Free A Mind at Peace by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar Page B

moment by moment, many things had been leaving him. They would just crust over and through a very subtle, unseen process, separate from whatever surrounded them. Do we leave them or do they leave us? That was the question.
    The gathering of so many antique objects on this street that played the full range of the sun’s lutes was powerful enough to make him forget about actual life and experience.
    A soldier approached and grabbed a trinket that caught his eye from the hodgepodge. A shaving mirror. Next came an elderly man, short, thin, well-kempt, yet wearing outdated clothes. He took up the mother-of-pearl fan; like an inexperienced adolescent, he spread and shut the fan a few times tentatively, inspecting the item that his ladylove had entrusted to him during a dance, turning it over and over in his hands furtively, with a feeling of adoration surfacing as if he were stunned that it actually belonged to her; then he returned it with an evident feeling of relief, and asked about the cost of the carved antler handle. Because Mümtaz didn’t enjoy speaking casually to Behçet Beyefendi, a one-time member of the old Ottoman Council of State, he stepped to the side and, filled with utter desolation, watched the old man’s rather puppetlike movements. You would not know by looking at him, but this unfortunate soul was in love with and jealously coveted a woman for nearly twenty years ... and in the very end ...
    Behçet had loved, and was jealous of, Atiye, his own wife of twenty years. First he grew jealous of her, then of Dr. Refik, one of the first members of the Committee of Union and Progress, and as a result, he made an illicit denunciation of Dr. Refik through a secret police report to the Ottoman palace; but even after the doctor’s death in exile, Behçet couldn’t save himself from fits of jealousy. As he’d told İhsan himself, when he heard the lady softly singing the “Song in Mahur” on her deathbed, he struck her in the mouth several times, and thereby had maybe hastened her death. This particular “Song in Mahur” was a ballad by Nuran’s great-grandfather Talât. The ordeal and many like it had given Behçet the reputation of being bad luck by several factions in their old Tanzimat-era family, which had flourished through a series of well-arranged marriages. Yet, the haunting ballad remained in people’s memories.
    The “Song in Mahur,” in its simplest and shortest version, resembled a visceral cry of anguish. The story of the song was strange in itself. When Talât’s wife, Nurhayat, eloped with an Egyptian major, Talât, a devotee of the Mevlevî order, had written the lyrics. He’d actually wanted to compose a complete cycle of pieces in the same Mahur mode. But just at that time, a friend returning from Egypt informed him of Nurhayat’s death. Later he learned that her death coincided with the night he’d finished composing the piece. In Mümtaz’s opinion, “Song in Mahur,” like some of Dede Efendi’s compositions and traditional semâi songs or like Tab’î Efendi’s “Beyâtî Yürük Semâi,” was a piece with a distinctive rhythm that confronted the listener with fate in its profundity. He distinctly remembered when he’d heard Nuran sing the song and tell the story of her grandmother. They were on the hills above Çengelköy, a little beyond the observatory. Massive cumuli filled the sky and the evening descended like a golden marsh over the city. For a long time Mümtaz couldn’t determine whether the hüzün of inexplicable melancholy falling about them and the memory-hued twilight had emanated from the evening or from the song itself.
    Behçet replaced the cane handle. Yet he couldn’t pull himself away from the folding fan. Obviously the small feminine accessory cast him – a man whose entire intellectual life had frozen like clockwork stuck at his wife’s death, and who resembled a living memento from 1909 in his outfit, necktie, and suede shoes – far back into