A Mind at Peace by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar Read Free Book Online

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