A Mind at Peace (53 page)

Orhan, with the same absentmindedness: “True, if this war happens, it won’t happen by accident like the last one!”

“The last war didn’t happen accidentally, either. Some believe that it happened because Poincaré wanted it to! Whatever the case, it caught the entire world off guard. Everybody distrusted their neighboring country and more or less armed themselves against each other. But the people on the ground didn’t give war much credence. They believed that it wasn’t possible in this century of civilization, that consent for this magnitude of death couldn’t be given. But today . . . today the world’s in the midst of a civil war. Ideas alone are at war. Ideas themselves have begun to run riot.”

“But isn’t that just a small faction?”

“Not at all! Because these persistent crises have also exhausted more moderate factions and groups that simply want to live their lives. That’s why war is a forgone conclusion.”

Orhan, after entertaining thoughts of hanging a fist-size lock on the door of the chemist’s shop that he’d recently opened, said, “Is it all worth it for the sake of a small harbor?”

“Of course not, but it isn’t simply an issue of the harbor. It’s uncertain what will follow! Not to mention that there’s the crucial problem of Nazi tyranny and aggression! The man’s a plague on humanity.”

“Mümtaz, do you actually still believe in humanity?”

Mümtaz gazed at Orhan. “What else is there?” He resembled the stray girl whom Suad had mentioned in his letter.

“I don’t believe in it. And the spilling of blood for the sake of humanity infuriates me. What’s it to me if Europe claims to be in dire straits? When we were in danger, did they give us a second thought? Did Europe even once think of preventing the catastrophe of the Balkan Wars? For centuries your Europe has performed cold-blooded surgery on us. An incision here, an amputation there. They uprooted us like grass from lands in which we’d lived for hundreds of years. Then they transplanted other nationalities in our place as if planting carrots in a field of rice. Didn’t Europe do all of this? Hasn’t Europe nurtured Hitler and the current state of crisis?”

“But we could come to a mutual understanding that violence unleashed against us and others should end! And it should end once and for all!”

“And you intend to do this through warfare?”

“Seeing that there’s the threat of military attack, of course through warfare ... First I’d repel the threat at the doorstep, then I’d try to prevent its reoccurrence.”

“Two wrongs don’t make a right!”

“Sometimes another wrong is the only solution. Surgery cures gangrene. Skin cancer can be abraded with a scalpel. Operations are terrible, but at times they’re the only available option. Not to mention that establishing a new ethics and morality is laborious and time-consuming. We assume it can happen all at once like a rising sun. But it manifests by means of suffering and trial and error, and through the resulting process of socialization. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Value judgments get absorbed through our skin, that’s how common and invasive they are. But they’re good for nothing. Because society doesn’t simply adopt what the mind conjures up.”

“Will it adopt it by force of war? We saw what happened between 1914 and 1918.”

“True, the road traveled is no indication of what lies ahead.”

Orhan, having finished with the lock, was lost in thought. During such moments, he’d be certain to sing a
türkü
. In fact, in place of answering Mümtaz, he mumbled:

Mümtaz recognized the
türkü
. During the last war, while in Konya with his father, Mümtaz remembered that soldiers being transported by evening freight trains and peasants carting vegetables to town toward daybreak always sang this song in the station. It had a searing melody. The entire drama of Anatolia was contained in this
türkü
.

“How strange!” he said. “It’s acceptible, even forgivable, for the masses to moan and complain. Just listen to
türkü
s from the last war! What spectacular pieces! The older ones are that way too. Take that Crimean War
türkü
. But these songs aren’t liked by intellectuals. So they have no right to whine! That means we’re accountable.”

Nuri returned to the earlier topic: “And how d’you know that things won’t run amok this time? Due to the absence or the surplus of the most insignificant thing, a piece of straw.”

Mümtaz completed his thought: “I’m not defending war. What makes you think that I am? For starters, can humanity even be divided into the ‘victorious’ and the ‘vanquished’? This is absurd. This division is sufficient to bankrupt values and ethics and even what we’re fighting for. Naturally it’s a mistake to expect good or great things to follow in the wake of every crisis. But what’s to be done? You see, there are five of us here. Five friends. When we think independently, we find ourselves possessed of an array of strengths. But in the face of any crisis . . .” His friends gazed at him intently as he continued: “Since morning I’ve been debating this on my own.” Abruptly, however, he returned to the previous topic: “On the contrary, worse, much worse things could arise.”

“What have you been deliberating since morning?”

“This morning, near the Hekim Ali Pasha Mosque, girls were playing games and singing
türkü
s. These songs have existed maybe since the time of the conquest of Istanbul. And the girls were singing them and playing. You see, I want these
türkü
s to persist.”

“That’s a defensive struggle . . . That’s different.”

“Sometimes a defensive struggle can change its character. If there’s a war, I’m not saying we’ll rush into it at all costs. For nobody knows what the developments leading up to it will be. Sometimes, unexpectedly, a back door opens. You look to find an unforeseen opportunity! In that case, waging or refraining from war becomes a matter that’s within your own control.”

“When one contemplates it, it’s confounding. The difference between those who controlled humanity’s fate at the start of the last war and today’s statesmen is immeasurable!”

Mümtaz turned to İhsan in his thoughts as if to ask him something.

“Of course there are a lot of differences. Back then humanity seemed to emerge out of a single mold. Values were still regarded in high esteem! Not to mention that centuries-old diplomacy, its gentility and protocol . . . Today it’s as if a lunatic has moved into the neighborhood. Europe as we know it has vanished. Half of Europe is in the hands of renegades bent on provoking the masses, on vengeance, and on spinning new fables.” The more he spoke, the more he assumed he was leaving his fixed ideas and fabrications behind.

“Do you know when I gave up hope on the current predicament? The day they signed the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact.”

“But the leftists quite applaude it. If you could just hear them rave! They’re now all praising the Führer. As if the Reichstag Fire Trial had never happened.” Nuri’s face was yellow with wrath. “As if so much murder hadn’t been committed.”

“Of course they praise him. But only until the next news flash. You get my drift, don’t you? Mind that one doesn’t lose his sense of ethics and value judgments ! Despite being opposed to war, I’m not afraid of it, and I’m waiting.”

He spoke with unfamiliar certitude. From one of the neighboring coffeehouses a radio or gramophone cast another variety of turmoil into the evening hour. Eyyubî Bekir Aǧa’s version of the “Song in Mahur” lilted through the twilight, staggering Mümtaz on the spot. As he heard the melody, the version that Nuran’s grandfather had composed, that ominous poem of love and death, filled him.
Tomorrow she’ll be leaving, and leaving full of resentment . . .
Fury, so vast as to be unbearable, rose within him.
Why did it have to happen this way? Why is everybody imposing on me like this?
She’d been talking about her peace of mind.
So then, where’s my own peace to be found? Don’t I count? What to do in such solitude?
He was all but thinking through Nuran’s words:
Peace, inner calm,
huzur
. . .

“The entire matter hinges on this . . .” Orhan didn’t complete his thought.

“Go on!”

“No, I’ve forgotten what I was going to say. Only you’re right on one point. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Each injustice condoned gives rise to greater injustice.”

“There’s another point: avoiding injustice while fighting injustice . . . This war, if it comes to pass, will be a bloodbath. But the torments suffered will all be in vain if we don’t change our methods . . .”

I shouldn’t be seeking peace through Nuran, but through myself. And this will only happen through sacrifice.
He stood.

“I’m worried about İhsan,” he said. “Please excuse me. And purge yourselves of these thoughts. Who knows, maybe there won’t be any war! Maybe we won’t get involved. We’re a country that’s lost so much blood, we’ve learned many lessons. The circumstances might just permit our neutrality.”

As Mümtaz took leave of his friends, he realized that they hadn’t discussed the stages of such a war, were it to happen. Inwardly, this pleased him.

Will it actually come to pass?
The voice accompanying him said, “Don’t worry about it,” then added, “Well-spoken, you’ve put yourself at ease! That’s all you need to do, nothing more!” He ran and hopped onto a streetcar, perhaps to escape Suad’s derisive voice.

III

İhsan lay as sick as ever, his gaunt face ruddy from fever. Occasionally he tried to wet his cracked and drawn lips with his tongue. This was no longer the former İhsan; perhaps he verged on becoming a memory. Seeing him in this state meant encountering him halfway on that foreordained path. This was precursor to becoming a remnant, existing only through Mümtaz and other acquaintances.
Should his persona grow a little more exhausted, a little more attenuated, it’ll pass into us, persisting only in our memories.

He gazed at İhsan’s hands. His distended veins looked as if they had been roasted. But they were alive. Alive as if they’d been conquered by another dimension of existence and were now living in another climate. A climate of 104 degrees. But that wasn’t all. The temperature alone didn’t create this environment. An array of small organisms, microbes, known as bacilli, observed through special instruments, isolated in tiny vials and in thin test tubes, introduced into a variety of laboratory animals, and thereby regenerated; for whose preservation and proliferation special methods were implemented, for whom hot and cold extremes were established, concerning whom a variety of tests were undertaken for their extraction from hosts, who were dyed in the most inconceivable ways, and preserved in fluids ranging in color by shades from blood red to dull green; these microbes had certain codes, and these microorganisms, along with the programming they carried, transformed this temperature between 102 and 104 degrees into a clime between life and death quite separate from our own context, transforming it into an unimaginable altitude or a suffocating, noxious quagmire, into the thin air found at a height of thousands of feet or into something like the maw of a volcano active with the admixture of unknown gases.

The afflicted man’s chest rose and fell like a poorly working bellows that couldn’t manage to find an adequate breath of salvation or preservation; he gulped air hungrily, and exhaled furtively and imperceptively like a tire leaking air; however quickly and noticeably he inhaled, his exhalation was indeterminable to the same degree.

One could hardly recognize this wheezing anatomy as a human torso – reduced to its most basic functions, rising and falling in its own inadequacy. The half-shaded light on the bedstead illuminated this mass of misery in greater clarity. Uncanny was the light of the room of the afflicted: It pointed out everything through idiosyncrasy, delineating certain objects in the foreground and others in the background. It was a light that declared, “I am awaiting a state of distinction, a zone between 102 and 104 degrees, a final threshold. That is all that I illuminate, nothing more.” But this enunciation, according to Mümtaz, existed to some degree in all the assembled objects: the bed had swollen along with the patient and had taken on his suffering. The drapes, the wardrobe mirror, the silence of the room, the tick of the clock whose pace gradually increased, and all else demonstrated what a bizarre, mean, rough-going passage the interstice between 102 and 104 constituted – leading from the manifest to arcana, from a numeric quantity to zilch, and from cognizance to absolute inertia.

Here reigned a sultanate. Over a period of nine days, this sultanate had been established in the corpus of the man lying here, whose hands twitched as they’d never before done in the normal atmosphere of 98.6 degrees, who sought oxygen to cool his lungs at the altitude of his ascent only by incessantly working his chest, his drawn lips waiting before countryside fountain spouts through which water hadn’t gushed for years, lips chapped like the earth longing for one burst of water and serenity, with eyes that regurgitated light, with a face that receded from within, a man of affliction whose very being declared, “I’m no longer what I once was!” In the course of nine days, he’d been removed from his old self, from resembling others, and had been relegated to the margins of existence, where only if one paid close attention could one discern his astonishing slow and steady metamorphosis.

What remained in this room of the man he used to know? Besides the suffering of his material being, practically nothing. Not even the light in his eyes was a sign of a life recognizably human. Any material object catching any reflection would elicit this much luminance, Mümtaz decided. But no, the eyes of ailing İhsan shone differently. It was as if İhsan could still read Mümtaz’s thoughts from the limits of extremity he occupied.
Why do I always succumb to pessimism like this? Why am I this cowardly?
he thought, and leaned toward İhsan to speak. But the man of affliction closed his eyes when Mümtaz took up his hands; he didn’t want to speak. Silence of the ephemeral. Silence the likes of which he hadn’t experienced before.