A Mind at Peace (26 page)

In Mümtaz’s esteem, everything from an Istanbul
paysage
to the entire Turkish culture, its filth, its decay, and its splendor was contained in traditional music. The Occident roamed dumbly in our midst like a stranger due to its inability to fathom our music. And many a vista appeared before our eyes accompanied by a melody.

“Not to mention that when a work of art, something of intrinsic value, is underscored by music it is transformed. Strange, isn’t it? In the end human life doesn’t embrace anything but sound. We exist as if passing over material things, as if barely touching them. Yet through poetry and music ...”

Mümtaz’s obsession with things past gave Nuran the inkling that he wanted nothing more than to be shut up in catacombs. The world certainly offered myriad pleasures and other modes of thought. She liked Üsküdar, but it was dilapidated and its inhabitants impoverished. Among the throngs of unfortunates, Mümtaz forged ahead, blithely spouting “Acemaşiran” and “Sultanîyegâh.” But what about society? Where was the overture to life? Actually doing something, treating the afflicted hordes, finding work for the unemployed, bringing smiles to crestfallen faces, delivering these people from being nothing but relics of the past ... Or had the episodes that he’d confided about his childhood affected him more profoundly than she’d assumed?
Am I living in a country vanquished by Death?

Taking Nuran by the arm, he pulled her away from the front of the ablution fountain. “I know,” he said. “A new life is necessary. Maybe I’ve mentioned this to you before. In order to leap forward or to reach new horizons, one still has to stand on some solid ground. A sense of identity is necessary ... Every nation appropriates this identity from its golden age.”

Mümtaz nonetheless suspected that he, too, bore traces of ambivalence. Not because he admired time past but because he couldn’t deliver himself from the annoying assault of the consciousness of death.

Their frenzied infatuation arose somewhat from this realization. The fact that he, and maybe he alone, knew this better than anyone was troubling. Often Mümtaz suffered under the assumption that the disquieting notion of death separated him from others. Didn’t this absolute comprise the clockwork that had regulated his dreams since childhood? In his love for Nuran, didn’t he consider her courage to live and her beauty something like life’s victories? Whenever he took her into his arms, wasn’t he declaring to the afreet of death looming just beyond her head, “I’m on the verge of vanquishing you. I’ve defeated you, here, regard my weapon and my shield”?

Nuran’s likely discernment of this truth made Mümtaz anxious.

“We need to separate two things. On one hand there’s a need for social progress. This can be achieved by analyzing social realities and by continually working to develop them. Naturally, Istanbul won’t remain just a place that produces lettuce. Istanbul, and each part of the homeland, requires a reform program. But our attachments to the past are also part of these social realities, because those attachments constitute one of the manifest forms our life has taken, and this persists into the present as well as the future.

“On the other hand there’s our realm of pleasure. Or, in short, the realm we inhabit. I’m no aesthete of decline. Maybe I’m searching for what’s still alive and viable in this decline. I’m making use of that.”

Nuran concurred through laughter, “I understand that, Mümtaz. However, at times one risks remaining on the sidelines of life, living through just one single idea. In which case, completely different images come to my mind.”

“For instance?”

“You won’t be upset with me?”

“On the contrary, why should I be?”

“Something like an ancient corpse interred with all its adored objects, including jewelry, gold ornaments, and images of beloved friends and family. Once entombed, he comes alive and his former life begins. Stars shimmer, lutes play, colors speak, and seasons produce their progeny. But forever on the other side of death. Always conceptually, like a dream that belongs to another ...”

“First, like an Isis, a fertility goddess bearing the golden disk of the sun, your image engraved upon a wall comes to life ever so slowly, sloughing off the constrictions of the ancient design, and you lean over my decayed body ... but honestly, genuine art
is
created in this way. The dead are living in our heads at this very moment. To just live one’s own life through another’s thoughts, or to force time to accept an aspect of your being. Take, for example, the ‘Hunched İmam’ ... the Hunched İmam, what a comical name! But what do we think about when listening to Tab’î Mustafa Efendi through his Aksak Semâi today? To us, he’s a genuine warden of life and death. And just conjure, if you will, his existence for a moment. An unfortunate soul living off alms from a mosque charity in Üsküdar on one of these hilltops, residing in a suffocating wooden house squeezed between the manors of pashas. A casualty of life condemned, after removing his shoes at the threshold, to sit on his knees in a constricted corner at the gatherings of grand viziers from Fazıl Ahmet Pasha to Baltacı Mehmet Pasha. Maybe he wasn’t even able to find his way into such gatherings. He might have spent his days among the lower echelons. Maybe he survived on handouts and small donations. Whenever we recite his songs, however, he makes an astonishing resurrection. He overtakes the roads of Çamlıca through which Sultan Mehmet IV rode his charger bedecked in gold and gems, or rather, he infuses the entire panorama. And suddenly the man waiting for a more cunning compatriot to give him the opportunity to earn an extra five or ten
kuruş
with a ‘Master, come join us in the
mevlûd
birth song of the Prophet tomorrow!’ is transformed into one possessed of ample means of admiration and recognition ... and maybe we’ve learned to appreciate each other by these very means.”

“Isn’t love the same in every part of the world always?”

“Yes and no ... That is, not at all in terms of the physiological! Just think of the differences between insects and mammals. Think of the wretched reproductive habits of fish and crustaceans or the variations between humans and other mammals, not to mention the disparities between tribes, clans, societies, and civilizations.” With a chuckle he quipped, “For instance, had you been a praying mantis, on the first day you’d come to Emirgân you would have devoured me.”

“And as a matter of course I would have died from indigestion.”

“Thank you, my dear ...”

Mümtaz gave open regard to her unrestrained elation. Standing, they conversed on the grounds of the former manor whose grandeur and frequent guests Sezai Bey had detailed in his memoirs. The entirety of the distant Istanbul horizon, including tulle shadows of
hüzün
and a seascape gradually appropriating the twilight, became an enchanted backdrop for Nuran’s visage! “Among elevated classes, an entire realm of culture, discernments, and web of associations serves to transform that fleeting moment of ecstasy, that physiological act, into divine pleasure. In contrast, conditions of life or ignorance in our
vatan
leave some of our own people bereft of the simple pleasure of a kiss.” Then he added, “Everything from trendy boutiques or the demands of modernity, from sexual etiquette or feelings of shame, from the fear of engaging in sin to literature and the arts is a factor in this act of intimacy.”

“What’s the upshot?”

“Who knows, maybe it is just what it is. For in life, everything’s a facsimile of all else in a certain respect. The female kangaroo carries its young in a stomach pouch. Anatolian women wrap their newborns to their backs as they work. And you carry Fatma in your head.”

“I might be preoccupied with my daughter, but you’re meddling with corpses seven centuries old.”

Mümtaz was startled by the harshness of her retort. He’d only wanted to say something amusing to make her laugh.

“Are you upset?”

“No, but was there any need to mention Fatma?”

“I was reminded of how she never much cared for me and – ”

“Then try to make yourself likable.” Her tone was cross.

Mümtaz shook his head in despair. “Do you think that’s possible?” Nuran didn’t reply. She, too, knew how difficult it would be.

“As for the corpses in my head, they’re certainly just as manifest in you. You know what’s really depressing? We’re their sole guardians. If we don’t give them a modicum of our existence, they’ll lose their only right to life. Poor forefathers, maestros of music, poets, and everyone else whose name and influence has reached our day, they wait with such longing to enrich our lives ... and accost us in the most unexpected places.”

They lumbered along, boarding the Kısıklı trolley. Nuran had forgotten about their squabble. She dwelled only on two comments:
First the praying mantis, that is, the female that eats its mate, and then Fatma? I wonder, is this how he perceives me?

Even Mümtaz was surprised by these two comparisons that had come to mind.
Why on earth did I recall this insect? Or am I suspicious that she’s a woman who considers only her own pleasures? Maybe she finds me to be overly sentimental and a know-it-all. She’s justified in doing so; I hold forth on so many topics ... but what am I to do? Since she represents everything to me, I’ll submit to her with all my being!
At the trolley stop, a young couple – they were eighteen or twenty years old – was having a fiery argument. The woman’s face in the twilight was a picture of despair, and the man, as was evident from his bearing, pressured her, displaying a formidable posture. Mümtaz and Nuran fell silent upon seeing them.
Love-stricken on the streets ...
Or was his caravan of poetry, his thoughts, all of it, in fact, nothing more than what these juveniles were doing? For the first time he felt the anxiety that he was wasting his days for Nuran’s sake.

Nuran had been gradually growing tired of his life and thoughts. The anxiety that he was confined to an absolute idea, to an orbit of sterility that took him outside of existence gnawed at him like a worm. It represented a vein of decay that would only grow with time.

Even if not in this way, uncertainty overwhelmed Mümtaz. The anxiety of losing her settled within him. For no reason, fate and the bewildering isolation with which he’d been acquainted since childhood resurfaced.

Their summer nonetheless persisted as the paradise of their worldy sojourn. The day after this outing, Nuran asked to be alone with him in Emirgân till evening. She wanted to sketch out the garden.

Half-recumbent on the sofa, she sketched repeated designs on a sheaf of paper held atop a sizable book on her knees. Her amateur, even childlike, line indicated each detail. She listed the names of flowers and palettes of colors in the margins. “Colors not to mix!” she wrote. A cluster of flowers, for example, was purely ruby or heliotrope. Each season, would boast a few swaths of color. The idea had come to her from seeing poppies sprouting in a fallow artichoke field. Only the roses would be distinct, burning like multi-armed, solemn torches, like lanterns and lamps left aflame.

Nuran, an avid enthusiast of roses, was mad for the velvety variety known as Dutch Stars, which were a sultanate all to themselves.
Let my clothes be démodé so long as exquisite roses bloom in my garden.
Next came chysanthemums. She found tulips to be too rigid; instead, she adored violets. When Mümtaz mentioned that there had once been a violet garden at Keçecizade Fuat Pasha’s Bosphorus-side
yalı
in Büyükdere, she became enthralled by this Tanzimat-era vizier. Besides roses, her favorite flowers were the blossoms of fruit and nut trees. Thus, the garden required plenty of almonds, plums, peaches, and apples. Though they bloomed briefly, lasting for only five days, they conjured visions lasting the entire year. Along with her love of flowers and trees, she also had an interest in keeping chickens. How might both be managed together? In the end, they agreed to have a largish coop made at the far end of the garden, a chicken house along with a small open space enclosed by wire.

Since coming to know Mümtaz, Nuran had dreamed that she’d live out the rest of her days in Emirgân. As Mümtaz became aware of her desires, he sought a means to purchase the house. But one way or another he hadn’t been able to corner the landlady to negotiate. She didn’t come to Emirgân. The pain of having lost four children in succession prevented her from visiting the neighborhood, not to mention the house she’d first occupied as a bride, and where she’d lived within splendor unimaginable to either Mümtaz or Nuran amid maidservants and adopted handmaids,
saz
-lutes and genteel conversation. He left his rent with the coffeehouse proprietor from whom an old servant from Rumelihisarı took it and sent it onward to the island of her residence.

Toward evening they continued to Büyükdere, eating dinner at a small restaurant there. Being the thirteenth of the month, they’d be able to make a
mehtap
outing beneath August moonlight. As soon as the moon rose, Mehmet arrived. Mümtaz found the youth’s face pale and wan. He revealed strains of annoyance. Mümtaz had known for some time that Mehmet was in love; maybe his beloved lived here in Büyükdere. Chance had cast their lives in the dual plot of a Molière farce. Considering the affair of the Boyacıköy coffeehouse apprentice and Anahit, the story line was actually tripled. Do what he may, or wander in whichever sublime or unattainable climes that he might, Mümtaz was relegated to living by the laws of humanity and existence. Likewise, there was Mehmet, a man who could love without having known Tab’î Mustafa Efendi or Dede Efendi, without having been awed by Baudelaire or Yahya Kemal.

The difference between them was that Mümtaz perceived his beloved through a matrix of abstractions. Some Nurans traipsed along the Bosphorus seafront at the Kanlıca residence in shorts or a bathing suit; others struggled against sail and gale in a caïque, or slept beneath the sun with eyelashes fanned downward, their firmly ripened faces fruits, deep within whose flesh swirled rejuvenating and redolent essences; still other Nurans floated face up in the sea, clambered aboard a rowboat, spoke, laughed, and plucked caterpillars off tree branches; yes, a plethora of Nurans congregating as a multitude of figures with experiences spanning the centuries entered into Mümtaz’s imagination.