Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

Mümtaz shrugged. “Nonsense. .”

But Suad was still laughing. Then he suddenly grew serious. “Perhaps,” he said. “But for me, this amounts to reality. Do you understand? For me, Allah is dead. I’m savoring my freedom. I’ve killed Allah within myself.”

İhsan asked, “Do you actually believe that you’re free?”

Suad looked at him spitefully. His face was covered in sweat. “I don’t know,” he said. “I want to be free. .”

“No, you can’t be…”

“Why? Who can stop me any longer?”

“The Allah that you’ve killed still exists within you. You’re no longer living your own life. In this state, you’re only a tomb, something like a coffin. You house a horrific, cruel death. What freedom could you possibly have? Yes, I, too, know that some people believe that ‘without Him, everything is permissible,’ and have gone on to plunder the site of His absence for the sake of humanity. I also know about the notion of the demigod, or ‘God-man.’ What of it? It’s only left us face-to-face with our own miseries. The fate of mankind is the same. One is still confronted with the same difficulties. One still suffers the same agonies. Honestly, what you perceive as a new dawn is but a conflagration. . No, by toying with notions of Allah, you won’t be able to escape Him. No wound can heal while it’s being ministered to.” He paused for a while. “But d’you know, Suad, what a great theologian you would have made? Because what you’re expounding is nothing but a theology in reverse.”

Suad said, “I don’t quite think so. In fact, not at all.”

“As you wish, but in my opinion, that’s how it is.”

Suad glanced at his watch, and lifting his glass toward the gathering, he downed his drink. Only Mümtaz watched him stare intently into the bottom of his empty glass before placing it back on the table.

“I should be going! Farewell to one and all. .”

Mümtaz and Nuran objected. “Where to? How? The night’s still young, there are amusements yet in store.” But he didn’t listen.

“No, I have the promise of an engagement! Though I’m a tad late, I should go. Good-bye, everyone!” With a gesture of his hand, he abruptly took leave of the gathering. Nuran and Mümtaz accompanied him to the doorway.

Mümtaz, to Nuran: “Why don’t you insist that he stay?” As he said this, he felt a sense of dissolution within him. Whether Suad stayed was of no import to him anymore.

Nuran, looking at Suad: “Insisting would be useless, he’s determined to go. Godspeed, Suad!” Before shaking his hand, she straightened his collar. “Would you like a scarf?”

“Thanks, but my collar is quite broad. If need be, I’ll raise it… Mümtaz will accompany me for a distance, won’t he?”

The two gentlemen exited together.

Under cover of night, Mümtaz breathed deeply. He felt so tired as to be unable to withstand anything more. In the humid night, they walked past a cluster of shadows, which he’d seen with different eyes a few hours before. The autumn night had engulfed the hilltops of Emirgân in a lonely phantasm of impossibility. The lights of the Asian shore resembled futile distress signals within the desolation. As if unable to see in the darkness, Suad stumbled to the right and left. They proceeded in this way until the middle of the hill where Mümtaz’s houseguest said, “You turn back now. .” But he couldn’t complete his words. He was seized by a bout of coughing.

Mümtaz said, “If you’d like, let’s turn back. Stay here with us tonight! You won’t be able to find any means of transport now. There’s an extra bed!” Suad didn’t respond until his coughing subsided. He simply held on to Mümtaz’s hand firmly. When the coughing died down, he said, “No, I’d best be going. I’ve disturbed you enough anyway.”

“Not at all. But you’re not well!”

“True, I’m not, not at all. . but it’ll pass!” And he let go of Mümtaz’s hand, which he’d been clasping tightly with two hands. Laughing, he said, “ Haydi! Go on, have fun…” In the darkness he sensed that Suad’s eyes sought out his own, and Mümtaz looked away involuntarily. But Suad didn’t go; grabbing the collar of Mümtaz’s jacket, he accosted him in a low voice, “I’ve written Nuran a letter. Are you aware of this? A love letter!”

Mümtaz, startled in the face of this lunge, stuttered, “I–I know. She showed it to me. Did you know that we’ll soon be getting married?”

“I knew you were involved.”

“In that case?”

“There is no case . Just another senseless act. . a half hour before I’d written it, I hadn’t thought of Nuran for months.”

Mümtaz, in a collected tone, as if there were no matter relating to him in the balance, said, “But with respect to me, with respect to your old friend, I don’t know, it wasn’t the right thing to do, now, was it?” They came eye to eye. An agonizing grimace overcame Suad’s face.

“You wouldn’t understand, would you, how impulses, strange and inappropriate, at times overtake one? Perhaps you’ll never understand. Because you uphold your measured actions, above all desiring predictable causes and effects. You seek out the logic in all things! But what’s done is done! Don’t let me detain you for nothing. I only wanted to inform you even if it’s an impropriety. Fare thee well.” And he began to hastily descend the hill.

Mümtaz cried after him, “Everybody’s this same way, so don’t be slavish to your damn cause!”

“Good-bye.” Suad descended with quick steps.

Mümtaz stood listening to Suad’s footsteps sounding a deeper clack in the night and to his gut-wrenching cough. Then he headed slowly back to the house, pleased that his hand was now free of the large, bony, and clammy vise of Suad’s palms. Within this eerie night, seeing his own hand in Suad’s had alarmed him. This tacky vise had given him the dread of a possession that seemed to penetrate clear through to his soul; maybe this was why he’d avoided Suad’s eyes. As he recalled this, he grew angry at himself; he’d been intimidated by a sick man. Nonetheless, his sense of salvation was so profound that he raised his hand aloft in the dark and watched it like a beloved keepsake with which he’d been reunited. Suad’s hands, with their sticky warmth, seemed to suck away a potent, rather essential and vital element from the skin of Mümtaz’s palm and fingertips. He asked himself repeatedly, Why is he so tormented? Why is he so cruel? Mümtaz knew that he’d descended into a mental state that he hadn’t experienced since he’d met Nuran. I’m a hundred steps away from him, and I’m still trembling on this road . Everyone he considered a part of his social circle was present in the house, but at that moment he thought neither of Nuran, İhsan, nor the houseguests.

On the crest of the hill, he stopped again and looked about. The autumn night, as if resting behind a black and highly polished glass pane, its scattered lights penetrating deeply into him, glimmered in a state beyond any and all potential for change. In the distance, the Bosphorus had become a glowing ashen ribbon. The hazy street lamps beyond, in astral stillness mimicking starlight, illuminated their own silence rather than the existences that surrounded them. Yet, all of it, everything in the environs, the ambient nocturnal sounds, the occasional peeping bird or buzzing insect, as well as the susurrus of branches, was in something of suspended animation.

And what if everything he said was true? Allah, what if all he said was true? Under this trepidation, he raised his head and watched the dome of sky. A debris of stars, luculent pulses that made the darkness of the firmament more aggressive, gleamed like windows of hope, anguish, and dread in houses of the afflicted. Involuntarily he thought, He’s not dead yet. . The torment within him was so great that he wanted to escape, to take refuge somewhere. But where could he go? In this black night laden with radiant caravans of infinite time no crack existed into which the human soul might seep. The sated black night wouldn’t accommodate one more thing, rejecting every living being and coalescing around him like a bejeweled carapace. Élan vital, the secret laughing and speaking through all matter, had withdrawn behind a thick gem-studded shroud. Somewhere some thing rustled, the edge of the horizon stirred. The heavy-laden, fierce night glided overhead like a large turquoise and gilt bird, though its wings maintained their rigidity.