Some of these figures, like poses and fleeting facial expressions, emerged from her deportment at any particular moment. Others, meanwhile, belonged to the consecutively manifesting identities in Nuran’s living presence, through the awakening of a surplus of legacies inherited from her forebears. Had he never seen the photograph of Nuran wearing a Mevlevî outfit that İclâl had once shown him, Mümtaz would have still compared the seated Nuran, legs folded beneath her as she listened to a gramophone record, to miniatures of an Orient even farther east than Istanbul.
During any ordinary moment, in her comportment, her clothes, her changing expressions during acts of love, his beloved had a variety of personas conjuring figures that had passed before her into the immortal Mirror of
Ars
; personas evoking, with augmented intensity and perhaps in an agonizing way, Mümtaz’s near obsession and the pleasures of her possession. Renoir’s portrait of a reading woman was one such figure. Beneath a radiance falling from above, illuminating her hair like a golden spray, the flaxen dream burgeoning like a posy of roses between the dark naphtha green background and her outfit of ferrous black cloth, with pink tulle concealing her neck, served as one of the most faithful aesthetic mirrors to certain passing hours of his ladylove through a handful of similarities including the pleasant calm of her face, the dark line of her lowered eyelids, the abrupt gathering of the chin into a small protrusion, and the sweet, almost nourishing smile upon her lips. Mümtaz’s imagination, within its obsession for Nuran, at times took her resemblance to the Renoir even further, and uncovered in her figure a likeness to the exuberance of flesh depicted by venerated Venetian masters of the Renaissance.
Tonight, however, against the backdrop of the gilded night issuing from the open window, within the wide décolleté of her gown, the woman with bare, sunburned arms and her hair parted down the middle ever so hastily after leaving the
hamam
of the sea was not the lady of intimate hours – evening light dripping like honey into a room with drawn curtains – pursued by so many poets and painters from the 1890s onward and captured by Renoir after repeated attempts. Presently, through the harsh cognizance and intense vivacity of her half-shaded face and head, and a keenness in her eyes that threatened to devour her entire face, Nuran more closely recalled the Florentine woman in Ghirlandaio’s
Presentation of the Virgin at the Temple
, recalling the semiancient earthly glory that flowed through her entire being and into the piazza receding to a distant vanishing point, her left hand perched upon her hip and her head cocked gracefully, highlighting the slight protrusion of her temple and the dimple on her chin which all but touched her shoulder.
Semblances of Nuran, transforming from moment to moment, became the young man’s agony and ecstasy. These medallions, or labryses, warranted individually by a momentary thought, a feeling of pleasure, a sudden sensation, or a gesture didn’t leave him in hours of solitude but emerged through a recollected sentence, a page in a book, or an idea. The most poignant pleasure, however, and naturally the sharpest anguish, came with Nurans that came to life within a piece of music heard out of the blue. These semblances manifested abruptly within the arabesque of the melody or the golden rain of the musical ensemble, they appeared and disappeared there, and they glared and jeered at Mümtaz from a measure of time transcending everyday experience, and consequently, the mode of the memory altered and became an echo of prior existences stirring awake.
The venture of living augmented exponentially through the enchantments of seeking Nuran in his surroundings and his past, discovering traces of her seasoning in all experiences, and seeing her before him in the legends, faiths, and arts of centuries – essentially through different personas yet always as herself.
Nuran, in his perspective, represented the golden key to time past as well as the seed of the private fable that Mümtaz considered the first condition for all forms of art and philosophy.
Mehmet’s beloved, whom he never saw, neither passed through the ring of these personas nor did he digress in his private fable, which was omnipresent in all things.
Mehmet adored and thought of his girlfriend without seeking in her the traces of any literary heroine, without savoring her bouquet in any chance chalice of music, and he approached her with the virility of a primal man who satisfied everything, every pleasure, through his body. The pleasures Mümtaz sought across centuries were for Mehmet satisfied solely by the flesh.
Likewise the Boyacıköy coffeehouse apprentice didn’t regard Anahit as a presence whose semblance might be found in the heavens. He neither sensed his own fate in the depths of her eyes, nor thought the rites and rituals of a forgotten faith had revived as he burrowed in her flesh. He didn’t fear that she’d leave him, and when she was away, he rested by laying out his tired body on the dusty stones of the quay or the fishing nets heaped before the coffeehouse, or he teased the neighborhood housekeeping girls; and later, when he understood within his being that he needed her, stretching slowly, he cast off the torpor that had overwhelmed him and called for her, placing beneath the customary stone the key to his single-room inside the old fortress walls so that she might easily enter; and knowing that she’d rouse him when she arrived, he slept heartily without giving it another thought.
Tonight Mehmet was downright irritable and doleful. Mümtaz had grown accustomed to reading like a book the face of this youngblood who’d worked for him for three years now. He must have certainly argued with his girlfriend. Or else he’d caught sight of her hereabouts in a garden or restaurant with another. Maybe this was the cause of their quarrel. In any case, Mehmet’s manner of enduring anguish varied completely from his own.
Mehmet represented a facet of undaunted humanity. He found resolve in his own self. Alone now before the restaurant, he puffed out his chest like a fighting cock. This conveyed respect and adoration for his physicality. Essentially it amounted to a primitive narcissism of sorts such that he only accepted a woman’s body as a mirror, and when his reflection became slightly blurred therein, he cast it aside contemptuously and took up with another. Women were capable of the same. Nuran might one day act similarly toward him.
This thought, descending upon Mümtaz, assumed such cruel proportions that Nuran took notice: “What’s happened? Is something wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said. “A bad inclination of mine. The tendency to mull over an idea until it assumes its cruelest possible form.”
“Tell me more.”
Mümtaz explained, somewhat mocking his own state of mind. Why should he conceal something from Nuran relating to her? She listened, at first with ridicule, and later through a changed expression.
“Why don’t you live in the present, Mümtaz? Why do you either dwell in the past or in the future? The present hour also exists.”
Mümtaz had no intention of denying the present hour.
He experienced it distinctly through Nuran’s face and imagination, and through the nocturnal Bosphorus that had become her earthly peer. Presently, her sweet state of intoxication merged with the benighted Bosphorus. Nuran’s face gradually assumed intensity by internal surges and radiated inner light just like this blue nocturne.
“It’s not that I’m not living in the moment. But, you came to me at such an unexpected time, when my experience of women and life was so slight; I’m at a loss as to what to do. Intellect, aesthetics, and lust for life all intersected in you. All of it merged through your person. I’m afflicted by the disease of being unable to think beyond you.”
Nuran indicated the rising moon with a smile.
The ridge of one of the opposite hilltops reddened. A fine shimmer of radiance appeared, resembling half of a fabled fruit, and at once the deep cerulean clarity of the nocturne transformed.
“Whereas you’d once maintained that one had to separate existence from other notions. You said it was the inaccessible section of the house. Neither love nor other realms of life could intrude upon it.”
Mümtaz abandoned the fabled fruit sliver: “That’s what I’d once said. But with you it changed. I no longer think through my head but through your body. Your body is the abode of my intellect now.”
Then Mümtaz explained the game he’d once made up as a boy: “One of my greatest pleasures is the refraction of light, and its variations. When I was at Galatasaray, I’d peer through my curled hand like a telescope and watch the light refracting from the ceiling fixture. It happens on its own, of course, all over the place, all the time. But making it happen pleased me to no end. Rare are the jewelers who could make ornaments of this kind. Certainly many hierograms and religious symbols have their origins in light and its refraction. To me, it was a poetics of illumination, like gemstones or even certain glances. You know the way a light source changes from brilliance to the glimmer of polished steel, to violet, pink, and pale purple flashes, and to sparks that needle and mesmerize us through the faculty of sight? An essential secret of art rests here: it’s a dream conjured in the simplest way, almost mechanically. Now, for me, all Creation refracts prismatically through your body, which I madly crave.” He thought momentarily, adding: “Nevertheless it doesn’t constitute art per se, it constitutes something approximating art; that is, they’re analogous.”
By the time they’d stepped back outside, the moon, encircled by a faint halo of mist opening out in spectral shades, had risen considerably.
The equivalent of this night could only be found in Ottoman music; a nocturne attained through musical arrangement and orchestration. Here, everything was a repetition of all else in measures of the infinite. Yet these successive refrains, when one paid careful attention, mingled with each other to such a degree that separating or culling them was impossible. Mümtaz and Nuran floated in the rowboat. The entire panoply was in a state of perpetual becoming with golden seaweed, lucid undulations of waves, aggregate shadows in the peripheries like truths of unfathomable mystery, streams of radiance, and abysses deepened by darkness. In effect, creation, as Shelley wrote, had become a flowing power. Or rather at the threshold of reason, like a very bold idea, and hence not yet come to final fruition, Creation loomed in a state of ambiguity, that made its every feature more alluring.
A
peşrev
overture of the moon. A prelude breathed through innumerable lips into metaphysical
ney
flutes. Fragile chalices of light shattered, elixirs of bejeweled essences were quaffed in doses, quick and bedazzling, and archetypal gems were hurled to sea as if the rites of sacrifice were being performed.
As if chasing the moon, a group of dolphins passed, sewing their paths into the sea. Farther ahead, a ferryboat searchlight illuminated to yet another degree of lucidity locales where lights had already gathered. As if elucidating an ancient and exquisite manuscript, all ambiguous glimmers attained vivid clarity. Wherever the currents pooled, swans by the hundreds experienced a lifetime of momentary dread. This fragile translucent world of glass fell into its own music, into the strange state of expectant listening wherein principal instruments played perhaps in a nethermost region of unlikeness.
As Mümtaz placed his jacket over Nuran’s shoulders, he said, “Behold the Ferahfezâ Peşrev of the Moon.”
Truly, as with Dede’s Ferahfezâ Peşrev, they’d entered a world that issued leaf by leaf from invisible
ney
s. Like the melody of a
ney
, their surroundings constituted a mirror reflection of gentle, profound, and unattainable mysteries. They rambled as if through the consecutive ripples of a numinous idea or of a love that had vanquished every defect, and they passed through a proliferation of unadulterated springs.
“We’re on the verge of entering the universe of Neşâtî’s couplet:
O Neşâtî, we’ve been burnished to such extent That we’re secreted in mirrors purely radiant
Nuran laughed, “Fine, but the material world of
eşya
exists, and we, too. Our bodies are material, aren’t they? I mean, as is true for everybody.”
“Praise be to God a thousand times over ... but in my opinion, yours isn’t like the rest.”
“Blasphemy.”
“Call it blasphemy or the shortest route to Allah. Don’t forget that tonight we’re in the divine body of the godhead:
Vahdet-i Vücut
.”
A fish leaped from the sea beside them, tracing an arch of brilliants in the air. Later, a little farther onward, within the steamy blue illumination of the sea, a whiteness of sorts frayed open.
Their satisfactions were beyond doubt. Despite their minds working furtively in contrary directions, they were happy to abandon themselves to the present. Mümtaz seriously doubted whether their love constituted the shortest possible route to Allah, or to any other destination for that matter. Despite acknowledging the lofty and central place love held in life, he also recognized it as a single emotion that didn’t minister to one completely. Also, he no longer worried about his naïveté being a source of annoyance to her. Besides, Nuran had accepted his manner of expression and thought. She’d forgotten her spite from the prior evening at Çamlıca. She’d only become irate with him because he’d shattered life’s serenity. She’d confessed this to Mümtaz that morning: “Any woman is a little lazy when it comes to such matters. But I prefer being with you to my own comfort. I’m happy to accept you as you are.”
With Mümtaz by her side, she found herself to be a submissive, naïve woman who went wherever her man took her. She trusted him. Despite his youth, he had stature, strength, and a distinct character, one that challenged others. In the face of life, he exercised the fortitude of one forged by a singular idea. She told herself,
Let him give my life some direction, and that should suffice ...
The rest was her business. She could follow her man to the end. A warm surge of twofold trust emanated from her entire person, because sharing the thoughts of the man she loved and accompanying him was another variation of love itself. And, like the other variety, it involved being reborn from a state of depletion without potential, being pregnant to a world in womb and body. In her affection for Mümtaz there existed a maternal feeling, love, adoration, and a modicum of gratitude.
He’s discovered aspects of me
... she mused.