Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

The husband-and-wife residents of the Kanlıca house — “relatives, one on Nuran’s father’s side and the other on Tevfik’s wife’s side” — couldn’t seem to fathom these newfound traits of Tevfik’s; they still regarded him as a distressed and downcast widower, and they spared no effort in putting him at ease by avoiding any reminders of his anguish. For this reason they’d even considered preventing him from staying in the quarters their son-in-law had first shared with their daughter when he’d moved into the house as a bridegroom. Clearly it’d be agony for Tevfik to stay in a room that harbored such sweet memories. But they were stunned when Tevfik boomed at the top of his voice, “Enough of this foolishness, I know that room, and it’s the best one in the house.”

In counterpoint to the bluefish season’s opera of light, a sly comedy played in the Bosphorus residence. Mümtaz and Nuran met this farce with laughter, whereas Tevfik regarded it at times rather gravely, but more often than not in feigned bouts of ire.

Since good old Tevfik imposed himself at will upon others — his sister excepted — the established customs of the household were immediately broken.

Till then, they cultivated a life of tranquility and ever so timid gestures meant to avoid anyone’s disturbance. Mukbile and Şükrü had no desire in life but horticulture. The lion’s share of their days passed in the back garden and hothouse.

They filled the remainder of their time by culling seeds at the table, writing and responding to famous flower and bulb companies as far away as Holland, Italy, England, and even America, and instructing and advising neighbors and acquaintances who’d adopted their hobby. Since their tenants, a family of three living in another part of the house, had taken up the same hobby over the eight or nine years they’d lived there, the flowers made up a communal garden.

By the start of summer, the household routine had changed anyway through frequent visits by Nuran and Mümtaz. No longer did anybody make polite apologies for an unintended disturbance in the night or because someone had drawn open the shutters of his room before others; instead of initiating every conversation with, “Excuse me, I believe I might have bothered you just then!” all was relinquished to a “How are you?” With the arrival of Tevfik, the issue spun completely out of control. Evenings, the old man’s rakı and hors d’oeuvre table was laid out on the waterfront terrace by the Bosphorus. Neighborhood fishermen could no longer pass by without stopping to chat, and the radio played without permission being granted individually by each resident. In this way, the owners of the residence and their tenants had embarked upon a brave new life.

Nuran and Mümtaz dined at Kanlıca or at the tavern in İstinye; or rather, they brought their food out onto rowboats. Under Tevfik’s insistence, one night on the rowboat, in keeping with bygone revelries by moonlight, they’d quaffed their fair share of spirits.

When Nuran grew tired of fishing, she joined in the melody being hummed by her uncle, and upon notice of his niece’s accompaniment, Tevfik raised his voice and the bluefish run became a reverie of musical delights.

Old Tevfik was friends with all the boatmen, the oldest of whom had known Nuran since childhood. And she’d become friends with them all. Boatmen aware of her imminent marriage to Mümtaz had even begun looking for vacant residences nearby. Mümtaz, pleased by such undertakings, because he believed they’d hasten the marriage protocol, noted down addresses so he could scout them out once the tenants had vacated in the fall; Nuran, on the contrary, took the opposite view so that the dreams she’d nourished regarding the Emirgân house, its garden and decor wouldn’t just evaporate: “Hold off for now!” she said. “I can’t spend day after day thinking about all that again.”

The caïquier in his sixties who’d said, “Nuran won’t be able forgo the proximity of the sea… Her father had a great affinity for it as well,” added, “When you find a yalı and settle down there… just wait and see how I’ll tend to you with a cornucopia of fish.” If it’d been within his power, the obliging man would have presented the entire Bosphorus to Tevfik’s niece as a wedding gift.

The couple admired the sensitivity of this old salt. Some nights he stepped aboard their rowboat and described old reveries with a spirited rhetoric that came from first-hand experience.

In his turbulent life he’d met with great success and gained vast experience; he’d both lived it up and fallen on hard times. Since the sea constituted the measure of what he loved, he could never consider himself down and out as long as he kept its company: “My grave, should I die with my wits about me, will be nothing less than the sea.” Following the illness that he’d suffered at winter’s end, after doctors informed him that he’d no longer be able to venture out to sea, he descended to the shoreline early one morning without attracting anyone’s notice, set off in his caïque, and vanished after surrendering to the currents, a stone lashed to his ankles. Mümtaz, later informed of the death, mourned as if he’d lost a close relative, though he was heartened that the old man hadn’t perished through some mishap far from his one and only love. In this abiding passion, the caïquier had discovered a trait befitting his character and fortune. With the quip, “I’ve gotten used to poverty, but not to old age…,” he displayed an ease of life held over from an era when wages amounted to less than a silver coin but tips could be worth upwards of twenty — or perhaps even a golden lira. While he described fetes held at the Egyptian khedive’s yalı , boat revelries by moonlight on the bay, and Bebek reveries, the attentive couple felt that they themselves were reliving them.

To be certain, he saw in Nuran’s beauty a reflection or memento of time past: “I’ve seen many things in this world, but never a lady as beautiful as this bride-to-be.” Such adoration coming from beyond Mümtaz’s milieu gave him childish pleasure. As the caïquier admired his beloved, Mümtaz believed that in this one respect he’d been reunited with a once-familiar world, his usual distance from which filled him with misery.

But the true marvel rested with Nuran herself. The way she waited silently, fishing line in hand, gave Mümtaz a taste of the precocious maturity of children.

To Mümtaz, Nuran’s interest in her surroundings seemed astounding given her casual demeanor, her focus solely on the line she held. The rowboat lantern illuminated her face and brisk movements, which, within the waves, bobbed to and fro, at times straight toward him out of the watery depths as if from enigmatic realms and back, to affect him like alchemy that resolved problems beyond cerebral solutions. Mümtaz would thus leave the ambience cast by her petite, puerile, and coy vision to face the exigencies of his psyche.

At the first tug of the line Nuran’s face hardened into clarity, and later, when the fish emerged, she began worrying about its quality. She made a childlike, headlong lunge toward everything that drew her admiration. Her excitement, or rather impatience, filled Mümtaz with delight.

Mümtaz, fully aware that this opulence emerged from his own imagination, knew nonetheless that some trait in Nuran sent his nervous system into a frenzy.

Time would come when his adulation would reach such a pinnacle that Mümtaz found his mortal jouissance excessive, and he began to worry about the consequences. Mümtaz’s imagination might readily believe, for example, that in a chariot drawn by enormous sea serpents, a sea-foamsplashing Poseidon would take Nuran by the hand and abscond with her to an undersea castle like the ones found in Andersen’s fairy tales, around which gathered radiant sparkles and curled scaly shadows of every velvety hue and shade, as if a multicolored taffy were being spun from pliant, mingled seaweed.