Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

He passed his days there, beside his mother’s sickbed, at times attending to her, at times lost in thought or reading. Each day toward noon he went to the telegraph office to learn whether any response to his mother’s telegram had come. Then he sequestered himself in her room, and within the sounds reaching him from the ever-animated, ever-lively street, he consoled her.

As evening fell he sat before the window. Over recent days a girl had been walking down the street. Each night she passed before the houses singing türkü s as she carried an empty bottle or some other vessel. Mümtaz recognized her voice when she was still at the far end of the street:

’Tis nightfall and I haven’t lit this lantern o’ mine The Almighty has written this fate o’ mine I haven’t caressed my lamb to my heart’s content Should I die, darling, your fate will be torment

Mümtaz’s heart ached, assuming the gaze his mother trained on him every time she lifted her head bore a meaning close to that of these lyrics. Nevertheless, he couldn’t keep from listening. The girl’s voice was beautiful and strong. But she was still quite small, and in the middle of the rendition her voice cracked oddly, like a whimper.

A little beyond the houses, at the end of the street that led below, the song changed. Her voice suddenly grew bolder and more radiant, to such a degree that it seemed to resonate in intensely luminous echoes against the walls of the houses, the road, even the air itself:

Mother-of-pearl, dear Mama, adorns İzmir’s minaret Pour and I’ll quaff, dear Mama, from a drinking goblet

By means of the second türkü, Mümtaz was liberated from the woes of his short existence, whose meanings he couldn’t yet fathom, to be transported without warning to some other luminous realm, yet laden with longing and suffering. This realm began at İzmir’s Kordonboyu esplanade and ended with the death of his father, which also escaped his full comprehension. Here, too, dwelled a residue of torments that didn’t fit into his childhood imagination; here, too, gathered death, exile, blood, seclusion, and hüzün, the Hydra-headed dragon of melancholy coiling within him. For Mümtaz, that entity called “day” ended when the girl passed by; an anonymous girl, yet one whose arrival he anticipated, however fearful he was that it might disturb his mother’s peace. Until the next evening, there passed an undisturbed monolith of time.

That week, one night toward daybreak, his mother migrated to other worlds. Before she died, she requested water, then tried repeatedly, yet unsuccessfully, to impart something to him; her face went pale, her eyes rolled upward, a tremor moved across her lips, and her body stiffened. Mümtaz’s mind recorded her final moments in immaculate detail.

Following her death, a cavernous void opened that he couldn’t manage to fill. Perhaps by trying continuously to forget troubled days, Mümtaz himself had created this temporal abyss in his mind. However, he did precisely remember the day he was placed on a ship to Istanbul. His kith and kin gathered and took him to a little grave in the courtyard of an old mosque; indicating a mound of recently smoothed-over earth, they said, “Here lies your mother.” But Mümtaz never accepted this final resting place. In his mind he’d buried his mother next to his father. The time span between their deaths was negligible. Having her rest beneath the large tree of death with his father was easier and more appropriate. Maybe because Mümtaz had grown accustomed to seeing them together, he could hardly think of them separately in eternal repose.

He remembered the day vividly. The landscape was suffused in white radiance. Sunlight conducted crystal lutes at every turn, on the wooden exteriors of houses, on terra-cotta shingles, on the pure white macadam, on swaths of sea appearing at intersections, on the lemon-yellow wall of the old mosque, on the small and dusty trees of the cemetery, on their sharp stones, on the ruined fortress ramparts where he saw his erstwhile friends at play; indeed, light was crooning its peculiar, contagious, and omnipotent song of radiance. The bees, the flies, the scrawny alley cats, the dog who’d commandeered the area in front of their house, the pigeons flocking on all sides, everyone and everything was besotted with the musical harmony and invitation of lux.

Only one figure, it seemed to him, only he alone, had been excluded from this banquet. Fate, through one of its decrees, had culled him from others.

What would happen to him? He didn’t know. He’d go to Istanbul, but to stay with whom? How would they regard him there? Never again would he see his mother and father. Into this agony now mingled the despair of an orphan. He felt an overwhelming urge to weep, though he restrained himself. Sobbing in the midst of this sunlight, on this road where each passerby practically hummed a tune, crying before this crystal sea seemed something of an impossibility. Weeping would do nothing but elicit pity from those around him. By now they must certainly be tired of him. For days on end, he’d sensed the shaking of heads and sidelong glances that pursued him like a veritable fiery hand on his back. He assumed he’d been a burden and cursed fate. No, he wouldn’t cry. He certainly seemed to possess a peculiar fate, distinct from others.

Toward midafternoon, the ship was to embark. The entire family accompanied him to the pier. There they entrusted him to a civil servant of long standing and his wife who would escort him to Istanbul; and Mümtaz, disgruntled by destiny, gladly bid farewell to the gathering then and there. He’d scarcely noticed the absence of the oldest son of the household, who’d shown him such camaraderie. A bizarre sense of revulsion overcame him. The sunlight gouged his eyes, and the merriment, in which he could not partake, annoyed him. He longed for an extraordinarily gloomy, somber, and muted place. A place like his mother’s grave. A place at the edge of a secluded mosque wall, shielded from the sunlight, where the crystal lutes of illumination didn’t mock his fate, where the bees, drunk with lifeblood and sun, didn’t buzz, where children didn’t laugh and shout shrilly in the light, like a shattered mirror whose shards pierced his flesh.

The blackened hulk looming in the offing heartened him. He spoke of nothing, didn’t even offer his thanks, only hastily took his leave by kissing hands and cheeks — and hurriedly at that.

In Istanbul he was greeted by his aunt and İhsan. İhsan had recently returned from a military imprisonment in Egypt. Reasons of health prevented him from going to Anatolia to fight in the resistance. As a consequence, he was working for the underground in Allied-occupied Istanbul. Mümtaz’s father, at home, had mentioned his nephew İhsan frequently. Statements like, “I’m quite impressed with İhsan. Hopefully, Mümtaz will grow up to be like him,” or, “The brightest one in our family is surely İhsan,” or, “I only wish for that boy’s safe and sound return,” could be heard almost daily. Hearing his father’s comments at once conjured a number of visions of this cousin, who was twenty-three years his elder. When greeted at the ship by İhsan, Mümtaz realized that he was actually more agreeable than the personae of his preconceptions. A man with a wounded leg, a pockmarked face, and smiling eyes grabbed him and proclaimed, “That’s no way to greet your old cousin!” lifted him into the air and advised, “Don’t be so long in the face, son, forget it all,” and declared his friendship without expecting a thing in return.

Mümtaz adjusted to the Şehzadebaşı household of old Istanbul with difficulty. His elderly aunt had seen much suffering. İhsan was very busy. In addition to his teaching, he had a great deal of writing and reading to attend to. Outside of school, Mümtaz passed his days in near isolation. They’d given him the top-floor room above İhsan’s. The large adjacent library would later provide him with a place to study and write. This first encounter with so many books, stacks of pictures, and curios astounded him. Once he grew accustomed to life in the household, the library beckoned. His first books came from its shelves. Novels, stories, and poetry — whose meanings he couldn’t quite decipher — were his truest friends that year. The following year they enrolled him in the French lyceum Galatasaray. One week afterward İhsan and Macide married.