Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

“Red mullet is the world’s most delectable fish, but it’s a different story if it isn’t caught in season, and especially if it isn’t caught off the Princes Islands, or in the southern mouth of the Bosphorus. South of the Dardanelles, mullet is a tasteless sea creature beyond any categorical description.”

Tevfik’s epicurean interests had attained the level of a philosophy of history.

“Just consider, if you will, the centuries-long labor of fate enabling us to eat this mullet together tonight. To begin with, as the poet Yahya Kemal explains, the waters of the Danube, the Volga, and the Don had to reach the Black Sea. Our forefathers had to up and travel from Central Asia and eventually settle in Istanbul. Furthermore, Sultan Mahmut II had to exile Nuran’s great-grandfather from Istanbul to Manastır for being a Bektashi, where he would in turn marry the daughter of a wealthy major from Merzifon. My grandfather had to buy this manor house with the money earned from a Koran that he’d copied out to console himself after his wife left him and that he’d offered for sale to who knows which pasha… My young boy, you understand what I’m saying, don’t you? The whole of an exalted Koran for the price of seven hundred fifty gold pieces… that is, equivalent to this building and the land out back… Then, Nuran’s father had to fall ill as a child and his mother had to bequeath him to the good graces of Aziz Mahmut Hüdai Efendi so when he grew up he’d initiate into that patron master’s dervish lodge, where he’d befriend my father. Nuran had to be born… You, too, would come into this world…”

Mümtaz adored this ethnosocial history of red mullet.

Tevfik’s son, Yaşar, laughed at his father to the degree sanctioned by him, within the incurable heart disease that he assumed had afflicted him of late. Tevfik represented the nineteenth-century Tanzimat era of reform, which set to work with lofty intentions and finished simply with a weakness for everyday pleasures — he lived in the ease, nonchalance, and pilfered delights of that age. Yaşar was more like the second constitutional period after 1908, and bore all of its instabilities. He displayed a bewildering idealism, fleeting feelings of inferiority, and rebellions that cast both off like a wave taking another’s place; in short, he vacillated between ecstatic enthusiasm and immobilizing despair.

At the table, Mümtaz assumed this man of about forty-five would enjoy himself more than anyone. He filled his glass in a state of complete excitement and, raising it toward Mümtaz, said, “Welcome,” before downing it in one gulp. Tevfik, as if reining in an unwieldy horse, greeted this eagerness with an extended “whooooaaaaa.” Yaşar paid no heed to the warning. The machinery of his body was working well; all day the house had been as hot as a small furnace; furthermore, he’d be going to Ankara in three days time; while rakı on the rocks and his father’s eggplant salad, along with other appetizers, awaited them, why show restraint? Yaşar would more or less enjoy himself like everybody, but only until he recalled his physiology. At the first signal from his delicate constitution, there began a state of affliction, fatigue, overall disgust, and withdrawal. No lack of jocularity existed between son, who lived more or less through the recent yields of science, and father, who over the span of his entire life knew nothing of medication — apart from the senna plant he had Huriye the maid pound on occasion as a purgative and the galingale root that he himself boiled on the brazier when a winter’s cough pestered him. As far as Tevfik knew, aspirin was but a version of the tango.

Tevfik wasn’t overly complaining about his son’s pharmaceutical obsession. Despite poisoning himself each day by recommended or excessive doses, for better or worse, Yaşar forged through life. Moreover, since he’d succumbed to hypochondria, he’d been liberated of many exigencies related to his career. He no longer grew out the nail of his right pinky “a length of four elifs,” and he no longer discussed the young contessa and her very charmante mother he’d met in Toledo, the straight, pristine boulevards of Bucharest, or the extraordinary beach at Varna. He neither boasted of his second secretariat in Paris, when he’d been honored to make an evening visit to that exquisite pied-à-terre of French singer-actress Mistinguett accompanied by her maidservant, nor the boardinghouse right behind Wilhelmstrasse where one midafternoon he’d suddenly come nose to nose with Swiss actor Emil Jannings, cigarette in mouth, a large canine behind him, as he stepped from his front door. He’d even forgotten about the large-eyed blonde at this boardinghouse, whose pointed eyelashes dripped blue mascara, about her mad infatuation with Wagner, the way her voice trembled when she recited Heine by heart, the incredible trip they took to the Tyrolean Alps, the folk songs they listened to beneath moonlight, and all the rest, forgotten. Likewise, the weeklong vacation he’d passed in the château of an old countryman of ours located a few hours from Budapest, those high-backed armchairs, horses, thoroughbred hounds, and threshing sites that resembled sets prepared for Marta Eggerth’s operetta-like films rather than a real harvest; in short, the thousand and one delights of pleasant music and cheap sentimentality, Viennese cafés, ladies of delicate comportment, and cocktail-party trivia about Mozart had all been elided from memory. Nowadays, Yaşar returned to the house every evening with a tightly wrapped, elegant parcel, undid its packaging as if removing a fruit from its rind, unfolded its thin prospectus, and within a radiance but seen shimmering on the lips and in the eyes of full-fledged devotees of the faith when they beheld the ordered workings of Creation like clockwork, read, stunned and grinning.

Mümtaz knew of Yaşar from his friends in Paris, including İhsan, and somewhat from chance encounters at Adile’s apartment. Nature had all but compensated this foreign affairs officer, who held the promise of the brightest future in ’25 and ’26, with hypochondria since he’d lost a midlevel ambassadorship due to the betrayal of a family friend; that is, since being sent to some Balkan town as head secretary in place of assuming a vacant central post as part of an embassy.

This obsession had occupied his entire life for the past half-dozen years, and it was not to be taken lightly. Yaşar resembled a man who’d been appointed by irade to the captaincy of a dreadnought, and just as such a captain would be preoccupied with the inscrutable workings of the vessel, Yaşar was occupied with his bodily workings, whose secrets, potential, and governing laws escaped him. His primary preoccupation was to synchronize numerous anatomical systems of disconcerting mystery and to coordinate their functions, preventing a matrix of probable disruptions through small and precisely timed interventions. In brief, Yaşar’s body remained in dry dock under the scrutiny of his own eyes. His hypochondria had increased, particularly after a careless physician had one day declared that he couldn’t actually be suffering from heart disease based on the vital signs of his own body, but added that perhaps his other systems were strained, resulting in some slight discomfort, and his life began to pass in pursuit of an elusive orchestration of bodily function. One could say that the unity known as the body had been lost for Yaşar, to be occupied by a perplexing collusion made up of independently working organs that resembled a governmental cabinet whose seats were occupied by ministers of different parties. From the intestines to the stomach, from the liver to the kidneys, and from the sympathetic nervous system down to the endocrine glands, each part functioned independently and to separate ends. Thus, Yaşar, who strove to lead these distinct apparatuses to a single coordinated goal, was something of a prime minister condemned to struggle against the impossible. In his efforts, he had but one single recourse: pharmaceuticals.