A Mind at Peace (5 page)

What did he contemplate? What did he expect? Had he assumed that the waves would convey something, or had he just surrendered himself to the curious drone made by the water filling and draining the grotto? The sounds bore an invitation, but where, to which arcanum?

By chance, toward nightfall, a caïque that had meandered out along the coast transported them back effortlessly to the pier. Hastily, Mümtaz abandoned his friends and ran home. He wanted to describe what he’d seen to his mother. But she was in such a state that he didn’t dare utter a word and was mindful not to leave her alone again.

He passed his days there, beside his mother’s sickbed, at times attending to her, at times lost in thought or reading. Each day toward noon he went to the telegraph office to learn whether any response to his mother’s telegram had come. Then he sequestered himself in her room, and within the sounds reaching him from the ever-animated, ever-lively street, he consoled her.

As evening fell he sat before the window. Over recent days a girl had been walking down the street. Each night she passed before the houses singing
türkü
s as she carried an empty bottle or some other vessel. Mümtaz recognized her voice when she was still at the far end of the street:

Mümtaz’s heart ached, assuming the gaze his mother trained on him every time she lifted her head bore a meaning close to that of these lyrics. Nevertheless, he couldn’t keep from listening. The girl’s voice was beautiful and strong. But she was still quite small, and in the middle of the rendition her voice cracked oddly, like a whimper.

A little beyond the houses, at the end of the street that led below, the song changed. Her voice suddenly grew bolder and more radiant, to such a degree that it seemed to resonate in intensely luminous echoes against the walls of the houses, the road, even the air itself:

By means of the second
türkü,
Mümtaz was liberated from the woes of his short existence, whose meanings he couldn’t yet fathom, to be transported without warning to some other luminous realm, yet laden with longing and suffering. This realm began at İzmir’s Kordonboyu esplanade and ended with the death of his father, which also escaped his full comprehension. Here, too, dwelled a residue of torments that didn’t fit into his childhood imagination; here, too, gathered death, exile, blood, seclusion, and
hüzün,
the Hydra-headed dragon of melancholy coiling within him. For Mümtaz, that entity called “day” ended when the girl passed by; an anonymous girl, yet one whose arrival he anticipated, however fearful he was that it might disturb his mother’s peace. Until the next evening, there passed an undisturbed monolith of time.

That week, one night toward daybreak, his mother migrated to other worlds. Before she died, she requested water, then tried repeatedly, yet unsuccessfully, to impart something to him; her face went pale, her eyes rolled upward, a tremor moved across her lips, and her body stiffened. Mümtaz’s mind recorded her final moments in immaculate detail.

Following her death, a cavernous void opened that he couldn’t manage to fill. Perhaps by trying continuously to forget troubled days, Mümtaz himself had created this temporal abyss in his mind. However, he did precisely remember the day he was placed on a ship to Istanbul. His kith and kin gathered and took him to a little grave in the courtyard of an old mosque; indicating a mound of recently smoothed-over earth, they said, “Here lies your mother.” But Mümtaz never accepted this final resting place. In his mind he’d buried his mother next to his father. The time span between their deaths was negligible. Having her rest beneath the large tree of death with his father was easier and more appropriate. Maybe because Mümtaz had grown accustomed to seeing them together, he could hardly think of them separately in eternal repose.

He remembered the day vividly. The landscape was suffused in white radiance. Sunlight conducted crystal lutes at every turn, on the wooden exteriors of houses, on terra-cotta shingles, on the pure white macadam, on swaths of sea appearing at intersections, on the lemon-yellow wall of the old mosque, on the small and dusty trees of the cemetery, on their sharp stones, on the ruined fortress ramparts where he saw his erstwhile friends at play; indeed, light was crooning its peculiar, contagious, and omnipotent song of radiance. The bees, the flies, the scrawny alley cats, the dog who’d commandeered the area in front of their house, the pigeons flocking on all sides, everyone and everything was besotted with the musical harmony and invitation of
lux.

Only one figure, it seemed to him, only he alone, had been excluded from this banquet. Fate, through one of its decrees, had culled him from others.

What would happen to him? He didn’t know. He’d go to Istanbul, but to stay with whom? How would they regard him there? Never again would he see his mother and father. Into this agony now mingled the despair of an orphan. He felt an overwhelming urge to weep, though he restrained himself. Sobbing in the midst of this sunlight, on this road where each passerby practically hummed a tune, crying before this crystal sea seemed something of an impossibility. Weeping would do nothing but elicit pity from those around him. By now they must certainly be tired of him. For days on end, he’d sensed the shaking of heads and sidelong glances that pursued him like a veritable fiery hand on his back. He assumed he’d been a burden and cursed fate. No, he wouldn’t cry. He certainly seemed to possess a peculiar fate, distinct from others.

Toward midafternoon, the ship was to embark. The entire family accompanied him to the pier. There they entrusted him to a civil servant of long standing and his wife who would escort him to Istanbul; and Mümtaz, disgruntled by destiny, gladly bid farewell to the gathering then and there. He’d scarcely noticed the absence of the oldest son of the household, who’d shown him such camaraderie. A bizarre sense of revulsion overcame him. The sunlight gouged his eyes, and the merriment, in which he could not partake, annoyed him. He longed for an extraordinarily gloomy, somber, and muted place. A place like his mother’s grave. A place at the edge of a secluded mosque wall, shielded from the sunlight, where the crystal lutes of illumination didn’t mock his fate, where the bees, drunk with lifeblood and sun, didn’t buzz, where children didn’t laugh and shout shrilly in the light, like a shattered mirror whose shards pierced his flesh.

The blackened hulk looming in the offing heartened him. He spoke of nothing, didn’t even offer his thanks, only hastily took his leave by kissing hands and cheeks – and hurriedly at that.

In Istanbul he was greeted by his aunt and İhsan. İhsan had recently returned from a military imprisonment in Egypt. Reasons of health prevented him from going to Anatolia to fight in the resistance. As a consequence, he was working for the underground in Allied-occupied Istanbul. Mümtaz’s father, at home, had mentioned his nephew İhsan frequently. Statements like, “I’m quite impressed with İhsan. Hopefully, Mümtaz will grow up to be like him,” or, “The brightest one in our family is surely İhsan,” or, “I only wish for that boy’s safe and sound return,” could be heard almost daily. Hearing his father’s comments at once conjured a number of visions of this cousin, who was twenty-three years his elder. When greeted at the ship by İhsan, Mümtaz realized that he was actually more agreeable than the personae of his preconceptions. A man with a wounded leg, a pockmarked face, and smiling eyes grabbed him and proclaimed, “That’s no way to greet your old cousin!” lifted him into the air and advised, “Don’t be so long in the face, son, forget it all,” and declared his friendship without expecting a thing in return.

Mümtaz adjusted to the Şehzadebaşı household of old Istanbul with difficulty. His elderly aunt had seen much suffering. İhsan was very busy. In addition to his teaching, he had a great deal of writing and reading to attend to. Outside of school, Mümtaz passed his days in near isolation. They’d given him the top-floor room above İhsan’s. The large adjacent library would later provide him with a place to study and write. This first encounter with so many books, stacks of pictures, and curios astounded him. Once he grew accustomed to life in the household, the library beckoned. His first books came from its shelves. Novels, stories, and poetry – whose meanings he couldn’t quite decipher – were his truest friends that year. The following year they enrolled him in the French lyceum Galatasaray. One week afterward İhsan and Macide married.

Mümtaz approved of his cousin’s bride at first sight. “I’m very pleased,” was his response to İhsan’s inquiring, however joking,
so-what-do-you-think
gesture. His naïve response bore a truth. Macide always infused her surroundings with a sense of contentment. This was part of her essence, secondary to her beauty, moral decency, and composure. With her arrival, life in the family changed dramatically. İhsan’s long silences eased and Aunt Sabire’s longing for bygone days waned. As for Mümtaz, he struck up a friendship with a woman twelve years his senior. Within a few weeks’ time, when he was accepted as a boarder at school, he felt the stirrings of remorse. The household in which he’d felt himself a guest had somehow become his own.

By belonging to a family that he loved, Mümtaz had staked a claim on life. The youth, who’d assumed on his last night in S. that everything would end and, due to his particular fate, that he’d remain ostracized from social life, suddenly found a new existence. Life besieged him and he was part of that life.

At the center of this life rested that exceptional creature, Macide, a petite woman who drew in her wake everything and everyone, magically transfiguring them. On weekends she’d pick Mümtaz up from school and, on empty stomachs, now stopping before shop fronts, now watching passersby come and go, they’d roam through the European quarter of Beyoǧlu for hours; then, like two truants who’d cut class, they’d return home in fear and dread of getting caught. When he was ready to go back to school again, Macide was at his side. She prepared his schoolbag and checked his clothes. She wasn’t a mother or a sister but rather a guardian angel of sorts; her presence was like that of an alchemist who understood many mysteries, transforming everything, reconciling matter and man, and infusing the hours of the day with an air of sweetness and light.

Mümtaz came to know İhsan later, upon entering into an intellectual life. Without letting on, İhsan had kept an eye on the youth, observing and nourishing his aptitudes and inclinations. When he’d reached the age of seventeen, Mümtaz felt ready to cross a threshold. He’d read the classical Ottoman divan collections and had savored the delicacies of history. İhsan himself taught the history course. On first seeing his older cousin in the classroom, Mümtaz thought,
How am I to learn anything from a relative?
But as class began, he understood that İhsan’s persona as teacher was distinct from that of the brother he knew so well. The entire class was awed from the first day. To them, İhsan was something like the eagle that had abducted Ganymede. He’d seized and capitivated them, and though he hadn’t taken them up to any Mount Olympus, he’d transported them to the heights of a path they’d subsequently descend by themselves.

Years later he and his classmates recalled lines still fresh in their minds from this first lecture. And lessons continued at home for Mümtaz. He was astounded to realize that he’d become something of a young colleague to İhsan, who shared many of his ideas, argued with, and mentored him. One after another, he’d make requests like, “Search for this matter in Joseph von Hammer,” or, “Go see what that charlatan chronicler Şânizâde Mehmed Ataullah has to say,” or, “Find out about this business from Hoca Sadeddin Efendi’s
Tâcüttevarih.
” Mümtaz would take up a large tome, sit at the table reserved for him in a corner of the room, and for hours, depending on the task at hand, note for İhsan details about the life of Hâlet Efendi, about the gifts sent with some embassy to Istanbul by the Hapsburg dynasty, or about the rationale for the Ottoman campaign to Egypt. İhsan aspired to write a comprehensive history of the Turks. It was to be a vehicle for organizing the social doctrine he espoused. Gradually he’d imparted his ideas to Mümtaz.

Listening to İhsan, Mümtaz felt that he was rushing from one epiphany to another. They debated the format of the project together. İhsan wanted a chronological history: Beginning with the economic conditions the Ottoman Empire had inherited from the Byzantines, and proceeding year by year to the present. Conversely one might write up a series of great events; however, this wouldn’t constitute a collection of comprehensive surveys as İhsan desired, although institutions and events would be better addressed. Mümtaz favored this second format. Following a heated debate, İhsan agreed. Mümtaz would help with the project; specifically, he was to prepare the art and intellectual history sections. While continuing down the path that İhsan had blazed, Mümtaz’s inclinations drew him toward poetry and aesthetics. An aspiring poet’s greatest hope is to find his own voice through tools that developed an inner realm. By and by he’d discovered the French poets Régnier and master of the sonnet Heredia, then the symbolists Verlaine and Baudelaire, and each of them gave him a new horizon.

Whatever he read or heard about later played in the peculiar stages erected in Mümtaz’s mind: the rocky outcroppings in Antalya and their house in N. All of the scenes in the novels he read took place in these two settings, from where they’d seep into his private life.

Mümtaz found himself in Baudelaire. He was more or less indebted to İhsan for this discovery. İhsan wasn’t an artist. His creative side had been subsumed by history and economics. Even so, he understood poetry and painting well. In his youth he’d read French writers methodically. For seven years, he’d lived in the Latin Quarter together with other international cohorts. He’d lived through many trends, witnessed the birth of various theories, and participated in the roaring harvest fires of aesthetic debates. Later, after he’d returned to Istanbul, he’d abruptly forsaken it all, even the poets he loved the most. In an unanticipated way, he occupied himself with topics pertaining to Turks, cultivating this interest to the exclusion of others. Since he’d developed the measure of his aesthetic sense in Europe, he didn’t particularly distinguish local choices in art from others. He introduced Mümtaz to the works of Ottoman poets like Bâkî, Nef’î, Nâilî, Nedim, and Shaykh Galip, along with musicians like Dede and Itrî. And it was İhsan who handed him a copy of Baudelaire. “Since you’re reading poetry, you might as well read an alchemist of genius,” he said, before reciting a few poems from memory. That week Mümtaz hadn’t gone to school. A mild grippe kept him in bed. It had been a bitter winter besides. All of Istanbul lay swathed in snow. İhsan, at the edge of his aunt’s bed, holding the leather-bound
Flowers of Evil
he’d just bought Mümtaz – perhaps with his eyes trained on his own youth, when a group of them were enamored of the red-haired Mademoiselle Romantique, when they pined for her, spending entire nights till dawn roaming from café to café – İhsan read in his gruff voice, “Invitation to the Voyage,” “Autumn Sonnet,” and “The Irremediable.”