Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

It was as he’d feared. Stopping by the house, he noticed Ahmet and Sabiha at play with two girls, then he caught sight of Macide’s relative Afife in the parlor, eyes swollen, face distraught, in the midst of confiding trouble and woe. A becoming, well-dressed, and polite lady, her demeanor, more than anguish per se, bespoke the pain of wounded pride. As Mümtaz listened to her, he remembered the letter Nuran had received. Hearing but a single sentence from those eight pages, directed toward her, would have revived this devastated woman, remaking her into a new person. But Suad wasn’t interested in his wife. He thought only of Nuran. Out of some perverse logic, his afflicted head had turned to face and fixate upon Nuran. Suad likely thought of Nuran while committing the trivial indiscretions that Afife presently enumerated or even while trying to seduce his secretaries. He’d again thought of her while vomiting blood into the basin held by these woebegone hands and while signing the consent form.

As soon as he’d been admitted to the hospice, he’d told himself, I must write to her this very evening, and with eyes trained on the ceiling, his face tense with fever, his chest wheezing as it rose and fell, he’d pondered over and again the sentences that would make up the letter.

Mümtaz lent an ear to Afife’s testimonial as he thought to himself, Disgusting… Disgusting… Everything was reprehensible. Nothing simple and comfortable could exist between people. Mankind, the enemy of contentment, struck wherever happiness appeared or made its presence felt. He quit the house in a strange state of revulsion. He walked briskly down the street. Yet Afife’s voice persisted, cursing her fate: “He’s destroyed himself. I ache for him, Macide. If you only knew how my heart aches for him. It’s just my fate.”

Revolting. Her pity and consciousness of fate revolted him. Her attachment and complaint revolted him. All of it revolted him: the way Suad fell into his life like a stone crashing through a window, the way he wrote to Nuran, the way Mümtaz perpetually thought about this ailing man as if he were now an inseparable aspect of his existence.

Afife’s voice: Macide, you can’t imagine what I’ve suffered. Just think about it… for nine years… Suad’s voice: My entire life has passed at a remove from you so that I could establish some stability. But I haven’t succeeded. You’ll come see me, won’t you? I’m in such need of refuge… Afife’s voice: A month will go by and he hasn’t once looked at the children’s faces. Let him just get well, I wish for nothing else!

This was disturbing. He could observe Suad’s life from two opposing perspectives, one represented by Nuran and the other by Afife. This doubled perspective should have removed Suad from the equation entirely and dispelled him. Yet Suad continued to be. Feverishly, he ogled the bodies of the nurses sashaying in and out of his room, and when he improved a little, he smiled at the youthful ones to spark their friendship, tried to caress their arms and cheeks, addressed them in a haughty tone meant to reveal his masculine pride, asked about their work, teased them with meaningful innuendos, and listened to their responses with a cocked eyebrow. When his health improved somewhat, he’d receive an earful from these nurses, and maybe in a quiet moment a slap. But this was on the sly, for when he met with doctors, he’d most certainly request that they address him as “sir,” and he’d hold forth in a sonorous voice on politics, human rights, and public affairs.

For nine years. . With a desire honed by nine years of disease, Suad had struck here and there contemplating young and voluptuous bodies; he’d sought mature women or he’d weighed and considered the possibilities of trysts like an engineer making complicated assessments about a tunnel or railway system, concluding, “There’s nothing to be had with this one, but the other one there is just right!” or, “This one demands patience; as for that one, friendship is an absolute precondition”; he’d come up with schemes to dance with them or get them alone in a room or apartment.

Suad did exist. Yes, he existed in his hospital room, in Mümtaz’s thoughts, in his wife’s swollen eyes, in his children’s thin necks, in the women’s lives he entered like a hand under cover of darkness, feculent filth dripping from grimy, tacky fingers, padding through and besmearing a closet of pristine laundry; women, each of whom he stained with a fondle, yes, in all things he existed. And to add insult to injury, this Suad was a man of Mümtaz’s acquaintance.

Beneath hard rain, he strode aimlessly. Once in a while clouds separated and everything on the street shone brightly down to the terra-cotta shingles; the fleeting presence of shimmering droplets on the electrical wires and the leaves of the municipality’s freshly planted saplings, tops cropped à la garçon , conjured a vision of pearls; everything and everyone was bathed in childlike jubilation. Then the downpour began anew, children with jackets pulled over their heads scattered, older pedestrians took shelter in this or that nook, and the street, the houses, everything vanished. A blackish, murky shroud resembling ashen muck encompassed everything; the material world became the prisoner of rain. It pelted everything with a great clangor, emitting loud sounds from the tops of streetcars, the wood boards of police booths, rooftops, and shingles as if they were grand organs or harpsichords; at whiles lightning flashed, and this thick, pasty muck abruptly, but in a disconcerting way, lit up temporarily before the redoubled descent of webs of fine thread.

Mümtaz walked, head exposed. He’d never before felt such anguish. Everything revolted him. All of it was absurd. Everywhere he saw Suad’s filthy hand and Yaşar’s gray hair, framing his fresh “guard of the harem” expression. This is how it’s going to be then. One could transform in twenty-four hours’ time to become the sworn enemy of two people, two wretches. Two souls, say a despised tenant and an unwanted guest, could just move into one’s life from where they might spew poison through their presences alone, by simply respiring under the sun, by looming and using words approximating one’s own while describing their feelings and thoughts.

A taxi stopped short. With the affection of a kiln-fired roughneck, the driver said, “Let’s ferry you along, young man…” Mümtaz looked around. Unawares, he’d come all the way to the mosque of Sultan Selim… a little beyond it. For a moment he wanted to disappear into the cool serenity of this old cathedral mosque. Beneath the downpour, however, everything was so miserable and sorrows of such intensity writhed within him that no matter where he went he’d be endlessly distraught.

Before the car door, which the driver had pushed opened, Mümtaz asked under his breath, “Fine, but where to?”

With the same cadence, the driver said, “Wherever you’d like to go, sir…”

“In that case, to the Galata Bridge.” His head spun; he felt nauseous. He hadn’t eaten anything. He wanted to go home immediately. But in this rain, what would he do at home? Nuran was gone today; had she come even, she’d have left by now. He imagined his writing table, lamp, and his books. He gave his seventy-eights some consideration. All of it bored and taxed him. Often, life could be endured by clinging to something. At this moment Mümtaz couldn’t locate such a miraculous locus of attachment anywhere.

His thoughts resembled a disk whose diameter gradually decreased each instant, heading toward zero, toward nothingness. In this dizzying vertigo, everything shriveled and shrank, changing color and character until it became a strange accretion like the disgusting stuff of Suad’s miserable and contaminating presence; the muck absorbed everything of note along his route, spinning and turning it in a tacky mass, and taking it all to nil.