Tahsin From Erzurum
BY AHMET HAMDI TANPINAR, TRANS. BY AYSEL BASCI
When I first laid eyes on Tahsin, it was a cold winter’s night, and he was already someone I’d heard of. This is his story, which everyone knows:
The son of a wealthy family in Erzurum, Tahsin graduated from the law school in Istanbul and worked briefly as a civil servant before volunteering to fight in the Balkan War. He was wounded at Thrace; after recovering, he returned to the battlefield. When the war ended, he abandoned everything and disappeared. For a long time, no one saw him anywhere, and he was presumed dead. Then we had some news. During the military draft, a school friend saw him at the door of a mosque in Tabriz, but when he approached, Tahsin pretended not to know him. Another friend ran into him in Damascus. Not recognizing his friend at first, Tahsin, in rags, begged him for money. But when he saw his friend’s face, he threw the money down and ran away.
It was this friend who told me about Tahsin.
After Tahsin’s father died, his mother and siblings set aside his considerable inheritance, hoping that one day he might return. His mother was so sure he would that whenever there was a knock on the door, she jumped from her seat screaming, “It’s Tahsin!”
While I was in Erzurum, I often heard stories of these “mothers in waiting.” In almost every home, families cried for their dead and waited for others who were missing. Tahsin was among the missing.
One day, I was having coffee in Tophane with a few friends when another friend entered the coffeehouse completely out of breath. “Have you heard? Tahsin is back,” he said, “and he’s been in Erzurum for the past three days. His siblings are hiding him. He showed up in tatters, and his mother almost died from happiness. He stayed home for a few nights; his family bought him new clothes and gave him his inheritance. His mother even tried to marry him off. He agreed at first, but then changed his mind, telling her, ‘Give it up, Mom. I’m not interested in money or this world. I can’t live in a house like this. Nice clothes, regular meals, warm beds—these things are not for me. I have no use for wealth, and I intend to leave soon.’
“His mother, begging him to stay, fainted from grief. His siblings pleaded with him: ‘For Mother’s sake, don’t go.’ Tahsin responded, ‘I don’t have a mother or siblings. I am dead; the dead have neither mothers nor siblings.’ After that, he locked himself in his room and refused to come out, even for meals. He wouldn’t open his door to anyone. Eventually his family had to accept the situation.
“One night, after his family went to bed, Tahsin crept downstairs. He put on his raggedy clothes and left.”
Someone asked, “Where do you suppose he is?”
“No one knows. His brothers sent men to search for him but so far, he hasn’t been seen anywhere. Some people thought he was hiding in Ilıca. His older brother went, but I doubt he’ll find him there.”
For a while, rumors about Tahsin flew around Erzurum. One afternoon, we heard that Tahsin was still in the city, hiding in a tiny house near the Kars Gate. The next day, the story was that he had returned home. The same afternoon, we also heard that he’d been seen near the Istanbul Gate. Three or four days later, we learned that Tahsin had returned to his old rogue ways. Realizing there was nothing to be done, his family decided to let him do as he pleased. He was later seen running around, dressed in rags and staying drunk all day.
After people had their fill of rumors about Tahsin’s present, they turned to his past. His childhood, his adolescence, his family—every aspect of his life was dissected. I listened to all of it, but something important was missing: an explanation. He had started out as a normal, modest, and even hard-working person. Why had he changed? Nobody could figure it out. His was a sudden, dramatic transformation.
Perhaps, as some believed, an illness caused it. Others speculated that his interest in mysticism had led him to abandon the world. Some even claimed he was suffering from unrequited love. Every possibility was entertained, every guess hazarded—but when analyzed closely, they all seemed remote. Tahsin was not so different from those around him; nothing about his situation could have prompted such a huge change. There was no logical explanation.
Among my acquaintances some went as far as to ask Tahsin directly. He dismissed these questions with vague answers or evaded them by making provocative speeches. Others who ran into him by chance said that he sometimes spoke eloquently, but only when he had initiated the conversation. The smallest insistence, or any effort to open a specific topic for discussion, was enough to send him rushing out.
Day to day, Tahsin got along without fanfare. Whatever he wanted, he asked for, from the first man he met. Two things about him were remarkable. First, his beauty. Everyone who saw him thought he had the countenance of a saint. Second: When he spoke, he used no vulgarity. This was more than a simple observation. My doctor friend, who was among the first to talk with Tahsin when he returned, said, “Dirty or vulgar doesn’t exist for him.”
Although Tahsin had traveled a lot, he never talked about his travels. He would shut down the subject, saying, “Every place is the same, all humans are alike.” He preferred to talk about death. Like everyone else, I was curious about this strange man. I wandered around hoping to run into him, without success. But as those around me slowly lost interest in Tahsin, my curiosity also waned. A few months went by.
It was a very cold, stormy night; there was a blizzard. My friends and I were at a coffeehouse in Tophane, drinking tea and listening to stories of the wanderings of someone we knew from Bayburt.
Suddenly the door was thrown open and a tallish, slightly stocky man entered, along with the snow and wind; his clothes were so wretched he seemed almost nude. He was barefoot and wearing an old black coat unbuttoned to show his naked, hairy chest, which looked like a dark rock on which snowflakes were slowly melting. For a moment he stood at the door. I stared at him, fascinated. So did the others. The noises of billiards, backgammon, and other kinds of mischief suddenly ceased. The stranger was Tahsin.
What I’d heard about him had been right. He did have a beautiful face. With his curly black hair, long beard, shiny eyes, and wide forehead, he looked like an ancient statue, like someone who had discovered a miracle of life that was beyond the rest of us. His face, with its plain beauty, rough severity, and exuberant and varied expressions, was more than a face.
Oblivious to the interest he’d attracted, Tahsin sauntered to the middle of the coffeehouse where he stopped to greet us. Like a dervish he placed his right hand on his chest as he reeled off one of Vasıf’s famous poems. How beautifully he recited it! How uniquely he emphasized the lines—especially when he came to this couplet:
Turning troubles into pleasure, that’s the trick of it.
Between joy and grief, life’s lived in the thick of it.1
As soon as he ended his recitation, Tahsin went to a corner to await the ashtray the coffeehouse owner was passing around to collect money. Tahsin took a little of what had been collected and left the rest with an old man sitting by the door. “Mr. Tahsin,” people called out, “won’t you join us for a cup of coffee?” Abruptly he left, paying no attention to the invitations.
Something about the way Tahsin had appeared and then instantly disappeared into the stormy darkness of that winter’s night tickled the imagination. In truth it was hard to tell him apart from it, as if he were the essence of night or something close to it, made from the same core ingredients and possessing the same powers.
I didn’t see Tahsin again for a while after that; no one even mentioned him. I think it’s safe to say that we at the coffeehouse were embarrassed by our earlier childish awe. I know I was.
From time to time, I remembered Tahsin and felt a need to speak with him. After the memory of those first awestruck moments had faded, my imagination painted a completely different portrait. I saw him as almost the epitome of the decay around me, which I observed all the more clearly with every passing day.
I saw Tahsin one last time on the night of the 1924 earthquake. For many, the memory of that autumn disaster, which shook towns as far away as Kars, remains vivid. Having never experienced a calamity like that, I couldn’t imagine how devastating it would be. The shaking of the ground is completely different from a storm at sea. We’re always suspicious of the sea; we know that it’s not a safe place for humans. Because we see it as an enemy from the start, the sea invokes feelings of resistance and defense in us as well as a drive to triumph.
But the earth is not like that; we trust it completely. Happiness, welfare, and safety are all connected to the earth, which always seems obedient, or compassionate, or at least indifferent and calm. That’s why, when the ground shakes, it’s a desperate situation, a breach of trust like being stabbed by a friend. Even those who remain alert and brave against the dangers of the sea are liable to collapse, joining the soulless herd when confronted by danger emanating from the earth.
Because I did not yet understand the seriousness of the matter, the first night of that disastrous quake I went to bed early and lost myself in a book about Salonika’s history. Five minutes later, every beam of my devastated house was squeaking, and my roof, a meter-and-a-half thick pile of earth, was preparing to bury me. I rushed outside. Although a little cool, it was a sweet autumn night. A beautiful moon, with a pale and friendly face, hung over the poplar trees the barracks yard across from my house, trying to return the world to its usual peace and convince us that nothing had changed. The noise of a distant fountain competed with the clamor of all those who had poured from their homes at this unseemly hour. I was walking in the middle of the road, keeping away from the walls on either side and looking ahead, focusing on the moon in the poplar trees.
It had such a calm, smiling face. Looking at it, I was almost angry with certain facts of cosmology; one could easily worship such a bright, easygoing face and believe it possessed unknown powers controlling our lives. I shivered, imagining the terrifying destruction it might conceiveably be wreaking on us from within. How frightening it is to imagine other beings watching our world from a distance! And yet, at that precise moment, who knew how many thousands of prayers were ascending toward that world’s circular face, shining like a candle.
A second jolt roused me from these thoughts. Now terrified of falling, I stepped more carefully as I went searching for my friends. The entire city was in the streets, in very strange clothes. Half-naked men who had rushed out in their underwear were getting dressed in front of their own doors. Some squares looked like scenes from Judgment Day.
About the women… The truth is, because of this earthquake, I was able to see the faces of some women in Erzurum.
Despite my lack of sleep, the night didn’t bother me much. A sleepless night brought on by an unforeseen disaster is bearable. Eventually I connected with five or ten friends. Although talking with them made me forget everything, my inner wish—“if only it were morning!”—grew stronger. If only it were morning…
The prisoner waking up at midnight in his cell, the hopelessly sick person sweating in his bed, the wretched person, afraid every moment of being strangled by contempt—in short, every kind of nighttime suffering waits for the morning sun as if for a cure. Light is a basic necessity for the human mind. We feel that as soon as the darkness ends, our suffering will at last get better. In reality, what could these poor people possibly expect from the sun? Who among us doesn’t remember the boring burden of days, following one after another, lit by that same cruel eye, with the same glow?
Well, and so what? Let the sun come up; the night might have been sleepless, but when its skirts, half-filled with dreams, clear away, people are restored to their own faces, their real faces. Let the city be rescued from its ghosts. Let the fountain’s noise be content to be just that, the fountain’s noise.
On this first night of the quake, even though I knew how to handle every minute of that sleepless night, I too awaited the morning. Sleeplessness causes me a discomfort similar to the altitude sickness described in travel books. When the morning sun finally found me at my home’s threshold, I was too afraid to cross it. I was tired and spent, without the confidence that makes for feeling safe in life and work, sadly gazing at a piece of wall swaying gently before me like a pendulum.
The next evening, every city square turned into a weird carnival. Tents, huts made of wood and empty crates, strange dwellings made of four poles covered with rugs, carts with just the fronts covered—and amidst all of this, old people were whispering, women and children crying, and the black-and-white ghosts… Having given my gas supply, along with two lamps which I had found earlier, to a happy and confused friend of mine, whose wife had just given birth, I was now homeless. I spent the early evening in another friend’s tent drinking tea, but after realizing his wife was standing in a corner without moving or talking, with her back turned to us, I felt sorry for her and left. The advancing night completed the scene, calming the crowd. The silence was absolute. Then, as if to take the measure the night’s loneliness, a mournful and familiar melody stretched across that cruel silence, drawing a border around it and inviting us to rejoin ordinary time, to rekindle everyday hopes.
And the moon! Tonight it was looking out, with its usual calm smile, above the Çifte Minaret, giving the impression of old faces full of experience, dragging their memories behind them like floods. I’d considered going home to bed. The shaking of the ground had eased somewhat. On the other hand, the news coming from the area was awful; it was hard to find the mental strength required to venture back inside the four walls of my home. Yet if I did not, I had a long night ahead of me; wandering alone in the freshening breeze, in a city that had accepted this calamity and was casually sleeping, wasn’t going to be easy. I did wander for a while. Then, realizing there was nothing else to do, I returned home. I don’t recall how long I slept. Suddenly I woke up, gripped by an instinctive fear. I reached for my shoes. Convinced that a disaster was imminent, I stood frozen in my room, facing my bed, from which I was having difficulty separating. I had never understood the concept of home, the meaning of one’s own bed, the torment of not having a place to sleep, as clearly as I did that night. Angry, sleepless, and miserable, I stared through the curtainless window. The moon, in the same place as the previous night, had dressed the poplar trees with its silver threads and was smiling with its usual solemn face. As I rushed from my room, I feared not the earthquake but that calm smiling face, its silence and indifference, the human being’s terrifying loneliness on earth.
Too late. The next jolt found me at the top of the stairway. Perhaps the strongest jolt yet, it was followed immediately by the sounds of distant collapses forceful enough to reverberate throughout the city. Of course, I leapt back into the street.
Preoccupied, hopeless, and insecure, I dawdled there, with every step attempting to shed my overwhelming sleepiness as if peeling off my skin. Sometimes I shook myself to stay alert, and to avoid stepping on those who had crawled out and gone to sleep where they lay. Wandering a city’s streets alone in the dark, a man changes his opinion of that city completely. I suspect that an accurate topography of a city may only be seen at such times. I suspect that I met Erzurum’s true physiognomy that night as well.
Once in a while, I looked up at the sky. The moon had slipped a little lower while maintaining its calm and cold beauty; it had turned on its light’s frozen fountain, filling the entire scene with its own daydreams and death poems. As if in the hands of a sarcastic and cruel magician, objects changed their shapes and positions. Everything was unrecognizably beautiful. Yet all this beauty was far, foreign, and even an enemy to me… If I could, I would have walked with my eyes closed. The ground had shattered my trust; I couldn’t easily make peace with it again. That night, the quake taught me a few things about the earth on which we crawl, wander, sit, and stand; on which we play a ridiculous and anxious game called life; and the pitiless mother that she is, to whose bosom we return after our few days.
“How will I spend the rest of this night?” I asked myself. I was swollen from lack of sleep, the smells of my own bed and skin filled my nose. The sheer length of the next day scared me. A little later, a hair-raising image crossed before my eyes: the earth throwing up the corpses in its bosom… Then I felt as if I understood a little better why, despite all our fears, we don’t think so much about death; perhaps we see it as a return. My saddest and scariest moment came while passing a half-finished, two-story house. I found myself shaking my head and thinking, “Poor people. What are you doing? Is life worth all this trouble?”As I was whispered those words, I sensed a second man within me, listening. At that moment, I became truly scared—of myself. The quake had destroyed my morale; death was trailing me. It would not let me go for several years.
By the time I arrived at the gardens in front of city hall, I was tired and miserable. How had I walked all that way? There was no need to wonder. The ground had obviously rolled me there, a tired and exhausted man rolling just like a stone down an elevation. I must have stopped automatically, upon reaching the flat expanse. Unpleasant thoughts about human fate had given me a kind of tenacity, preventing me from going into the coffeehouse. I sat down, or rather I shrank, with the resentment of a demi-god, into a nearby chair. By then, the cool air had gone frosty. Sulking mindlessly, I turned my face to the plain. Someone nearby said, “Mister, give me that light.” A strong, naked arm reached up. It was Tahsin. I had found the most suitable friend for the night! Handing him the lamp I said, “Hello, Mr. Tahsin.”
He responded with a dry voice: “Hello.”
He was on his side on the autumn grass, his head propped on his left hand, a lit cigarette in his right. His response was so sudden and direct that it could have been a gunshot in the air. Naturally, all my desire to talk was gone; in fact, I began to feel a little uncomfortable. But Tahsin was in a talkative mood. As I was getting up to leave, he spoke again. “Such a beautiful night, isn’t it? Just like a dream…”
He dragged deeply on his cigarette and stretched out on his back. His eyes were open, he was watching the sky. What could I tell this man sinking into the soil who, while praising the beauty of nature, looked to be a part of it? The silence continued. Then, more sweetly, as if murmuring to himself, he said, “Nature’s silence is not such so terrible. It’s just that we can’t get used to it.”
How smoothly he spoke, as if continuing a conversation. “Like frogs filling a pond, we always insist on destroying the silence.” He stopped and turned his head away. I said, “Yes, continue.” He rolled onto his stomach. Then, with an agility that surprised me, he jumped right up and sat down beside me, crossing his legs. “Buy me a hookah,” he said, “and get one for yourself too.”
I said, “For you, okay, but I can’t use it. It makes me sick.”
He agreed, but on his face was a mysterious expression. It was clear he didn’t like me. When his hookah arrived, he asked for a chair, saying, “Let’s sit like gentlemen tonight.” He inhaled, then turned to me, full of animosity. “What happens if you get sick?”
“Nothing. Is getting sick a good thing?”
“You might even die,” he said with a fake motherly voice. “Oh, if you die, what will the world do? Poor world, imagine its state without you. Oh, do be careful—”
It was impossible to listen to these meaningless words without getting angry. As he ridiculed me, he tightened his coat’s collar as if it were a noose.
“Why are you talking like this,” I asked him, “to someone you’ve just met?”
He mocked me again. “Oh dear, he is about to cry! If you’re going to be this soft, why bother living at all?”
“Soft or tough,” I said, “I’m not the only person in this world. There are millions just like me and some even weaker. They all live, and they die,” I continued insinuatingly, “together with those who are stronger.”
He replied, “Of course, no doubt about it. There are always those stronger or weaker than you. But they all know their place.” In the dim light, his eyes shone like fire. He was using my name, but he seemed to be talking to a crowd, his voice loud and deep. “You, on the other hand, are trying to conquer the world without even considering whether you’re equal to it. What are you doing outside the hole you’ll be buried in?”
I accepted his game: “Okay, but we are succeeding.”
He guffawed. “Did you say succeeding? What success? Where, when? How have you all been able to ignore the mercy of the giant you’re living on like lice? Life is continuously celebrating the victory of death. And here you are, shaking your small heads, just trying to get by.”
I answered as gently and sweetly as I could: “Life and love have victories too, despite the realities of nature!”
He interrupted me with a wave of his hand. “Sad,” he said. “Life is nothing but a eulogy honoring death. The sun is a cemetery, and the soil, and us…”
He was saying all these crazy things with a voice that found its way directly into my heart and with such confidence that I was forced to beg: “Stop. Please stop. Why are you telling me these things? What gives you the right?”
He was far from listening to me. At the height of his exuberance, he stood tall, one hand on the table and the other clasped upon his shoulder, pointing upward as if threatening or sermonizing. “I’m telling you. Everything is mortal. Everything comes from death and returns there.” He pointed around repeatedly, while crushing weeds beneath his feet. “Everything you see. We’re all of us just worms wandering on a large, enormous cadaver. Do you understand? Cadaver worms…”
At a loss, I calmed myself before I confronted him. “Why are you screaming? Sit down! You could say all these things from your seat.” He stopped. I watched his face’s changing lines in the frozen light. Lowering his voice, he said, “Yes, you’re right. It’s better to talk quietly. This way I won’t scare you.”
Who was this man? A prophet of death, or a fool who liked to shock? And why had I run into this sinister bird tonight? He sat down and, with amazing calm, picked up the end of the hookah tube; he sank into that calm. Then he went blank-faced and announced that he was bored; he would leave Erzurum the next morning. “One must wander a little,” he said, before changing the subject to the earthquake. He had not left the coffeehouse for two days and didn’t know anything about it. I told him about all the strange things I had seen on the way there. When I finished, he made fun of me: “So the whole city is now just like me, is it? In that case, I should definitely leave.” Suddenly full of energy, he jumped up. “Farewell, sir. Please forgive me. I got a little carried away before.”
He left without rushing or turning back, and he disappeared where the shadows cast by the garden’s saplings mixed with the shades of twilight. I never saw him in Erzurum again. No one knew where he went. But the crazy man had taught me a lesson that night. I went home and immediately got into bed. In this mortal world, nothing’s worth the loss of a good night’s sleep.
Note
1. The couplet is by Enderunlu Vasıf (1771-1824), an Ottoman court poet known for his Divan poetry.