Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

“In the end İhsan stood by his decision. Of course it was a calculated risk. How should I put it, a contrary outcome would have led to catastrophe. İhsan might have caused the death of the woman he loved. The birth might have further strained Macide. But İhsan trusted life. Sabiha was born without a hitch. And what a beautiful girl. Macide’s previous state of melancholia diminished; only slight traces remained. At times she still loses herself in daydreams, but she doesn’t tell stories to the ragdoll in her arms the way she used to.”

“Could you have ventured such a thing?”

“I said we were an eccentric family, didn’t I? If it’d happened to me, I would have done so too. But when İhsan asked for my opinion, I debated with him at length.”

Nuran drew completely different conclusions: “As with every such gamble… the observer is skeptical about the act in question. Later he applauds the venture. Should the venture fail, however…”

“No, not at all, had İhsan failed, I wouldn’t have blamed him. When I debated this matter with him, I gave it considerable thought.

“What he did was somewhat courageous. It was an act of commiseration; he was attempting to resolve a problem holistically. Had he failed, all of us would have been devastated. Maybe it would have spelled his demise or downfall. But I wouldn’t have blamed him. Because İhsan, in this case, wasn’t tinkering with the lives of others, he was playing with his own contentment. I knew he couldn’t stand to live without Macide.”

“Is he that enamored of her?”

“Excessively so… his whole existence passes in her company. Without her he wouldn’t be able to work. He’s even more articulate in her presence.”

“Is the girl healthy?” Nuran thought constantly in terms of her own life.

“Yes, she’s normal. She’s only four years old, so it’s too early to tell completely, but did you notice the beatific expression on her mother’s face? You see, Sabiha has that same demeanor. And she has a vivid imagination. Perhaps later she’ll suffer some. But she’ll persevere through life, the experience of which is quite sublime.”

Living was sublime, quite lovely. The most exalted prayer couldn’t approach it. Nuran learned this after coming to know Mümtaz, this naïve man-child who only displayed confidence when engaged in intellectual discourse. Living was lovely from daybreak to nightfall, to the hours filled with a thousand pleasantries including sleeping and waking, from dreams to fantasies to losing herself in the embrace of this affectionate buffoon, and later, to regaining her wits in those same arms again.

And what she observed today was lovely, even the one-legged man limping before them, and the solitary and suffering urchin whose face was ravaged by fire or disease that left one eye protruding. Seeing such things, agonizing and exquisite, before sitting beside Mümtaz on this ferry bench in the midst of an evening, even the remorse stirring within her felt exquisite as she thought about how she’d find her family waiting expectantly at home. Because it all wound the apparatus of consciousness by which we appropriated existence and objects. The ferry had made its stop in Çengelköy and continued onward.

They entered a profound night and the heart of the Bosphorus. In a short while they’d be at Vaniköy. She remembered the day they’d talked, sitting on the landing’s hawser mooring post. Existence was a cornucopia, yet summer waned; summer, the pearl, the singular season of their lives. If only she had faith in life like Mümtaz and İhsan. But she did not. She was feeble before life. Due to this frailty, she might one day lose Mümtaz, one so vital to and dependent on her. For she knew herself well. She was incapable of relinquishing herself completely to a thought, or an idea, or a love. As soon as she entered the house, her mother’s cross expression and Fatma’s annoyed behavior would make her forget everything else. Her life lay in so many fragments.

She resided in separate homes. She resided in abodes of love and obligation. Passing from one to the next, she more or less underwent a transfiguration.

She knew all of this hadn’t escaped Mümtaz’s notice. One day he’d said, “Our bodies are what we can most easily give each other; the real challenge is sharing our lives. For a love to be genuine, two people must enter into a mirror and emerge as one soul!” Only searing insights that ravaged and exposed Nuran could make him utter such a statement. Mümtaz shuddered as if her silence oppressed him. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“ Hiç . Nothing. You’ve gone and muddled my thoughts. Sümbül Sinan, Merkez Efendi, Macide, and everybody’s intrinsic right to life. I’m exhausted and want nothing more than to be myself.”

Toward the end of September, the bluefish runs offered another excuse to savor the Bosphorus. Bluefish outings were among the most alluring amusements on the straits.

An illuminated diversion stretching out along both shores beginning from Beylerbeyi and Kabataş in the south, extending north to Telli Tabya and the Kavaklar near the Black Sea, and gathering around the confluence of currents, the bluefish catches gave rise, here and there, to waterborne fetes, especially on darkened nights of the new moon. In contrast to other excursions that developed as part of a venture demanding long outings, this carnival dance developed then and there, with everyone.

Since childhood, Nuran had adored the seas over which caïque lanterns shimmered like brilliants swathed in black and purple velvets, the translucent darkness beginning where such radiance ceased, shattering a little farther onward due to another cluster of anglers, the wake of a ferryboat or small swells; she adored the rising of this luminous silhouette within a thousand prismatic refractions, the way it spread through the setting as if it might abduct her; in brief, she loved these nocturnal excursions for bluefish that conveyed a sense of occurring in a realm where reflection, glint, and shocks of light alone appointed a highly polished, radiant palace accompanied by crescendos progressing from small melodies and musical measures to vast and idiosyncratic variations.

Before she’d married, and even when younger, her father, who considered his daughter and Tevfik his only like-minded cohorts in the house, would take them fishing for bluefish. When she reminisced about these nights with Mümtaz, he didn’t miss the opportunity to take summer, which had already been so wondrous, to a plane of higher pleasure. Tevfik was more than ready. He’d grown tired of Kandilli, his sister, and even Fatma. “I’ll be spending the month of September in Kanlıca…” Since Nuran and her uncle would be there together, she’d be more comfortable.

When Tevfik went down to Kanlıca from the manse in part to present this plan to Nuran, with the excuse that the hill in Kandilli was difficult to climb after midnight, he’d abruptly turned into the Tevfik of twenty years prior. He stared into the windows of the old Bosphorus residences he passed as if to ask, “Have the damsels I’d courted grown younger as I have?” Twenty years ago, Tevfik himself was a popular diversion, just like the Bosphorus reveries of the Bebek inlet and the pleasure grounds of Göksu, the “Sweetwaters of Asia.” Whenever he crooned from his rowboat of an evening or in the middle of the night, windows opened furtively, colorful and timid shadows extended out into the aether, heartfelt “ah”s, the frissons of reunion, might be heard, and flowers fell to the water’s surface from trembling fingers or locks or dresses being straightened. As had been rumored, each of these songs and serenades was an explicit cipher or love letter of single intent between Tevfik and the ladies who’d opened their windows, let down their hair at the exact moment his rowboat glided past and, swooning from the music, had been brazen enough to drop a flower they held or wore into his rowboat below. Come what may, on the following day one of them would be certain to make a “stop at the tailor’s,” to visit an old acquaintance, a wet nurse, or long-standing maidservant, or perhaps, in a predetermined fashion, one of the garden gates of her Bosphorus residence would be left unlocked on such a night with a devoted servant or handmaid waiting knowingly behind it.