Dreams by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar
A short story by a Turkish master, Part 2
This story continues from the first part of Dreams, available here.
By now, Cemil was scared to go to bed. He tried to extend the evening as much as he could. He told stories to his children and explained his winter projects to his wife. He would write a new book. “I’ll describe the creation of a shantytown,” he said. After a while, they sent the children to bed and listened to music.
At around 1:30 am, he asked his wife for tea, like he used to do. He was about to drink his tea while listening to Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé when, from among the magnificent melodies in the first part reminiscent of a rough sea, he saw the woman from his dreams. Again, her hands were covering her face, and she was sobbing. Her image appeared so abruptly that he almost dropped the cup in his hand. His wife, surprised, stared at him.
Between having tea and listening to music, oddly enough, he must have slept — no doubt, for a very short time. Otherwise, how could he have seen an image plausible only in a dream?
A part of him was in everything in the image: the sea, the woman’s face, the noise of the waves, the sobbing, the foam spilling all around. He remembered being sleepy before asking for the tea. He had been barely able to talk, listen to the music, or even take the tea cup from his wife. That night, he didn’t have any other dreams; the next night and the following night were the same. “I am afraid,” he confessed to himself. “I am afraid! ”
Two days later, he woke up from a night of uninterrupted sleep without a single image that would make him long for anyone. He felt empty. Diminished. Poor. In reality, he had spent the whole day and night hoping to see the woman in his dreams. The next day’s experience was even worse. He wandered around all day, miserable and aimless, as if he had really lost a loved one. Am I not going to see her again?
The mystery of his dreams was so profound that Cemil felt disconnected from his normal life. He visited the doctor again. “What’s scariest is that my feelings persist even after the dreams end, as though I’ve encountered real life things in my dreams.” The doctor advised him to go to bed early and pay attention to his diet. “Take a break from work,” he said, “and try to think about other things. Every now and then, tire yourself physically.”
That night it was impossible to go to bed early. His sister and his wife’s relatives were visiting from Istanbul. After dinner, to kill time, they decided to play cards. Everything went well until 11:00, at which point he felt the same heaviness in his body as three nights earlier. His entire body tightened and was tense.
He had never felt so tired, not even during his military service. He was barely able to hold the cards in his hands. But in addition to his desire to go to sleep, there was another feeling, a kind of bliss that he had not tasted before. Of course, it was not that simple, because this feeling of happiness was also sad and filled with nostalgia. While struggling to analyze his feelings, albeit unsuccessfully, Cemil passed out.
Now the image was very clear. The young woman was standing in front of him, her hands pressing into a table. Her face wore a strange fear. She was moving her lips like she wanted to say something. When Cemil came back to his senses, he found himself on the floor, the others by his side. The cards he’d been holding were scattered around him. Even during his very short dream, he had been able to hear the concern of those around him. His brother-in-law, a doctor, said, “You fainted. Has this happened before?” They all urged him to go to bed and rest.
Back in his room, he tried to remember his dream. It had been short, just a few seconds, but with the same clarity and cruel-world atmosphere as before. I am where I should be — at least, it feels like I am where I should be. But the table was not ours.
It was an uncovered light table, and the woman had been standing next to it. Her neck had been wounded, although the small wound had closed. Her face had been unobstructed, but Cemil hadn’t been able to see it, because it had been covered with something else: fear and pain. Despite this, Cemil knew she was young and beautiful. Her terror-filled eyes revealed she had not experienced much life.
That night — closer to morning, actually — he had another dream. He was looking out from the door of a rather empty room. It must have been nighttime. From an open window, darkness and wind were pouring into the room. It was quite a strong wind because it lifted everything up into the air, from the window draperies to the bed covers.
For a while, Cemil looked at the door’s threshold like he was looking for something he knew very well, although he didn’t know what. He then suddenly ran to the window. But as soon as he got there, the window slammed shut in his face.
A loud scream woke Cemil as he desperately tried to free himself from the draperies wrapping his entire body and his face. He was sure that the room and that scream belonged to the woman in his dreams.
Cemil was sure of one other thing: The scream would continue in his future dreams.
Indeed, the following night, following the advice of his brother-in-law and the first doctor he had seen, he went to bed early. Or rather, he went to bed as soon as she beckoned. A few minutes later, the young woman’s screams woke him up.
This time, he was surrounded by strange shadows, as if the darkness were made up of large, sticky chunks of glue that were continually separating from one another and then rejoining. They would be partially lit by an unknown light source, then turn completely dark and obscure again.
Cemil was trying hard to discern something from this strange and terrifying chaos. He tried unsuccessfully to identify shapes in the blurriness. The most important impression this terrible dream left on Cemil was that, whatever was happening, it was happening in total silence — a silence that was crushing him as if he had committed a sin or a crime. This silence was so heavy that Cemil felt like he was carrying it, whether he wanted to or not, like a load on his shoulders and spine. He knew that, at some point, this silence would break and something very cruel would burst forth to break it. He was waiting for that.
Finally it happened. From all this darkness, he heard the woman’s voice. Except this time, she wasn’t screaming. She was speaking very clearly: “Save me! Please save me! You don’t know how they are torturing me. You don’t know … Save me!”
Just as Cemil was about to gallantly throw himself into the darkness, he woke up. His heart was pumping like it was about to burst from his chest. He sat up in bed and turned on the night lamp. Everything was where it was supposed to be. From the open door of the next room, he could hear the breathing of his wife and his children.
Through an open window, a mild wind was carrying the smells of all the gardens in the neighborhood into his bedroom. He listened to the silence for a while. Then he got up and stood in front of the window. A group of stars was hanging so low they almost came inside his room. At one point, his eye went to the clock. It was five past eleven.
Cemil usually had these dreams between the time he went to bed and 2 or 2:30 a.m., although sometimes he had to fight with similar dreams close to morning as well. Interestingly, in those later dreams, he wasn’t experiencing what was happening, but rather things that had happened in the past.
In fact, the dreams he had at the start of his sleep always involved a kind of movement. In contrast, the others, like in films, were reflections of the past. But the most astonishing thing was that these dreams had continuity, like novels published as series.
For months, Cemil read everything he could about dreams. He knew everything about them, including detailed observations about their various aspects. In the past two days, he had spent hours talking with his brother-in-law, to whom he described the entire affair. In the end, the elderly doctor changed his mind completely from his initial conviction, concluding, “I’m afraid you are not going to find the explanations within yourself.” The continuity of Cemil’s dreams had caught his attention as well.
Another evening, Cemil was talking with the young woman in his dreams. He knew she was next to him, but he could not look at her face. He was convinced he was madly in love with her. He wanted to tell her many things, and his heart was breaking into pieces. Meanwhile, she kept saying, “They are calling me. I have no choice but to go. Don’t you understand?” Then, she begged him, “Save me, please save me!” She continued, “Oh God, it will start again! They will ask me again. They will tie me tightly and will ask me over and over. They will ask me things I can never reveal.” She repeated, “Save me, please save me! How can I tell them? You don’t know how I suffer, standing at that table! People can be so cruel, for no reason.”
Although it was only a dream, Cemil wanted to ask her, “What is the truth of the story? Who are you?” But no words left his muted mouth. All he could do was listen to her, his heart full of compassion. The woman suddenly disappeared, and Cemil found himself in very dark gardens, wandering along unknown roads, and chasing noises he thought he heard in the dark. Later, a bright light came through his window and he woke up.
When he slept again, close to morning, he found the young woman at a table with her hands and legs tied. She was not talking; she was just looking at him. Her gaze was so incredibly sad that, when Cemil woke up, he cried like a child.
He spent the day very disturbed. It was a hot day with cloudy skies. He wandered throughout the house, like a tormented soul. Eventually, he left home and went to Kozyatağı. From there, he went to İçerenköy. He studied every woman he encountered, as if searching for the woman from his dreams. Next, he went to Kadiköy, and from there, to İstanbul. He visited some friends in Taksim and Şişli.
For a month, he spent his days rushing out of his home early and returning late. One evening, while returning home on the ferry, he ran into an old acquaintance. His friend commented that Cemil was quite thin and distracted, and he accused him of not taking care of himself.
Running into an acquaintance, sitting next to him or standing next to him while pulling at his coat collar, was enough of an excuse for this friend to talk nonstop. He moved from one topic to another, telling Cemil about international affairs, his new job, his friends at work, and so on.
“Did you know,” Cemil’s friend asked, “that my vice director lives near you? A group of us meet at his house once a week. Many times, I wanted to invite you to join us, but they said ‘No, he is a loner, he doesn’t go anywhere.’ Imagine, my friend. I don’t really believe in such things, but there is this medium.”
The friend stared at Cemil. “They also found a spirit. A young woman, Selma, she committed suicide not too long ago. For two months, we have been calling her spirit and she tells us everything. Everything we ask, she answers. Except, she refuses to tell us why she committed suicide. No matter how much we press her, she refuses!”
Cemil could not listen any more. On top of the waves, an apparition with fear-filled eyes and tightly pressed lips was looking at him, beckoning to him, as if to say, “Let’s go!”
This story first appeared in Adroit Journal, Issue 44, in January 2023
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–1962) was a Turkish poet, novelist, literary scholar and essayist, widely regarded as one of the most important representatives of modernism in Turkish literature. He was a professor of aesthetics, mythology and literature at the University of Istanbul. Although he died more than 60 years ago, his writing and poetry remains very popular. His novel The Time Regulation Institute is considered one of the best novels in Turkish literature. With this novel, Tanpınar became one of the two Turkish novelists whose works became Penguin Classics.
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