A Mind at Peace (57 page)

Mümtaz wanted to scramble out of the thoughts into which he’d fallen. But he failed. The doctor shifted his considerable weight and leaned onto his arm with a certain sense of purpose. He stopped. Once again he took a deep breath and exhaled as if confiding to the night.

“Just a few people can change everything, d’you understand? A decent group . . . This being the case ... Consider this tranquil nighttime hour. Now, just think of tomorrow morning.”

Tomorrow morning opened before Mümtaz like a black well. The doctor, however, didn’t even look into the well that he’d conjured.

“Regrettable, isn’t it? First a nation or a class of people is provoked by means of a series of instigations. Next a madman or a plan concocted behind the scenes ensures the exploitation and appropriation of the masses, who are dragged into the abyss after being bumped from rock to rock as if possessed by a djinn . . . Just take Germany, for instance. Think about it individual by individual . . . Then look at how it can be manipulated en masse once in the hands of a sadist . . . In turn, sadism, worship of power, blind trust in fate, the thought that ‘only I can set things straight,’ through a retribution taken to excess, passes to others, even those in the opposition . . . A terrifying door is opening up; a barrier is being torn down, beyond which rests only endless catastrophe.” Mümtaz stopped short, as if refusing to pass through this doorway.

“I even read the letters that German students had written to their families during the last war. They all sounded like mystics of humanity . . .”

“Mystics you say? The worst of all fates. Above all don’t let your feet leave the ground. Then you’re susceptible to anything. Anything contracted through the air. Because white noise speaks through your being. Mystics of humanity, mystics of power, mystics of race, the abomination of mystics of torment... Because divinity hangs beside us like a theater costume, and it’s so easy to simply slip it on ... Mind that mankind doesn’t attempt to deify itself. Mind that it doesn’t believe it’s an Absolute Idea or that it’s the only vehicle through which truth can be found.

“Young man, whatever I have faith in torments me as much as what I doubt. As a result, I bring harm to nobody. Meanwhile, mystics are not that way. They have a mission . . .” He laughed like a boy. Mümtaz, heartened by the innocence of this laugh, waited for him to begin talking again.

“When I was little, a mad Koran chanter, a
hafiz
, would visit us. This man claimed he’d subdued a djinn and had become its master. My father, you see, was bent on discovering treasure. The
hafiz
spent his days and nights in the men’s quarters of our house . . . They’d wake up early and go off to who knows where. As I came and went from those quarters, I’d sometimes see him seeking out treasure spots through intercession from beyond. He’d commune with the spirit world. Turning to face the wall, and as if speaking on the telephone, he’d converse with the unseen or with the deficiencies in his own psyche. I could follow the outlines of the conversation from his responses and line of questioning. A kook, apparently, a harmless lunatic. But there’s no such thing as a harmless lunatic. Young man, a madman is always dangerous. And the trance states of divine communion are terrifying.

“One day when my father was out, the
hafiz
was again speaking to the walls. Apparently he’d been told that in order for the treasure to be located, a young, adopted Arab girl needed to be sacrificed in the empty adjacent lot. Mayhem broke out in the house. The mad
hafiz
entered the kitchen and began to sharpen all the meat cleavers while reciting bizarre prayers and incantations. The chef first grew leary of the glint in the madman’s eye, then of the words he overheard . . . Mind you, he was both sharpening knives and speaking to the unseen . . .

“Thank goodness he was detained in time. What trials and tribulations my father suffered before he’d had the man locked up in Toptaşı. And the
hafiz
didn’t keep his peace there, either. Every day he submitted denunciations of my father to the palace.”

“Did it at least cure your father of his obsession with treasure?”

“Yes, but this time he fell sway to alchemy, and everything we owned ended up going to a con man from Marrakech ...” He let out a deep, sorrowful sigh. “Recovering from this variety of illness isn’t as easy as it seems. There are so many overlapping symptoms. Take today’s Nazi sadism . . . I can almost see the emergence of tomorrow’s masochistic literature, a complete underground literature spawned through their worship of power . . . It’ll all be submission and tears: Kill me, tear me apart, for as I suffer cruelty and pain, I find myself... Later the reactionary rebellions will begin. Oh, take pity on the individual . . . The rights of the individual are being trampled upon, the individual is being oppressed . . . Individuals are nothing but the bloody bricks and tiles of this flesh and blood Tower of Babel . . . Do you remember those who were spouting such blather a decade or so ago?”

The doctor puffed out his broad chest in the night. “Health, Allah, bestow health upon us . . . Not strength, but health . . . The health of humankind . . . Healthiness that accepts life inherently the way it is . . . We don’t want an existence resembling that of the gods . . . Let’s live a life specific to us . . . Let’s live humanely. Let’s live without being deluded by anything, without telling lies to ourselves, let’s live without worshiping our own lies and apparitions . . .”

Mümtaz thought,
This one’s a prophet of another magnitude . . .

It relieved him to enter their neighborhood. This degree of thought, this contradictory and speculative stream of consciousness, disturbed him. As if wanting to thrust it all off his shoulders at once, he thought of Nuran. When he’d been beside her, life had been so steady. A world in which everything was arranged according to its own value ... But Nuran was quite a distance away, and in the house they were approaching rested an infirm man whose condition was a riddle. A man whom he dearly loved . . .
Only one hundred paces at most, only one hundred paces.

The pain of living with countless barriers and limits racked his nervous system.

He couldn’t complete his thought. Ahead of them on the road a shadow darted through the stinging nettle. The doctor made a start. Mümtaz said, “Don’t be startled . . . He’s an old Bektashi dervish. He sleeps in an abandoned cistern around here . . . The neighborhood looks after him.”

An elderly man stopped and stood before them. “
Hû
, greetings, companions of holiness . . .” He brought his hand to his heart and forehead and recited a couplet by Shaykh Galip:

In a deep and sonorous voice, as if feeling the surface of a bas-relief, he recited the letters and the syllables, exposing the full force of their intensity. As if he had no other concern besides being understood, being heard and understood, he bore no particular style of expression, no specific poetic flare. The effect was more stunning because he was at a remove from all variety of proselytizing, or even calling. He just left them face-to-face with a truth before vanishing; and this truth was a truth that described their torment. But was it only theirs? No, near and far, it constituted the torment of the world. This couplet was the first instance of a signpost within the night – and all previous nights – within the webbing they traced, the dark and labyrinthine catacomb that they couldn’t manage to escape.

The doctor: “Fine, but he’s no Bektashi, he’s a Mevlevî . . .”

“No, he’s a Bektashi. I’ve spoken to him often. Many nights İhsan, myself, and he have commiserated over
rakı
together . . . He’s Bektashi through and through; he recites beautiful strains of verse, and he’s particularly fond of this couplet. One day he’d said to me, ‘The sole reality is this: One ought to hold humanity in high regard. We ought to sense this regard within us without effort.’ In his opinion, this was more important than love . . . In short, he’s one who displays respect toward others and humanity ...”

“He has respect for humanity . . . In that case, he’s completely mad.” Then he abruptly changed his tone. He gazed at the houses that appeared pale next to the handlike objects illuminated by a feeble light, at the lot overgrown with weeds, and at the face of his companion, whose fatigue could just be discerned. A rooster, fluttering its wings somewhere above them, emptied its radiance into the night like an elixir of molten rubies and agate concealed within its being.

“The East,” he said, “my beloved East... From without, it appears lazy, foolish, helpless, and impoverished . . . But from within, it has resolved never to be deceived . . . What could be more beautiful? When will we learn to satisfy people from within? When will we understand the meaning of the phrase, ‘Mind you minister to yourself ’?”

“Does the East even comprehend this?”

“Whether it does or doesn’t, it’s conveyed the idea, hasn’t it, my son?”

V

The small, stray girl spared from sacrifice had seemingly arrived just in the nick of time to turn on the light. As soon as Mümtaz entered behind the doctor, he saw the objects that he’d left an hour ago again in the same position within the illumination of the mirror, with the same blithe invulnerability of an hour before, pleased to simply be themselves, gathered and glimmering.
Oh, the way these objects simply wait, as if for an opportunity to leave us . . .

The world exists even without me. It exists on its own. It persists. I’m a small trace of this persistence . . . But I exist, and I find the strength to persevere in the consciousness of continuity ... Through that continuity, I move from my genesis toward eternity ...

With the demeanor of a man pleading for grace from tyranny, Mümtaz looked about. For he knew that he wouldn’t persist eternally, and perhaps this minute, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps a few days hence, one day his presence within this continuity would cease and be usurped by other presences, and he knew he wouldn’t be the way he’d been in the past, and he wouldn’t sense the same shudders, and furthermore whether or not he would shudder. Eternity was a nebulous light into which his intellect at times shone. And not even to such a great depth. Only to a part of his being that fleetingly shifted toward the arcane. Meanwhile, reality amounted to this stone foyer that he perceived in a glance through his doubled existence and, as always, through his past; it amounted to the stairs he climbed, and İhsan’s room, whose staleness – comprised of the odor of medicines, sweat, and illness – he sensed before even entering; yes, reality was the suffering present there. Other unseen realities also existed that he couldn’t sense with his flesh yet that stabbed and twisted into him like a knife: Nuran’s disposition of a solitary lily in the white nightgown that they’d selected together; the tree branches that spilled over the garden walls of the house; the stunted fig tree that all but came to life on moonlit nights; the small chinar before the door; the nocturnes through which he passed; and the small table and chairs where he so longed to sit with her and have morning tea – a table whose cloth, left in place instead of gathered up, made the possibility of this pleasure more tangible . . .

But there were other realities. Things he’d never seen, of whose existence he was uncertain, that he sensed had settled into him in light of recent events, infecting him. Telegraph operators conveyed breaking news from one office to another while thinking of their wives, children, and homes; typesetters aligned letters and type with scorched fingers; housewives roamed through their houses aimlessly, feeling as if they’d forgotten something, opening, for maybe the twentieth time, the luggage they’d prepared, yet unable to add anything useful or new that would help confront the unknown; they did nothing but abandon broken smiles, pitiful prayers, and the grasp of their fingers before letting the suitcase close yet again . . . Train whistles, songs of separation ... These, too, played within him like a knife blade. No, he wasn’t in the realm of the eternal but of the worldly. The world resided in everybody. A world that existed at times in a corner of our beings, at times as a single soul in totality, at times a world we forgot about during our workaday lives, though we carried it with us, in our very blood; a world that, like it or not, we sensed in the weight of this evening upon our shoulders. And beneath this burden, beside the patient, the wrestler’s physique of the physician seemed slightly diminished.

İhsan was a little better, but he was dazed. On the taut skin of his forehead were drops of perspiration that seemed foreign to it, giving the impression that he couldn’t relax. By the looks of his chest, which appeared more puffed out and powerful under the force of his respiration, and his sweaty ruddy face, rather than a sick man, he resembled a swimmer who’d just vanquished the waves that he’d been struggling against for hours, and now waited for his pulse to return to normal where he sat resting on the shore. Had he actually vanquished them, however? His face resided in such an eerie region of remoteness. The worst of all possible prognoses resurfaced in Mümtaz’s mind.

“The good lady saved the patient just in the nick of time ... I’d guessed as much besides. There was no recourse but to increase the sulfamide dosage. Now I’m going to prescribe eight sulfamide capsules. And we’ll closely monitor the results. In addition we’ll need a bit of syrup and another heart medication. Mümtaz, I’m afraid we’re going to have to trouble you again.”

From the forest of a life of fragments, İhsan looked at Mümtaz as if to say, “And where did you find this specimen?” Then he extended his hand to hold the physician’s and uttered perhaps his first words of the night: “What d’you say, doctor? Will it happen? Will they proceed with this madness?”

The physician immediately answered his patient: “You concentrate on getting well!” Though his eyes said, “I share your concern!”