A Mind at Peace Read online

  He made a vague sign with his infirm hand.

  Mümtaz leaned toward the bed. “I haven’t read the papers yet. I don’t think there’s anything to worry about,” he said.

  In truth, he was convinced of the approach of war. “When the world is about to slough its skin, mayhem is inevitable.” İhsan, with whom he always discussed current events, would often repeat this quote by Albert Sorel. To this warning, Mümtaz now added the bitter prediction of a poet he quite admired: “This is the end of Europe.” But he couldn’t discuss such things at present. İhsan lay ailing.

  From where İhsan lay, he contemplated the situation. His hand fell to the quilt in a gesture of pleading and despair.

  “How did he pass the night?”

  “There’s been no change, Mümtaz,” Macide answered in her gentle voice like a dream of spring grass. “He’s always and forever the same.”

  “Were you able to sleep at all?”

  “I lay down here together with Sabiha. But I couldn’t sleep.”

  She gestured to the divan with her hand, grinning. She might have indicated this spot where she’d slept for five days, as if pointing to a gallows with horror and a shudder. But for Macide, this astounding and exceedingly precious creature, her smile made up half her character. So much so, she was unrecognizable without it. Thank God those days are behind us! The days when Macide had lost her smile were over.

  “Why don’t you sleep for a spell?”

  “After you return ... I couldn’t sleep all night for the train whistles. I wonder if troops are being mobilized or some such thing?”

  Mümtaz recalled: I learned of the tragedy by telegram while I was in Kastamonu. I came immediately. Macide and baby Ahmet were in two separate rooms. Everyone was preoccupied with Macide. My aunt Sabire was frantic. İhsan was a mere shadow of himself. I’ll never forget that summer. If İhsan hadn’t maintained faith in life, what condition would Macide be in today?

  İhsan pointed to Macide. “This one – ” He stopped as if powerless to finish his words. Then he mustered his strength and continued, “Give this one a word of advice.”

  Good God, his labored speech. This man, who was the most articulate of anyone Mümtaz knew, whose classroom lectures, conversations, and repartees would stay with him for days, could barely string together these few words. But he was content nevertheless. Despite everything, the “old codger” – this was his expression – had come through. He’d been able to express himself. Mümtaz would, of course, find a way to keep Macide from exhausting herself; İhsan’s eyes, fixed as they were on the young gentleman’s face, lost all focus.

  Stepping outside, Mümtaz stared at the street as if he were observing it in the wake of a long absence. At the entrance to the mosque opposite the house, an urchin toying with a length of twine gazed at fig branches lolling over the low wall. Perhaps he was contemplating the assault he’d soon make on the fig tree and the pleasures it promised. Just the way I sat and thought twenty years ago ... but back then the mosque wasn’t in this condition. He completed his thought remorsefully, Neither was the neighborhood.

  A street suffused in radiance. Mümtaz ever so absentmindedly studied the sunlight. Then he looked back at the urchin and at the fig branch and, above it, the dome of the mosque, whose lead sheathing had been commandeered for military supplies – slipped off like a glove from a hand or effortlessly peeled away like the skin of a fig from this very tree. The historic Mosque of Hazel-Eyed Mehmet Efendi, he thought. I’ll find out who that man is yet! The man had once endowed another mosque in Eyüp, where his tomb was located. But would Mümtaz ever be able to unearth the charter of this charitable trust to verify the fact?

  II

  Most of the addresses given to Mümtaz were false leads. A nurse named Fatma had never lived at the first house of his inquiry. The daughter of the family had simply begun a nursing course. The girl greeted him with a smile. “I signed up for the course so I could be of some use in case of war. But I haven’t learned anything yet.” She was solemn of voice. “My brother’s in the army ... Thinking of him.” An actual nurse had lived in the second house he visited. But three months ago she’d left for a job she’d found in an Anatolian hospital. Her mother, greeting Mümtaz, said, “Let me look into it. When I see one of my daughter’s friends, I’ll pass the word.”

  With the patience of one who didn’t want to spoil a charade, Mümtaz scribbled his address on a scrap of paper. The house was old and ramshackle. What do they do in winter? How do they keep warm? he thought as he walked away. Anyway, these questions were moot. On this late August morning, each street seized him in its ovenlike maw, then gobbled and swallowed him whole, before passing him on to the next one. An intermittent shady patch or a pocket of cool air at an intersection seemed to ease life’s toil. “İhsan, this summer I can’t avoid the libraries. I have to finish the first volume no matter what!” he’d said. The first volume ... before his eyes Mümtaz saw pages crisscrossed with threads of writing: annotations in crimson ink, extensive marginalia, and scratched-out lines that resembled an argument with himself. Who knew, maybe the history would never be completed. Under the torment of this thought, he went from street to street, speaking to corner grocers and proprietors of coffeehouses. The only nurse he was able to locate at home said, “I’ve taken leave from work because my husband’s sick. It’s not that I’m unemployed. After admitting him to the hospital, I’ll return to my job.” The woman’s face was a veritable building on the verge of collapse.

  Mümtaz, reluctantly: “What’s he have?”

  “Paralysis from stroke. I wasn’t with him. They brought him home, half his body limp. If they’d had any sense, they’d have taken him to the hospital then and there. Now the doctors say we should wait ten days before moving him again. How many times I begged of that wench, ‘Let him out of your clutches, he doesn’t have a penny or a thing, he isn’t young or handsome, find someone better for yourself.’ No, it had to be him above all, and now I’m stuck with three kids.”

  At the threshold of this family tragedy, Mümtaz bid farewell to the woman facing him. Three children, a paralyzed husband ... on a nurse’s wages. They lived in two rooms of a large house. Even their water vats were stored in the entryway, meaning they might not have use of a kitchen or toilet. The wooden house had been built by some wealthy Ottoman bureaucrat, finance minister, or provincial governor when marrying off his daughter. Despite its faded paint, the elegance of its construction was still evident through meticulously carved window casings, oriel windows, and eaves. Twin five-stepped staircases curved up to the entrance. On the right side stood the door to the coal cellar. But the owner had rented it to a coal merchant. Perhaps the kitchen was rented separately as well.

  Loping and rumbling, the massive body of a coal-laden truck clogged the street.

  Mümtaz veered into an alleyway ...

  He mused about the previous summer, how perhaps on one such day, he’d wandered these very streets with his beloved Nuran, strolling through the Koca Mustafa Pasha and Hekim Ali Pasha neighborhoods. Side by side in the heat, their bodies nearly entwined, wiping sweat from their foreheads, conversing all the while, they’d entered the courtyard of this very medrese or deciphered the Ottoman inscription on the fountain he’d now passed. One year ago. Mümtaz cast glances about as if seeking the shortest possible route to the previous year. He’d come as far as the Seven Martyrs beyond the city’s ancient land walls. The martyrs of Sultan Mehmed’s conquest slept side by side in small stone tombs. The street was dusty and narrow. Where the martyrs rested, however, it opened into a diminutive square. From the window of a two-story house, so run-down that it almost appeared – like those tiny sports cars – made of pasteboard, came the sounds of a tango, and in the middle of the street, dusty girls played a game. Mümtaz heard their song:Raise the gate, toll keeper, toll keeper. What will you pay me to pass on through?

  The girls were hale and hearty, but their clothes were in tatters. In a neighborhood where
Hekimoǧlu Ali Pasha’s manor had stood at one time, these houses like remnants of life, these poor clothes, and this song brought strange thoughts to his mind. Nuran had certainly played this game in her childhood. And before that, her mother and her grandmother sang the same ditty while playing this game.

  What should persist is this very song, our children’s growing up while singing this song and playing this game, not Hekimoǧlu Pasha himself or his manor or his neighborhood. Everything is subject to transformation; we can even foster such change through our own determination. What shouldn’t change are the things that structure social life, and mark it with our own stamp.

  İhsan understood such things well. He’d once said, “Every lullaby holds the thoughts and dreams of a million children!” İhsan, however, lay bedridden. Furthermore, Nuran wanted nothing to do with him, and the headlines announced a tense state of foreign affairs. Since morning he’d been under the assault of forces he didn’t want to acknowledge, relegating them to a corner of his mind.

  The poor girls played over a tinderbox. Still, the song was the same old song; life forged ahead even atop a powder keg.

  He sauntered along, passing gradually from one thought to the next. He realized that he wouldn’t be able to find a nurse in these outskirts of the city. He’d forgotten about the last address in his hand. After following the lead, he’d phone a relative near the American Hospital before trying to look around there.

  He plodded through decrepit, grim neighborhoods, passing before aged houses whose bleakness gave them the semblance of human faces. Throngs surrounded him, wearing expressions forlorn and sickly.

  They were all downcast, anticipating what the impending apocalypse of tomorrow held in store for them.

  If not for the disease ... and what if he were drafted? What if he had to go and leave İhsan infirm like this?

  Returning to the house, he found Macide asleep. İhsan’s breathing had steadied. The doctor had left good news in his wake. Ahmet was at his father’s bedside together with his grandmother Sabire. Curled up near her mother’s feet, Sabiha was truly asleep now.

  Overwhelmed by an eerie quiet, he climbed the stairs to his room. He’d seen the characters that made up his entire circle, almost, for he’d had no news of Nuran. What was she doing? he wondered.

  III

  İhsan and his wife held vital places in Mümtaz’s upbringing. Following the deaths of both his father and mother within a span of just a few weeks, his cousin had raised him. Macide and İhsan; İhsan and Macide. Until he’d made Nuran’s acquaintance, his life had passed almost entirely between them. İhsan had been both a father and a mentor to him.

  In France, where Mümtaz had been sent for two years about the time Macide had regained her health, his cousin’s influence persisted; in those new surroundings with so many temptations, he’d been spared initial experiences of decadence in part due to İhsan’s guidance, and thus hadn’t squandered his time.

  Macide, meanwhile, had entered his life when he most needed a woman’s compassion and beauty’s counsel. When she came to mind, he’d muse, I’ve spent part of my youth beneath a spring bough. Thus, İhsan’s affliction had shaken this already troubled youth to his core. From the moment he’d heard the word “pneumonia” leave the doctor’s lips, he’d been living in a perplexing state of distress.

  It wasn’t the first time Mümtaz had known such anguish. Anxiety in part constituted his inner self, that entity resting beneath the surface yet controlling everything. İhsan had strived to banish the serpent coiled within Mümtaz, and to extract its tree, whose roots extended into the boy’s heart. But it was essentially with Macide’s arrival that Mümtaz improved and turned to face the sun. Until he’d passed into her hands, Mümtaz was a creature of resentments, closed to the world, expecting nothing but calamity to fall from the skies – and rightly so.

  After the Great War, during the armistice-era invasion of S. by Greece, a local Anatolian Greek, an adversary of the owner of the house where Mümtaz’s family lived, mistakenly shot his father instead of the landlord. The town verged on capture. Many Turkish families had already fled. Mümtaz’s ill-fated father had found conveyance for wife and son that same night. Their bags and belongings had been prepared. He’d spent the entire day in town arranging for the trip. A little after nightfall he’d returned home to say, “Haydi! It’s all set! Let’s eat something, and we’ll be on the road within the hour. The routes are still open.” They ate on a cloth spread on the ground. There came a thump at the door. The servant informed them of someone waiting to see the man of the house. His father rushed to the door, assuming he’d receive details about the wagon he’d spent dawn till dusk procuring. Then they heard the report of a gun, a single, hollow shot without so much as an echo. The large man, one hand pressed over his abdomen, almost slithered back upstairs, collapsing in the hallway. It all lasted no more than five minutes. Neither mother nor child knew what words had been exchanged below or even who’d come. The shot was followed by the downhill patter of men running. While still numb with shock, they heard the sound of approaching artillery. Shortly, the neighbors arrived and an elder tried to pull them off the body, saying, “He’d always treated us with reverence. Let’s not leave him out in the open but bury him. He’s a martyr and can be buried without rites in his clothes.”

  Hastily, a grave was dug under a sprawling chinar tree in a corner of the yard within the light of a sooty lantern and an as-yet-unpacked oil lamp held aloft by a half-mad gardener.

  Mümtaz never forgot this scene. Upstairs, his mother continued to weep over the corpse. As if spellbound, he was glued to one wing of the garden gate, staring at the men by the tree trunk. The three men worked under the lantern they’d hung from a branch. The flame of the lantern verged on blowing out in the breeze; meanwhile, the old gardener raised the edge of his jacket to keep the other oil lamp lit. Beneath two sources of light, shadows expanded and contracted and amid artillery thuds, his mother’s wails mingled with the rasp of shoveling. When they were nearly finished, the air turned crimson. The glow came from the direction of the house; the town was burning. The fire had broken out an hour beforehand. The men continued to work under reddened skies. Shrapnel began to fall here and there. A roar louder than the sound of water bursting a levee rose from town, followed by an apocalypse of sounds. A man, hopping over the fence into the yard, shouted, “They’re entering town.” Everybody froze. Only his mother came downstairs, pleading. Mümtaz could withstand no more, and his hand, which clung to the gate wing, loosened and he collapsed to the ground. From where he lay, certain sounds reached his ears, but what he saw differed from what actually surrounded him. His father, as he did every night, had taken out the base of the large crystal lantern and tried to light it. When Mümtaz came to consciousness, he found himself outside the fence. “Can you walk?” his mother asked. He gazed about absently and said, “I can walk.” He did walk.

  Mümtaz couldn’t fully recollect the journey. From which hilltop did they watch the town burn? On which main road did they join the ghastly, miserable procession of suffering hundreds? Who’d put them on the sprung carriage toward daybreak, seating him next to the driver? These questions remained a mystery.

  He had fragmented memories, one of which was the way his mother was transfigured on the exodus. No longer was she a wife who wept and moaned over her husband’s corpse. She was a mother who’d set out and was trying to deliver her son and herself. Silently she did what those who led the refugee column said. She walked, holding her son’s hand tightly. Mümtaz could still feel the clench of her hand, a grip that would outlast her death.

  Or else the memory was more vivid. He’d see his mother standing stiffly beside him with her torn headcovering and her gaunt, rigid face. Later, in the carriage, each time she cast her head back, she seemed a shade paler, a little more withdrawn, a veritable wound of withered face and withheld tears.

  The second night of their exile they spent in a spacious inn lime-washed white, seem
ingly waiting alone for the Anatolian steppe. The stairs of the inn ran along the exterior and the windows of the rooms opened onto a terrace, where fruits were dried beneath the autumn sun. Mümtaz slept in one room with four or five other children and as many women. Before the entrance of the inn lolled a group of camels and mules free of wagons and stables. When one of the intermingled gathering of dormant animals stirred, the whole lot began to move; the clink-clank of their small bells and the cries of the watchmen disrupted the silence of the steppe night and the sense of exile gathered by slight gale and solitude from who knows which remote foothills, deserted valleys, or emptied villages and piled around the sooty lantern illuminating their quarters. At whiles, in the blackness, whatever the cigarette-smoking men before the entryway uttered reached his ears. The words filled Mümtaz with despair and resentment though he didn’t fully understand their significance; the sentences made the petty, spoiled, and privileged life he’d lived till then at once very harsh, cruel, and absurd. Then winds blew through open windows, bedsheet curtains billowed, and sounds from distant locales mingled with voices of the closest proximity.

  A commotion woke them in the dead of night. The surrounding muteness had so hermetically sealed off their lives, like an incredibly dense yet thin substance, that the faintest sound or slightest noise became a resounding racket, like an object shattering glass, and conveyed feelings of devastation and collapse. Everybody rushed to the window, some even began flocking outside. Only Mümtaz’s mother remained still. Four men on horseback appeared, one of whom lowered a figure from the croup of his horse. Mümtaz, sidling up to the horses’ muzzles, heard a young village woman mumble, “God be pleased with ye.” The lamp held aloft by the innkeeper illuminated her large black irises. A waistcloth covered the lower part of her body, the kind worn by women who worked the opium fields. On her upper body, she wore the traditional embroidered coat of the Zeybek fighters of the Aegean mountains. These horsemen drank water from the terra-cotta jug passed around by the innkeeper’s apprentice, who’d earlier brought tea up to the rooms; they shared bread offered by the innkeeper and filled their haircloth sacks with barley; as if rehearsed beforehand, everything happened swiftly. Men congregating before the inn asked repeatedly of news.