A Mind at Peace (22 page)

Excursuses gaped open like large cisterns or grottos; then he’d start again from the very beginning, making analogies and comparisons and sketches of contrasting situations in the air. Opposite Sabih, Mümtaz took the only precaution available to keep the monologue as short as possible: he neither asked questions nor responded, but only made occasional nods of agreement and waited like one beneath eaves during a downpour. These eaves might at times be Nuran’s pearls crossing the small indentation at her throat called the Bosphorus, or the cleft in her chin, which he so admired, or at times the puerile gestures and hesitations of her hands. He couldn’t fathom how a creature of such beauty had entered his life, and in this regard he had no faith in fortune. He listened to Sabih for hours as he sat in a state of enchantment brought on by the bashful, staccato laughter that transfigured Nuran’s face into a rose blossom beneath water.

In Mümtaz’s esteem, Sabih was like the flailing tail-end of that baffling and fabled creature the newspapers called public opinion, hydra-headed
vox populi
whose actual number of minds remained a mystery. He understood that one lived through current events. Like a boulder washed by waves, he was content as long as he could feel events passing over him. Sabih had no need for an idea of his own; there was always the newspaper. Genera of papers constituted both his ship and his seas, both his compass and his captain. Excluding an occasional change in temperament, he seemed to issue hot off the press along with the editions and extras he read each day. Yet, as he spoke, associations multiplied, memories deepened, and ultimately he’d mutate into a beast of four or five ideas at once. Tonight was such a night. To begin with, he was a democrat, next he became a very fiery revolutionary. Then he sank into boundless love for humanity and, finally, into the austere need for law and order.

Thank goodness for Adile. A number of items needed to be fetched from the shops. The maid was off and the doorman was ill.

Amid these tirades and the delicious reveries of Nuran that greeted him, Mümtaz surreptitiously wondered how Adile would upset Nuran’s pleasure, what details she’d impart, which relic of bygone days she’d uncover; in short, the type of impasses she’d point out to forestall their love. He knew that Adile didn’t much care for Nuran in light of her open fraternizing with Mümtaz on the island ferry, her gracious manner with the young lady notwithstanding. A few days after that chance encounter, in the coffee-house they’d entered upon Sabih’s insistence, she’d said, “You have no idea, Mümtaz, what a heartless woman she is. Heartless and cruel ...” Adile knew quite well how worldly Nuran was and with what constant lack of means she’d walled off the will of her heart. Back then Mümtaz had ignored this broadside attack and changed the subject. What Mümtaz wondered now was how this woman, who only concerned herself with her milieu, would try to disturb their peace.

Adile didn’t keep Mümtaz waiting long. With a wave of sincerity that gathered momentum with the second glass, she first praised Nuran’s beauty then described the automobile of a girlhood friend, her fur coat, and the evening banquets she hosted at her house. Finally, when her heart had drained itself of compassion, she revealed her sincere hopes for Nuran. From that mysterious wellspring called fate, she wished for everything that Mümtaz couldn’t possibly provide: ermine furs, jewelry, rubies, and the most luxurious automobiles passed before Nuran’s eyes, astonished by the abundance, as Adile concluded: “
Vallahi!
Honestly, my dear Nuran, when I think about all that you suffer to keep an ill child from being distraught! I could never display such patience. You realize these are your best years ... D’you have any idea what it’s like from here on out?”

In this manner, after listing all of life’s possibilities to Nuran, she’d reminded her, by mentioning Fatma’s illness, that her actual duty was to maternal concerns, before advising her, despite everything, to live her life to the fullest. Only one possible meaning could be deduced from this advice. Had Nuran perchance understood? “Either be the mother of your daughter, or arrange a good future for yourself. You’re wasting time with this buffoon.” Even if she had, she wouldn’t have let on.

Doubtless, Adile wouldn’t content herself with such subtle innuendo alone; she’d also make assaults of broader scope. But, two belated guests changed the composition of the night: a friend of Nuran’s father who’d given her
tanbur
-lute lessons at one time and a neighborhood friend of Sabih’s, a musician who’d be staying the night. With their arrival, the evening became a song-and-drink revelry.

Since Nuran couldn’t possibly oppose the insistence of her former mentor, she resigned herself to this new turn.

Though the musicians greatly admired
a la turca
music, they rarely ventured beyond the
makam
s of the Ferahfezâ, the Acemaşiran, the Beyatî, the Sultanîyegâh, the Nühüft, and the Mahur, which were essentially climes of the soul ... But within these
makam
s, they didn’t recite each piece simply as it was. According to Mümtaz,
a la turca
music resembled Ottoman classical poetry. In that case as well, one had to decide between genuine art and simple imitation. More precisely, pieces selected with today’s level of discernment, the criteria of Western tastes, could be deemed to be rather beautiful. In addition to these
makam
s, they played Hüseynî: a few works of Tab’î Mustafa Efendi’s caliber and some of İsmail Dede Efendi’s songs; in the Hicaz
makam
, they played Haji Halil Efendi’s famous
semâi;
and they considered Haji Arif’s two famous pieces and the Suzidilârâ
makam
, entwined with the fate of the modernizer Sultan Selim III, to represent a pinnacle.

These passions were rounded out by a few ecstatic pieces of rare vintage from the nineteenth-century reigns of Sultan Abdülmecit and Sultan Abdülaziz,
saz semâi
instrumentals,
makam
vocal medleys called
kâr-ı nâtık
, along with the works of present-day masters like Emin Dede, who kept alive the purest of classical tastes in the present like a belated spring or an exotic plant that adapted well to new soil. Mümtaz maintained that these works showed how classical Ottoman music merged with modern sensibilities and tastes. What he discovered in the old masters of schools of painting, considered to be “modern” now for the past fifty or sixty years, who were trained between 1400 and 1500, that is, a genuine innovation in aesthetics and sensibility, he also found in these musical genres, the
beste,
the
semâi
and the
şarkı,
and languid, gilded songs called
kâr
that resembled variegated and intricately carved wood ceilings or, rather, conjured Bosphorus panoramas as might be seen from sixteen-oared caïques, bejeweled and regal. In addition to these pieces, of course, there was the bark, the seed, the branch, and the tree roots; in other words, an entire assemblage of arboreal growth. Notwithstanding, what flourished here was the essential delicacy, the bloom of satisfaction, the absolute idea and the invigorating sap, the vision that was a rare vagary of chance, namely, the true reign, namely, the sultanate of the soul.

In this musical dalliance of Nuran’s, her distinction from her beloved Mümtaz was that she loved
gazel
vocal improvisations, perhaps with the corporeal attachment of her muliebrity to the deep masculine voice, to its sorrow and its melancholia approaching primitivism. For her, a
gazel
-song that filled a summer’s night was an articulation of beauty, perhaps constituting an art form distinct from music itself. Furthermore, Nuran knew the strains and folk songs that she’d heard and learned from her grandmother, a well-traveled, experienced old Bektashi. A sparkling new horizon opened for Mümtaz through the way this daughter and scion of an established family, raised along the Bosphorus, admired, like an İsmail Dede Efendi or Hafız Post, and recited, with an expression particular to each piece, village dirges,
türkü
s from Rumeli, Kozan, and Afşar, traditional dance music of Kastamonu and Trabzon, old Bektashi lyricals, and Kadiri
naat
-odes to the Prophet. On a number of occasions, while she recited these pieces, Mümtaz felt that Nuran was a daughter of an Eastern tribal clan or a young Kütahya bride going to a maidens’ celebration bedecked in pied velvets, atlas silks, sashes, and silver-threaded slippers. Truly baffling was his discovery, in this refined cosmopolitan, of a shared intimacy with the people whose lilts she’d appropriated – as if she were one of them. As days passed, it all constituted a force that transformed and completed Mümtaz’s dulcinea before his eyes, giving their love a panorama of the order of the soul.

That night, too, at Sabih’s, Nuran successively laid open the bastions of Nühüft and Sultanîyegâh
makam
s; as she sang these songs – her hands, which he so adored and admired, keeping tempo upon the small, crimson, wave-patterned tablecloth amid a debris of forks and knives – a constellation of sisters augmented the Nurans in his life and phantasies by means of the various expressions continually confronting him in her facial guises. In the course of hours, Nuran had herself forgotten all the discretions that she’d so insistently advised him to maintain. Blurting out, “Come then, Mümtaz, take me home, I believe the
rakı
has taken hold of me,” she quit the table, which amounted to a declaration of open warfare against Adile. In consult with her other guests, however, the mistress of the house was struggling to dampen some or another nuptial plans with the most strident of caveats, and thereby didn’t take full notice.

For Mümtaz, Seyid Nuh’s piece in Nühüft represented the most faithful aspect of Turkish song. Very few works conveyed the yearning for the eternal in the soul, the wingèd ascension toward the sun, toward illumination and immolation. The Nühüft, the thrust of its élan vital, was the essence of a civilization’s inner world hurtling toward a radiance that obliterated all else. Herein, the singular aim was enthrallment or depletion of a sort. And humanity’s infinity, in this instance, casting off rationalism in a single flutter, was in the process of attaining purity of soul. As Mümtaz listened, he was distilled from our material world; and death, at one pole, became the talismanic mirror before a rational life congruent with Creation; death was the downcast sibling living entangled with its grinning doppelgänger.

Truly bewildering was how this miraculous phenomenon suddenly stopped. Listeners were affected in kind as soon as the music started around a simple couplet of inferior quality. In this matter, the
makam
had a vital role to play. The lucid melody was laced with such crepuscular undertones that Eros and Thanatos, the two polarities in which the soul of mankind dwelled, merged involuntarily.

Relative to the Nühüft, İsmail Dede Efendi’s Acemaşiran
semâi
in 6/4 allegro was altogether different in its opulence. After a plethora of deaths, it resembled a searing recollection; a hundred thousand souls languishing in the intermediary state of a liminal
ârâf.
Here, too, the occult spoke. Here, too, humanity jettisoned many of its inherent qualities. Yet something was being yearned for. Here, Allah, or the Beloved, remained external. We yearned to ascend toward Him, exclaiming in Farsi:

Mümtaz sat listening to Nuran’s voice, watching the changes in countenance caused by her straining, and he, too, like İsmail Dede, uttered, “Therein our paradise does abide.”

As Mümtaz listened to this piece and, the
türkü
s and melodies sung by the increasingly impassioned elderly master of music Emin Dede, he contemplated the groundless animus Adile harbored toward their relationship. How
did
life manage to thrive between two polarities? At one extent, an array of vehicles for mankind’s exaltation and, at the other, trifling worries, the settling of scores, and random enmities that strove to exclude and banish people from exalted heights.

Or did fate wish to declare, “I will
not
leave you alone with your soul”? At the table he caught two or three glances Adile cast at him and Nuran. The mistress of the house looked at Mümtaz underhandedly as if to say, “I’ll show you.” But when she came eye to eye with Nuran, she declared, “I’m yours forever. You have no better friend than me.” Adile, in this manner, embraced Nuran, whom she thought was weaker and whom she knew had some breaches in her life. The small-minded settling of accounts had persisted in the same way during Seyid Nuh’s Mi’raj of the Sun, Dede’s expression of love that conflated Allah and Beloved, and the oh-so-profound synthesis of
türkü
s from Rumeli, or “Turkey in Europe,” with experiences on another horizon like fate, love, suffering, death, and separation. All the same, Adile admired traditional music and drew enjoyment from it. Yet even fine art couldn’t mollify the temperaments of some.

VIII

Nuran invited Mümtaz, whom she’d frequently mentioned, to the house. To Mümtaz, Nuran’s residence was like the paradise described in the last couplet of Itrî’s Acemaşiran song. On this count, he longed to see it and its inhabitants. Particularly the way the elderly music aficionado had piqued his curiosity that night by referring to Nuran’s uncle: “He knows this repertoire as well as we do, but he’s a creature of habit. He doesn’t show himself often.”

He found Nuran’s mother to be as he’d expected. Nazife, having come of age around the 1908 constitutional revolution, exhibited a number of endearing characteristics like many who’d grown accustomed to seeing life from beneath a gauzy black veil. She satisfied many a pleasure through a furtive glance. She had a childlike curiosity: “Now I’ve been exposed to this as well. When I go home, I’ll think about it more ... What’s happening on the outside? The world in which you live is so different from ours.”

Such thoughts could be understood to be natural impulses among most ladies who’d come of age thirty years ago. Under the influence of those years, she was very progressive in thought but very reserved in action. She’d been loved madly by a husband who was twenty years her senior, and she bore a multitude of personality quirks that accrued from being overly indulged. These traits constituted the persona of Nuran’s mother as wife of Rasim, one-time provincial governor and
ney
flutist.