Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

It was a disgusting jumble… and he didn’t want to enter his house with it. As a matter of course, this meaningless distress would end in a short while. Or else it would deplete everything like the emptying of a mill sluice.

He loitered on the bridge. No, it was futile. He wasn’t able to return home. He felt intolerable agony imagining his garden, the melancholy of flowers and branches beneath rains that beat, briskly whipped, then bore down with great gusts upon the large chestnut in back and the clusters of trees in the distance.

“I’m afraid of loneliness,” he said. “I’m afraid of loneliness.” Actually, it wasn’t just loneliness, he was afraid of entering into the circle of Suad’s existence and instabilities. He turned and sought out the taxi. The cabbie hadn’t yet gone.

“Take me to Beyoǧlu,” he said.

As they passed Şişhane, clouds parted momentarily. Above the Süleymaniye Mosque, sunshine gushed as if from a sluice through a massive, single-hued, nearly translucent cumulus cloud, the likes of which appeared in old miniature paintings. The entire city had become the opulent and ornate decor for a fairy tale of sorts, or a Scheherazade fable. He exited the taxi at Galatasaray. Under the pure, make-believe golden light, he at first wanted to walk up toward Taksim Square. But in the dread of running into an acquaintance, he turned back. He walked toward Tepebaşı. There he entered a small bistro. The rain had quickened again. Through the dirty window, he stared at the rain pelting the façades of the apartments opposite, pondering the immense radiance he’d just witnessed.

In the empty establishment, the garçon, bored from lack of business, repeatedly cued the gramophone with dance tunes. Mümtaz ordered beer and some food. The cold drink brought his wits about him; he looked around the sleepy setting. Despite appearing ordered from the outside, the tables and chairs whose paint and patina had flaked, and the multihued bottles of alcohol crowding the old shelves slumbered head-to-shoulder. Such a strange somnolence reigned, disturbing the ongoing downpour of rain and tango; it overtook them like waves of indifference rising in the wake of longing for the faraway and the unattainable. Nonetheless, he wasn’t the only soul in the place. Upstairs, in a pantry-like alcove, a couple conversed, backs to the door. Amid the patter of rain and music rose a female voice from an indeterminate station of life, confirming its place at a fringe; a voice whose person was face-to-face with fate, perhaps satisfied, perhaps desperate; intermittently, the growl of a deep masculine voice responded in turn. They were any of hundreds of couples one encountered. But Mümtaz’s distraught nerves reacted at once to these sob-like chortles. His emotions anticipated something significant. The vertigo that had turned his surroundings into disgusting muck on the verge of overtaking all Creation had slowed along with everything spinning dizzyingly toward zero about the axis of Suad’s face or name.

The voices intensified:

“It isn’t possible, dontcha know? I can’t, I’m afraid, I can’t bring myself to…”

“Don’t be insane, we’ll be ruined, Hacer, my sweet, we’ll be ruined.”

“I can’t do it… I can’t take my own child. Won’t you divorce her?”

The snarling gramophone soon came alive. A downpour pelted the windows of the apartments opposite with a longing for the Andes and the Panama Canal, through the yearning of Singapore shipmen and Shanghai fishermen, the longing for things and people removed and estranged from the here-and-now, for whomever and however many things lay beyond thresholds of death, far away and alienated. Yet Mümtaz, now indifferent to the longing, couldn’t be drawn back by any invitation.

The man’s voice strained like the wail of a violin whose strings verged on breaking: “Just think for a second, I’d have no other option but suicide… If you want to see my demise, that’s different.”

She paused a while; then her already relenting volition made one final feeble and half-hearted stand: “Supposing something should happen to me, or I should die?”

“You know as well as I do that nothing of the sort will happen.”

“What if word gets out… and it becomes legal?”

“Did anyone hear of the time in Konya? We know the doctor… go tomorrow, it should be handled tomorrow, you understand. I’m fed-up enough already.”

A screeching chair… and perhaps the perverse affection of the sound of a kiss falling to the ground, then a hysterical sob. With visions of Havana, nothing remained but the ship of hard rain uprooting everything in its path as it churned toward shores of mystery…

“ Haydi! C’mon, let’s go. I’ll miss the island ferry.”

Mümtaz withdrew farther into a corner; and from there observed Afife’s husband, the man who’d concealed his love for Nuran for a decade like a beacon of salvation, his back hunched, the skin of his face drawn over its bones as he descended the stairs followed by a thin woman — poorly combed brunette hair jutting out from a mauve hat — trembling visibly under a thin calico dress as she contemplated the misbegotten plans of her life. As the man settled the bill, he thrust his hand into a pocket. He removed and lit a cigarette. “I thought you’d quit,” she said.

He answered as he wiped his forehead with the backside of the pack, “You never know…” With him leading, they exited and vanished into the downpour.

Mümtaz stared from where he sat, the cheapest variety of eau de toilette cloying his nostrils. The windows opposite had begun a new dance beneath hard rain; they spun, centripetal force drawing everything toward them as they jeered at the scene through reflections of death.

The estimations that he’d been making were correct: it was Suad, Suad who’d been in love with Nuran since before the beginning of time!

Out of fear of making eye contact, Mümtaz only fleetingly looked into Suad’s face. Fate cast this instant as a revelation. The moment Mümtaz glanced, Suad cackled slyly, wringing his hands as if to say, “We’ve dispensed with that noise, haven’t we now?” His laughter preoccupied Mümtaz for days. To fathom it fully, he’d have to search beyond human will and even conscientious life. This laughter was the suppressed chortle of a beast. No matter how much Suad praised and admired himself, boasting of graceunder-pressure by declaring, “An intelligent man knows how to get out of a tight spot!” his cackle and its bestial gratification belied an instinct less cunning than the fabled fox who purported to be wily though its pelt was to hang in the furrier shop, and this instinct seemed superior and successful because it only addressed what appealed to it directly, as a ready-made solution. No, this instinct was neither a dark temptation around which supernatural mysteries congregated nor a rarefied and rapacious appetite that caught its prey, regardless of the level of the heavens, to tear feather from feather and bone from bone. In Suad, there existed not a single fable or a single wingèd ascension toward decency, the sublime, or loftiness. The way she had resigned herself to defeat demonstrated that she was a bird of the same feather. They’d grappled and she’d lost. Tomorrow they’d separate, each on a distinct path, she in pursuit of dreams of marriage, Suad longing to forget through other conquests the vagrancy he imagined in his soul; in short, they’d entertain various encounters and possibilities before one day meeting again, and amid bygone dreams and dread, they’d reunite, frolic one atop the other, perhaps pay a visit to the doctor again, and by and by another embryo in the nighttime of formation, eyes yet sealed, would be tossed to the city’s sewers without having seen the rays of the sun… and so on and so forth, till the end, till the woebegotten fruits of the tree of death rotted fully and fell away, they’d live out their fate.