A Mind at Peace (17 page)

Am I to once more pass over roads that I’ve already traveled? Is there torment greater than this? Why are men so selfish? Why is it that they think we women are as free as them?
And she absolutely had to get new shoes. These heels were so cumbersome that they made her look like the dotty teachers back at the girls’ academy.
These shoes were only good for an address on women’s rights at a protest rally. Not the shoes themselves of course ... It was evident that shoes couldn’t speak ... How could he possibly find me attractive and elegant in these?

The girl yesterday morning on the ferry, her lips were as red as pomegranate blossoms, and she faced Mümtaz perpetually. Even I, from where I sat, could see the invitation on her lips, and I grew anxious for her sake. He, however, from his vantage point, strained to see me. He had such a peculiar way of stretching his neck. It was so unbecoming ...
She wanted to say to him, “All right then, move along now, let’s go our separate ways here ... What need is there to insist upon this meaningless affair?” But she couldn’t manage it. She knew full well that he’d be miserably heartbroken. And she didn’t want to make him sad. Rather, she might, if she could console him by taking his head into her hands, if this were possible, she might do so simply to savor this pleasure. Because cruelty also had its pleasures. She sensed this within her now like an urge. Only temporarily, for a fleeting moment only, of course. Because she couldn’t endure too much of it; she wouldn’t want too much. It was part of her. And this being the case, she needed to feel happiness and torment together. Nuran would introduce all of it to him; because she was aware of this fact, she found herself strong and ever so powerful. Thus, her smile was as thin as a knife blade. Yet the anxiety within her continued to speak:
Others who see us together, who knows what they’ll say? It’s so obvious that he’s inappropriately younger than me . . . They’ll assume I’ve separated from Fâhir to be with him. I wasn’t even the one who separated from Fâhir . . . He left.
If only he’d just go away and let her be.

IV

The Bosphorus ferry held crowds of another magnitude. This wasn’t a wealthy, luxurious pleasure ground where every feature was ordered and arranged by money, with wide roads of asphalt and ornamental flower beds like the island, which had emerged abruptly during Istanbul’s decline, in so short a time it might be termed a season. No, this was a venue that had lived shoulder to shoulder with Istanbul from the start, had seen its fortunes rise with the city’s, and had fallen on hard times when the city lost its ways and means, a venue that withdrew into itself when the city changed its predilections, conserving as much as possible the bygone trends in which it had participated; in short, this was a venue that had experienced an entire culture like a single-minded venture.

In Mümtaz’s estimation, one did become somewhat anonymous on the island. That was a place for rather conventional people; one longed for what was actually inessential there, at least for what alienated one from oneself and in the process prevented one from standing on terra firma. On the Bosphorus, in contrast, everything summoned one inward, and plummeted one into one’s own depths. Here everything belonged to us, those facets that governed the grand synthesis, including the panorama and the architecture, as temporal as it was ... those facets that we founded and subsequently came into being along with us. This was a realm of squat-minareted and smallmosqued villages whose lime-washed walls defined Istanbul neighborhoods; a realm of sprawling cemeteries that at times dominated a panorama from edge to edge; a realm of fountains with broken ornamental fascia whose long-dry spouts nevertheless provided a cooling tonic; a realm of large Bosphorus residences, of wooden dervish houses in whose courtyards goats now grazed, of quayside coffeehouses, the shouts of whose apprentice waiters mingled into the otherworld of Istanbul ramadans like a salutation from the mortal world, of public squares filled with the memories of bygone wrestling matches with drums and shrill pipes and contenders bedecked in outfits like national holiday costumes, of enormous chinar trees, of overcast evenings, of eerie and emotive echoes and of daybreaks during which nymphs of dawn bore torches aloft, hovering in mother-of-pearl visions reflected in mirrors of the metaphysical.

Besides, everything on the Bosphorus was a reflection. Light was reflection, sound was reflection; sporadically, here, one might become the echo of an array of things unbeknownst to oneself.

Whenever Mümtaz lent an ear to his early childhood memories and listened to the echoes of the ferry horns that reached him after ricocheting from the surrounding hilltops, he might discern from which wellsprings the incurable
hüzün
within him sometimes rose and flowed forth and made him so opulent amid everyday routine.

The ferry gathered civil servants returning from their city jobs, sightseers, beachgoers, young students, military officers, elderly women, and congregants on deck, the remorse of whose lives, and the day’s fatigue, dripping from their faces, intentionally or not, seemed to surrender to this waning evening hour. Like the potter described by Omar Khayyám, the evening took up all those heads and worked them from the inside and outside, transfigured their lines, painted them, varnished and shellacked them, made their eyes dreamier, softened their lips, and filled their stares with renewed glimmers of yearning and hope. They came to the center of this radiance as themselves, but, as if fallen into the midst of sorcery, they changed with the transformations of light. Intermittently, a guffaw verging on the obnoxious rose from the center of a group; in the distance, all the way at the bow, well-to-do children raised along the Bosphorus played harmonicas and sang songs in callow voices; and passengers who’d grown accustomed to commuting together called out to one another. These were passing interruptions, however. Quiescence, rather resembling expectation, expanded again – its arboreal growth and boundless leaves beshrouding all.

The roots of this tree that traced a bright crimson arc amid the gilded design of a finely wrought Herat bookbinding on the horizon lay in the sun, illuminating golden arabesques in increasing prominence, melding them anew each moment and recasting them in accordance with their own phantasies. From there, the tree flourished branch by branch. Through its radiance, Nuran had become a fruit of arboreal silence, with her stony expression, her small, protruding chin ready to reject him, her narrowed eyes, and her hands clenching her purse.

“So much so that you seem like you’re drooping from the boughs of the evening ... As soon as the light has faded fully, I fear you might fall to the ground.”

“In that case, the night will gather all of us at once ... Because you’re in the same state.” And that’s just what happened. Even before reaching Üsküdar, the roses dusk had cast hither and yond faded and the sea grew winedark. The large bound tome with Herat gilding was now a deep magenta cloud fragment. On the tips of distant minarets stirred one or two flights of whiteness like belated birds. The wave of illumination that had engulfed the opposite shore sprawled like the last reverberations of a score of Ottoman music.

As night fell, Mümtaz found a nip of winter yet in the air. With an unsettling sense of cold, he recoiled into himself.

“In winter the Bosphorus has a separate beauty,” he said. “An eerie loneliness.”

“But you can’t quite endure it.”

“No, I can’t. In order to withstand it, one either has to be thoroughly rooted in life or has to live extravagantly. I mean, one has to have had a sufficient degree of experience. As for me – ”

He cut himself off; he was about to say, “I’m still like a child.” What was there in his life besides a menagerie of dreams?
Tomorrow, won’t you, too, become a dream?

“You know what one of my favorite things is? Since I was a little girl, closed, darkened windows facing the Bosphorus upon whose panes the light plays ... lights moving with the ferry and changing from window to window sometimes form arcs of fire ... but don’t bother looking now, since you haven’t noticed. Look for them from a good vantage, a little farther on.”

Mümtaz was surprised that he hadn’t noticed a detail so simple. “The nighttime map of the Bosphorus is a bit like these lights for me. Like what you said ... One lives here as if in a dream, sometimes becoming part of a fable ...”

The sentimentality into which they’d fallen threatened to embarrass Mümtaz. The grand sultanate of the night began after Üsküdar. Large blocks of houses, their boundaries marked by street lamps burning bright, were separated by black abysses that made them more foreboding, mysterious, and fabulous than they actually were. This harmony was broken by the lights in public squares before ferry landings that alluded to a life of greater comfort. With almost each of its windows illuminated, a vintage Bosphorus residence passed before them like a behemoth that had long been submerged, having relinquished its mass and density.

“There are quite a few people in there,” he said.

In fact, each window framed a few heads. They were huddled together, watching the ferry. The sound of a horn.

“The horns haven’t yet reached their summertime pitch ...”

They shared their observations with one another. They were like two small children. Each observed what passed separately, and spoke only occasionally. Nuran pointed to an unshuttered and blackened window: “See,” she said, “how it becomes woven like moiré cloth ... then the arcs ... there goes another one, like a falling star ... a little farther on, close to our house, fishermen’s lanterns mingle into these reflections. But the most beautiful of all are these arcs: a calculus of light.”

Later they straightened themselves as if from a tome over which they both had been poring and stared at each other. Both were smiling.

“I’ll walk with you as far as your house,” he said.

“On the condition that you turn back at the head of the street ... unless you want to give my mother a heart attack.”

Mümtaz grew inwardly annoyed.
Her mother ... Allah, how many obstacles must I overcome?
he thought.

As if reading Mümtaz’s mind, she said, “There’s nothing much to be done about it; we have to accept our lives as they are. One cannot just do as one wishes ... D’you know that even at my age I have to give an account of my whereabouts? Had Mother known that I was on my way home, she would have been mad with worry by now. She would have conjured seventy-five different catastrophes for this beloved daughter of hers.” Then she abruptly changed the subject. “Do you only like traditional music?”

“No, all of it ... of course as much as I understand ... My memory for music is limited and I never studied it. You’re also fond of it, aren’t you?”

“Exceptionally so ... In our family traditional music is something of an heirloom,” she said. “We belong to the Mevlevî tradition on my father’s side and to the Bektashi on my mother’s side. Early in the nineteenth century, they say Sultan Mahmut II even exiled my mother’s grandfather to Manastır in Macedonia for his involvement in the Sufi order. When I was a girl, every night there were musical gatherings and lots of entertainment.”

“I’m aware,” he said. “I once saw an old photograph of you dressed in Mevlevî robes. It’d been taken without your father’s knowledge.”

He took care to avoid uttering İclâl’s name. An indication of his timidity. Not to mention that he didn’t want to constantly mention another woman’s name.

“Of course, İclâl was also ...,” she said.
For the grace of God, there was nothing sacred to that girl. Those who knew her lived in houses of glass.

Mümtaz: “But she wasn’t the one who showed me the photograph. And, moreover, I myself guessed it was you in the picture.”

Nuran never imagined that this memory would transport her clear back to those days. She pictured her father holding a
ney
and sitting on the divan in the large upstairs foyer. “Come, sit down,” he gestured, as if inviting her to his side.

Her entire girlhood had passed in a birdcage of melodies made by that flute. The world, which manifested for others through a thousand sensations, manifested for her purely through sound and music. Nuran had embarked on life through a realm of pure imagination like the reflections in the orb of pale glass called “New World” that hung beneath the chandelier in that same foyer. “When that photograph was taken, my father was still alive. Only we weren’t living along the Bosphorus then. We were staying in Libadiye. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Çamlıca district?”

But Mümtaz couldn’t take his thoughts off the photograph. “That’s a striking picture. You resemble depictions in old miniatures. Granted, the outfit isn’t the same, but you somehow recall a youth proffering a goblet of wine to Ali Şîr Nevaî.” He added, laughing, “Where’d you learn to sit like that?”

“Like I said, a legacy from my ancestors. It’s part of my being. I was born with it.”

Shortly thereafter the third significant event of the day occurred. They disembarked together at Kandilli. As if this was how it regularly happened, they strode together across the wooden planks of the landing. Mümtaz handed the official at the exit both of their tickets at once, and the man took them without a hitch. They continued together across the square. They began to walk up the hill. As they walked, they embraced one another’s presence. Nuran’s shoe caught on a stone; Mümtaz took her by the arm. They turned left into an alleyway. Next they climbed another small incline. At the mouth of a narrow path he and Nuran parted. “This is our garden ... The house is on the opposite side. It’s best if you turn back,” she said.

A street lamp above them illuminated a large chinar as though from within. Beneath this fragrant radiance showering them leaf by leaf, and beside the splashing of a fountain and the peeping of frogs, they took leave of one another. Mümtaz regreted not asking her whether they would soon be able to meet. Within him lurked the dread of never again laying eyes on her. Beneath the burden of such misgivings, he returned the way they had come, slightly remorseful, though enriched countless times over by Nuran’s allure, his heart yawning open to companionship of an indeterminate order.