Free A Mind at Peace by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar Page A

prominently displayed. Leaning against the shop’s rolling shutter rested two sizable photographs in thick, gilt wooden frames: pictures of Ottoman-era Greek Orthodox patriarchs from the reign of Sultan Abdülhamit II or a little afterward. Their medals, garments, and emblems were identical to those that appeared in the newspapers. From behind well-polished glass, through the vantage of time past, they gazed at the objects spread out before them and at the street crowds temporarily obscuring them at each surge. Perchance they were most pleased by the roar of life sounding so many years later – by the therapy of sun and sound .
    Mümtaz wondered, Did the photographer nudge and prod them the way the man who takes my photos does?
    He sought traces of such primping in the folds of their loose-fitting robes and in their expressions, which had striven for years to merge grace with representational grandeur.
    Above them hung a handsome Arabic calligraphy panel in a kitschy plaster frame: Hüvessemiulalîm, “the One who discerns and knows all.” The rigid plaster hadn’t destroyed the vitality of the script. Each curve and curl articulated its message.
    The peculiar quirks of this little street, however, weren’t limited to just a few. A Nevâkâr song from a Darülelhan conservatory record being played in a shop a bit farther down revealed and concealed its own numinous world like a rose garden under a deluge, while a fox-trot blared from a gramophone across the way. Mümtaz stared down the full length of the street, which seemed to rise vertically, searing his eyes under the midafternoon sun. Heaps of castoff items, bed frames, broken and worn-out furniture, folding screens with torn panels, and braziers were aligned and stacked atop each other in phalanxes along either side of the street.
    Most regrettable were the mattresses and pillows, which constituted a tragedy simply by having ended up here. Mattresses and pillows ... the array of dreams and the countless slumbers they contained. The fox-trot dissolved in the snarl of an unwound spring and was immediately followed by an old türkü one would only chance to hear under such circumstances. “The gardens of Çamlıca . . .” Mümtaz recognized the singer as Memo. The full sorrow of the last days of the reign of Sultan Abdülhamit II persisted in the memory of this singer, a cadet in the military academy, who’d drowned in the waters of the Golden Horn. His voice overspread these remnants of life like a grand and luminous marquee. What a dense and intricate life the alley possessed. How all of Istanbul, including every variety and assortment of its fashions and its greatest intimacies and surprises, flowed through here, composing a novel of material objects and discarded life fragments. Or, rather, everyone’s quotidian life had gathered here entwined arm in arm as if proving that within our separate workaday lives, nothing new under the sun existed.
    Every accident, every illness, every demolition, every tragedy that occurred in the city each day and each hour had cast these objects here, eliminating their individuality, making them public property, and forging an aggregate arranged through the hand-to-hand cooperation between chance and misery.
    What a fine custom it was in some ancient civilizations to burn or bury one’s possessions together with the deceased. But one didn’t relinquish things only when dying ... Two months ago Mümtaz had made a gift of his favorite pair of cuff links to a friend. A fortnight ago he’d forgotten in a taxi a book he’d had newly bound. Was this all? A few months earlier the woman he loved decided she wanted to live apart and left him. İhsan lay bedridden. For nine days now pneumonia had taken him captive and had slowly dragged him to that quiet interstice where he rested today. Something catastrophic could happen at any moment. No, one didn’t just vanish and leave things behind at death. Perhaps over his entire existence,