A Mind at Peace (31 page)

Nuran and Mümtaz dined at Kanlıca or at the tavern in İstinye; or rather, they brought their food out onto rowboats. Under Tevfik’s insistence, one night on the rowboat, in keeping with bygone revelries by moonlight, they’d quaffed their fair share of spirits.

When Nuran grew tired of fishing, she joined in the melody being hummed by her uncle, and upon notice of his niece’s accompaniment, Tevfik raised his voice and the bluefish run became a reverie of musical delights.

Old Tevfik was friends with all the boatmen, the oldest of whom had known Nuran since childhood. And she’d become friends with them all. Boatmen aware of her imminent marriage to Mümtaz had even begun looking for vacant residences nearby. Mümtaz, pleased by such undertakings, because he believed they’d hasten the marriage protocol, noted down addresses so he could scout them out once the tenants had vacated in the fall; Nuran, on the contrary, took the opposite view so that the dreams she’d nourished regarding the Emirgân house, its garden and decor wouldn’t just evaporate: “Hold off for now!” she said. “I can’t spend day after day thinking about all that again.”

The caïquier in his sixties who’d said, “Nuran won’t be able forgo the proximity of the sea ... Her father had a great affinity for it as well,” added, “When you find a
yalı
and settle down there ... just wait and see how I’ll tend to you with a cornucopia of fish.” If it’d been within his power, the obliging man would have presented the entire Bosphorus to Tevfik’s niece as a wedding gift.

The couple admired the sensitivity of this old salt. Some nights he stepped aboard their rowboat and described old reveries with a spirited rhetoric that came from first-hand experience.

In his turbulent life he’d met with great success and gained vast experience; he’d both lived it up and fallen on hard times. Since the sea constituted the measure of what he loved, he could never consider himself down and out as long as he kept its company: “My grave, should I die with my wits about me, will be nothing less than the sea.” Following the illness that he’d suffered at winter’s end, after doctors informed him that he’d no longer be able to venture out to sea, he descended to the shoreline early one morning without attracting anyone’s notice, set off in his caïque, and vanished after surrendering to the currents, a stone lashed to his ankles. Mümtaz, later informed of the death, mourned as if he’d lost a close relative, though he was heartened that the old man hadn’t perished through some mishap far from his one and only love. In this abiding passion, the caïquier had discovered a trait befitting his character and fortune. With the quip, “I’ve gotten used to poverty, but not to old age ...,” he displayed an ease of life held over from an era when wages amounted to less than a silver coin but tips could be worth upwards of twenty – or perhaps even a golden lira. While he described fetes held at the Egyptian khedive’s
yalı
, boat revelries by moonlight on the bay, and Bebek reveries, the attentive couple felt that they themselves were reliving them.

To be certain, he saw in Nuran’s beauty a reflection or memento of time past: “I’ve seen many things in this world, but never a lady as beautiful as this bride-to-be.” Such adoration coming from beyond Mümtaz’s milieu gave him childish pleasure. As the caïquier admired his beloved, Mümtaz believed that in this one respect he’d been reunited with a once-familiar world, his usual distance from which filled him with misery.

But the true marvel rested with Nuran herself. The way she waited silently, fishing line in hand, gave Mümtaz a taste of the precocious maturity of children.

To Mümtaz, Nuran’s interest in her surroundings seemed astounding given her casual demeanor, her focus solely on the line she held. The rowboat lantern illuminated her face and brisk movements, which, within the waves, bobbed to and fro, at times straight toward him out of the watery depths as if from enigmatic realms and back, to affect him like alchemy that resolved problems beyond cerebral solutions. Mümtaz would thus leave the ambience cast by her petite, puerile, and coy vision to face the exigencies of his psyche.

At the first tug of the line Nuran’s face hardened into clarity, and later, when the fish emerged, she began worrying about its quality. She made a childlike, headlong lunge toward everything that drew her admiration. Her excitement, or rather impatience, filled Mümtaz with delight.

Mümtaz, fully aware that this opulence emerged from his own imagination, knew nonetheless that some trait in Nuran sent his nervous system into a frenzy.

Time would come when his adulation would reach such a pinnacle that Mümtaz found his mortal jouissance excessive, and he began to worry about the consequences. Mümtaz’s imagination might readily believe, for example, that in a chariot drawn by enormous sea serpents, a sea-foamsplashing Poseidon would take Nuran by the hand and abscond with her to an undersea castle like the ones found in Andersen’s fairy tales, around which gathered radiant sparkles and curled scaly shadows of every velvety hue and shade, as if a multicolored taffy were being spun from pliant, mingled seaweed.

Doubtless, this amounted to a figment of the imagination. But during such nights, a mood in Nuran that drew his curiosty gave these phantasies prominence. At certain times, while standing before him, Nuran might seem completely withdrawn from his life. And this phenomenon raised the possibility, in accordance with Mümtaz’s own mental states, that he was viewing her through a death shroud or across the space of oblivion.

His fantasies and anxieties bore a hint of truth; Mümtaz in essence lived in a dreamscape.

By means of their friendship, Nuran discovered a season of exception where possibilities flourished. Her every desire, every action, every thought, her passing annoyances, flirtations and overindulgences, and even crassness amounted to diversions as wondrous as art, drawing mysteries and aesthetic beauties to her, and transforming life’s order through happy-golucky discoveries. Beneath Mümtaz’s enamored gaze, it seemed that Nuran perpetually created herself and the objects in her midst anew: the response of the beloved, who senses ardor, to the lover’s affections. Those outside the alchemy could never hope to understand this esoteric exchange. Nuran later discovered these separately experienced moments still present within her, involuntarily recollecting each in order to reexperience them.

She wove the weft of their days with vivid beauty and creativity.

On their return, after Tevfik had parted from them at Kanlıca, they enjoyed gliding before
yalı
s whose waters assumed the colors of naphthahued atlas silk,
yali
s interred in the dark density of a laurel forest, a few of whose leaves were varnished by light; that is, they plied silhouette, arcana, and silence. This voyage to a semiemotional realm progressing by lunges from light to light cast from a balcony, kitchen door, or the windows of a house whose residents hadn’t yet retired, was disrupted by the moon and its luminance in a suddenly yawning cove; and within the eerie serenity that the Bosphorus assumed after midnight, a ferryboat searchlight occasionally caught them atop a swell, focusing insistently on them as if rehearsing the tableau of a
mi’raj
quite different from accounts of the known variety – yearning to spirit them to lofty heights of the esoteric.

Through a matrix of phenomena that went unnoticed when Mümtaz wasn’t present, Nuran grew alarmed under the illuminating fishnet of radiance approaching them, and she cuddled up to him: “If I’m frightened by a dream when we’re together in bed, I’ll cuddle up like this.”

At times their surroundings became nothing but quiet sparkle, as if they existed within vast turquoise. The dark seawater filled with large gem clusters extended by the stars, and the silhouettes on one shore sauntered by as if chasing after rowboats on the other side.

During daylight hours, the oneiric mood in which inlets, hilltops, and copses manifested in perspicuity, as if each edge and curve had been individually embellished under luminous sunlight, became a mirage or phantasy of which the two of them became a part; for Mümtaz, this wasn’t just ephemeral exuberance; it might simultaneously be an epiphany of aesthetic secrets approximating alchemy. Whenever he remarked, “This resembles a passage through your soul,” he, too, realized how three distinct modes of beauty – that is, the aesthetic order, the cherished order of the natural world, and the feminine order of undiminished allure – mingled together in his soul, and how he existed in a peculiar dimension of sorcery and dreamwork.

He occasionally wondered, “Do we love each other or the Bosphorus?” At other times, he attributed their state of satisfaction and lunacy to the exuberance induced by Ottoman music. “These alchemists of old have us wrapped around their little fingers ...” he’d said, trying to conceptualize a distinct Nuran or to locate her hermetically within her own aesthetic. But the fusion wasn’t as superficial as he’d thought, and Nuran, by unexpectedly entering his life, illuminated things that had been present within him for a considerable time and constituted the lion’s share of his spirit, and she’d established her sultanate in contexts that were more or less prepared to accept him; as a consequence, there was no possibility of extricating Istanbul, the Bosphorus, Ottoman music, or his beloved from one another. The Bosphorus contained a prearranged existential framework through its history, the hours of the day it regulated, at least in certain seasons, and through its diverse beauty that bespoke vivid memories. As for Ottoman music, its Dionysian effusion, writhing through rigid arrangements and unleashing a tempestuous deluge of roses, inspired one to be the prey and sacrifice of an absolute thought or desire, to burn in its forge, only to resurrect and again burn to ash; likewise, the satisfaction music provided the couple in seeking each other among age-old and virtually forgotten splendors, while inducing them to inhabit a prearranged existential framework opulent enough to confront any and all eventualities, demonstrated how this might be accomplished, and finally primed them emotionally to make themselves at home there.

But Ottoman music wasn’t an art form that dispensed with humanity or depleted it by imparting a sense of devotional awe. All of those saintly souled and humble virtuosi, no matter how lofty the pinnacle of their art might be, were pleased to remain within society and to live communally with others.

Due to these two enabling forces that clung tightly to Mümtaz’s identity, Nuran became an enigmatic being returning to live as the mortal substantiation of the historical, the sublime, and the vital; she became a spectacular presence vanquishing time through urge and beauty; and through her, he deciphered the logic of his aesthetic and emotional realms. Being next to Nuran, embracing her, and loving her assumed the quality of a force transcending the limits of her person.

Mümtaz was exhilarated by the semblances of fable and faith adopted by her in his imagination over these nocturnal returns.

When Mümtaz said that he’d experienced a
mi’raj
through Nuran’s love, or declared that he’d seen visions of her distinct personas, like variations of the divine incarnate, in the ever-changing ornament and progression of the arabesque of Itrî’s Nevâkâr song, in the Rast
semâi
s and melodies of Hafız Post, and in the great gale of Dede Efendi, whose cantus firmus would forever accompany Mümtaz, he genuinely, as it were, approached the true architects of this territory and culture, and Nuran’s mortal presence actually became the miracle of a reincarnation. Within the figure of the beloved, Mümtaz craved the concentration of the cosmos and the gathering of a mode of compassionate love specifically Turkish, descendant from forebears whose moral code even reappeared as a carnal and bloody dream, at least in the most visceral folk songs. Synthesized within this mode were
evliya
folk saints as well as
türkü
s of Istanbul, Konya, Bursa, and Kırşehir that recounted romances of
efe
militants and youngbloods and also, resonating through forgotten years whenever he cocked an ear toward his childhood, adventures of murder and vengeance in sonorous strains, Bingöl and Urfa dialects and Trabzon and Rumeli
türkü
s filled with yearning, desire, and the urge for self-depletion.

Under the effect of such a bloody and violent phase of Creation, Mümtaz wasn’t stifled by having limited himself to a single love or to the corporeal splendor of, in a phrase borrowed from the French, “a petite mademoiselle,” but rather witnessed the construction of his own inner world stone by stone through their romance.

They’d finally get out of the rowboat either near the Vaniköy factory or at one of the empty waterfront quays on the outskirts of Kandilli. The last of Mümtaz’s pleasures was to walk the remainder of the way back, sharing the weight of Nuran’s fatigue in his body.

She often remained oblivious to Mümtaz’s thoughts over these walks, made even more solemn and unendurable due to the advanced hour and the silence, his nerves frazzled by pleasure.

Soon, confronted by the high wall surrounding Nuran’s house, he’d part from her company before the door that led to what seemed like the flip-side of fate.

Mümtaz detested his solitary returns despite the vivid and splendid memories of the previous twenty-four hours.

Dread filled Mümtaz every time he accompanied Nuran home, thinking it might be the last. He believed the human soul tolerated contentment the least of all emotions, most likely because nothing lay beyond it; one was obligated to endure contentment ignorant of its duration. One could forge through anguish, striving to escape it as if picking through brambles, hobbling down a rocky path, or trying to break free of a swamp. But one carried contentment like a burden until it was involuntarily laid down at the edge of a road or elsewhere.

Take prisons for example, or comb court proceedings or newspaper collections where daily misadventures are recorded in columns of minuscule type; there’s no shortage of malefactors who’ve cast off burdens of joy simply because they’ve tired of shouldering them.