Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

He rose slowly. He entered the sea from a rowboat at the dock. The fog persisted, though not as thickly; light shone as if distilled through a pearl-hued alembic. Cold salt water washed away the fatigue of a night poorly slept. In a friend’s rowboat, without a thought for whom he’d donned the regalia of fleeting thoughts or rather apprehension, he went as far as the Emirgân ferry landing. And later, with his wet trunks in hand and the black-furred pup behind him, he walked home. The puppy was beside itself, overjoyed by this friendship; it not only traced circles around Mümtaz but made strange barks, small yelps, and growls as it loped along. At least he knows how to express his joy. Humanity couldn’t be fully content; this was impossible. What with thought, settling accounts, and anxiety. Especially anxiety. Humans are creatures of anxiety and fear. What great miracle could save us from this fear? But at the moment Mümtaz was simply full of bliss. Even if it came amid a host of thoughts and experiences that weren’t his own, he was blissful. Yet, in the middle of the hill, he was lanced by dread. The scales of the balance suddenly tipped in the opposite direction: What if she doesn’t come. . or if her visit isn’t fulfilled. .

Opening the door, he invited the dog inside. The animal didn’t enter. He’d only once satisfied himself by being a guest in this house for three days. Then he’d reclaimed his freedom and gone back to the hollow at the base of the large chinar where he’d come into the world. He preferred to wait there for Mümtaz and to accompany him on walks.

And now it was outside, two paws on the threshold, wagging its tail, cocking its ears, asking to be played with a little or spoken to. Mümtaz had no choice but to go inside, leaving the door open. The dog placed its head on the threshold like a bygone lover of a traditional romance and stretched out before the door. Friendly peeps and growls emanated from its throat, and its eyes languished in the anticipated pleasure of reunion.

Nuran arrived amid such commonplaces. By the time she’d come, the dog had long gone. Mümtaz, distraught with impatience, waited for her before the door wearing his blue shirt and wrinkled pants. From the hill, she entered through the door breathlessly.

“Allah! What a steep hill,” she said.

She’d debated with herself for three days. She believed that the whole affair was quite unnecessary; distressed, she worried about where this step might land her. She was standing before a shroud of mystery. Should she draw it open, the universe would become a muddle. She acknowledged an attraction to Mümtaz. Something within her, which she liked to think was novel, awakening to the boundlessness of indeterminate hopes, to the warmth of presence in life, persisted in drawing her to him. Despite this, at the same time, she’d been hampered by an array of obstacles.

Over this three-day period, the specter of her great-grandmother never left her. The lady in the faint daguerreotype that she’d discovered in the old hope chest when still a little girl; the lady with her long white cloak and semitransparent veil-cloth, with her pallid, moonlight-hued face, and the eyes of a gazelle startled at the edge of a precipice; the lady who inspired in her such mysterious desires, who’d cultivated the pleasures of time past, and who’d turned traditional music and song into a veritable clime wherein Nuran could thrive, now attempted to deny her the measure of her intimate life. Seemingly, this faded picture incessantly came alive saying, “I was the object of much affection, and that’s what led to my ruin. Because I loved and was loved, all those who depended upon me were condemned to misery. With one of your closest relatives as such an object lesson, how do you dare?”

Yet, it wasn’t only her great-grandmother’s voice or presence that spoke to Nuran. A secondary, deeper and more complex voice emanated from the depths. And this second voice addressed Nuran’s heart and soul. It spoke through the cacophony of the treacherous awakenings of her heart and soul. This was the sound of the mixture of bloodlines coursing through her veins. Sacrificing everything at once for the sake of love and desire, the lifeblood of her great-grandmother Nurhayat — charging at full gallop — and the lifeblood of her great-grandfather Talât, prepared to burn in Eros’s forge like an object of sacrifice; and later still, her father’s lifeblood mixing in with these two, which, after ripening through thousands of manly exploits in Ottoman borderlands, in the Balkans, along the shores of the Black Sea, and stunned at having unexpectedly landed in Istanbul during the Crimean War, exchanging struggles in the name of freedom for a demure and diminished existence, his lifeblood becoming the willing captive of the sybaritic pleasures of ages; all of it constituted an exceptional, rather rarefied admixture. In one strain, purity of adventure; in another, purity of resignation, compliance, and subservience. That second voice articulating itself within Nuran in myriad accents was nothing but the voice of this mixed bloodline. Nuran carried this blood within herself for years like a pernicious legacy, trying to restrain and reject it. But on the second encounter with Mümtaz on the island ferry, she simply surrendered, for fearing something resembled the expectation of its arrival. Perhaps Nuran had enabled the awakening of this legacy within her through her own inner fear. That’s why she’d made a throaty recital of the “Song in Mahur” for Mümtaz on the ferry after his initial request, without even eliciting so much as a “please” from him! — shameless! — and she’d furthermore sung that song in the Sultanîyegâh makam on the hilltops of Kandilli. This blood was a strange brew. It’d been beaten to froth by the odd whisk of that musical genre known as a la turca.

The “Song in Mahur” — a family heirloom with its periodic turpitude and keepsakes of cruelty, with its torments resembling the return to a primordial, primitive state of sorts — created an abyss through twin legacies, an abyss now yawning within her and summoning her. When Nuran pondered her great-grandmother’s life, how astonishing it was indeed that the lady who’d provided her with such models of etiquette spoke in a completely different idiom whenever Nuran evoked this song, after which, from the small and faint, austere picture in its chipped, gilded frame, this matron now glared at her life with eyes of rebuke, and passionately overwhelmed like an autumn prepared for burial beneath brittle leaves before the image of her existence, she abruptly cast off her former penitence, resuscitated by the semiferal beauty recounted by the elderly ladies amongst whom Nuran was raised, to begin an eternal fire dance in the furnace of her affections and lust for life. “Join in!” she demanded. “Join in the steeplechase, burn and live! Because love is the perfect form of existence…” Even more astounding, her great-grandfather with his downtrodden and subjugated spirit accompanied Nurhayat in this fire dance, an all but primitive rite, and was prepared to again endure all his suffering. Indeed, he didn’t speak deliriously and desirously through a bewitching aura like Nurhayat, and he couldn’t perform the fire dance with the same agility. He, however, stoked the fires with his own torment like a sappy, greasy log smoldering in a hearth of anguish. “Seeing as you bear my blood, you too shall love and suffer one way or another! Don’t try to deliver yourself from fate in vain!” And he went even further, asking: “Haven’t you waited your entire life for this?” These were two people who knew nothing of decorum! “I’ve come here all the way from Hell’s half acre to burn in this fire! I’ve been cast about by countless winds. I’ve dried off beneath sunlight on nameless shores…” And as Nuran listened, she remembered what Mümtaz had told her under the tree in Emirgân, that his fate seemed to have ordained everything beforehand. “Who knows,” he’d said. “Maybe because I denied everything from the past during my childhood, I cherish the past now. Or else there might be a different reason. We were peasants three generations ago. We’re completing a process of acculturation. My mother used to like music in the old style. My father, on the other hand, understood nothing of it. I could say that İhsan is something of an expert in music. I, on the other hand, have included it in my life. Hasn’t it been this way throughout history? Yes, perhaps I’m living the fate of a people. Do you want to know what I really think? Until our music changes organically on its own, our station in life won’t change. Because it’s impossible for us to forget it… Until it transforms, our singular fate will be the fate of love!” When she heard this, Nuran had grown annoyed with him, because, staring into her eyes, he’d spoken of love while in İclâl’s company. But, now, she understood him. She saw a figure much like her great-grandfather in Mümtaz. He’d also uprooted himself and come here for the sake of searing experience.