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Monday evening proved to be this way: At six o’clock, on his return from the university to Taksim, he was informed that Adile and her circle, with Suad and Nuran in tow, had spent three days ago in one of Istanbul’s popular nightclubs. Apathetic fool who’d practically collared Mümtaz gave him the news in a fashion he wouldn’t forget, describing the merrymaking to which he’d been privy from a afar, down to the gowns the ladies wore, Suad’s flights of exuberance, his style of toasting, and his boisterous laughter: “I was by myself. Honestly, if you’d been there, I would have gone and joined them . . . I even waited for you for a while. The women there, brother! What women!” He wasn’t aware of Mümtaz’s involvement with Nuran, just his friendship with Sabih. For this reason, he said whatever came to mind: “And there was one darling, most likely Suad’s mistress!”
Then, as if unable to forgive Mümtaz for letting his potential amusements wither: “Brother, where have you gone and disappeared to? Or are you writing something? I guess you’re spending time in new places, aren’t you? But this is really too much. Why don’t you at least tell us where you’ll be so we can come find you? Or let’s go out together one night, how’s that? These friends of yours . . . Anyway, wherever you go, you won’t find a group more entertaining than they are!”
Mümtaz stopped listening. He stepped back, virtually pushing away the hand of the pathetic gadfly and freeloader who wouldn’t unhand his collar. Had he remained a few minutes longer, he’d have been forced to thrash him then and there. Intense anger toward Nuran overwhelmed him. Mümtaz had spent that very Friday waiting for her. The day before on the telephone, she’d promised with such certainty that she’d be coming . . . Then, exhausted from expectation and suffering, he’d retired to bed without going anywhere. Furthermore, on account of her promise, he’d spent the entire night worried that some random misfortune had befallen her. He awoke frequently, smoked cigarettes, paced in his room, and opened the window, cocking an ear to the silence of the street. And now, he’d received word of how she’d spent the night in question, which had been so torturous for him, of the new dress he’d yet to see, and of her latest coiffure.
After Mümtaz had received such news, returning home was nearly impossible. The isolation, deafening silence, sense of despair, and ire and vengeance that drove into him like poisoned daggers . . . He was so intimate with them... Quickening his steps, he walked toward Beyoǧlu. He stopped often and repeated the statement he’d just heard:
Most likely Suad’s mistress!
Why shouldn’t this be the case? He recalled a trivial detail. Nuran, one day when they were going out, had asked, “Why don’t you wear your blue necktie?” before describing a tie he’d seen around Suad’s neck three days earlier. This commonplace absentmindedness, or confusion, now incensed him. It happened repeatedly this way. Mümtaz, under the influence of outsiders, would recollect from the very beginning every word they’d exchanged, and in each of her words, in every gesture, he’d seek out hard evidence of betrayal.
The evening of tragic thoughts, which a poet he admired called “the accomplice of villains,” gradually relinquished its place to a dark, foggy night. Mümtaz walked down the street, staring into illuminated window fronts that seemed transformed within smells of coal and damp fog. Where should he head? While shouldering such misery all places were equal. Going somewhere meant interacting with others. Meanwhile, Mümtaz wanted to escape the company of others. Their lack of understanding distressed him. They lived easily, unburdened. Or else ...
Or else, I’m completely hopeless ... What should I do? Where should I go, Allah?
In a matter of minutes, out of daydream and torment, jealousy had erected its baffling and intricate apparatus inside and outside his person . . . as if a spider were ceaselessly working, spinning webs of steel.
Such was jealousy. Jealousy, the other side of love. Jealousy through which all pleasures and satisfactions, the smiles that heartened us, commitments, and hopes for the future returned inverted, piercing our flesh as sharpened knives and pointed lancets. Mümtaz had known and experienced this for months on end. Long before, the chalice of love had doubled. While quaffing the nectar of delirious desire from one, in the midst of bliss whose each minute resembled devotional worship, the hand of fate pushed another chalice into his palms, and he would fast awaken from the inebriation into a realm of miserable heartaches, petty emotions, and vile suspicions.
In a corner of his mind sat a cruel conjurer who enjoyed inflicting unimaginable tortures. Within a matter of seconds he’d transfigure everything in Mümtaz’s surroundings, making the manifest disappear and manifesting what didn’t exist, thereby ruining not just the moment but Mümtaz’s past and the semblance and meaning of bygone days; the conjurer transformed each of Mümtaz’s visions – the pleasures of hours of solitude – into a state of endless torment.
With a fury that he’d never known, he sensed the grating, gnawing voice and subversive stirrings of the conjurer.
Beneath drizzling rain, which had begun again, and in bitter cold, he walked hastily, making frequent stops to talk to himself, frustrated with the inability to control his hand gestures. But neither this quickened pace, as he bumped to the right and left, nor the pedestrians frequently confronting him like creatures of an unrecognizable species, nor the shopwindows, into which he stared without seeing anything, could prevent the further intensification, the moment-by-moment proliferation, of the growing distress, the boisterous rancor and the sense of isolation and self-pity, making them more disruptive, lethal, and unendurable.
He was overcome with the desire to go to Sabih’s apartment and catch them all there, gathered together. He wanted to catch them in the middle of a party to which he hadn’t been invited. Tonight Nuran was certainly among them, doubtless accompanied by Suad. Seeing them all in the same place had now become his greatest desire.
I must learn everything!
But what would he learn? What was there left for him to learn?
“Most likely Suad’s mistress . . .”
The statement wouldn’t leave his head. So, then, even a cursory glance from a distance offered such a conclusion.
Slowly he began to walk toward Talimhane. The noises of taxis and car horns had lost their sharpness in the humid weather, and they sounded like mattresses dropped from above. Astranger, grabbing him by the arm, pulled him from before a passing car. Mümtaz, so distracted that he wasn’t able to thank the man, only realized what had happened five or ten steps later; turning around, he looked as if to say, “Why d’you go and do that? Why didn’t you just let me be? Everything could have ended at that moment.” But the stranger had vanished into the night.
Sabih and Adile’s apartment: The parlor, the dining room, the small office, in short, the entire side that faced the street, was illuminated. “She’s certainly here,” he repeated, and walked toward the entrance. But before the door he stopped short. “What if they’re actually there and I catch them together?” His resolve, and even his anger, had dissipated. Only now did he contemplate the effect his sudden entrance into this house – which he hadn’t visited for weeks, in such a wretched state, and only for the sake of finding her – would have upon Nuran. At such times her expression changed drastically and she gazed with forlorn and reproachful eyes.
He moved away from the front of the building. Not looking at anyone on the street to avoid recognizing belated guests, he walked, in effect, in complete disregard of his surroundings.
From an apartment floor close to street level, a radio sounded. And suddenly Mustafa Çavuş’s
türkü
overwhelmed the winter night and the street. “Majestic eyes, majestic . . .” Mümtaz felt a wrenching sensation. It was one of Nuran’s favorite songs. He again began to walk hurriedly. But the music became an angel of torment chasing him, accosting him, and pinning him down. “Why? Why does it have to be this way?” He repeatedly brought a hand to his brow, attempting to shoo away dark thoughts.
How long did he walk in this state? Which route did he take? He himself didn’t quite know.
If only I had a drink . . .
He found himself at the door of a small tavern in the vicinity of Tünel.
He slunk into a corner amid the smell of burnt olive oil, Greek songs, the shouts of garçons, ready-made smiles careening through the air, wafts of alcohol and cigarette smoke. This wasn’t the Mümtaz of old. He’d become a small, puny being. The din around him notwithstanding, the voices in his head persisted. The Eviç
makam
still spoke through his thoughts with the ambience it had gathered from now-lost lands of the Balkans, serving up beautiful facets of Nuran’s attributes, of the bitterness of human fate, and of the memories of long-forgotten cities and the old estates of nobles along the banks of the Danube. He mused:
The Eviç
makam
is the Hüseynî of Turkey-in-Europe.
The tavern was packed to the gills. Everybody sang, laughed, and caroused. A few numbers – learned by ear from a Greek operetta troupe that had recently toured – had fast become famous and sounded from each table separately. Working girls accompanied by friends, prostitutes taken wholesale from their dens for a night’s diversion, bachelor civil servants, laborers who erected the days with unknown expertise, and callous-handed coast guard workers, all of them bearing their own human burdens, like little caravans from disparate lands, had stopped here at the headwaters of alcohol, at this strange reclusion shared by one and all, attempting to slake thirsts preordained by their natures and fates – some to forget, others in sorrowful nostalgia, and others still for the sake of taming carnal urges.
Like a sponge, alcohol had wiped away some of their faces while other faces sparkled brightly, like luminous shopwindows. Still, from beneath the alcohol-induced half-sleep, there awoke in each of them, like creatures kept and fed in dampness and dark, a legacy, a repressed emotion, a base representation, or the yearning – of desire, vengeance, the urge to kill, or a sense of self-sacrifice to be forgotten by daybreak, or tragically, lasting a lifetime – to gallop, to satisfy itself whatever the cost; creatures poised, like lizards on boulders crouched and warming in the sun, before, in an astounding metamorphosis, they strove to usurp the place of this human material, this paltry, living prey they’d cornered. Step by step they tried to transport these men and women to their own marked territories, to that assertion present in each individual to be nothing but a singular moment, to the edge of a sharpened knife blade with conflated meanings of Eros and Thanatos.
Whether crude or repulsive, elevated or foolhardy, ascetic or purely sybaritic, everyone hurled toward unity of being. Some, however, simply existed in states of entropy. Like a melting chunk of ice tossed against a wall, they dispersed into unseen particles. Such people hadn’t yet seized upon the experience of their lives, or were so benign, they never would, dreamers and desperados who’d in fact, or due to the constraints of fate, remained in a stunning state of dormancy.
A young and naïve whore of swarthy skin and scrawny build, a forlorn waif resembling a corncob marinated in mud, propped an elbow on the knee of her paramour and crooned to him sotto voce. Her voice was like spoiled and fermented dough. She frequently hiccuped, her expression souring under the force of alcohol rising in her throat, though once the hiccuping ceased, she continued her song.
Farther ahead, three men sat together, conversing. The hands of one continuously kept tempo on the tabletop. The one in the center, a lout who was undoubtedly experiencing one of the triumphs of his life – a man in his fifties – in a tone that he tried to make measured and melodious, detailed something as he paused to rest upon each word; frequently, both his hands extended out over the plates of
meze
, without touching them, to mime his plans; after each comment, he stared into the faces of his two friends; what kind of make-believe project or never-to-be castle in the sky was taking root within? A man of ideas. What did it matter if he forgot about it tomorrow? By evening he’d be here again, at this table or another, where he’d be sure to rediscover it with more richness.
Mümtaz glanced at the face of the youth keeping tempo. His posture revealed that he maintained his distance, as much as possible, from this mine of truth. Evidently he envied the man of ideas, and was distressed that his own ideas didn’t meet muster. He listened in a state of distraction. More than the third man, who truly looked awed, he missed neither word nor gesture through his feigned lack of attention. He listened in hatred and envy, making separate, internal objections to each articulated word. Tomorrow the exact words would issue from his own mouth and the same gestures would be aped by him; any other outcome was impossible. Mümtaz once again glanced into the young blade’s face, overcast with derision. He resembled a closed palm, a category of things that functioned to take and hide. He framed a fierce and greedy emptiness.
A dame beside them, past her prime and wearing too much makeup, rested her head on the shoulder of a tom, listening intently to what he said. Sporadically, she laughed slowly in a voice that waxed coquettish, then grabbed her glass, took a few swigs, and once again rested her head on his shoulder. In the distance a garçon laughed at them through the experience of many years.
For Mümtaz, the voice of the floozy, alienated from her own experiences so that her crude face resembled a wall whose paint had blistered from humidity, and her sedated and saucy look lost all their tragic proportions through the garçon’s silent laughter and were reduced to nothing but a trifle. To be sure, the garçon was an appraiser, an appraiser of human beings ... And under the terrible effect of this term, which he’d heard since his childhood, he was pushed to the verge. So then, one’s life experiences could foster cynical wisdom, which encouraged one to laugh derisively and cruelly before what should be pitied. So then, so-called humanism was the delusion of intellectuals, cockamamy mystics, and dupes who mistook the indistinct glimmers within themselves as the blazing sun of truth. Humanism wasn’t intrinsic to life; it was only a mode of thought. This notion transported him back a few months, to that fateful night in Emirgân and heated discussions with İhsan; in keeping with the conversation at the house, Mümtaz conjured a tableau of Plato with a copy of
The Republic
beneath his arm, on the path of exile.