A Mind at Peace Read Online Free PDF Page B

make them resemble my essence. I am the efendi of life. Where I am there can be neither despair nor depression. I am the elation of wine and the sweetness of honey.”
    Any life-form heeding this advice chirped and twittered merrily above every sorrow. Each day the cargo and passengers carried by one or two steamships, a horde of camels or beasts of burden were deposited in front of the hotel opposite their house, bundles were opened and repacked and reloaded, crates nailed shut, and metal straps cinched around wooden chests; travelers satin chairs before the entryway, conversing; as in a Futurist painting, simply an eye or a sole ear and its curiosity, or an eager female head, protruded through windows; out of idleness, brazen Italian soldiers of the Allied occupation played with children in door fronts for hours, calling out to them with repeated cara mio s, carried trays of raw pastries and baklava prepared by housewives to hot bakery ovens, and when they got a little fresh and met with a scolding, they bowed their heads as if quite ashamed and walked away jeering openly before wandering down a backstreet to reemerge. In front of the depot, enormous dromedaries, the world’s most pacific animals, were made to wrestle; everybody was gratified to see nature’s disproportioned and tranquil creatures succumb to the mind of mankind. At night boys and girls went to the Palisades district, or to other places beneath the moonlight or in pitch-blackness to route water to the gardens of their houses. Life was restricted, but nature was vast and inviting.
    On only the second day of his arrival, Mümtaz had made numerous friends. He’d wander together with the boys of the house to the citrus groves and to the Karaoǧlan district. They’d even go as far as the walnut groves on the outskirts of the city. Much later he’d come to like the Kozyataǧı neighborhood in Istanbul because it reminded him of this walnut orchard. But for the most part they’d spend their days at Mermerli or at the seaside on the wharf, and toward evening they’d go up to the bluffs of Hastaneüstü.
    Mümtaz liked to spend the twilight hours perched on boulders between the road and the sea. The sun above the Bey Mountains girded the hilly undulations in golden and silver armor as if arranging the rites of its own death by preparing a sarcophagus of gilding and indigo shadows; then the arc that had descended and toppled backward spread open like a golden fan, and large swaths of light, bats of fire, fluttered here and there, hanging from the rocks. The ineluctable modality of the visible was as bountiful and lush as a season. The boulders, during the daytime, were only seaweed-covered blocks of stone that wind and rain had eroded with holes like sponges, but because they abruptly came to life in twilight, Mümtaz was besieged by a horde of fabulous beings whose numinous powers and physical forms were superior to man’s, who were mute like fate itself, only communicating through echoes of their existence within mankind. And his small body in their midst – an understanding of life expanding inside him – Mümtaz tried not to be scattered by that astounding gust of apprehension whose origins extended deeply into the past and whorled about his entire being. It was the sea mated with the sun ... the hour when all things were reborn in a new form, when voices augmented, when humanity receded as it moved toward the infinite under a firmament that deepened and lost its warmth and friendly countenance, when from everywhere nature declared, “For whatever reason did you go and become the plaything of dreary suffering? Come, return to me, dissolve in whole synthesis, you’ll forget everything, and sleep the comfortable and blithe sleep of dumb matter.” Mümtaz sensed this calling until it reached his vertebrae, and to avoid lunging at the invitation, whose meaning he didn’t fully understand, his tiny being stiffened and recoiled.
    At times he did go farther,