A Mind at Peace (34 page)

Fate is what confronts us,
he thought.
What we wrestle against without being able to overcome it.

Oh, how mankind, enemy of the sublime, unknowingly desired the destruction of its own happiness as well as that of others; humankind, enemy of peace and decency, enemy of its own self.

And perhaps Suad, during his days of illness, in a letter received from Istanbul, had learned of Nuran’s separation from her husband and recognized the opportunity for one last conquest. The desire to settle an old account.
Seeing that I’ll be going to Istanbul, I’ll take care of this business as well. A lonely woman, an old friend, and so many memories between us.

A day of rain followed; Mümtaz descended to the old city. He had to attend to a number of small errands. Afterward he stopped at İhsans’ house in Şehzadebaşı to inquire about Suad. Despite having spent a distressing night thanks to him, he also wondered about his present state of health. One by one, the topics they’d discussed together at the start of summer at the island restaurant came to mind, along with Suad’s gestures, his derisive and mordant laughter, and his bizarre glances that made one forgive his every affront.

It was as he’d feared. Stopping by the house, he noticed Ahmet and Sabiha at play with two girls, then he caught sight of Macide’s relative Afife in the parlor, eyes swollen, face distraught, in the midst of confiding trouble and woe. A becoming, well-dressed, and polite lady, her demeanor, more than anguish per se, bespoke the pain of wounded pride. As Mümtaz listened to her, he remembered the letter Nuran had received. Hearing but a single sentence from those eight pages, directed toward her, would have revived this devastated woman, remaking her into a new person. But Suad wasn’t interested in his wife. He thought only of Nuran. Out of some perverse logic, his afflicted head had turned to face and fixate upon Nuran. Suad likely thought of Nuran while committing the trivial indiscretions that Afife presently enumerated or even while trying to seduce his secretaries. He’d again thought of her while vomiting blood into the basin held by these woebegone hands and while signing the consent form.

As soon as he’d been admitted to the hospice, he’d told himself,
I must write to her this very evening,
and with eyes trained on the ceiling, his face tense with fever, his chest wheezing as it rose and fell, he’d pondered over and again the sentences that would make up the letter.

Mümtaz lent an ear to Afife’s testimonial as he thought to himself,
Disgusting ... Disgusting ...
Everything was reprehensible. Nothing simple and comfortable could exist between people. Mankind, the enemy of contentment, struck wherever happiness appeared or made its presence felt. He quit the house in a strange state of revulsion. He walked briskly down the street. Yet Afife’s voice persisted, cursing her fate: “He’s destroyed himself. I ache for him, Macide. If you only knew how my heart aches for him. It’s just my fate.”

Revolting. Her pity and consciousness of fate revolted him. Her attachment and complaint revolted him. All of it revolted him: the way Suad fell into his life like a stone crashing through a window, the way he wrote to Nuran, the way Mümtaz perpetually thought about this ailing man as if he were now an inseparable aspect of his existence.

Afife’s voice:
Macide, you can’t imagine what I’ve suffered. Just think about it ... for nine years ...
Suad’s voice:
My entire life has passed at a remove from you so that I could establish some stability. But I haven’t succeeded. You’ll come see me, won’t you? I’m in such need of refuge ...
Afife’s voice:
A month will go by and he hasn’t once looked at the children’s faces. Let him just get well, I wish for nothing else!

This was disturbing. He could observe Suad’s life from two opposing perspectives, one represented by Nuran and the other by Afife. This doubled perspective should have removed Suad from the equation entirely and dispelled him. Yet Suad continued to be. Feverishly, he ogled the bodies of the nurses sashaying in and out of his room, and when he improved a little, he smiled at the youthful ones to spark their friendship, tried to caress their arms and cheeks, addressed them in a haughty tone meant to reveal his masculine pride, asked about their work, teased them with meaningful innuendos, and listened to their responses with a cocked eyebrow. When his health improved somewhat, he’d receive an earful from these nurses, and maybe in a quiet moment a slap. But this was on the sly, for when he met with doctors, he’d most certainly request that they address him as “sir,” and he’d hold forth in a sonorous voice on politics, human rights, and public affairs.

For nine years . . .
With a desire honed by nine years of disease, Suad had struck here and there contemplating young and voluptuous bodies; he’d sought mature women or he’d weighed and considered the possibilities of trysts like an engineer making complicated assessments about a tunnel or railway system, concluding, “There’s nothing to be had with this one, but the other one there is just right!” or, “This one demands patience; as for that one, friendship is an absolute precondition”; he’d come up with schemes to dance with them or get them alone in a room or apartment.

Suad did exist. Yes, he existed in his hospital room, in Mümtaz’s thoughts, in his wife’s swollen eyes, in his children’s thin necks, in the women’s lives he entered like a hand under cover of darkness, feculent filth dripping from grimy, tacky fingers, padding through and besmearing a closet of pristine laundry; women, each of whom he stained with a fondle, yes, in all things he existed. And to add insult to injury, this Suad was a man of Mümtaz’s acquaintance.

Beneath hard rain, he strode aimlessly. Once in a while clouds separated and everything on the street shone brightly down to the terra-cotta shingles; the fleeting presence of shimmering droplets on the electrical wires and the leaves of the municipality’s freshly planted saplings, tops cropped
à la garçon
, conjured a vision of pearls; everything and everyone was bathed in childlike jubilation. Then the downpour began anew, children with jackets pulled over their heads scattered, older pedestrians took shelter in this or that nook, and the street, the houses, everything vanished. A blackish, murky shroud resembling ashen muck encompassed everything; the material world became the prisoner of rain. It pelted everything with a great clangor, emitting loud sounds from the tops of streetcars, the wood boards of police booths, rooftops, and shingles as if they were grand organs or harpsichords; at whiles lightning flashed, and this thick, pasty muck abruptly, but in a disconcerting way, lit up temporarily before the redoubled descent of webs of fine thread.

Mümtaz walked, head exposed. He’d never before felt such anguish. Everything revolted him. All of it was absurd. Everywhere he saw Suad’s filthy hand and Yaşar’s gray hair, framing his fresh “guard of the harem” expression.
This is how it’s going to be then.
One could transform in twenty-four hours’ time to become the sworn enemy of two people, two wretches. Two souls, say a despised tenant and an unwanted guest, could just move into one’s life from where they might spew poison through their presences alone, by simply respiring under the sun, by looming and using words approximating one’s own while describing their feelings and thoughts.

A taxi stopped short. With the affection of a kiln-fired roughneck, the driver said, “Let’s ferry you along, young man ...” Mümtaz looked around. Unawares, he’d come all the way to the mosque of Sultan Selim ... a little beyond it. For a moment he wanted to disappear into the cool serenity of this old cathedral mosque. Beneath the downpour, however, everything was so miserable and sorrows of such intensity writhed within him that no matter where he went he’d be endlessly distraught.

Before the car door, which the driver had pushed opened, Mümtaz asked under his breath, “Fine, but where to?”

With the same cadence, the driver said, “Wherever you’d like to go, sir ...”

“In that case, to the Galata Bridge.” His head spun; he felt nauseous. He hadn’t eaten anything. He wanted to go home immediately. But in this rain, what would he do at home? Nuran was gone today; had she come even, she’d have left by now. He imagined his writing table, lamp, and his books. He gave his seventy-eights some consideration. All of it bored and taxed him. Often, life could be endured by clinging to something. At this moment Mümtaz couldn’t locate such a miraculous locus of attachment anywhere.

His thoughts resembled a disk whose diameter gradually decreased each instant, heading toward zero, toward nothingness. In this dizzying vertigo, everything shriveled and shrank, changing color and character until it became a strange accretion like the disgusting stuff of Suad’s miserable and contaminating presence; the muck absorbed everything of note along his route, spinning and turning it in a tacky mass, and taking it all to nil.

It was a disgusting jumble ... and he didn’t want to enter his house with it. As a matter of course, this meaningless distress would end in a short while. Or else it would deplete everything like the emptying of a mill sluice.

He loitered on the bridge. No, it was futile. He wasn’t able to return home. He felt intolerable agony imagining his garden, the melancholy of flowers and branches beneath rains that beat, briskly whipped, then bore down with great gusts upon the large chestnut in back and the clusters of trees in the distance.

“I’m afraid of loneliness,” he said. “I’m afraid of loneliness.” Actually, it wasn’t just loneliness, he was afraid of entering into the circle of Suad’s existence and instabilities. He turned and sought out the taxi. The cabbie hadn’t yet gone.

“Take me to Beyoǧlu,” he said.

As they passed Şişhane, clouds parted momentarily. Above the Süleymaniye Mosque, sunshine gushed as if from a sluice through a massive, single-hued, nearly translucent cumulus cloud, the likes of which appeared in old miniature paintings. The entire city had become the opulent and ornate decor for a fairy tale of sorts, or a Scheherazade fable. He exited the taxi at Galatasaray. Under the pure, make-believe golden light, he at first wanted to walk up toward Taksim Square. But in the dread of running into an acquaintance, he turned back. He walked toward Tepebaşı. There he entered a small bistro. The rain had quickened again. Through the dirty window, he stared at the rain pelting the façades of the apartments opposite, pondering the immense radiance he’d just witnessed.

In the empty establishment, the garçon, bored from lack of business, repeatedly cued the gramophone with dance tunes. Mümtaz ordered beer and some food. The cold drink brought his wits about him; he looked around the sleepy setting. Despite appearing ordered from the outside, the tables and chairs whose paint and patina had flaked, and the multihued bottles of alcohol crowding the old shelves slumbered head-to-shoulder. Such a strange somnolence reigned, disturbing the ongoing downpour of rain and tango; it overtook them like waves of indifference rising in the wake of longing for the faraway and the unattainable. Nonetheless, he wasn’t the only soul in the place. Upstairs, in a pantry-like alcove, a couple conversed, backs to the door. Amid the patter of rain and music rose a female voice from an indeterminate station of life, confirming its place at a fringe; a voice whose person was face-to-face with fate, perhaps satisfied, perhaps desperate; intermittently, the growl of a deep masculine voice responded in turn. They were any of hundreds of couples one encountered. But Mümtaz’s distraught nerves reacted at once to these sob-like chortles. His emotions anticipated something significant. The vertigo that had turned his surroundings into disgusting muck on the verge of overtaking all Creation had slowed along with everything spinning dizzyingly toward zero about the axis of Suad’s face or name.

The voices intensified:

“It isn’t possible, dontcha know? I can’t, I’m afraid, I can’t bring myself to ...”

“Don’t be insane, we’ll be ruined, Hacer, my sweet, we’ll be ruined.”

“I can’t do it ... I can’t take my own child. Won’t you divorce her?”

The snarling gramophone soon came alive. A downpour pelted the windows of the apartments opposite with a longing for the Andes and the Panama Canal, through the yearning of Singapore shipmen and Shanghai fishermen, the longing for things and people removed and estranged from the here-and-now, for whomever and however many things lay beyond thresholds of death, far away and alienated. Yet Mümtaz, now indifferent to the longing, couldn’t be drawn back by any invitation.

The man’s voice strained like the wail of a violin whose strings verged on breaking: “Just think for a second, I’d have no other option but suicide ... If you want to see my demise, that’s different.”

She paused a while; then her already relenting volition made one final feeble and half-hearted stand: “Supposing something should happen to me, or I should die?”

“You know as well as I do that nothing of the sort will happen.”

“What if word gets out ... and it becomes legal?”

“Did anyone hear of the time in Konya? We know the doctor ... go tomorrow, it should be handled tomorrow, you understand. I’m fed-up enough already.”

A screeching chair ... and perhaps the perverse affection of the sound of a kiss falling to the ground, then a hysterical sob. With visions of Havana, nothing remained but the ship of hard rain uprooting everything in its path as it churned toward shores of mystery ...

“
Haydi!
C’mon, let’s go. I’ll miss the island ferry.”

Mümtaz withdrew farther into a corner; and from there observed Afife’s husband, the man who’d concealed his love for Nuran for a decade like a beacon of salvation, his back hunched, the skin of his face drawn over its bones as he descended the stairs followed by a thin woman – poorly combed brunette hair jutting out from a mauve hat – trembling visibly under a thin calico dress as she contemplated the misbegotten plans of her life. As the man settled the bill, he thrust his hand into a pocket. He removed and lit a cigarette. “I thought you’d quit,” she said.