Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

Amid the debate that raged within her, Nuran observed her life and surroundings through new eyes, realizing how this bizarre family legacy regulated her private life and how her great-grandmother’s gravity ruled her. Not just her, the entire family. A bygone venture in love, a date torn from the calendar guided them all, preparing individual sorrows for them and their acquaintances in accordance with each of their dispositions. It was her turn. Hers and Mümtaz’s! Their shadows would flit and dart inside the golden cage that was the “Song in Mahur.”

Nuran knew that she’d pay a visit to Mümtaz from the first day. Not because an available young gentleman had invited her. Mümtaz’s voice by itself was inadequate to the task. An entire heredity, which made this love her singular fate, drove her there. Others had hollowed out their lives running away from it. Nuran’s mother had been this way. Not once in her life did she laugh openly, acknowledge an innuendo freely, or expose her feelings; she hadn’t even once kissed her children passionately. “Above all, a woman should know how to restrain herself, darling!” It was the first piece of advice she’d heard from her mother, who’d involuntarily always been cruel and had verged on oppressing her father — who loved her dearly and had to feel emotion to know he was alive. Her uncle Tevfik’s petulance arose on account of her mother. And the inappropriate affections Tevfik’s son Yaşar harbored for Nuran — so disquieting under the same roof — again were of the same origin. Nuran, too, had grown up with fear. Out of a coterie of young suitors that she could have loved, she’d married Fâhir, whom she knew she’d be able to love under the assumption that they’d somehow manage through the foundation of a good friendship. And her daughter, Fatma, even now, prepared for a similar fate. Her overzealous dependency on Fâhir and Nuran, the sensitivity and jealousy, were all traces of a legacy, an overwhelming burden that Fatma bore, too. It was anyone’s guess how miserable Fatma would become. Nuran, perfectly aware of this, took it all into consideration. Yet she also accepted life as it was. Because life could afflict one if it so desired. After Talât’s ordeal, a peculiar fanaticism against divorces seized the entire family. Nothing was considered as disgraceful as divorce. For this reason, most of the bridegrooms who’d married into the family began gallivanting and misbehaving, because they knew up front that their indiscretions would be forgiven. Some even left wives wanting for a scrap of stale bread. This zealotry took hold not only among the women but among the men as well. Tevfik lived with a woman who openly despised him, her husband of thirty years, because she considered him to be more attractive than her. Despite all of this, you see, Nuran divorced Fâhir. The first instance of divorce in sixty years had been enacted by Nuran. But this legacy, or social etiquette, didn’t exist only in their household. There were various martyrs in every branch of this sprawling family: Behçet, Atiye, Dr. Refik, and Salahaddin Reşit, who’d met his demise in Medina, among them.

Nuran politely listened to this harsh tirade within herself for three days. On the evening of the third day, after concluding, I’m not obligated to give an account of my actions to anyone! she called Mümtaz. And the next morning, so as not to keep him waiting, she left the house at an early hour. In the end, Eros, like Thanatos, was one of the formative forces of life. On the way there, amid visions of Mümtaz, she began to murmur the “Song in Mahur”:

And you left even my soul full of yearning. .

Recollecting the song’s ill fortune, however, she didn’t continue on to the second verse. She even forewent singing the middle part and the refrain, which she so loved. At the ferry landing, a petite, muddy-faced street waif approached. She wore a filthy, torn print dress and stretched out her hand like a wooden spoon spattered with drying food. Piping, “May Allah bless your beloved!” the urchin asked for change. As Nuran opened her purse, she thought, I wonder if everyone can read where I’m going from my face? She verged on tears. She was in the midst of doing something she hadn’t done in her adolescence or youth. Should I return? she thought, roaming before the ticket window. But love tempted her through the mystery of the unknown. “I’ve bought some new Debussy. You have to come…” he’d said on the telephone. To admire Debussy and Wagner yet to live the “Song in Mahur” was the fate of being a Turk. As she waited for the ferry, she recalled what İclâl had imparted to her that night after she’d parted from Mümtaz. “If he’d let himself relax, he could be a lot of fun, because he’s likable. But he seems to jumble and confuse everything together: love, art, history, and physical pleasure! He could only be enamored of a woman like you.” So, then, İclâl had sensed this as well. As Nuran waited, she gauged her impatience. Is it because I’m bored that I’m doing this? Or is it only a matter of physical desire? But she couldn’t recall being bored at any moment since they’d met. She was comfortable, completely at ease. As she boarded the ferry, she thought, Come what may, I won’t be defeated by myself! And only by dint of this resolve did she smile at love and the image of Mümtaz.

She gazed out the window at Akıntıburnu. Here and there hovered slight patches of mist. But the Bosphorus slid by like a soaring bird. She watched the elation of waters beneath vernal sunlight. I’m so reckless! The whole family’s foolhardy! Great-grandmother and great-granddaughter, we’ve fallen for two jesters, two aimless men. One can structure life through one’s volition…

For Mümtaz, the day delivered delicacies he’d never before tasted. For the first time in his life, a woman revealed the mystique of her intimacy to him. She was neither a goddess nor just any creature with a passion for the tryst. She relinquished all of herself, surrendered the measure of her essence like a garden, to the mate her body had chosen, and laid bare her every secret and potential with a “there you have it, this is who I am…” Still, what she was, this self, constituted a realm opulent and exceptional — how many would die without discovering such sublimity. Neither undersea treasures nor the opulence of fables could have been so extensive and astounding. Later Mümtaz would frequently recall when he first caught sight of her stark-naked figure in the twilight of the tightly shuttered room. She delivered starlight and the sparkle of bejeweled affluence. This bacchanal of light, both its eulogy and its worship, was constituted by moments of bedazzlement and blaze in which the fire stirred and leapt into flames a thousand times over from its own ashes. It was a Mi’raj of Harmony made by the corporeal in concert with the soul — such that one sensed the ascension without being cognizant of the heavens to be attained.

When Mümtaz gazed upon his inamorata, he’d invariably think of this day, and ponder at length which of the forces of fate had united them.

He wondered where and in which unfathomable depths it had been conjured: all decency, beauty, and simple essence, the soft suppleness of skin, the heavy breathing summoning arcana from the occult of genesis concealed in her body, and her physical presence in its substantiation cascading toward him from the darkness of mysteries; now tenderness, now caress, now stupor like another simulacrum of death, and then facets that were the pleasure and elation of resuscitation and resurrection under the orient of the sun; that is to say, contractions, spasms, and depletions that resembled the self-worship of her being in the Mihrab of the Sun. These profound unions, and upon their release the wellspring of yearning, couldn’t be contained by a single existence alone. They could only be the result of forces conjured in a remote and dark epoch before human cognizance or even existence. Nature on its own couldn’t achieve this intimacy. Happenstance alone wasn’t enough to enable the discovery of another within one with such impact.