A Mind at Peace (3 page)

The girls were hale and hearty, but their clothes were in tatters. In a neighborhood where Hekimoǧlu Ali Pasha’s manor had stood at one time, these houses like remnants of life, these poor clothes, and this song brought strange thoughts to his mind. Nuran had certainly played this game in her childhood. And before that, her mother and her grandmother sang the same ditty while playing this game.

İhsan understood such things well. He’d once said, “Every lullaby holds the thoughts and dreams of a million children!” İhsan, however, lay bedridden. Furthermore, Nuran wanted nothing to do with him, and the headlines announced a tense state of foreign affairs. Since morning he’d been under the assault of forces he didn’t want to acknowledge, relegating them to a corner of his mind.

The poor girls played over a tinderbox. Still, the song was the same old song; life forged ahead even atop a powder keg.

He sauntered along, passing gradually from one thought to the next. He realized that he wouldn’t be able to find a nurse in these outskirts of the city. He’d forgotten about the last address in his hand. After following the lead, he’d phone a relative near the American Hospital before trying to look around there.

He plodded through decrepit, grim neighborhoods, passing before aged houses whose bleakness gave them the semblance of human faces. Throngs surrounded him, wearing expressions forlorn and sickly.

They were all downcast, anticipating what the impending apocalypse of tomorrow held in store for them.

If not for the disease ... and what if he were drafted? What if he had to go and leave İhsan infirm like this?

Returning to the house, he found Macide asleep. İhsan’s breathing had steadied. The doctor had left good news in his wake. Ahmet was at his father’s bedside together with his grandmother Sabire. Curled up near her mother’s feet, Sabiha was truly asleep now.

Overwhelmed by an eerie quiet, he climbed the stairs to his room. He’d seen the characters that made up his entire circle, almost, for he’d had no news of Nuran.
What was she doing?
he wondered.

III

İhsan and his wife held vital places in Mümtaz’s upbringing. Following the deaths of both his father and mother within a span of just a few weeks, his cousin had raised him. Macide and İhsan; İhsan and Macide. Until he’d made Nuran’s acquaintance, his life had passed almost entirely between them. İhsan had been both a father and a mentor to him.

In France, where Mümtaz had been sent for two years about the time Macide had regained her health, his cousin’s influence persisted; in those new surroundings with so many temptations, he’d been spared initial experiences of decadence in part due to İhsan’s guidance, and thus hadn’t squandered his time.

Macide, meanwhile, had entered his life when he most needed a woman’s compassion and beauty’s counsel. When she came to mind, he’d muse,
I’ve spent part of my youth beneath a spring bough.
Thus, İhsan’s affliction had shaken this already troubled youth to his core. From the moment he’d heard the word “pneumonia” leave the doctor’s lips, he’d been living in a perplexing state of distress.

It wasn’t the first time Mümtaz had known such anguish. Anxiety in part constituted his inner self, that entity resting beneath the surface yet controlling everything. İhsan had strived to banish the serpent coiled within Mümtaz, and to extract its tree, whose roots extended into the boy’s heart. But it was essentially with Macide’s arrival that Mümtaz improved and turned to face the sun. Until he’d passed into her hands, Mümtaz was a creature of resentments, closed to the world, expecting nothing but calamity to fall from the skies – and rightly so.

After the Great War, during the armistice-era invasion of S. by Greece, a local Anatolian Greek, an adversary of the owner of the house where Mümtaz’s family lived, mistakenly shot his father instead of the landlord. The town verged on capture. Many Turkish families had already fled. Mümtaz’s ill-fated father had found conveyance for wife and son that same night. Their bags and belongings had been prepared. He’d spent the entire day in town arranging for the trip. A little after nightfall he’d returned home to say, “
Haydi!
It’s all set! Let’s eat something, and we’ll be on the road within the hour. The routes are still open.” They ate on a cloth spread on the ground. There came a thump at the door. The servant informed them of someone waiting to see the man of the house. His father rushed to the door, assuming he’d receive details about the wagon he’d spent dawn till dusk procuring. Then they heard the report of a gun, a single, hollow shot without so much as an echo. The large man, one hand pressed over his abdomen, almost slithered back upstairs, collapsing in the hallway. It all lasted no more than five minutes. Neither mother nor child knew what words had been exchanged below or even who’d come. The shot was followed by the downhill patter of men running. While still numb with shock, they heard the sound of approaching artillery. Shortly, the neighbors arrived and an elder tried to pull them off the body, saying, “He’d always treated us with reverence. Let’s not leave him out in the open but bury him. He’s a martyr and can be buried without rites in his clothes.”

Hastily, a grave was dug under a sprawling chinar tree in a corner of the yard within the light of a sooty lantern and an as-yet-unpacked oil lamp held aloft by a half-mad gardener.

Mümtaz never forgot this scene. Upstairs, his mother continued to weep over the corpse. As if spellbound, he was glued to one wing of the garden gate, staring at the men by the tree trunk. The three men worked under the lantern they’d hung from a branch. The flame of the lantern verged on blowing out in the breeze; meanwhile, the old gardener raised the edge of his jacket to keep the other oil lamp lit. Beneath two sources of light, shadows expanded and contracted and amid artillery thuds, his mother’s wails mingled with the rasp of shoveling. When they were nearly finished, the air turned crimson. The glow came from the direction of the house; the town was burning. The fire had broken out an hour beforehand. The men continued to work under reddened skies. Shrapnel began to fall here and there. A roar louder than the sound of water bursting a levee rose from town, followed by an apocalypse of sounds. A man, hopping over the fence into the yard, shouted, “They’re entering town.” Everybody froze. Only his mother came downstairs, pleading. Mümtaz could withstand no more, and his hand, which clung to the gate wing, loosened and he collapsed to the ground. From where he lay, certain sounds reached his ears, but what he saw differed from what actually surrounded him. His father, as he did every night, had taken out the base of the large crystal lantern and tried to light it. When Mümtaz came to consciousness, he found himself outside the fence. “Can you walk?” his mother asked. He gazed about absently and said, “I can walk.” He did walk.

Mümtaz couldn’t fully recollect the journey. From which hilltop did they watch the town burn? On which main road did they join the ghastly, miserable procession of suffering hundreds? Who’d put them on the sprung carriage toward daybreak, seating him next to the driver? These questions remained a mystery.

He had fragmented memories, one of which was the way his mother was transfigured on the exodus. No longer was she a wife who wept and moaned over her husband’s corpse. She was a mother who’d set out and was trying to deliver her son and herself. Silently she did what those who led the refugee column said. She walked, holding her son’s hand tightly. Mümtaz could still feel the clench of her hand, a grip that would outlast her death.

Or else the memory was more vivid. He’d see his mother standing stiffly beside him with her torn headcovering and her gaunt, rigid face. Later, in the carriage, each time she cast her head back, she seemed a shade paler, a little more withdrawn, a veritable wound of withered face and withheld tears.

The second night of their exile they spent in a spacious inn lime-washed white, seemingly waiting alone for the Anatolian steppe. The stairs of the inn ran along the exterior and the windows of the rooms opened onto a terrace, where fruits were dried beneath the autumn sun. Mümtaz slept in one room with four or five other children and as many women. Before the entrance of the inn lolled a group of camels and mules free of wagons and stables. When one of the intermingled gathering of dormant animals stirred, the whole lot began to move; the clink-clank of their small bells and the cries of the watchmen disrupted the silence of the steppe night and the sense of exile gathered by slight gale and solitude from who knows which remote foothills, deserted valleys, or emptied villages and piled around the sooty lantern illuminating their quarters. At whiles, in the blackness, whatever the cigarette-smoking men before the entryway uttered reached his ears. The words filled Mümtaz with despair and resentment though he didn’t fully understand their significance; the sentences made the petty, spoiled, and privileged life he’d lived till then at once very harsh, cruel, and absurd. Then winds blew through open windows, bedsheet curtains billowed, and sounds from distant locales mingled with voices of the closest proximity.

A commotion woke them in the dead of night. The surrounding muteness had so hermetically sealed off their lives, like an incredibly dense yet thin substance, that the faintest sound or slightest noise became a resounding racket, like an object shattering glass, and conveyed feelings of devastation and collapse. Everybody rushed to the window, some even began flocking outside. Only Mümtaz’s mother remained still. Four men on horseback appeared, one of whom lowered a figure from the croup of his horse. Mümtaz, sidling up to the horses’ muzzles, heard a young village woman mumble, “God be pleased with ye.” The lamp held aloft by the innkeeper illuminated her large black irises. A waistcloth covered the lower part of her body, the kind worn by women who worked the opium fields. On her upper body, she wore the traditional embroidered coat of the Zeybek fighters of the Aegean mountains. These horsemen drank water from the terra-cotta jug passed around by the innkeeper’s apprentice, who’d earlier brought tea up to the rooms; they shared bread offered by the innkeeper and filled their haircloth sacks with barley; as if rehearsed beforehand, everything happened swiftly. Men congregating before the inn asked repeatedly of news.

“There’s a battle raging over S. You’ve got till tomorrow. But don’t stay too late, there’s a flood of refugees on the way.”

Then they quickly spurred their horses with nothing so much as a farewell. Where were they going? What were they doing?

Mümtaz went back upstairs where he discovered the newcomer, a girl of eighteen or twenty, stretched out beside his mother, sobbing open-eyed and stone-faced. Moving aside, his mother had made a space for her. Mümtaz lay next to the young woman for only a few hours, but in his sleep on subsequent nights, he relived bodily the sensations roused by her nighttime proximity. Even long after the fact, he’d awaken as if he were in her arms, her hair veiling his face, her breasts pressed against his chest, and her sultry breath on his forehead – as he’d actually experienced a few times that night. She wrenched awake sporadically. During such intervals, she moaned with halting, nearly inhuman sobs perhaps as heartrending as his mother’s silence, but the moment she nodded back to sleep, she’d clasp Mümtaz with her arms and legs as if forcefully prying him from his mother’s bosom, and her face would graze his in a full tumult of tresses and panting, or she’d draw him toward her, pressing him against her torso. As Mümtaz arose to these frequent embraces and groans, it surprised him to find her body, teeming with bewildering and mystical desires, entwined with his own; and this body, willing, with every iota of its being, to die a separate death from the one he’d experienced the night before, alarmed him, as did her sweet breath, which seemed to melt everything it contacted into soft ore, as did her eerie and tense face, and Mümtaz tightly shut his eyes to avoid the incognizant glint of hers in the light of the still-burning lantern.

Carnal desires churning by themselves, burning embraces, and moans that filled their barrenness in opposite proportion contained a sorcery unknown to him. He couldn’t manage to free himself from her embrace and simply abandoned himself to that peculiar twinned state of one weary of body who’d fallen asleep in warm, aromatic water, afraid of drowning on one hand, yet unable to resist the numbness of sleep on the other. Never before had he experienced this. His body, which had previously felt nothing beyond simple arousal, opened as if to an entirely new realm; within a state of intoxication, moments of pure delight continually settled in utterly mysterious and unfamiliar vertices of his body. Internally, he felt a delicious feeling of being expended that recalled certain final stages of sleep, and what’s more, these hot embraces and caresses themselves bore desire for depletion. The moment it reached its pinnacle, one of consciousness lost, when he practically merged with his surroundings, his body, ravished by fatigue and anguish, suddenly slipped into unconsciousness. Oddly, as soon as sleep overtook him, he always had the dream of the previous night, when he’d passed out, and he saw his father with the large crystal lantern; but since the dream occurred within the torment of an initial experience, it roused him frequently and violently. Thus his inner suffering united with the ecstasy emanating from the woman’s figure and overwhelmed his whole being, and he became a grotesque creature doubled in body and meaning.

Toward daybreak he awoke fully to find himself in the arms of the woman, his jaw resting against her diminutive chin, in complete command of his senses with every ounce of his being, when her eyes suddenly opened with unnerving insistence. To avoid her gaze, he shut his eyes again, and rolled anxiously toward his mother.