; and secondly, to be raised along the Bosphorus. If not on that same day, Mümtaz learned in the coming weeks that the third, though perhaps superseding, factor was to resemble Nuran herself: to speak Turkish liltingly as she did; to face her interlocutor with the insistence she carried in her eyes; to lean toward one, when addressed, by cocking her sandy brown head; to make similar gestures of hand; to simply blush, moments after making a retort, astonished at her own pluck; to ply through the midst of life in a calm and nourishing manner, forever her own woman, like a river without pretension or anxiety, vast and wide — whose waters were clear enough to see all the way to the bottom.

When she’d been introduced to him, Nuran laughed and said, “I know you, we took the same ferry here this morning. You’re İclâl’s friend Mümtaz.”

She’d stressed “İclâl’s friend.” Mümtaz was pleased by the recognition; yet, he was apprehensive about the light İclâl might have cast upon him. İclâl wasn’t a bad person; the friendship between them would persist throughout life. Nevertheless, she was chatty.

“I wonder what that charismatic relation of mine imparted to you?” Nuran said.

“In that case, let me tell you,” he replied. “You’re the illustrious Nuran.” Gesturing to Fatma: “The young lady was, you might say, raised in our very classroom, though she never entered it. Each morning we heard the general bulletin of the current state of affairs from İclâl.” He smiled at the girl from a distance; but Fatma paid no heed to such coyness. She had no intention of countenancing any strange male; all men were a threat to her happiness. Only her mother smiled. Mümtaz now recalled how he’d at first been tempted to sit across from Nuran on the morning ferry, but upon his hesitation, as a vagary of chance he’d let himself be chewed up by Muazzez’s chit-chattering teeth — he regretted that Nuran might have registered his reticence.

Muazzez and İclâl boasted of quite a delicious friendship, in which their diverse constitutions complemented and completed one another. Muazzez was a daily gazette of insignificant events and a gazetteer of unknown lands. She resembled her grandmother, who had a relative — or friend at least — residing in every district of Istanbul, whom she loved like a sibling and could always call upon.

The grandmother in question, having attained an age of social respect, roamed from dawn to dusk repeating at each visit the tidbits she’d witnessed or heard on the street or at the previous call, only to return in the evening with an assortment of gossip that had been thoroughly committed to memory. In this enormous city, there remained little to which she wasn’t privy. Acquainted with all of Istanbul, that is to say those who were “above the sieve,” she could discuss how people were during any particular year, month, or even day. She’d been this way for some time. “We all come home with a saddlebag of news and information,” she’d say. “In the evenings at the dinner table we tell each other what’s happened, and in the morning at breakfast we’ll separate the wheat from the chaff, culling what’s of value.” Once, due to this hearsay being doled out, Muazzez’s uncle had been unable to jockey for position to make a vital announcement; after three days he was barely able to interject: “Everybody, excuse the interruption, I’ve been meaning to tell you for days now, but I couldn’t find an opening. I’ve received a telegraph from İkbal; we’ve been blessed with the birth of a baby girl!” They named the girl Nisyan, or “slip of the mind.”