“What about his contemporary Merkez Efendi? What was he like?”
“He was of a completely different nature. He wouldn’t harm even the vilest of creatures. Despite having a great affection for cats, he wouldn’t keep them in his house because they pestered our friends the mice. Could you imagine that a sultanate of the soul could be so easily established?”
Nuran thought and said, “I wonder if such men exist today?”
“They must exist, considering that neither the notion of salvation nor the door to sainthood has come to an end ... The paths to Allah are always open.”
Nuran stared at her companion as if she’d glimpsed one of his hidden faces. She’d expected to hear a modicum of derision, even disparagement or denigration. Meanwhile, Mümtaz had expressed himself in rather unanticipated terms.
Mümtaz felt the urge to explain himself: “I wouldn’t say that I’m exactly religious. At this moment I’m certainly quite bound to the world. But neither would I intervene between Allah and his subjects, nor would I question the greatness and potential of the human soul. Not to mention that both constitute the roots of a national life. Just consider how many days we’ve spent in Istanbul and Üsküdar. You were born in Süleymaniye and I in a small neighborhood between Aksaray and Şehzade. We’re both familiar with the inhabitants there and the conditions under which they live. They’re all orphans of a civilizational collapse. Before preparing the formula for a New Life for these unfortunates, what good does it do to destroy previous forms that have provided them with the strength to persevere? Great revolutions have long experimented with this, and they’ve served no purpose besides leaving the masses naked and exposed. Not to mention that everywhere, even in societies of extreme wealth and comfort, existence contains myriad relics and is full of interruptions and half-formed lives. Sümbül Sinan and others like him are mainstays for these fragmented people. Just take a look at this elderly lady.”
Nearly doubled over, she approached from one end of the road, leaning upon something between a crutch and cane, and neared the mausoleum with timid, feeble steps. She prayed, her toothless mouth mumbling; with her hands she clung to the railing and remained motionless. From the mosque front, Mümtaz and Nuran watched her every move. How meager her dress ... everything she wore was in tatters.
“Who knows what afflicts her? As we speak, Sümbül Sinan is whispering in her soul and promising her immeasurable consolation. And if he can’t provide anything else, at least he can embellish visions of the afterlife. All else aside, don’t you think this human suffering, this search for refuge and despair, is enough to sanctify this place?”
As she turned around, stepping to the front of the mosque, something approaching hope shimmered in the woman’s squinty eyes and distraught expression. She stopped there as well to pray.
Nuran, as if having stumbled into a labyrinth with no exit, shook her head. “A good dispensary, a few hospitals, a little organization ...”
“Even if you established all of that, there’s still the abruptness of death itself.”
“People accept that, however ... We’re raised through its socializing force.”
“We accept it in others! Not in ourselves. We don’t easily accept the deaths of our relatives and loved ones. Through our own deaths all matters find resolution, but when our loved ones take final leave we’re shaken to our foundations. What then? Are you prepared to just dismiss the downtrodden? I’m not saying
you
in particular, but there are fools who think this way and consider themselves powerful as a result. Take the Nazis, for example. Meanwhile, from the day we’re born, humans are helpless and in need of kindness.
“Not to mention that your good dispensaries and hospitals aren’t so easily procured. They demand high levels of productivity to support them, a social life of comfort and welfare, and an ethics fostered and created by work. This is what I mean by the transformation of social conditions.”
As he spoke, he thought of his all night discussions with İhsan. Most of these were his ideas. When Mümtaz was yet an eighteen-year-old lyceum student preparing to submit his diploma exam, he’d been tossed into this forge of ideas. Now, as he conveyed them to Nuran in the courtyard of this small mosque, he recalled, as if distantly, İhsan’s inspirational expression, his fiery rhetoric, his epiphanies, the measured gestures of his hands, his repartee flashing abruptly amid the heat of the oration, and his biting sarcasm. As they spoke, Macide would listen to them from a corner, her wool knitting in her hands, a honeyed smile on her lips, laughing at their banter and startled by their ire.
It’d been a week now since he’d seen İhsan. He wondered about him. What was he doing? What state were they in?
As chance would have it, they encountered İhsan and Macide walking arm in arm on the Galata Bridge that same evening. In his other hand, İhsan carried a weighty piece of luggage. Mümtaz introduced them to Nuran. Then he inquired, “Where are you coming from like this,
Aǧabey
?”
“Over the past week we’ve been lazing in Suadiye.”
“Don’t listen to him, Mümtaz, for a full week he rowed us around until nightfall or swam as I fried beneath the sun.”
Both of their faces were ruddy. Mümtaz could indeed imagine what Macide had suffered. İhsan couldn’t stand being apart from her. Each moment of his life he needed his wife beside him. At times, in class at Galatasaray, after İhsan had signaled the respectfully standing students to sit down with an ambiguous hand gesture – was it a greeting or a blessing? – Mümtaz was all but convinced that he might produce Macide’s head from his leather bag. Lost in nostalgia, he stared at the face of his “Pearly Sis.” But Macide was preoccupied, all of her attention fixed upon Nuran, whom she candidly scrutinized as they conversed. When Nuran began speaking a little, Macide’s face relaxed as if a taut spring had loosened. Macide laughed at her interlocutor. The human voice had a peculiar, almost metaphysical effect upon Macide. Neither clothes, nor age, nor occupation, nor even beauty affected her so.
She existed within the human voice, residing there in her most collected posture. When meeting somebody for the first time, she mustered all of her attention, listening to the voice and passing judgments based on its cadence; in accordance, she either approved of her interlocutor, simply remained impassive, or announced her animosity by declaring, “His voice slithers through one like a snake.”
This vocal gauge of hers didn’t consist of the “high,” “low,” “cracking,” or “soft” descriptive words that others might use. One might describe a voice as being “pretty” or “ugly.” For Macide, voice was distinguished by different criteria. Even its mode of perception was a factor. Like specialized devices used to pinpoint certain foreign objects or to measure the functional potential of sensory organs, her ear was effectively removed from her body. A keenness had developed within her like the olfactory sense of canines, or that of desert or woodland animals unaccustomed to human society; and as these creatures discovered certain special qualities in things only through smell, similarly Macide, through listening, uncovered moral characteristics in others and judged them accordingly. “So-and-so is a good person,” she’d say. “And a very good person ... but I think something’s troubling him; his voice virtually bleeds,” or, “He’s very selfish, he’s conceited ... his voice eclipses his vision.” These were the phrases Macide used to describe various states of affliction. Each individual speaking before her would either disrobe through his or her voice, exposing innermost secrets, or be sentenced by the verdict of a solitary judge.
One entered Macide’s life aurally. She was attracted to İhsan through his voice and had accepted Mümtaz in like manner. Presently, she opened her soul like a giant clam to Nuran’s voice where snippets of conversation would transfigure into a string of pearls.
Eyes closed, Macide listened to the people she admired. Perhaps as they spoke, she sensed the pleasure of bathing in cold, restorative waters rich with the untapped attributes of roots or minerals or even stars. When she abandoned herself to the current of a voice, traits of hers broke away and floated like objects drifting toward the unknown; and as people got to know Macide, they came to recognize the phenomenon. Her entire being conveyed the inertia of a flower-laden boat.
One might say that her strained nervous system transcended value judgments such as “good” and “evil,” existing through an aural aesthetic of sorts. Macide had once described her condition to Mümtaz: “It happened before I fell ill, too. But less so. Now it’s intensified. When I hear certain people speak, my body becomes rigid. It’s as if I’m wearing a suit of armor.”
İhsan attributed this peculiarity of his wife’s not just to voices alone, but to the presence of the other person. Mümtaz inherently believed what Macide said. Since the experience was specific to her, why not believe her? This pointed to an effective variance of method between İhsan and Mümtaz.
İhsan went on to describe what they’d done over the week and with whom they’d met.
Mümtaz asked why they hadn’t traveled up the Bosphorus to visit. İhsan answered, taking great satisfaction in the blush of Nuran’s cheeks, “So as not to disturb your honeymoon.” Later he promised that they’d pay a three-day visit. “The children will be going to the farm with their grandmother. We’ll be free. Expect us in the coming weeks.” İhsan spoke to them as if they were actually married, pleasing them both.
Once on the ferry, Nuran said, “Macide is quite beautiful. But she does have a way of giving you the once-over, doesn’t she now?”
Mümtaz explained the phenomenon of voices, wanting to close the matter half jokingly and half seriously, “The lot of us is a little eccentric.”
But Nuran’s inquiry persisted. “You’d mentioned that Macide was ill; she seemed quite well.”
“She’d been ill, but İhsan returned her to health.”
“How d’you mean?”
“Through the birth of their child ... İhsan has conviction in life, you see. He believes life consists of miraculous transformations. And the secret to life resides in existence itself. During Macide’s episode, the eugenics employed by the Nazis were a widespread topic of debate. It enraged İhsan. Not even entertaining the possibility that a child born of a mother such as Macide might be unstable, İhsan believed that her maternity and new sense of responsibility would return her to health. He also considered the deprivation of the rights of motherhood a crime against her person and nature. Some doctors considered Macide a lost cause and advised them to separate their beds.
“In the end İhsan stood by his decision. Of course it was a calculated risk. How should I put it, a contrary outcome would have led to catastrophe. İhsan might have caused the death of the woman he loved. The birth might have further strained Macide. But İhsan trusted life. Sabiha was born without a hitch. And what a beautiful girl. Macide’s previous state of melancholia diminished; only slight traces remained. At times she still loses herself in daydreams, but she doesn’t tell stories to the ragdoll in her arms the way she used to.”
“Could you have ventured such a thing?”
“I said we were an eccentric family, didn’t I? If it’d happened to me, I would have done so too. But when İhsan asked for my opinion, I debated with him at length.”
Nuran drew completely different conclusions: “As with every such gamble ... the observer is skeptical about the act in question. Later he applauds the venture. Should the venture fail, however ...”
“No, not at all, had İhsan failed, I wouldn’t have blamed him. When I debated this matter with him, I gave it considerable thought.
“What he did was somewhat courageous. It was an act of commiseration; he was attempting to resolve a problem holistically. Had he failed, all of us would have been devastated. Maybe it would have spelled his demise or downfall. But I wouldn’t have blamed him. Because İhsan, in this case, wasn’t tinkering with the lives of others, he was playing with his own contentment. I knew he couldn’t stand to live without Macide.”
“Is he that enamored of her?”
“Excessively so ... his whole existence passes in her company. Without her he wouldn’t be able to work. He’s even more articulate in her presence.”
“Is the girl healthy?” Nuran thought constantly in terms of her own life.
“Yes, she’s normal. She’s only four years old, so it’s too early to tell completely, but did you notice the beatific expression on her mother’s face? You see, Sabiha has that same demeanor. And she has a vivid imagination. Perhaps later she’ll suffer some. But she’ll persevere through life, the experience of which is quite sublime.”
Living was sublime, quite lovely. The most exalted prayer couldn’t approach it. Nuran learned this after coming to know Mümtaz, this naïve man-child who only displayed confidence when engaged in intellectual discourse. Living was lovely from daybreak to nightfall, to the hours filled with a thousand pleasantries including sleeping and waking, from dreams to fantasies to losing herself in the embrace of this affectionate buffoon, and later, to regaining her wits in those same arms again.
And what she observed today was lovely, even the one-legged man limping before them, and the solitary and suffering urchin whose face was ravaged by fire or disease that left one eye protruding. Seeing such things, agonizing and exquisite, before sitting beside Mümtaz on this ferry bench in the midst of an evening, even the remorse stirring within her felt exquisite as she thought about how she’d find her family waiting expectantly at home. Because it all wound the apparatus of consciousness by which we appropriated existence and objects. The ferry had made its stop in Çengelköy and continued onward.
They entered a profound night and the heart of the Bosphorus. In a short while they’d be at Vaniköy. She remembered the day they’d talked, sitting on the landing’s hawser mooring post. Existence was a cornucopia, yet summer waned; summer, the pearl, the singular season of their lives. If only she had faith in life like Mümtaz and İhsan. But she did not. She was feeble before life. Due to this frailty, she might one day lose Mümtaz, one so vital to and dependent on her. For she knew herself well. She was incapable of relinquishing herself completely to a thought, or an idea, or a love. As soon as she entered the house, her mother’s cross expression and Fatma’s annoyed behavior would make her forget everything else. Her life lay in so many fragments.