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, 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 time, to the years when he was the fine gentleman Behçet, when he was enamored and grew jealous of his beloved, and, not least of all, when he’d been the catalyst of her and her lover’s deaths. Presently, reminiscences long forgotten were being resurrected in the head of this living, breathing remnant of things past.
I wonder which of life’s fragments he sees in these paving stones he stares at so intently?
An old shrew struggled to follow behind the used mattresses she’d purchased, perhaps up the street. The street porter she’d hired was overwhelmed by the top-heaviness of the burden on his back more than the weight itself. Mümtaz didn’t want to spend another second here; today neither the book market nor the Çadırcılar street market was of any consequence. He turned into the flea market.
The market was cold, crowded, and cacophonous. Almost everywhere in the small shops hung an array of clothing, prepared life-molds, like selfcontained fates. Buy one, put it on, and exit as a new person! Crammed on both sides were dresses, yellow and navy blue worker’s overalls, old outfits, light-colored summer wear whose tacking was visible above the sewingmachine seams, cheap women’s overcoats that sheared dreams of life to zero with unseen scissors from where they hung. They were displayed by the dozens on tables, small chairs, couches, and shelves. A cornucopia! No shortage of thrift and misery as one might have thought; just disrobe from life but once and be certain to find desperation in every imaginable size!
He stopped short before a display window: A small, broken mannequin had been dressed in a wedding gown that had somehow slipped down too far; on the bareness of her neck, above the décolleté, the shopkeeper had pasted the image of a betrothed couple cut from a fashion magazine. The prim and stylish couple, located under hair tinsel and veil and above the white gown, before a landscape fit for silver-screen lovers, made this watershed moment bursting with bliss an advertisement for life and love that subdued one like a season – as would happen in the mind of the woman who might wear this gown. A small electric bulb burned over this contentment-on-sale, as if to clearly emphasize the difference between thought and experience. With no need to look any longer, Mümtaz began to walk briskly. He made a series of turns and crossed a number of intersections. He wasn’t looking anymore; he knew what to expect.
After having seen what rests inside me.
For months now, everywhere, he’d seen only what existed inside him. And he realized, as well, that there was nothing so surprising or fearful in whatever he saw or stood before.
The market was a fragment of this city’s life; forever and a day it would confide in him somehow. All the same, what affected Mümtaz was not what he saw but rather his own life experiences.
Had he found himself before a good canvas by Pierre Bonnard, one of
Les Nabis,
or had he gazed at the Bosphorus from atop the Beylerbeyi Palace; had he listened to a piece of music by Tab’î Mustafa Efendi or to
The Magic Flute,
which he so admired, he’d still have these same feelings. His mind resembled a small dynamo stamping everything that passed beneath its cylinder with his own shape and essence, thereby obscuring and disposing of its actual meaning and form. Mümtaz had termed this phenomenon “cold print.”
Mümtaz’s relations with the external world had been this way for months. He perceived everything only after it had passed through the animosity between him and Nuran, spoiling its mood, coloring, and character. His person had been secretly contaminated, and he related to his surroundings only in accordance with the changing effects of the poison.
It might be a crisis eliding everything at a single stroke, like Istanbul’s rainy and misty mornings that deadened all color. No matter how much Mümtaz struggled to draw open the multilayered shroud, he’d fail to see anything familiar. Beginning with the consciousness of his existence, ashen muck, like a river whose flow was barely detectable, would carry everything away; a kind of Pompeii buried beneath lava and moving at the rate of a life span.
At such times nothing “good,” “bad,” “pretty,” or “ugly” existed for Mümtaz. Through an effectively isolated eye whose connection with the nervous system that sustained it had been lost and whose potential for analysis had been interrupted, an objective eye experiencing final moments of hermetic perception, Mümtaz would stare dumbly at the living visions in this garden of death, and at everything that broke free from the ashen muck and accosted him, as if he were staring at reflections of a realm of nothing but echo and aftershock.
At times, seized by an anxiety that shook the entire framework, rattling everything from the windows to the foundation, Mümtaz would be agitated by all things in a frenzy that pushed the limits of his mental faculties. No accident at sea could damage a ship on the verge of sinking down to the last stave, dislodging its every nail.
He turned toward the old Bedesten of the Grand Bazaar. The auction hall was empty. But the double-sided display cases and the rooms had been prepared for tomorrow’s great auction. In one of the cases, a single antique piece of jewelry, rumors of which had spread through Istanbul for the past two months, glimmered like a cluster of stars, rawly and savagely, yet not without beauty.
Within the jewel, a truth ignited and blazed in its own vast and deep essence. Only sublimity of sorts, a consciousness that had attained the utmost lucidity, or beauty that had killed off the human within it and freed itself of all weakness, could emit such light.
He tried fleetingly to imagine it adorning Nuran’s neck. But he failed; he’d forgotten how to conjure visions of happiness. Mümtaz had no chance of owning this piece. Besides, it seemed to him an impossibility to meet her again in that old mind-set and for them to be drawn to each other. This impossibility unified the inhuman sparkle of the ornament before him with the beauty of the woman in his thoughts.
By distancing herself from his life, Nuran had been cleansed of all her faults and all they’d shared, assuming the radiant hardness of this diamond in an inaccessible stratum of existence. Separation had thus transformed her into a mythical presence beyond Mümtaz’s realm of being.
Had I only ever experienced her at a distance like this, so alone, inherently beautiful, and removed from everything ...
Thus he’d be spared from stings of conscience and memories that bore into him like an auger. Perhaps this was one of the personas the woman who’d abandoned him assumed sporadically in his mind’s eye. Yet alongside it, there was the woman with whom he’d broken and shared his daily bread for months, his beloved Nuran, a being who’d suffered so much for him, who’d shared all his hopes, who’d lived, temporarily withdrawn from all else, only with Mümtaz and for Mümtaz. But there was more. An array of Nurans wallowing in trivial episodes – whose contexts and colors were taken from inadequacies in Mümtaz’s soul – which she’d all but shattered to shards and stuck into his flesh; Nurans who sought an opportunity to escape from submerged depths where they’d been trapped, surfacing to control Mümtaz’s life. Each of them individually, like the characters in a Wagnerian opera, appeared with its own special mood and manner of possessing him. Each of them subdued him, agitating his person and his nerves to different degrees. Some of them left him in the same distressed psychological state for days, dragging him back and forth between anger and vengeance or the blackest death, then with the slightest cue or under the simplest pretext, she’d relinquish her place to another persona; and Mümtaz’s face, tense with jealousy, his pulse racing with fury, would be transfigured, and an irresistible compassion would tear him asunder, his shoulders would droop under the weight of the sins he assumed he’d committed, and he’d believe he was cruel, insensitive, and selfish – increasingly ashamed of himself and his life.