A Mind at Peace (20 page)

Mümtaz strolled until he reached Boyacıköy. There he sat at a small seaside fishermen’s coffeehouse. The view before him dilated or contracted depending on the direction he walked. In this miraculous play of light, rowboats, motorboats, and fishermen’s caïques full of lobster traps, each had surprising qualities based on their distance from him. One or two neighborhood youths and a few fishermen lolled about the coffeehouse. Mümtaz went to one of them, requesting that he inform Mehmet of his arrival. Then they began talking about this and that. Mümtaz’s impatience, however, prevented his remaining in one place for too long. Nuran was en route. This idea stupefied him. He could only take his thoughts to this threshold. But as soon as he arrived there, he shuddered as if an abyss yawned at his feet.

He remained in ignorance of what lay beyond. What lay beyond was a radiant chasm where colors seemed to meld, into whose aurora he and Nuran vanished.

At such a moment so personal and particular to him, Mümtaz was surprised to be engaged in everyday conversation with others. Stranger still, no one sensed this state of exception in him. All the characters remained the same. Grinning, the old coffeehouse proprietor was pleased at having overcome the sciatica that had afflicted him last winter while fishing for swordfish. His apprentice must have made up with his lover, Anahit – who’d made a custom of returning to her beloved after lengthy breakups spent recuperating from the fatigues of love – judging by the way he swayed afoot sleeplessly and wearily, like a rudderless boat without sail, lost in the mists of last night’s bedroom pleasures, which had yet to dissipate. A pair of fishermen mended a net heaped like a mysterious sea creature, crouching before cork buoys and blackened ropes. All about them, seaweed, shellfish, and the briny tang of the deep sea grew thick. Each member of the group posed questions to Mümtaz and listened to his answers. But none of them knew what he thought. Maybe they were aware of it, but they gave it no import. For him to have a woman, to be loved by a woman, was such a natural occurrence that had begun hundreds of thousands of years before him. Though, like death and affliction, it happened only when it was felt in one’s own person ... and perhaps because of this, it also served to alienate him from the surroundings.

Amid these thoughts, Mümtaz looked at Sadık from Rize, Remzi from Giresun, Arab Nuri, who was the seventh generation from Hisarlı, and Yani from Bebek. All were products of this experience: these wizened faces and calloused hands, these men who appeared to know nothing but the sea, fish, waves, sails, and nets, with him standing beside them – a youth with the countenance of Andrea del Sarto’s black-haired, Renaissance Madonnas, a youth whose swimming trunks were wound scarflike around his neck. They’d all either had the experience or were preparing to have it.

Oddly enough, despite the same mechanisms churning within them, they were oblivious to the very aspect of Mümtaz to which they could most relate. No, sitting and talking to them was futile. These men were his friends. Like this coffee-house, these nets, these masts leaning against the wall, the mosque up ahead, and the fountain, they were all his friends, including even the black, curly-coated puppy that waited for him each morning at the landing and followed him here, and might even accompany him all the way back to the house. Yet today, Mümtaz was alone in his joy and this would always be the case. In the future, he’d be alone in his misery, nothing but a riddle, a mystery to his friends and acquaintances. Or else he’d become nothing but a lone cipher flung to life’s periphery, and on another day, when he died, he’d die in the same fashion, alone.

He rose slowly. He entered the sea from a rowboat at the dock. The fog persisted, though not as thickly; light shone as if distilled through a pearl-hued alembic. Cold salt water washed away the fatigue of a night poorly slept. In a friend’s rowboat, without a thought for whom he’d donned the regalia of fleeting thoughts or rather apprehension, he went as far as the Emirgân ferry landing. And later, with his wet trunks in hand and the black-furred pup behind him, he walked home. The puppy was beside itself, overjoyed by this friendship; it not only traced circles around Mümtaz but made strange barks, small yelps, and growls as it loped along.
At least he knows how to express his joy.
Humanity couldn’t be fully content; this was impossible. What with thought, settling accounts, and anxiety. Especially anxiety. Humans are creatures of anxiety and fear.
What great miracle could save us from this fear?
But at the moment Mümtaz was simply full of bliss. Even if it came amid a host of thoughts and experiences that weren’t his own, he was blissful. Yet, in the middle of the hill, he was lanced by dread. The scales of the balance suddenly tipped in the opposite direction:
What if she doesn’t come . . . or if her visit isn’t fulfilled . . .

Opening the door, he invited the dog inside. The animal didn’t enter. He’d only once satisfied himself by being a guest in this house for three days. Then he’d reclaimed his freedom and gone back to the hollow at the base of the large chinar where he’d come into the world. He preferred to wait there for Mümtaz and to accompany him on walks.

And now it was outside, two paws on the threshold, wagging its tail, cocking its ears, asking to be played with a little or spoken to. Mümtaz had no choice but to go inside, leaving the door open. The dog placed its head on the threshold like a bygone lover of a traditional romance and stretched out before the door. Friendly peeps and growls emanated from its throat, and its eyes languished in the anticipated pleasure of reunion.

Nuran arrived amid such commonplaces. By the time she’d come, the dog had long gone. Mümtaz, distraught with impatience, waited for her before the door wearing his blue shirt and wrinkled pants. From the hill, she entered through the door breathlessly.

“Allah! What a steep hill,” she said.

She’d debated with herself for three days. She believed that the whole affair was quite unnecessary; distressed, she worried about where this step might land her. She was standing before a shroud of mystery. Should she draw it open, the universe would become a muddle. She acknowledged an attraction to Mümtaz. Something within her, which she liked to think was novel, awakening to the boundlessness of indeterminate hopes, to the warmth of presence in life, persisted in drawing her to him. Despite this, at the same time, she’d been hampered by an array of obstacles.

Over this three-day period, the specter of her great-grandmother never left her. The lady in the faint daguerreotype that she’d discovered in the old hope chest when still a little girl; the lady with her long white cloak and semitransparent veil-cloth, with her pallid, moonlight-hued face, and the eyes of a gazelle startled at the edge of a precipice; the lady who inspired in her such mysterious desires, who’d cultivated the pleasures of time past, and who’d turned traditional music and song into a veritable clime wherein Nuran could thrive, now attempted to deny her the measure of her intimate life. Seemingly, this faded picture incessantly came alive saying, “I was the object of much affection, and that’s what led to my ruin. Because I loved and was loved, all those who depended upon me were condemned to misery. With one of your closest relatives as such an object lesson, how do you dare?”

Yet, it wasn’t only her great-grandmother’s voice or presence that spoke to Nuran. A secondary, deeper and more complex voice emanated from the depths. And this second voice addressed Nuran’s heart and soul. It spoke through the cacophony of the treacherous awakenings of her heart and soul. This was the sound of the mixture of bloodlines coursing through her veins. Sacrificing everything at once for the sake of love and desire, the lifeblood of her great-grandmother Nurhayat – charging at full gallop – and the lifeblood of her great-grandfather Talât, prepared to burn in Eros’s forge like an object of sacrifice; and later still, her father’s lifeblood mixing in with these two, which, after ripening through thousands of manly exploits in Ottoman borderlands, in the Balkans, along the shores of the Black Sea, and stunned at having unexpectedly landed in Istanbul during the Crimean War, exchanging struggles in the name of freedom for a demure and diminished existence, his lifeblood becoming the willing captive of the sybaritic pleasures of ages; all of it constituted an exceptional, rather rarefied admixture. In one strain, purity of adventure; in another, purity of resignation, compliance, and subservience. That second voice articulating itself within Nuran in myriad accents was nothing but the voice of this mixed bloodline. Nuran carried this blood within herself for years like a pernicious legacy, trying to restrain and reject it. But on the second encounter with Mümtaz on the island ferry, she simply surrendered, for fearing something resembled the expectation of its arrival. Perhaps Nuran had enabled the awakening of this legacy within her through her own inner fear. That’s why she’d made a throaty recital of the “Song in Mahur” for Mümtaz on the ferry after his initial request, without even eliciting so much as a “please” from him! – shameless! – and she’d furthermore sung that song in the Sultanîyegâh
makam
on the hilltops of Kandilli. This blood was a strange brew. It’d been beaten to froth by the odd whisk of that musical genre known as
a la turca.

The “Song in Mahur” – a family heirloom with its periodic turpitude and keepsakes of cruelty, with its torments resembling the return to a primordial, primitive state of sorts – created an abyss through twin legacies, an abyss now yawning within her and summoning her. When Nuran pondered her great-grandmother’s life, how astonishing it was indeed that the lady who’d provided her with such models of etiquette spoke in a completely different idiom whenever Nuran evoked this song, after which, from the small and faint, austere picture in its chipped, gilded frame, this matron now glared at her life with eyes of rebuke, and passionately overwhelmed like an autumn prepared for burial beneath brittle leaves before the image of her existence, she abruptly cast off her former penitence, resuscitated by the semiferal beauty recounted by the elderly ladies amongst whom Nuran was raised, to begin an eternal fire dance in the furnace of her affections and lust for life. “Join in!” she demanded. “Join in the steeplechase, burn and live! Because love is the perfect form of existence ...” Even more astounding, her great-grandfather with his downtrodden and subjugated spirit accompanied Nurhayat in this fire dance, an all but primitive rite, and was prepared to again endure all his suffering. Indeed, he didn’t speak deliriously and desirously through a bewitching aura like Nurhayat, and he couldn’t perform the fire dance with the same agility. He, however, stoked the fires with his own torment like a sappy, greasy log smoldering in a hearth of anguish. “Seeing as you bear my blood, you too shall love and suffer one way or another! Don’t try to deliver yourself from fate in vain!” And he went even further, asking: “Haven’t you waited your entire life for this?” These were two people who knew nothing of decorum! “I’ve come here all the way from Hell’s half acre to burn in this fire! I’ve been cast about by countless winds. I’ve dried off beneath sunlight on nameless shores ...” And as Nuran listened, she remembered what Mümtaz had told her under the tree in Emirgân, that his fate seemed to have ordained everything beforehand. “Who knows,” he’d said. “Maybe because I denied everything from the past during my childhood, I cherish the past now. Or else there might be a different reason. We were peasants three generations ago. We’re completing a process of acculturation. My mother used to like music in the old style. My father, on the other hand, understood nothing of it. I could say that İhsan is something of an expert in music. I, on the other hand, have included it in my life. Hasn’t it been this way throughout history? Yes, perhaps I’m living the fate of a people. Do you want to know what I really think? Until our music changes organically on its own, our station in life won’t change. Because it’s impossible for us to forget it ... Until it transforms, our singular fate will be the fate of love!” When she heard this, Nuran had grown annoyed with him, because, staring into her eyes, he’d spoken of love while in İclâl’s company. But, now, she understood him. She saw a figure much like her great-grandfather in Mümtaz. He’d also uprooted himself and come here for the sake of searing experience.

Amid the debate that raged within her, Nuran observed her life and surroundings through new eyes, realizing how this bizarre family legacy regulated her private life and how her great-grandmother’s gravity ruled her. Not just her, the entire family. A bygone venture in love, a date torn from the calendar guided them all, preparing individual sorrows for them and their acquaintances in accordance with each of their dispositions. It was her turn. Hers and Mümtaz’s! Their shadows would flit and dart inside the golden cage that was the “Song in Mahur.”

Nuran knew that she’d pay a visit to Mümtaz from the first day. Not because an available young gentleman had invited her. Mümtaz’s voice by itself was inadequate to the task. An entire heredity, which made this love her singular fate, drove her there. Others had hollowed out their lives running away from it. Nuran’s mother had been this way. Not once in her life did she laugh openly, acknowledge an innuendo freely, or expose her feelings; she hadn’t even once kissed her children passionately. “Above all, a woman should know how to restrain herself, darling!” It was the first piece of advice she’d heard from her mother, who’d involuntarily always been cruel and had verged on oppressing her father – who loved her dearly and had to feel emotion to know he was alive. Her uncle Tevfik’s petulance arose on account of her mother. And the inappropriate affections Tevfik’s son Yaşar harbored for Nuran – so disquieting under the same roof – again were of the same origin. Nuran, too, had grown up with fear. Out of a coterie of young suitors that she could have loved, she’d married Fâhir, whom she knew she’d be able to love under the assumption that they’d somehow manage through the foundation of a good friendship. And her daughter, Fatma, even now, prepared for a similar fate. Her overzealous dependency on Fâhir and Nuran, the sensitivity and jealousy, were all traces of a legacy, an overwhelming burden that Fatma bore, too. It was anyone’s guess how miserable Fatma would become. Nuran, perfectly aware of this, took it all into consideration. Yet she also accepted life as it was. Because life could afflict one if it so desired. After Talât’s ordeal, a peculiar fanaticism against divorces seized the entire family. Nothing was considered as disgraceful as divorce. For this reason, most of the bridegrooms who’d married into the family began gallivanting and misbehaving, because they knew up front that their indiscretions would be forgiven. Some even left wives wanting for a scrap of stale bread. This zealotry took hold not only among the women but among the men as well. Tevfik lived with a woman who openly despised him, her husband of thirty years, because she considered him to be more attractive than her. Despite all of this, you see, Nuran divorced Fâhir. The first instance of divorce in sixty years had been enacted by Nuran. But this legacy, or social etiquette, didn’t exist only in their household. There were various martyrs in every branch of this sprawling family: Behçet, Atiye, Dr. Refik, and Salahaddin Reşit, who’d met his demise in Medina, among them.