Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

“You know what would happen to me at times when I was a girl? Maybe it’s something that everyone experiences. In certain absentminded moments, summers at Libadiye or while sitting lazily along the Bosphorus, I’d have the sensation that I’d suddenly left my body. It approximated floating in emptiness. Strangest of all, it happened one night while I was dreaming. Again, I’d left my body. And I knew very well that I’d left it. I was extremely cold. For some reason, however, I didn’t want to rejoin it. I awoke in that agonizing state, my teeth chattering wildly. You know that when I die, you’ll no longer be attracted to my body.”

“Who knows? I find death to be a matter of unthinkable ugliness. But you’ll live on in my thoughts… of course, if I don’t go mad first.”

“You’ll fall in love with another. Your thoughts will settle in other abodes. The way we frequently moved houses in our childhood… it was so strange. At first we’d find it alienating. We’d always think of the former house. We weren’t able to fit either our evenings or our mornings into those new rooms and halls. Later we’d grow accustomed to it.”

As if embarrassed by this sentimentality, she began to describe her girlhood. The house in Süleymaniye, the inner courtyard with a fountain and pool in Aleppo, the splashing of water, the ice cream at the Aleppo bazaar, the commedia dell’arte performances of a boisterous royal comic named Behçet in the tumbledown theater next to the hotel, the way her rather devout grandmother once stormed out in the middle of the show; then later, the frenzied exile, jam-packed trains, terror, crowds, the wounded abandoned en route, the anguish of leaving everything behind and heading away, of painful recollections like an amputated limb after surgery; then later, the house in Bursa, the ekirge road… the beauty of the Bursa plain, and the manor house in Libadiye. Elementary school, the year spent in Sültantepe… Every detail revived before Mümtaz’s eyes in ablur as if all of it constituted inseparable parts of their lives. A multitude of memories and sources merged through their relationship…

As Mümtaz listened, he thought about his historical novel on Shaykh Galip. The outline or the sections he’d written hadn’t satisfied him. It needed further revision. He wanted to proceed through a resolute idea, not through trivial, amusing passages. As the moonlight spilled into the sea in the Kanlıca inlet like a golden channel, he explained to Nuran: “There are too many digressions. I don’t want it to be that way. Listening to you talk now, I sensed the need for a kind of organization beyond the synthesis of an ordinary plot structure. Does a novel have to start at one point and end at another? Do the characters have to move rigidly like locomotives on fixed rails? Maybe it’s sufficient if the story line takes life itself as a framework, gathering it around a few characters. It’s enough if Shaykh Galip appears in this framework amid these people through the effects of his outlook and a few biographical scenes.” Then, looking at the opposite shore, he added, “Under one condition…”

“Under what condition, Mümtaz?”

“The narrative should describe us and our contexts.”

The Kanlıca inlet reveled in bygone moonlit nocturnes. Almost no other boats remained. The night had progressed significantly. Lingering sounds of radio programs coming from open windows gradually fell silent. Only the moon reigned: her realm of golden dreams along with the music of silence and themselves. The melody slowly increased its intensity, overwhelming him like an obsession.

Nuran repeatedly let her hand dip into the water, tugging and straining one corner of the sapphire silk cloth that the moon had pulled tightly around itself — only then did Nuran understand the oneiric and phantasmic nature of the night.

“Only this way can I avoid getting stuck on the page. Like the flesh of fruit that clings to the pit, the essential idea…”

Nuran said, “I’ve got it! The entire Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara, Istanbul, the seen and the unseen, and all of us are like the fruit around the pit of the moon. We’ve always clung to it. Just look at these hilltops.”

One by one, everything in their surroundings received the moonlight. The setting declared with almost feminine instinct, “Come, transform me, work me, transfigure me into something else, polish my leaves, turn my shadow into a harder and darker element.” And the moon proceeded to draw it all inward from the casing, the sheath, or the face, appropriating it into her own being. Nuran’s face sparkled like a fully splendent crystal bowl. The oars of the rowboat passing beside them dipped into and out of the sea within the glimmer of objects made of brilliants. Creation was a halved fruit around whose lunar kernel everything coalesced.

“Your so-called essential idea, what is that?”

Mümtaz fell silent; truthfully, what constituted the essential idea?

“The hidden face of life that smiles within us,” he said. “Eros.”

The night grew increasingly colder. From time to time slight winds blew, forming a spring of pure essences over the surface of the sea out of the floral scents wafting from hither and yond, forming a garden of visions. Waves fluttered and peaked in spots along the dilapidated quayside and where the currents met.

“The garments of the moon are being washed,” said Nuran.

They existed in a world of pure sapphire: a misty, translucent blue along with a gilded deluge dispersing mote by mote, leaf by leaf, and flowing in wide runnels; ney melodies sounded by hundreds of unseen mouths, sheathed by an accompaniment of proliferating silence that transformed and progressed with the music.

Through the nocturne, street lamps, indeed all sources of light except the moon, assumed a bizarre torpor. In silence, being nothing more than what they were, lights extended columns, arches, and portals of golden fringes over and into the Bosphorus. At times these lights grew attenuated, nevertheless merging into one another like patches of golden seaweed.

The moon in the midst of all, the kernel of a fruit beginning to shrivel, drew about itself this exquisiteness at the height of its ripeness. A stunning sultanate reigned. All things exposed themselves to its rule, accepting its 214 authorial order, and in kind, the order transformed each entity intrinsically, recasting it as the reverie of a vast and mysterious substantiation.

“The arc of genesis has descended over us. We’re part of a single unified realm.”

Before them, the village of Bebek obscured a large swath of the Sea of Shadows. The coastal lights, however, even those shining all the way from the opposite shore, jutted into this nexus of shadows, working prodigiously toward a future of inscrutable intent…

Wandering through Üsküdar had given Nuran the desire to know Istanbul more intimately. An oppressive heat notwithstanding, they descended into the old city a few days in a row. Beginning with Topkapı Palace, district by district, they visited mosques and medrese s. Toward evening they rested in Beyoǧlu cafés or parted company to run separate errands before meeting at the ferry landing again.

Awaiting Nuran at the landing or focusing on the face of the clock when she failed to appear gave Mümtaz deep pleasure. It surprised him that men complained of the tendency women had of making others wait, a favorite fallback for comedians. Waiting for his beloved was delectable. Anything promising her presence was delicious.

As Nuran further came to know Istanbul, she felt Mümtaz was justified in his perspective. One day she’d asked, “Lambie, at your age how did you ever come to admire all these historical things?” Mümtaz didn’t hesitate to describe İhsan. He explained that during İhsan’s youth in Paris, he’d set out on the path of socialist Jean Jaurès for a time; and later how he’d abruptly changed his tune upon returning to Istanbul during the Balkan Wars; how İhsan had wandered through the foundations of our Turkish presence here, and how he never tired of reliving it as part of his subjective experience.