Read A Mind at Peace for Free Online Page B

Hydra-headed dragon of melancholy coiling within him. For Mümtaz, that entity called “day” ended when the girl passed by; an anonymous girl, yet one whose arrival he anticipated, however fearful he was that it might disturb his mother’s peace. Until the next evening, there passed an undisturbed monolith of time.
    That week, one night toward daybreak, his mother migrated to other worlds. Before she died, she requested water, then tried repeatedly, yet unsuccessfully, to impart something to him; her face went pale, her eyes rolled upward, a tremor moved across her lips, and her body stiffened. Mümtaz’s mind recorded her final moments in immaculate detail.
    Following her death, a cavernous void opened that he couldn’t manage to fill. Perhaps by trying continuously to forget troubled days, Mümtaz himself had created this temporal abyss in his mind. However, he did precisely remember the day he was placed on a ship to Istanbul. His kith and kin gathered and took him to a little grave in the courtyard of an old mosque; indicating a mound of recently smoothed-over earth, they said, “Here lies your mother.” But Mümtaz never accepted this final resting place. In his mind he’d buried his mother next to his father. The time span between their deaths was negligible. Having her rest beneath the large tree of death with his father was easier and more appropriate. Maybe because Mümtaz had grown accustomed to seeing them together, he could hardly think of them separately in eternal repose.
    He remembered the day vividly. The landscape was suffused in white radiance. Sunlight conducted crystal lutes at every turn, on the wooden exteriors of houses, on terra-cotta shingles, on the pure white macadam, on swaths of sea appearing at intersections, on the lemon-yellow wall of the old mosque, on the small and dusty trees of the cemetery, on their sharp stones, on the ruined fortress ramparts where he saw his erstwhile friends at play; indeed, light was crooning its peculiar, contagious, and omnipotent song of radiance. The bees, the flies, the scrawny alley cats, the dog who’d commandeered the area in front of their house, the pigeons flocking on all sides, everyone and everything was besotted with the musical harmony and invitation of lux.
    Only one figure, it seemed to him, only he alone, had been excluded from this banquet. Fate, through one of its decrees, had culled him from others.
    What would happen to him? He didn’t know. He’d go to Istanbul, but to stay with whom? How would they regard him there? Never again would he see his mother and father. Into this agony now mingled the despair of an orphan. He felt an overwhelming urge to weep, though he restrained himself. Sobbing in the midst of this sunlight, on this road where each passerby practically hummed a tune, crying before this crystal sea seemed something of an impossibility. Weeping would do nothing but elicit pity from those around him. By now they must certainly be tired of him. For days on end, he’d sensed the shaking of heads and sidelong glances that pursued him like a veritable fiery hand on his back. He assumed he’d been a burden and cursed fate. No, he wouldn’t cry. He certainly seemed to possess a peculiar fate, distinct from others.
    Toward midafternoon, the ship was to embark. The entire family accompanied him to the pier. There they entrusted him to a civil servant of long standing and his wife who would escort him to Istanbul; and Mümtaz, disgruntled by destiny, gladly bid farewell to the gathering then and there. He’d scarcely noticed the absence of the oldest son of the household, who’d shown him such camaraderie. A bizarre sense of revulsion overcame him. The sunlight gouged his eyes, and the merriment, in which he could not partake, annoyed him. He longed for an extraordinarily gloomy, somber, and muted place. A place like his mother’s grave. A place at the edge of a secluded mosque wall, shielded from the sunlight, where the