Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

Nuran, for her part, was in no state to utter a word. She wasn’t waiting free and easy at the intersections of life like Mümtaz. She’d already lived out one life and had separated from her husband. She might rightly assume that hundreds of eyes were boring into her from this throng. If he’d only leave. If he’d only leave and go… His arrival was so sudden. I need to spend time alone. Who does he think I am? One of those chums of his with whom he gads about?

I’m a woman who’s established her life, only to watch it crumble. I have a daughter. Love, for me, is nothing new. I’ve passed through this experience so much earlier than him… At a place where Nuran might have found a thousand pleasures, she only met with affliction.

Am I to once more pass over roads that I’ve already traveled? Is there torment greater than this? Why are men so selfish? Why is it that they think we women are as free as them? And she absolutely had to get new shoes. These heels were so cumbersome that they made her look like the dotty teachers back at the girls’ academy. These shoes were only good for an address on women’s rights at a protest rally. Not the shoes themselves of course… It was evident that shoes couldn’t speak… How could he possibly find me attractive and elegant in these?

The girl yesterday morning on the ferry, her lips were as red as pomegranate blossoms, and she faced Mümtaz perpetually. Even I, from where I sat, could see the invitation on her lips, and I grew anxious for her sake. He, however, from his vantage point, strained to see me. He had such a peculiar way of stretching his neck. It was so unbecoming… She wanted to say to him, “All right then, move along now, let’s go our separate ways here… What need is there to insist upon this meaningless affair?” But she couldn’t manage it. She knew full well that he’d be miserably heartbroken. And she didn’t want to make him sad. Rather, she might, if she could console him by taking his head into her hands, if this were possible, she might do so simply to savor this pleasure. Because cruelty also had its pleasures. She sensed this within her now like an urge. Only temporarily, for a fleeting moment only, of course. Because she couldn’t endure too much of it; she wouldn’t want too much. It was part of her. And this being the case, she needed to feel happiness and torment together. Nuran would introduce all of it to him; because she was aware of this fact, she found herself strong and ever so powerful. Thus, her smile was as thin as a knife blade. Yet the anxiety within her continued to speak: Others who see us together, who knows what they’ll say? It’s so obvious that he’s inappropriately younger than me. . They’ll assume I’ve separated from Fâhir to be with him. I wasn’t even the one who separated from Fâhir. . He left. If only he’d just go away and let her be.

The Bosphorus ferry held crowds of another magnitude. This wasn’t a wealthy, luxurious pleasure ground where every feature was ordered and arranged by money, with wide roads of asphalt and ornamental flower beds like the island, which had emerged abruptly during Istanbul’s decline, in so short a time it might be termed a season. No, this was a venue that had lived shoulder to shoulder with Istanbul from the start, had seen its fortunes rise with the city’s, and had fallen on hard times when the city lost its ways and means, a venue that withdrew into itself when the city changed its predilections, conserving as much as possible the bygone trends in which it had participated; in short, this was a venue that had experienced an entire culture like a single-minded venture.

In Mümtaz’s estimation, one did become somewhat anonymous on the island. That was a place for rather conventional people; one longed for what was actually inessential there, at least for what alienated one from oneself and in the process prevented one from standing on terra firma. On the Bosphorus, in contrast, everything summoned one inward, and plummeted one into one’s own depths. Here everything belonged to us, those facets that governed the grand synthesis, including the panorama and the architecture, as temporal as it was… those facets that we founded and subsequently came into being along with us. This was a realm of squat-minareted and smallmosqued villages whose lime-washed walls defined Istanbul neighborhoods; a realm of sprawling cemeteries that at times dominated a panorama from edge to edge; a realm of fountains with broken ornamental fascia whose long-dry spouts nevertheless provided a cooling tonic; a realm of large Bosphorus residences, of wooden dervish houses in whose courtyards goats now grazed, of quayside coffeehouses, the shouts of whose apprentice waiters mingled into the otherworld of Istanbul ramadans like a salutation from the mortal world, of public squares filled with the memories of bygone wrestling matches with drums and shrill pipes and contenders bedecked in outfits like national holiday costumes, of enormous chinar trees, of overcast evenings, of eerie and emotive echoes and of daybreaks during which nymphs of dawn bore torches aloft, hovering in mother-of-pearl visions reflected in mirrors of the metaphysical.

Besides, everything on the Bosphorus was a reflection. Light was reflection, sound was reflection; sporadically, here, one might become the echo of an array of things unbeknownst to oneself.

Whenever Mümtaz lent an ear to his early childhood memories and listened to the echoes of the ferry horns that reached him after ricocheting from the surrounding hilltops, he might discern from which wellsprings the incurable hüzün within him sometimes rose and flowed forth and made him so opulent amid everyday routine.

The ferry gathered civil servants returning from their city jobs, sightseers, beachgoers, young students, military officers, elderly women, and congregants on deck, the remorse of whose lives, and the day’s fatigue, dripping from their faces, intentionally or not, seemed to surrender to this waning evening hour. Like the potter described by Omar Khayyám, the evening took up all those heads and worked them from the inside and outside, transfigured their lines, painted them, varnished and shellacked them, made their eyes dreamier, softened their lips, and filled their stares with renewed glimmers of yearning and hope. They came to the center of this radiance as themselves, but, as if fallen into the midst of sorcery, they changed with the transformations of light. Intermittently, a guffaw verging on the obnoxious rose from the center of a group; in the distance, all the way at the bow, well-to-do children raised along the Bosphorus played harmonicas and sang songs in callow voices; and passengers who’d grown accustomed to commuting together called out to one another. These were passing interruptions, however. Quiescence, rather resembling expectation, expanded again — its arboreal growth and boundless leaves beshrouding all.

The roots of this tree that traced a bright crimson arc amid the gilded design of a finely wrought Herat bookbinding on the horizon lay in the sun, illuminating golden arabesques in increasing prominence, melding them anew each moment and recasting them in accordance with their own phantasies. From there, the tree flourished branch by branch. Through its radiance, Nuran had become a fruit of arboreal silence, with her stony expression, her small, protruding chin ready to reject him, her narrowed eyes, and her hands clenching her purse.

“So much so that you seem like you’re drooping from the boughs of the evening… As soon as the light has faded fully, I fear you might fall to the ground.”

“In that case, the night will gather all of us at once… Because you’re in the same state.” And that’s just what happened. Even before reaching Üsküdar, the roses dusk had cast hither and yond faded and the sea grew winedark. The large bound tome with Herat gilding was now a deep magenta cloud fragment. On the tips of distant minarets stirred one or two flights of whiteness like belated birds. The wave of illumination that had engulfed the opposite shore sprawled like the last reverberations of a score of Ottoman music.