Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

As she turned around, stepping to the front of the mosque, something approaching hope shimmered in the woman’s squinty eyes and distraught expression. She stopped there as well to pray.

Nuran, as if having stumbled into a labyrinth with no exit, shook her head. “A good dispensary, a few hospitals, a little organization…”

“Even if you established all of that, there’s still the abruptness of death itself.”

“People accept that, however… We’re raised through its socializing force.”

“We accept it in others! Not in ourselves. We don’t easily accept the deaths of our relatives and loved ones. Through our own deaths all matters find resolution, but when our loved ones take final leave we’re shaken to our foundations. What then? Are you prepared to just dismiss the downtrodden? I’m not saying you in particular, but there are fools who think this way and consider themselves powerful as a result. Take the Nazis, for example. Meanwhile, from the day we’re born, humans are helpless and in need of kindness.

“Not to mention that your good dispensaries and hospitals aren’t so easily procured. They demand high levels of productivity to support them, a social life of comfort and welfare, and an ethics fostered and created by work. This is what I mean by the transformation of social conditions.”

As he spoke, he thought of his all night discussions with İhsan. Most of these were his ideas. When Mümtaz was yet an eighteen-year-old lyceum student preparing to submit his diploma exam, he’d been tossed into this forge of ideas. Now, as he conveyed them to Nuran in the courtyard of this small mosque, he recalled, as if distantly, İhsan’s inspirational expression, his fiery rhetoric, his epiphanies, the measured gestures of his hands, his repartee flashing abruptly amid the heat of the oration, and his biting sarcasm. As they spoke, Macide would listen to them from a corner, her wool knitting in her hands, a honeyed smile on her lips, laughing at their banter and startled by their ire.

It’d been a week now since he’d seen İhsan. He wondered about him. What was he doing? What state were they in?

As chance would have it, they encountered İhsan and Macide walking arm in arm on the Galata Bridge that same evening. In his other hand, İhsan carried a weighty piece of luggage. Mümtaz introduced them to Nuran. Then he inquired, “Where are you coming from like this, Aǧabey ?”

“Over the past week we’ve been lazing in Suadiye.”

“Don’t listen to him, Mümtaz, for a full week he rowed us around until nightfall or swam as I fried beneath the sun.”

Both of their faces were ruddy. Mümtaz could indeed imagine what Macide had suffered. İhsan couldn’t stand being apart from her. Each moment of his life he needed his wife beside him. At times, in class at Galatasaray, after İhsan had signaled the respectfully standing students to sit down with an ambiguous hand gesture — was it a greeting or a blessing? — Mümtaz was all but convinced that he might produce Macide’s head from his leather bag. Lost in nostalgia, he stared at the face of his “Pearly Sis.” But Macide was preoccupied, all of her attention fixed upon Nuran, whom she candidly scrutinized as they conversed. When Nuran began speaking a little, Macide’s face relaxed as if a taut spring had loosened. Macide laughed at her interlocutor. The human voice had a peculiar, almost metaphysical effect upon Macide. Neither clothes, nor age, nor occupation, nor even beauty affected her so.

She existed within the human voice, residing there in her most collected posture. When meeting somebody for the first time, she mustered all of her attention, listening to the voice and passing judgments based on its cadence; in accordance, she either approved of her interlocutor, simply remained impassive, or announced her animosity by declaring, “His voice slithers through one like a snake.”

This vocal gauge of hers didn’t consist of the “high,” “low,” “cracking,” or “soft” descriptive words that others might use. One might describe a voice as being “pretty” or “ugly.” For Macide, voice was distinguished by different criteria. Even its mode of perception was a factor. Like specialized devices used to pinpoint certain foreign objects or to measure the functional potential of sensory organs, her ear was effectively removed from her body. A keenness had developed within her like the olfactory sense of canines, or that of desert or woodland animals unaccustomed to human society; and as these creatures discovered certain special qualities in things only through smell, similarly Macide, through listening, uncovered moral characteristics in others and judged them accordingly. “So-and-so is a good person,” she’d say. “And a very good person… but I think something’s troubling him; his voice virtually bleeds,” or, “He’s very selfish, he’s conceited… his voice eclipses his vision.” These were the phrases Macide used to describe various states of affliction. Each individual speaking before her would either disrobe through his or her voice, exposing innermost secrets, or be sentenced by the verdict of a solitary judge.

One entered Macide’s life aurally. She was attracted to İhsan through his voice and had accepted Mümtaz in like manner. Presently, she opened her soul like a giant clam to Nuran’s voice where snippets of conversation would transfigure into a string of pearls.

Eyes closed, Macide listened to the people she admired. Perhaps as they spoke, she sensed the pleasure of bathing in cold, restorative waters rich with the untapped attributes of roots or minerals or even stars. When she abandoned herself to the current of a voice, traits of hers broke away and floated like objects drifting toward the unknown; and as people got to know Macide, they came to recognize the phenomenon. Her entire being conveyed the inertia of a flower-laden boat.

One might say that her strained nervous system transcended value judgments such as “good” and “evil,” existing through an aural aesthetic of sorts. Macide had once described her condition to Mümtaz: “It happened before I fell ill, too. But less so. Now it’s intensified. When I hear certain people speak, my body becomes rigid. It’s as if I’m wearing a suit of armor.”

İhsan attributed this peculiarity of his wife’s not just to voices alone, but to the presence of the other person. Mümtaz inherently believed what Macide said. Since the experience was specific to her, why not believe her? This pointed to an effective variance of method between İhsan and Mümtaz.

İhsan went on to describe what they’d done over the week and with whom they’d met.

Mümtaz asked why they hadn’t traveled up the Bosphorus to visit. İhsan answered, taking great satisfaction in the blush of Nuran’s cheeks, “So as not to disturb your honeymoon.” Later he promised that they’d pay a three-day visit. “The children will be going to the farm with their grandmother. We’ll be free. Expect us in the coming weeks.” İhsan spoke to them as if they were actually married, pleasing them both.

Once on the ferry, Nuran said, “Macide is quite beautiful. But she does have a way of giving you the once-over, doesn’t she now?”

Mümtaz explained the phenomenon of voices, wanting to close the matter half jokingly and half seriously, “The lot of us is a little eccentric.”

But Nuran’s inquiry persisted. “You’d mentioned that Macide was ill; she seemed quite well.”

“She’d been ill, but İhsan returned her to health.”

“How d’you mean?”

“Through the birth of their child… İhsan has conviction in life, you see. He believes life consists of miraculous transformations. And the secret to life resides in existence itself. During Macide’s episode, the eugenics employed by the Nazis were a widespread topic of debate. It enraged İhsan. Not even entertaining the possibility that a child born of a mother such as Macide might be unstable, İhsan believed that her maternity and new sense of responsibility would return her to health. He also considered the deprivation of the rights of motherhood a crime against her person and nature. Some doctors considered Macide a lost cause and advised them to separate their beds.