Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

“You mean, like an odalisque, is that so? You know, the kind painted by Matissse?” And she shook her head as she laughed. “No, thanks. I’m Nuran. I live in Kandilli, in the year 1938 and I wear more or less the fashions of my day. I have no desire to change my style or my identity. I’m not in a state of despair, not to mention that these mirrors give me a feeling of the forlorn.”

Despite this, she didn’t want to leave. As she wandered the lodge, she acquired a taste for its pleasures. Here existed the beauty of simplicity. It wasn’t overwrought with excess and opulence like the châteaux at which she gazed in photographs in L’Ilustracion or English magazines. This was an abode of integrity. It was as overwhleming as the colors of an Indian sari, ornate and shimmering with unrefined gems, or the songs taught to her by her father… and she heard the remorse of those songs within herself.

They stepped outside. “What shall we do now?” said İclâl.

“We’ll go home. This man overcome with despair will accompany us as far as the hill. As a reward for troubling him so, we’ll give him a little sustenance. He might have been dying of hunger over the last five days. Afterward, if he so desires, he can continue his blockade of the landing.”

As she spoke, she watched Mümtaz’s expression, feeling viscerally the heat of the moment when they had kissed before a tarnished mirror awhile beforehand. Within the waters of the mirror — in whose depths slept reflections of the lives of hundreds of people she’d never known or seen — their heads and hands had unexpectedly united. So abruptly that it had startled them both. And Nuran’s jubilation arose somewhat from the desire to conceal this astonishment.

Almost no further conversation passed in the caïque. Mümtaz’s feet rested in the hole at the stern as he skippered the motor. The Bosphorus was enveloped in dense silence, a quiet that seemed to embalm them. Instead of being engulfed by the setting sun, these three apparitions were wrapped in golden, honey yellow, and purple ribbons. Nuran disrupted the serenity first, perhaps aware of how brazen she actually was. Or maybe she wanted to further plumb the depths of the man who was attracted to her. “Honestly, you don’t have any aspirations to accomplish anything grand?”

“Not grand… but you know I have a job. I do that, nothing more.”

He was intimidated by greatness. That was something quite sinister. Because more often than not it occurred by stepping beyond the bounds of life. Or else one lost the capacity for freedom of thought, becoming the plaything of historical events.

“In that case, one gets lost in the tangled web of one’s own self or of events. In reality, in this concert performance of sorts there’s nothing grand or trivial. There’s only everything and everyone… just like the current surroundings in which we find ourselves. Which of these waves or reflections of light could you dispense with? They glow and die out on their own… They come and go, the loom weaves continuously. But why is it that you seek greatness and not just satisfaction?”

Nuran’s response surprised him: “People are more comfortable engaging in such pursuits.”

“But, then, those around them become more uncomfortable!” said Mümtaz.

They pressed onward, to where the Bosphorus met the Black Sea, taking in the nightfall to its fullest extent. İclâl had sunk into daydreams. A house of her own, work, considerable work, responsibility, accounting, long waits, children’s clothes, food and meals… From time to time she’d escape them all to contemplate Muazzez. Nuran and Mümtaz were involved. She’d gathered this much. Would she reveal this to Muazzez? Her good friend might actually harbor a fondness for Mümtaz. The only place she herself could permit such affections was in her soul, filled only with the lives of others… No, I can’t tell her anything! But the news was exceptional. For once in my life I’d have outdone her with this tidbit.

That night Mümtaz wasn’t able to lay eyes on Nuran’s house, which he’d so often conjured in his mind’s eye. On the walk back, Nuran, taking advantage of İclâl’s fiddling with her shoe, had discreetly conveyed to Mümtaz that it wouldn’t be fitting for him to come to the house. Her earlier boldness vanished when they entered her neighborhood.

“I’ll phone and come pay a visit,” she said. But to stay with him a while longer, she suggested he accompany her to the pistachio trees, where they waited together for night to descend fully. There, Mümtaz listened once more to Nuran’s rendition of Talât’s remorseful “Song in Mahur,” along with a piece by İsmail Dede Efendi in the Sultanîyegâh makam.

Nuran arrived on the appointed day. Mümtaz recalled that day many times afterward. Its memory was both a dagger twisted into his chest as well as a garden of the purest gold. He hadn’t forgotten a single detail. During days of torment, or times he noticed Nuran’s indifference toward him, one by one he’d recount these details, reliving them.

Till then he’d only regarded Nuran from a distance as an alluring apparition. But from the moment she’d whispered into his ear on the road, “Don’t come now, I’ll phone and pay a visit,” this alluring apparition, this creature of distances had suddenly transfigured. As if these words, percolated into his ear, were an occult spell, feelings that had a second beforehand functioned solely to embellish, deepen, and enrich each passing moment abruptly assumed the force of fiery humors.

Until that moment, the young man was satisfied simply by the presence of this beautiful woman, and when she departed, melancholy descended over him, yet he couldn’t imagine her as a part of his life. His feelings for her had only recently met with the catalyst of his imagination. These feelings amounted to elegant phantasies, trivial infatuations, posturings, and passing lusts. And a relationship could be established, one could love and go his separate way like this. Encounters of this variety included eating a table d’hôte meal, sleeping in rooms of the same hotel, traveling together by car, or laughing and being amused by a play or film.

Mümtaz had had his share of these types of relations. But everything had changed the moment he’d felt Nuran’s face and lips pressed to his ear and, in such proximity, sensed her voice inflected by desire. From that moment onward, his imagination blazed. That large and astonishing forge, each second and within his very person, fired and produced an array of semblances of Nuran. These spasms amounted to a process of discovering himself within a state of shock or a new order and harmony.

Nuran’s breath surging through his veins ushered in a chain of balmy, redolent springs; desire and lust for life flowed from him toward her, like herds of thirsty animals migrating to cool springs in midafter-noon swelter.

Harboring the mystery of existence, organelles whose very presence was beyond doubt had come alive within the body. Mümtaz, respresenting an iota of being, now felt himself to be as vast and infinite as all Creation. Through Nuran’s presence he’d discovered his own existence.

He lived in a universe made up of an array of mirrors, and in each he saw another Nuran who constituted but another facet of himself. The trees, the water, the light, the wind, Bosphorus villages, old make-believe masal s, the books he read, the roads he wandered, the friends with whom he spoke, the covey of pigeons that fluttered above him, the buzzing summer insects whose bodies, colors, and life cycles mystified him were all manifestations emanating from Nuran. It all belonged to her. In fact, he languished under the sway of a spell conjured by his being and his imagination. Simply because that bewildering and opulent feminine creature, that profound nature so different from man, had momentarily transferred the heat of her being through his ear.