Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

“You’ll be spending the evening with us, isn’t that so, my dear sister?”

Pleased at having lopped eight or ten years off her own age through her use of the word “sister,” Adile awaited Nuran’s answer. Nuran tried to explain that she’d only planned to stop in for a short visit and that she had to leave but neither Adile nor Sabih was having any of it.

“In any case, you and Mümtaz are friends from over Bosphorus seas. Even if you’re going to leave, you’ll leave late. Let’s have a rakı .”

“It’d be better for us to leave early. İclâl and friends will be coming by tomorrow…”

Only after he’d received assurances that they wouldn’t go did Sabih begin to delve into his repertoire about recent developments in Germany: In his good opinion, the German economy was in shambles. War was a forgone conclusion. Yet his austere and perhaps truthful judgments depended upon such long-winded proofs arrived at by such convoluted means!

Excursuses gaped open like large cisterns or grottos; then he’d start again from the very beginning, making analogies and comparisons and sketches of contrasting situations in the air. Opposite Sabih, Mümtaz took the only precaution available to keep the monologue as short as possible: he neither asked questions nor responded, but only made occasional nods of agreement and waited like one beneath eaves during a downpour. These eaves might at times be Nuran’s pearls crossing the small indentation at her throat called the Bosphorus, or the cleft in her chin, which he so admired, or at times the puerile gestures and hesitations of her hands. He couldn’t fathom how a creature of such beauty had entered his life, and in this regard he had no faith in fortune. He listened to Sabih for hours as he sat in a state of enchantment brought on by the bashful, staccato laughter that transfigured Nuran’s face into a rose blossom beneath water.

In Mümtaz’s esteem, Sabih was like the flailing tail-end of that baffling and fabled creature the newspapers called public opinion, hydra-headed vox populi whose actual number of minds remained a mystery. He understood that one lived through current events. Like a boulder washed by waves, he was content as long as he could feel events passing over him. Sabih had no need for an idea of his own; there was always the newspaper. Genera of papers constituted both his ship and his seas, both his compass and his captain. Excluding an occasional change in temperament, he seemed to issue hot off the press along with the editions and extras he read each day. Yet, as he spoke, associations multiplied, memories deepened, and ultimately he’d mutate into a beast of four or five ideas at once. Tonight was such a night. To begin with, he was a democrat, next he became a very fiery revolutionary. Then he sank into boundless love for humanity and, finally, into the austere need for law and order.

Thank goodness for Adile. A number of items needed to be fetched from the shops. The maid was off and the doorman was ill.

Amid these tirades and the delicious reveries of Nuran that greeted him, Mümtaz surreptitiously wondered how Adile would upset Nuran’s pleasure, what details she’d impart, which relic of bygone days she’d uncover; in short, the type of impasses she’d point out to forestall their love. He knew that Adile didn’t much care for Nuran in light of her open fraternizing with Mümtaz on the island ferry, her gracious manner with the young lady notwithstanding. A few days after that chance encounter, in the coffee-house they’d entered upon Sabih’s insistence, she’d said, “You have no idea, Mümtaz, what a heartless woman she is. Heartless and cruel…” Adile knew quite well how worldly Nuran was and with what constant lack of means she’d walled off the will of her heart. Back then Mümtaz had ignored this broadside attack and changed the subject. What Mümtaz wondered now was how this woman, who only concerned herself with her milieu, would try to disturb their peace.

Adile didn’t keep Mümtaz waiting long. With a wave of sincerity that gathered momentum with the second glass, she first praised Nuran’s beauty then described the automobile of a girlhood friend, her fur coat, and the evening banquets she hosted at her house. Finally, when her heart had drained itself of compassion, she revealed her sincere hopes for Nuran. From that mysterious wellspring called fate, she wished for everything that Mümtaz couldn’t possibly provide: ermine furs, jewelry, rubies, and the most luxurious automobiles passed before Nuran’s eyes, astonished by the abundance, as Adile concluded: “ Vallahi! Honestly, my dear Nuran, when I think about all that you suffer to keep an ill child from being distraught! I could never display such patience. You realize these are your best years… D’you have any idea what it’s like from here on out?”

In this manner, after listing all of life’s possibilities to Nuran, she’d reminded her, by mentioning Fatma’s illness, that her actual duty was to maternal concerns, before advising her, despite everything, to live her life to the fullest. Only one possible meaning could be deduced from this advice. Had Nuran perchance understood? “Either be the mother of your daughter, or arrange a good future for yourself. You’re wasting time with this buffoon.” Even if she had, she wouldn’t have let on.

Doubtless, Adile wouldn’t content herself with such subtle innuendo alone; she’d also make assaults of broader scope. But, two belated guests changed the composition of the night: a friend of Nuran’s father who’d given her tanbur -lute lessons at one time and a neighborhood friend of Sabih’s, a musician who’d be staying the night. With their arrival, the evening became a song-and-drink revelry.

Since Nuran couldn’t possibly oppose the insistence of her former mentor, she resigned herself to this new turn.

Though the musicians greatly admired a la turca music, they rarely ventured beyond the makam s of the Ferahfezâ, the Acemaşiran, the Beyatî, the Sultanîyegâh, the Nühüft, and the Mahur, which were essentially climes of the soul… But within these makam s, they didn’t recite each piece simply as it was. According to Mümtaz, a la turca music resembled Ottoman classical poetry. In that case as well, one had to decide between genuine art and simple imitation. More precisely, pieces selected with today’s level of discernment, the criteria of Western tastes, could be deemed to be rather beautiful. In addition to these makam s, they played Hüseynî: a few works of Tab’î Mustafa Efendi’s caliber and some of İsmail Dede Efendi’s songs; in the Hicaz makam , they played Haji Halil Efendi’s famous semâi; and they considered Haji Arif’s two famous pieces and the Suzidilârâ makam , entwined with the fate of the modernizer Sultan Selim III, to represent a pinnacle.

These passions were rounded out by a few ecstatic pieces of rare vintage from the nineteenth-century reigns of Sultan Abdülmecit and Sultan Abdülaziz, saz semâi instrumentals, makam vocal medleys called kâr-ı nâtık , along with the works of present-day masters like Emin Dede, who kept alive the purest of classical tastes in the present like a belated spring or an exotic plant that adapted well to new soil. Mümtaz maintained that these works showed how classical Ottoman music merged with modern sensibilities and tastes. What he discovered in the old masters of schools of painting, considered to be “modern” now for the past fifty or sixty years, who were trained between 1400 and 1500, that is, a genuine innovation in aesthetics and sensibility, he also found in these musical genres, the beste, the semâi and the şarkı, and languid, gilded songs called kâr that resembled variegated and intricately carved wood ceilings or, rather, conjured Bosphorus panoramas as might be seen from sixteen-oared caïques, bejeweled and regal. In addition to these pieces, of course, there was the bark, the seed, the branch, and the tree roots; in other words, an entire assemblage of arboreal growth. Notwithstanding, what flourished here was the essential delicacy, the bloom of satisfaction, the absolute idea and the invigorating sap, the vision that was a rare vagary of chance, namely, the true reign, namely, the sultanate of the soul.