Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

At the threshold of this family tragedy, Mümtaz bid farewell to the woman facing him. Three children, a paralyzed husband… on a nurse’s wages. They lived in two rooms of a large house. Even their water vats were stored in the entryway, meaning they might not have use of a kitchen or toilet. The wooden house had been built by some wealthy Ottoman bureaucrat, finance minister, or provincial governor when marrying off his daughter. Despite its faded paint, the elegance of its construction was still evident through meticulously carved window casings, oriel windows, and eaves. Twin five-stepped staircases curved up to the entrance. On the right side stood the door to the coal cellar. But the owner had rented it to a coal merchant. Perhaps the kitchen was rented separately as well.

Loping and rumbling, the massive body of a coal-laden truck clogged the street.

Mümtaz veered into an alleyway…

He mused about the previous summer, how perhaps on one such day, he’d wandered these very streets with his beloved Nuran, strolling through the Koca Mustafa Pasha and Hekim Ali Pasha neighborhoods. Side by side in the heat, their bodies nearly entwined, wiping sweat from their foreheads, conversing all the while, they’d entered the courtyard of this very medrese or deciphered the Ottoman inscription on the fountain he’d now passed. One year ago. Mümtaz cast glances about as if seeking the shortest possible route to the previous year. He’d come as far as the Seven Martyrs beyond the city’s ancient land walls. The martyrs of Sultan Mehmed’s conquest slept side by side in small stone tombs. The street was dusty and narrow. Where the martyrs rested, however, it opened into a diminutive square. From the window of a two-story house, so run-down that it almost appeared — like those tiny sports cars — made of pasteboard, came the sounds of a tango, and in the middle of the street, dusty girls played a game. Mümtaz heard their song:

Raise the gate, toll keeper, toll keeper. What will you pay me to pass on through?

The girls were hale and hearty, but their clothes were in tatters. In a neighborhood where Hekimoǧlu Ali Pasha’s manor had stood at one time, these houses like remnants of life, these poor clothes, and this song brought strange thoughts to his mind. Nuran had certainly played this game in her childhood. And before that, her mother and her grandmother sang the same ditty while playing this game.

What should persist is this very song, our children’s growing up while singing this song and playing this game, not Hekimoǧlu Pasha himself or his manor or his neighborhood. Everything is subject to transformation; we can even foster such change through our own determination. What shouldn’t change are the things that structure social life, and mark it with our own stamp.

İhsan understood such things well. He’d once said, “Every lullaby holds the thoughts and dreams of a million children!” İhsan, however, lay bedridden. Furthermore, Nuran wanted nothing to do with him, and the headlines announced a tense state of foreign affairs. Since morning he’d been under the assault of forces he didn’t want to acknowledge, relegating them to a corner of his mind.

The poor girls played over a tinderbox. Still, the song was the same old song; life forged ahead even atop a powder keg.

He sauntered along, passing gradually from one thought to the next. He realized that he wouldn’t be able to find a nurse in these outskirts of the city. He’d forgotten about the last address in his hand. After following the lead, he’d phone a relative near the American Hospital before trying to look around there.

He plodded through decrepit, grim neighborhoods, passing before aged houses whose bleakness gave them the semblance of human faces. Throngs surrounded him, wearing expressions forlorn and sickly.

They were all downcast, anticipating what the impending apocalypse of tomorrow held in store for them.

If not for the disease… and what if he were drafted? What if he had to go and leave İhsan infirm like this?

Returning to the house, he found Macide asleep. İhsan’s breathing had steadied. The doctor had left good news in his wake. Ahmet was at his father’s bedside together with his grandmother Sabire. Curled up near her mother’s feet, Sabiha was truly asleep now.

Overwhelmed by an eerie quiet, he climbed the stairs to his room. He’d seen the characters that made up his entire circle, almost, for he’d had no news of Nuran. What was she doing? he wondered.

İhsan and his wife held vital places in Mümtaz’s upbringing. Following the deaths of both his father and mother within a span of just a few weeks, his cousin had raised him. Macide and İhsan; İhsan and Macide. Until he’d made Nuran’s acquaintance, his life had passed almost entirely between them. İhsan had been both a father and a mentor to him.

In France, where Mümtaz had been sent for two years about the time Macide had regained her health, his cousin’s influence persisted; in those new surroundings with so many temptations, he’d been spared initial experiences of decadence in part due to İhsan’s guidance, and thus hadn’t squandered his time.

Macide, meanwhile, had entered his life when he most needed a woman’s compassion and beauty’s counsel. When she came to mind, he’d muse, I’ve spent part of my youth beneath a spring bough. Thus, İhsan’s affliction had shaken this already troubled youth to his core. From the moment he’d heard the word “pneumonia” leave the doctor’s lips, he’d been living in a perplexing state of distress.

It wasn’t the first time Mümtaz had known such anguish. Anxiety in part constituted his inner self, that entity resting beneath the surface yet controlling everything. İhsan had strived to banish the serpent coiled within Mümtaz, and to extract its tree, whose roots extended into the boy’s heart. But it was essentially with Macide’s arrival that Mümtaz improved and turned to face the sun. Until he’d passed into her hands, Mümtaz was a creature of resentments, closed to the world, expecting nothing but calamity to fall from the skies — and rightly so.

After the Great War, during the armistice-era invasion of S. by Greece, a local Anatolian Greek, an adversary of the owner of the house where Mümtaz’s family lived, mistakenly shot his father instead of the landlord. The town verged on capture. Many Turkish families had already fled. Mümtaz’s ill-fated father had found conveyance for wife and son that same night. Their bags and belongings had been prepared. He’d spent the entire day in town arranging for the trip. A little after nightfall he’d returned home to say, “ Haydi! It’s all set! Let’s eat something, and we’ll be on the road within the hour. The routes are still open.” They ate on a cloth spread on the ground. There came a thump at the door. The servant informed them of someone waiting to see the man of the house. His father rushed to the door, assuming he’d receive details about the wagon he’d spent dawn till dusk procuring. Then they heard the report of a gun, a single, hollow shot without so much as an echo. The large man, one hand pressed over his abdomen, almost slithered back upstairs, collapsing in the hallway. It all lasted no more than five minutes. Neither mother nor child knew what words had been exchanged below or even who’d come. The shot was followed by the downhill patter of men running. While still numb with shock, they heard the sound of approaching artillery. Shortly, the neighbors arrived and an elder tried to pull them off the body, saying, “He’d always treated us with reverence. Let’s not leave him out in the open but bury him. He’s a martyr and can be buried without rites in his clothes.”