Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

He stood, paid his bill, and stepped out into the street. He walked slowly. His previous vertigo and nausea had ceased; now, another strain of agony rose within him. He thought about the fetus. Tomorrow the fetus would be plucked from its mother’s womb with a fine set of forceps. It, too, had been appended to Mümtaz’s life through its brief misadventure. Tomorrow it would perish. Tomorrow evening a quivering, bloody clot of being, an anomaly resembling a skinned frog, would float in a cesspool of the city.

Tomorrow the central operator on Heybeliada would hear a bell. A voice from Istanbul would exclaim, “Sanatorium!” and the operator would plug the cable into the appropriate slot. A conversation would transpire; Suad would be roused from his bed: “Hello, hello, is it you, sir?” He’d ask, “Is everything in order?” and until he received an answer, his brows would furrow, and briefly with his entire being he’d swing between two extremities, before the lines on his face softened, and the perspiration on his forehead dried. “Thank you, good brother, thank you so much. Send her my best regards, I’ll go and see her myself later.”

It was the last venture of an unborn fetus as would be experienced by other people tomorrow. Later a taxi would be summoned, and a sallowfaced, afflicted woman would return to the home of a relative or a friend as elsewhere the doctor’s attendants sterilized the instruments and washed the basins under copious amounts of water.

He wiped his brow. He walked from Galatasaray up to Taksim Square along İstiklâl Boulevard neither gazing at the shops nor the throngs inundating him from either side.

A tiny fetus, an unborn child. This, too, had been appended to Mümtaz’s life. Over a period of forty-eight hours, his life had grown and expanded. What else and who else would yet enter into it, all due to the fact that he loved a woman who loved him in return? A day in the life. Living meant being besieged by others and slowly suffocating. To exist…

But the tiny fetus, the children conceived by Suad and that woeful subservient woman wouldn’t live. Tomorrow evening it would perish.

An urchin begged for alms, his feet, face, eyes, and hands covered in mud to such an extent that his voice seemed to come from a swamp.

“For the sake of Allah…”

Mümtaz verged on asking: “But how quickly you’ve emerged from the cesspool into which you’d been tossed? How have you managed to grow like this?”

“For the sake of Allah…”

His hand went to a pocket. When the mass of dirt and mud before him saw this, it became a bit more animated; its twitching hand closed over the money, and without saying thanks, it went on to approach the man behind Mümtaz.

“ Allah rızası için ,” he pleaded again.

He would die. For the sake of Allah. He would die, tomorrow evening. The perplexing vertigo had begun again. Everything was spinning around him. It spun like a hoop spinning at the speed of light, and as it spun, everything blurred and lost color and shape.

“ Allah rızası için …”

A child was to die. Tomorrow she’d have to call him. She’d have to say, “It’s all taken care of, it’s over!” This was living. All of it was part and parcel of life. All of it constituted existence: the sea bass marinating in mayonnaise displayed in the window of this restaurant, its membranelike skin before him, the saltfish whose rather frigid eyes lit up like a varnished yellow tin canister — whose extinguished eyes glared with the sheen of unpolished zinc — and the white-frocked waiter stepping on Mümtaz’s toes.

They surrounded him as if they’d long awaited the moment of Suad’s entrance into his life, and they gradually constricted him in that bizarre vertigo, closer and more firmly, without giving him the chance to move a muscle.

“What should I do? Allah, how to escape?” A small beam of sunlight shone suddenly. Like the soft angel hair of children, a treetop was illuminated by an iridescent light. Mümtaz stood stark still. He’d undergone an abrupt and astounding transformation. Neither the prior revulsion nor the constricting pressure remained. He looked around as if he’d awoken from a deep, extended sleep. With a feeling of satisfaction foreign to him and in a state of profound longing, he remembered Nuran. His eyes fixated on the radiance atop the tree, as if the wet light led to Nuran, emanating from lands where she resided; staring, he pined for her. Nuran was also part of his life, and as a result, the remainder, the confounding faces that filled the dark side of the medallion of life, had simply vanished.

But he wasn’t at peace. The torment that had incapacitated him for two days hadn’t dissipated but had only transformed. A profound yearning for Nuran and the dread of having lost her forever rose within him. He felt her absence viscerally as if he hadn’t seen her in ages and he believed that he’d insulted her in unknown ways. He was convinced she despised him. Though he wanted to pursue her, the distances between them were impossibly vast, and it drove him crazy.

By the time he’d reached Beşiktaş, evening had fallen. The sky had cleared behind him; only the eastern sky was enshrouded in deep purple clouds. Within their shadows, the hilltops, buildings, and gardens receiving the last of the sunshine assumed unrecognizable, grotesque forms that stuck in one’s imagination, as if they’d sprung from a spell or séance.

A dark and dank ferry landing: within a bizarre shiver, a fever of sorts, he awaited the Bosphorus ferry. Like a prisoner of fate, his face pressed to the iron bars of the pier fence, as if maintaining contact with his world through bars and interstices, he stared at the Asian shore, toward haunts of Nuran’s habitation. In that state, Mümtaz might have recalled each prison türkü that had embellished his childhood with sorrowful hüzün .

Perhaps through this remembrance and through his own enduring efforts, he’d descended into a phantasy that would prepare the way for an episode of psychosis, or hysteria of sorts. Beset by delusion, he stepped back from the fence and sat on one of the wooden benches in the waiting room.

The waters before Üsküdar embraced an opaque night. This was no longer a summer’s or September’s night exposed like a daisy, whose charms laughed with open abandon. A few days of rain had drawn an impermeable shroud separating the yali s and seas before which the ferry passed and the summer diversions and iridescent, languid hours that howled in a mother-of-pearl seashell, hours that had lasted till a day beforehand. Nuran, behind this shroud, gazed at him in remorse brought on by fathoms of separation, as if through a maddening lack of possibilities. Everything remained behind the shroud. His whole life, what he admired and believed, fables, songs, hours of intimacy, riotous laughter, unions of intellect, and even his own self, languished there, beshrouded.

Tonight a faded and feverish shadow consisting only of desperate memories and vague intimations remained exiled along with Mümtaz; instead of paving stones, the sidewalks were covered with memories reviving at first contact and assuming the form of reminiscences of days-past; tonight resembled a passageway from whose walls seeped melodies of nostalgic songs instead of water, Mümtaz could do nothing but roam, seeking out and searching for his former self by striving to sidle up to familiar sources of light one by one so as to warm his bones — yet whatever light he approached simply sputtered out.

From the lowered shades of yali s filtered fuller and more woeful lights different from the radiance that had caught them so unawares on nights of the bluefish; street lamps sparkled through denser haze, and gardens and copses — like massive flowers with withered petals and faded colors — persisted as shadows that coiled around a name or a memory.