Ahmet Tanpinar - A Mind at Peace

He walked, watching this illumination within the nocturne, noting the darkness it disrupted, the glistening faces and clothes and the shadows that sank further into the night as he slowly approached the scene of figures. The light embellished each movement one after the next onto the night and, within a reigning shadow, gradually and confidently completed the forms. In this way, an everyday undertaking came to life boldly.

When he reached them, one of the workers requested a cigarette. “We’re all out of ’em,” he said. Mümtaz left his half-smoked pack with them and continued.

He forged through the summer’s night, the sounds of hammers, the susurrus of trees, and the rumbling passage of empty trolleys testing rails in the distance.

Beneath the luminance of two electric lamps, the municipal complex at Beyazıt, within that peculiar and overwhelming starkness specific to this type of official building, slumbered, stealthily poised. And it woke quickly. First a policeman on duty emerged from nowhere, his collar undone, cap in hand; then a janitor appeared in a corridor along with the chair on which he slept. The chair and its partner awoke together: One shape approached Mümtaz, while the other skipped backward.

The doctor wasn’t available. A short while beforehand he’d been summoned to a difficult birth. He’d telephoned to say he’d be delayed.

Tonight a child had been born. Mümtaz’s mind registered this fact without attaching much importance to it, like a newspaper tidbit. Shocked by his failure to find what he sought, he gazed at the faces of the two men standing before him. The police officer mumbled, “Doctor. . doctor. .” Finally he meticulously described the route to the house of a military doctor a short way past Soǧanaǧa: “He’s an exceptionally good man; he’d help you even if he were in the most dire situation, but I can’t be sure if he’s at home.”

“What d’you mean?”

“His children have gone to their summerhouse. But he stays here certain nights.”

To let a little coolness and an echo of the sea into this stifling night, Mümtaz inquired, “Where do the children go?”

“To Çengelköy, on the Asian shore. . They have a villa there…”

To Çengelköy. . How Mümtaz would have loved to find himself in Çengelköy or any spot on the Bosphorus removed from the anxieties of recent days. How he would have loved the feel of a rocky road beneath his feet, the treetops of Kuleli above his head, to find himself in the spot where those shadows conjured a realm unto themselves in the dark waters, and farther on; he’d chat with the factory guard, then he’d slowly walk from Vaniköy toward Kandilli, and at the crest of the hill, he’d sit on a boulder and watch the Bosphorus, and take in the scents of the enormous black rose of the night. And he’d think about Nuran and the following day’s tryst.

Nuran’s name coursed through his body like a feverish shiver. But pleasures of reminiscence weren’t as innocent as they’d previously been. Intermingled with them was the anxious guilt of having neglected İhsan. Meanwhile, he’d made it here almost in a run. He realized he was covered in sweat. But he’d continue to run. This was something like one’s fate as determined by the stars. Those guilty by birth were fated to run this way throughout their lives, bearing torment. Mumbling, “And me, throughout my life. . poor İhsan…” Mümtaz turned into a narrow alley.

A private, cleanly dressed Istanbul youth opened the door. When Mümtaz inquired after the doctor, the soldier gestured upstairs before vanishing. He came back down immediately, indicating that Mümtaz could go up.

A sizable parlor: Two of its windows faced the Bosphorus. In a corner rested a broad divan with two chairs beside it piled with seventy-eights, and nearby a gramophone played. Without so much as a glance at the doctor’s face, Mümtaz recognized the piece being played. The violin concerto approached conclusion. On the bed, the doctor, wearing gaiters, trousers, and an undershirt that clung to his body from perspiration, listened without disturbing his peace. Mümtaz, within the astounding transfiguration of the musical motif, which gave one the sensation of being in a dream, could all but observe himself approaching his own essence. Before his eyes, a seed that had only just been sown grew rapidly, branched out, and foliated.

What unanticipated crescendos, soaring strains, proclamations of self, fits of hesitation, and finally, an arrival like the discovery of truth, repeating its concise development within subtle variations like an autumn cornucopia, before once again vanishing into the marvel of metamorphosis.

Silently Mümtaz sat on the corner of the bed in a spot where the doctor had retracted his foot, and listened.

What was it? Had he been asked such a question, he’d have answered, “Doubtless, one of the things I’m most attached to in this life.” But this still would have conveyed nothing. Was it symbolic of human fate? Did it amount to a complaint or a surrender? Was it the dark dance of memory in the light of unconsciousness? Which of the dead did it summon to life? Which span of time did it resurrect?

Or was it simply another realm formed outside life by the single-handed toil of a deev in human cloak — a creature unlike man — created for the sole purpose of expending its strengths? Certainly this, too, was a distinct and particular climate like the one he delved into at İhsan’s bedside, with its specific extremes, stifling altitudes, harsh and rejuvenating breezes, and devastating siroccos. And as was the case when one’s pulse reached 120 and one’s body temperature 104, one lived here in a discrete way, facing other challenges of singular intensity.

Suad had listened to this concerto before his suicide. Even earlier, over and over for an entire day, he’d listened to it alone. This was what he’d confided in his letter without indicating why. And the concerto, in its heavy, tormented progression, didn’t divulge this secret. The music itself was unaware that Suad had listened to it. It simply scattered and spewed its fiery essence.

Mümtaz gazed at the gramophone as if the entire enigma of Suad was hidden between the small metallic disk of the speaker and the hermetic world of the vinyl record that spun in frozen sparkles. How many times had Mümtaz pictured Suad listening to this piece in his own apartment on that last night? His face must have been very pale. . And who knows, maybe, like the protagonist of the story that he’d suggested I write, he laughed at everything with a saintly piety of sorts. According to his letter, first he’d listened to this concerto together with that girl, and after she’d left the next morning, he’d played it by himself. And at night, while writing his letter, he’d listened to it again. Undoubtedly he raised his head from time to time, and because he knew it was the last time he would hear it, he surrendered all of his attentions to its agonizing progression. And perhaps, like all people facing death, he was absent and indifferent to everything. Perhaps he was afraid. He regretted what he was about to do. He sought a means to avoid it, looking to the door, hoping that someone would enter and deliver him from this predicament.

And Mümtaz wondered whether this concerto had played a part in his demise. For it transported the listener to such realms of impossibility. . Then, abruptly and vaguely, he recalled that he, too, had listened to the same piece that same night. Indeed, the soreness of memory within him at that moment, the helpless awakening, didn’t come from nowhere. But where? I returned home at night. I conversed with İhsan briefly. He felt well. And I was tired. I went to bed. Then, until Macide woke me up. . The first side of the seventy-eight snarled to a halt. The doctor, with nary a glance at Mümtaz, cued the other side. Mümtaz wiped his brow as if he’d been roused awake. But where? Or else was it in my dream? Of course, he couldn’t have heard the entire piece. But the vivid pleasure of taste, the pain!