Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

She often remained oblivious to Mümtaz’s thoughts over these walks, made even more solemn and unendurable due to the advanced hour and the silence, his nerves frazzled by pleasure.

Soon, confronted by the high wall surrounding Nuran’s house, he’d part from her company before the door that led to what seemed like the flip-side of fate.

Mümtaz detested his solitary returns despite the vivid and splendid memories of the previous twenty-four hours.

Dread filled Mümtaz every time he accompanied Nuran home, thinking it might be the last. He believed the human soul tolerated contentment the least of all emotions, most likely because nothing lay beyond it; one was obligated to endure contentment ignorant of its duration. One could forge through anguish, striving to escape it as if picking through brambles, hobbling down a rocky path, or trying to break free of a swamp. But one carried contentment like a burden until it was involuntarily laid down at the edge of a road or elsewhere.

Take prisons for example, or comb court proceedings or newspaper collections where daily misadventures are recorded in columns of minuscule type; there’s no shortage of malefactors who’ve cast off burdens of joy simply because they’ve tired of shouldering them.

Aware of this, Mümtaz also knew that they were content; therefore he feared the impending loss of delight. The postponement of their marriage despite Nuran’s open desire to live together filled him with misery. The actual meaning of separate homes was separate obligations, pleasures, and strifes. Nuran lived two lives at once, between which she maintained a precarious balance. The balance could suddenly tip against him through any randomly placed counterweight.

Even so, he believed that she regarded their summer as something exceptional. He discerned in her an outlook that quite simply anticipated the best from the march of time: “The summer’s all ours, Mümtaz; we can engage in all manner of madness.” Under the anxiety of losing her, this declaration assumed a thousand and one shapes in Mümtaz’s head.

Each of these cruel and fleeting thoughts came with their opposites, and Mümtaz quickly cast them off. After Nuran had fully entered his life, she’d changed character a number of times in his mind. To be exact, beside the Nurans that inspired fear and awe respectively, a third Nuran emerged through sacrifices she’d made solely for him and the way she’d divided her life into hemispheres without any complaint. This Nuran, both loftier and deeper than desire, love, and adoration, as well as removed from any individual anxiety, was the Nuran of compassion that rose like endless inner tidewaters. Even when apart, Mümtaz wished for her happiness and holistic harmony of soul. His discovery of this emotion marked a genuine salvation, a maturation of sorts. He thus stopped regarding his contentment as solely limited to his own self, and his soul opened to human fate in new ways.

Toward the ides of October, their joy ever so gradually began to wane. Each felt inwardly and indeterminately that their contentment now suffered from mummification due to its dormancy. They discussed this at Kanlıca’s İsmail Aǧa coffeehouse on one of their most beautiful days together. They’d trysted at the yalı and toward noon crossed the Bosphorus to Emirgân. By evening they’d gone down to the ferry landing. Emirgân Square and its coffeehouse were cool and tranquil.

When they left the European shores of Emirgân, the sun had descended significantly, casting the Asian shore under the direct sunbeams of evening. It was a nostalgic, warm radiance that seized one, stuck in one’s throat, and weighed on one’s chest like an age-old türkü . Moving toward this radiance over a sea agleam from horizon to horizon, unlike the regular workaday trips they made, was like hurtling toward a land of promise.

Neither Mümtaz nor Nuran quite recalled ever before seeing the cerulean cast of the frequently cresting waves. A final wave that mixed deep mosaic gold and gemstone dust into a phthalo blue reminiscent of a Fra Angelico canvas — the wave infused by like like a downpour of divine absolution — virtually tossed them onto the Kanlıca ferry landing. One gunwale edge of the rowboat remained all but hooked onto the quay.

Mümtaz had never in his life seen such a carnivalesque setting. This was no projection of the felicity of his inner self. Maybe all Creation, including people, houses, trees, the phalanx of Bosphorus shearwaters that soared past sipping the sea, pigeons and cats, the watermelons and casabas piled off to the side, had been roused from a deep hibernation. In the twilight, the sea bream dangled on the fishing line held by a policeman as if experiencing a peak moment and flopped along with the to and fro of the line, appearing quite satisfied to be a pendulum ticking out the remainder of its fleeting life. The officer, perhaps astounded by the jubilation of colors or pleased by the joy in Nuran’s expression, with a solemnity that didn’t in the least match his unbuttoned collar or unbelted overcoat, made a salutation by waving his pole above them, along with the scaly, titanium white symbol of forbearance and tolerance and said, “A hearty welcome to you both; your arrival has brought good luck.”

Laughing at this semiformal and, with the sea bream gasping for life on the line, well-nigh tragic greeting, they took seats before İsmail Aǧa’s coffeehouse. Opposite them, two ladies waited for the ferry; behind them, a few aged gentlemen savored the evening in silence.

Something smiled through the surrounding objects quite separate from their radiance, their edges, their volume, and their attributes: a force superseding all of that. It was in effect the memory of previously lived time. The fullness of its warmth rose from the depths like nostalgia. Mümtaz paraphrased Yahya Kemal’s then popular couplet: “Behind us, the old men of Kanlıca are preparing for autumn…”

Nuran slowly recited the couplet verbatim:

The days foreshortened, agèd men in Kanlıca One by one conjure memories of past autumns

And she added, “I’m in awe over the way one poet could vanquish a city through verse this way. Every time I hear this couplet, Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais comes to mind…”

Mümtaz rounded out her thought: “The couplet captures something grand, an essence that will never change.” This autumnal hour could only be described in such a manner. All indications were that summer had ended. This thought alone filled them with a feeling of foreboding within which they took in their surroundings.

Summer’s end saddened them. A few days beforehand, Nuran had pointed out an early flock of swallows passing south overhead. And this morning, he’d arrived at the yalı with three crisp oak leaves collected en route. Worms of death had gnawed the leaves along their edges and had slowly traced a path toward their centers within the cerise of an evening. The once pliant leaves had assumed a hardened, calcified form, as if plucked from nighttime itself.

The song of a solitary bird sounded two or three times in stark yearning, the way a flute solo might bestir among violins and violas in an orchestra. They contemplated the likely tragedy that had caused this affect, yearning doubtless linked in some unspecified measure to the accident that fed it and gave it poignancy. At present in sprawling woods, trees sensed their sap gradually recede and longed to link their branches and huddle together for warmth while their desiccated leaves fell from the slightest tremor. The panorama was as variegated as springtime. The mastic trees of autumn had turned red like the Judas trees of spring, though more sorrowfully.

“Early one morning let’s go to the Emirgân woods. It’s exquisite the way the trees virtually shiver as they wake.”