Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

Bizarre visions plagued him through the night. He was to marry Nuran. Such a love couldn’t just be left to chance. Mentally, he prepared his house. He sought out additional means of support. Finally, when on the verge of completing a long European travel itinerary, his eyes closed in Norway to apparitions of them arm in arm, watching the Mi’raj of Light in a fjord. But were they actually in Norway or in another spot in the world? Moreover, it seemed to him that they were passing by Anadoluhisarı on the Bosphorus, and he jerked awake in uncertainty. After that, he slept through a chain of similar fitful spells of lost consciousness. Nuran’s face, her smile, or unforgettable aspects of her mannerisms disrupted the nuances of a new dream, at which point Mümtaz would shudder awake, and the phantasies that he’d conjured in his previous interlude of wakefulness persisted. In this fashion, he passed the night living a novel that paralleled his own life.

Unable to keep still, he rose at whiles, roamed about the room, smoked a cigarette, or read a page or two of a book. Then he’d get back into bed and try to sleep. Soon the same apparition appeared before his eyes with the same clarity, breaking the flow of the dream that he couldn’t comprehend, and Nuran would emerge abruptly from the downstairs foyer mirror, or the plum tree in the yard would assume her form, or he’d encounter her in one of the rooms of his childhood and when her face assumed its full definitiveness, he’d find himself awake in his bed with the following thought: Tomorrow she will come…

Before then Mümtaz hadn’t fully savored the magic of the word tomorrow. His life had only passed in present days. After the serious illness he’d suffered while a student at Galatasaray, thoughts of the past that had poisoned his childhood had diminished. Now, the word sparkled like a jewel within him: Tomorrow. Mümtaz sensed a spiritual opulence within, as if the sun, a golden egg within his own self, would bring creation itself to light from his own being…

Tomorrow… an astounding, enchanted portal. A gateway that opened onto age twenty-seven, upon whose threshold he slept tonight. No wonder he was so frantic. For behind this door also loomed Nuran. She possessed both mysterious and familiar allures… a gentle voice, a warm laugh, and other aspects whose elixir she dispensed at will — one as scarlet as murder, as searing as fire, and, oddly, as soul-stirring as light cascading from multicolored panes along with Koranic chants in ancient mosques. Beyond that was her life, into whose intimacy he desired access, his existence poised to merge with hers. The breezes of how many mountaintops, the waters of how many rivers and springs, how much longing and eternity would thereby achieve a union complete?

He could withstand it no more. As if he didn’t want to miss a second of this vast and peerless tomorrow, he sprung from bed. He opened the balcony door; dawn had broken. Fog covered all. Creation was yet working the loom of genesis within the pearl of time. Only the opposite hilltops — removed from actual realities as hermetic forms and giving the sensation, as one gazed, that they might reveal the secret cipher of the origins of all things — floated above this shroud of icy sparkle like a phantom ship. Farther in the distance, a cluster of trees shimmered with more grace and flourish than they actually bore under the first shafts of sunlight that managed to reach them through an atmosphere thick with humidity.

But the Bosphorus remained hidden. It flowed quietly beneath a thick foglike shroud of genesis. Toward the seafront of the village of Beykoz, this shroud accumulated more density.

By the time he sauntered down to the ferry landing, it was at least seven o’clock. The proprietor of the teahouse waited until the sun made its full appearance before setting out tables and chairs. The seawaters were crystal clear. In places within the sea, whorls of light that resembled the memory of color more than color per se constituted a realm of unadulterated, crystalline essence.

Into this twilight world a crimson motorboat, whose flat stern indicated that it had been made in Sürmene on the Black Sea, appeared unexpectedly before him only to vanish within a sense of detachment caused by having issued from the indeterminate. Calmly, the phantom of a more fantastic, narrower-hulled caïque followed in its wake as if it were a manifestation of spirit in a world of ideal forms. Like all phantasms and ideas born of the moment, they appeared ephemerally, then, as if the celluloid of the mind had snapped to be spliced elsewhere, another snippet began to play. Most disconcerting of all was the commencement and cessation of voice and sound.

Mümtaz strolled until he reached Boyacıköy. There he sat at a small seaside fishermen’s coffeehouse. The view before him dilated or contracted depending on the direction he walked. In this miraculous play of light, rowboats, motorboats, and fishermen’s caïques full of lobster traps, each had surprising qualities based on their distance from him. One or two neighborhood youths and a few fishermen lolled about the coffeehouse. Mümtaz went to one of them, requesting that he inform Mehmet of his arrival. Then they began talking about this and that. Mümtaz’s impatience, however, prevented his remaining in one place for too long. Nuran was en route. This idea stupefied him. He could only take his thoughts to this threshold. But as soon as he arrived there, he shuddered as if an abyss yawned at his feet.

He remained in ignorance of what lay beyond. What lay beyond was a radiant chasm where colors seemed to meld, into whose aurora he and Nuran vanished.

At such a moment so personal and particular to him, Mümtaz was surprised to be engaged in everyday conversation with others. Stranger still, no one sensed this state of exception in him. All the characters remained the same. Grinning, the old coffeehouse proprietor was pleased at having overcome the sciatica that had afflicted him last winter while fishing for swordfish. His apprentice must have made up with his lover, Anahit — who’d made a custom of returning to her beloved after lengthy breakups spent recuperating from the fatigues of love — judging by the way he swayed afoot sleeplessly and wearily, like a rudderless boat without sail, lost in the mists of last night’s bedroom pleasures, which had yet to dissipate. A pair of fishermen mended a net heaped like a mysterious sea creature, crouching before cork buoys and blackened ropes. All about them, seaweed, shellfish, and the briny tang of the deep sea grew thick. Each member of the group posed questions to Mümtaz and listened to his answers. But none of them knew what he thought. Maybe they were aware of it, but they gave it no import. For him to have a woman, to be loved by a woman, was such a natural occurrence that had begun hundreds of thousands of years before him. Though, like death and affliction, it happened only when it was felt in one’s own person… and perhaps because of this, it also served to alienate him from the surroundings.

Amid these thoughts, Mümtaz looked at Sadık from Rize, Remzi from Giresun, Arab Nuri, who was the seventh generation from Hisarlı, and Yani from Bebek. All were products of this experience: these wizened faces and calloused hands, these men who appeared to know nothing but the sea, fish, waves, sails, and nets, with him standing beside them — a youth with the countenance of Andrea del Sarto’s black-haired, Renaissance Madonnas, a youth whose swimming trunks were wound scarflike around his neck. They’d all either had the experience or were preparing to have it.

Oddly enough, despite the same mechanisms churning within them, they were oblivious to the very aspect of Mümtaz to which they could most relate. No, sitting and talking to them was futile. These men were his friends. Like this coffee-house, these nets, these masts leaning against the wall, the mosque up ahead, and the fountain, they were all his friends, including even the black, curly-coated puppy that waited for him each morning at the landing and followed him here, and might even accompany him all the way back to the house. Yet today, Mümtaz was alone in his joy and this would always be the case. In the future, he’d be alone in his misery, nothing but a riddle, a mystery to his friends and acquaintances. Or else he’d become nothing but a lone cipher flung to life’s periphery, and on another day, when he died, he’d die in the same fashion, alone.