Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

“Will it adopt it by force of war? We saw what happened between 1914 and 1918.”

“True, the road traveled is no indication of what lies ahead.”

Orhan, having finished with the lock, was lost in thought. During such moments, he’d be certain to sing a türkü . In fact, in place of answering Mümtaz, he mumbled:

Imperiled between a rock and a hard place, One falls by bullet, the next by knife wound. .

Mümtaz recognized the türkü . During the last war, while in Konya with his father, Mümtaz remembered that soldiers being transported by evening freight trains and peasants carting vegetables to town toward daybreak always sang this song in the station. It had a searing melody. The entire drama of Anatolia was contained in this türkü .

“How strange!” he said. “It’s acceptible, even forgivable, for the masses to moan and complain. Just listen to türkü s from the last war! What spectacular pieces! The older ones are that way too. Take that Crimean War türkü . But these songs aren’t liked by intellectuals. So they have no right to whine! That means we’re accountable.”

Nuri returned to the earlier topic: “And how d’you know that things won’t run amok this time? Due to the absence or the surplus of the most insignificant thing, a piece of straw.”

Mümtaz completed his thought: “I’m not defending war. What makes you think that I am? For starters, can humanity even be divided into the ‘victorious’ and the ‘vanquished’? This is absurd. This division is sufficient to bankrupt values and ethics and even what we’re fighting for. Naturally it’s a mistake to expect good or great things to follow in the wake of every crisis. But what’s to be done? You see, there are five of us here. Five friends. When we think independently, we find ourselves possessed of an array of strengths. But in the face of any crisis. .” His friends gazed at him intently as he continued: “Since morning I’ve been debating this on my own.” Abruptly, however, he returned to the previous topic: “On the contrary, worse, much worse things could arise.”

“What have you been deliberating since morning?”

“This morning, near the Hekim Ali Pasha Mosque, girls were playing games and singing türkü s. These songs have existed maybe since the time of the conquest of Istanbul. And the girls were singing them and playing. You see, I want these türkü s to persist.”

“That’s a defensive struggle. . That’s different.”

“Sometimes a defensive struggle can change its character. If there’s a war, I’m not saying we’ll rush into it at all costs. For nobody knows what the developments leading up to it will be. Sometimes, unexpectedly, a back door opens. You look to find an unforeseen opportunity! In that case, waging or refraining from war becomes a matter that’s within your own control.”

“When one contemplates it, it’s confounding. The difference between those who controlled humanity’s fate at the start of the last war and today’s statesmen is immeasurable!”

Mümtaz turned to İhsan in his thoughts as if to ask him something.

“Of course there are a lot of differences. Back then humanity seemed to emerge out of a single mold. Values were still regarded in high esteem! Not to mention that centuries-old diplomacy, its gentility and protocol. . Today it’s as if a lunatic has moved into the neighborhood. Europe as we know it has vanished. Half of Europe is in the hands of renegades bent on provoking the masses, on vengeance, and on spinning new fables.” The more he spoke, the more he assumed he was leaving his fixed ideas and fabrications behind.

“Do you know when I gave up hope on the current predicament? The day they signed the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact.”

“But the leftists quite applaude it. If you could just hear them rave! They’re now all praising the Führer. As if the Reichstag Fire Trial had never happened.” Nuri’s face was yellow with wrath. “As if so much murder hadn’t been committed.”

“Of course they praise him. But only until the next news flash. You get my drift, don’t you? Mind that one doesn’t lose his sense of ethics and value judgments! Despite being opposed to war, I’m not afraid of it, and I’m waiting.”

He spoke with unfamiliar certitude. From one of the neighboring coffeehouses a radio or gramophone cast another variety of turmoil into the evening hour. Eyyubî Bekir Aǧa’s version of the “Song in Mahur” lilted through the twilight, staggering Mümtaz on the spot. As he heard the melody, the version that Nuran’s grandfather had composed, that ominous poem of love and death, filled him. Tomorrow she’ll be leaving, and leaving full of resentment. . Fury, so vast as to be unbearable, rose within him. Why did it have to happen this way? Why is everybody imposing on me like this? She’d been talking about her peace of mind. So then, where’s my own peace to be found? Don’t I count? What to do in such solitude? He was all but thinking through Nuran’s words: Peace, inner calm, huzur . .

“The entire matter hinges on this. .” Orhan didn’t complete his thought.

“Go on!”

“No, I’ve forgotten what I was going to say. Only you’re right on one point. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Each injustice condoned gives rise to greater injustice.”

“There’s another point: avoiding injustice while fighting injustice. . This war, if it comes to pass, will be a bloodbath. But the torments suffered will all be in vain if we don’t change our methods. .”

I shouldn’t be seeking peace through Nuran, but through myself. And this will only happen through sacrifice. He stood.

“I’m worried about İhsan,” he said. “Please excuse me. And purge yourselves of these thoughts. Who knows, maybe there won’t be any war! Maybe we won’t get involved. We’re a country that’s lost so much blood, we’ve learned many lessons. The circumstances might just permit our neutrality.”

As Mümtaz took leave of his friends, he realized that they hadn’t discussed the stages of such a war, were it to happen. Inwardly, this pleased him.

Will it actually come to pass? The voice accompanying him said, “Don’t worry about it,” then added, “Well-spoken, you’ve put yourself at ease! That’s all you need to do, nothing more!” He ran and hopped onto a streetcar, perhaps to escape Suad’s derisive voice.

İhsan lay as sick as ever, his gaunt face ruddy from fever. Occasionally he tried to wet his cracked and drawn lips with his tongue. This was no longer the former İhsan; perhaps he verged on becoming a memory. Seeing him in this state meant encountering him halfway on that foreordained path. This was precursor to becoming a remnant, existing only through Mümtaz and other acquaintances. Should his persona grow a little more exhausted, a little more attenuated, it’ll pass into us, persisting only in our memories.

He gazed at İhsan’s hands. His distended veins looked as if they had been roasted. But they were alive. Alive as if they’d been conquered by another dimension of existence and were now living in another climate. A climate of 104 degrees. But that wasn’t all. The temperature alone didn’t create this environment. An array of small organisms, microbes, known as bacilli, observed through special instruments, isolated in tiny vials and in thin test tubes, introduced into a variety of laboratory animals, and thereby regenerated; for whose preservation and proliferation special methods were implemented, for whom hot and cold extremes were established, concerning whom a variety of tests were undertaken for their extraction from hosts, who were dyed in the most inconceivable ways, and preserved in fluids ranging in color by shades from blood red to dull green; these microbes had certain codes, and these microorganisms, along with the programming they carried, transformed this temperature between 102 and 104 degrees into a clime between life and death quite separate from our own context, transforming it into an unimaginable altitude or a suffocating, noxious quagmire, into the thin air found at a height of thousands of feet or into something like the maw of a volcano active with the admixture of unknown gases.