The Time Regulation Institute

by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

  “There’s something about that brute,” he’d say. “The baker Ahmet Efendi would never have ended up as he did. In just three days his house and business were burned to the ground, his family destroyed. Now the fellow’s ruined and living in the poor house.”

  Shuddering at the thought of Lutfullah’s gruesome powers, he’d adjust his collar and hock a ball of phlegm to the ground.

  “He’s not a man. He’s a devil! God protect us from the stones this monster might send down upon us. Why doesn’t the government put the evil wizard behind bars? Just last night I saw him hobbling toward the graveyard in Edirnekapı. Has he done someone in?”

  It was rumored that whenever Seyit Lutfullah convened with his auspicious spirits by turning his head toward the wall, his prophecies always came true, and that his breath, and even his hand, had a healing effect on people afflicted with certain nervous disorders.

  In 1906, the year Lutfullah’s fame began to spread, Abdüsselam Bey became convinced he’d lost a valuable gold watch. Through Nuri Efendi he consulted Seyit Lutfullah, who, after holding long talks with the world beyond, told Abdüsselam in his mangled Turkish:

  “The watch a lady’s trunk, the trunk the hull of a ship, the ship the middle of the sea . . . Send telegraph at once . . . For if not . . .”

  Such was his answer.

  Three days later we discovered that the truth was really quite different. The watch was found in the pocket of a waistcoat in the bedroom wardrobe of a chambermaid who had been brought from Egypt by Abdüsselam’s second wife. But consider the coincidence: at around the same time, the following telegraph was received concerning a servant from Ünye who had left the household to return to her native village.

  “Woman found. A cheap knock-off table clock in her trunk. Both clock and woman in custody. Waiting further instructions.”

  One might say that Seyit Lutfullah owed his renown in Istanbul to this misinterpretation, which was somewhat correct in its details but muddled in its context.

  Indeed this slight error in context was what made the man’s astounding powers apparent. Seen through this distorting prism, his divine inspiration was as clear as a lone ship on rough seas in the dead of night. After all, when asked to account for the discrepancies, Seyit Lutfullah never once claimed that his mediation with the spirits was entirely conclusive.

  So the discrepancy came to seem like no more than a missing link—very much like that mosque (I can never remember which one) with no fewer than nine hundred ninety-nine windows. For if Lutfullah’s prophesy had come true, the whole thing would have been written off as mere coincidence, its assorted details forgotten. Yet not one of the details revealed by this minor error was lost; in light of the mistake, all the particulars—the watch, the servant who left Abdüsselam Bey’s villa, the hull of the ferryboat, the chest—were illuminated like roadside inns along an arduous journey. I am left to wonder whether there can be an example that better illustrates the crucial—and supportive—role error plays in human affairs.

  From then on Seyit Lutfullah was one of the most esteemed guests at the Tunisian’s villa. His every word was believed. His attire, his lifestyle, and his ruin of a medrese all helped to consolidate his position. He dismissed with a vague gesture any advice about moderate alterations to his dress; alluding to an ominous dark power, he’d say, “They’d never allow it.” He once accepted a robe and turban at Abdüsselam Bey’s insistence, only to return them three days later, saying, “They were not authorized. May the patron forgive me.” Seyit Lutfullah knew how to forge a legend that would last.

  He liked to say that it was his auspicious guardian spirits who had directed him to the medrese that was his home.

  I’ve seen very few places like this ruin of a medrese: its every fragment spoke of the effort and precision of its creator. You might almost think that this building and its miniature neighboring mosque—attributed to the reign of Mahmud I—began their slow descent into ruin the moment they left the hands of the architects, in strict accordance with a plan that foresaw its current state.

  The paving stones in the courtyard had been either broken or dislodged by an enormous plane tree surging out in all directions. Most of the rooms on the three wings—save for Seyit Lutfullah’s—were partly or completely in ruins. As for the little mosque on the left side of the courtyard, all that remained were four front steps leading up to the minaret. In a charming little graveyard off to one side lay four or five esteemed personages from the era, along with the kahvecıbası who built both medrese and mosque; it was separated from the street by a flimsy fence that was barely standing.

  Trees and dry vegetation dominated the medrese’s entire courtyard, as well as the graveyard and the plot where the mosque had once stood; a few trees had thrust their roots out from beneath toppled columns. The oddest sight was the slender and elegant cypress sapling that grew on the roof of the room where Seyit Lutfullah slept, rustling in the wind like the flowers of a silk oya. On cloudier days it seemed no more than a smudge against the ashen void of the sky, an arrow pointing toward an infinite and unassailable nature.

  Marked with this strange herald, the medrese teetered like a giant scale at the top of a hill from which it would one day fall. Seyit Lutfullah slept on a mattress tossed on the floor of the ruin’s only intact room, which was mildewed and perpetually dark. Beside his mattress were a handful of large bottles that seemed to hold his provisions and, strange as it may seem, a tortoise—a gift from Aselban, coyly named Çesminigâr, “the fountain of beauty”—which trundled about under the feet of Lutfullah’s visitors, entirely at ease with humans.

  Rumor had it that auspicious spirits had directed Lutfullah to the medrese because it was close to the treasure of Andronikos. This tallied with Seyit Lutfullah’s endless tales of his quest in the world beyond for this treasure dating back to the days of that emperor.

  But, then again, judging by what my dear friend told me in strict confidence, the medrese was neither devastated nor in the ruined state that we saw before us. It was, on the contrary, a sumptuous and resplendent saray; We were as incapable of seeing the true splendor of this palace as we were of seeing Seyit Lutfullah’s true beauty. Only when the treasure was uncovered would its pillars of pure gold and its diamond-encrusted turquoise domes shine forth. Then everything would fall into place. Aselban would agree to appear in human form, her lover would be reunited with his true face, and at last they would be joined in eternal bliss.

  “Thereafter I will reign over the entire world,” he would say, “and everything I desire will come true.” He’d banish misery and injustice from the world and govern with absolute justice. For this strange man had peculiar ideas about the struggle between justice and injustice, leading one to wonder whether his activities might not be directed by larger forces after all, and, in the end, casting some light on his true nature.

  By this logic, Seyit Lutfullah was the type of man to scorn and repudiate the riches offered by chance, so he might attain the otherworldly pleasures and power of eternal life. He was an idealist with a lofty soul. To have “everything” in life, he chose to live in the barren desert of “nothing.”

  When I explained these various eccentricities to Dr. Ramiz, he homed in on this one aspect of Lutfullah’s personality, and on countless subsequent occasions he told me this problem of justice and injustice could very well be the key, or at least one of the keys, to unlocking the Seyit Lutfullah affair. My dear friend, so zealously devoted to avant-garde scientific methods, once went so far as to ask me if Seyit Lutfullah had read Marx. Quite often he’d flare up and say, “I am most certain the man has read either Engels or Marx. What a pity you have never inquired.”

  “How could such a lowly creature have read the work of such lofty intellects? The miserable soul doesn’t even speak proper Turkish!” I’d reply.

  And he’d challenge me.

  “Your kind is always the same. You
lose sight of mankind’s superior virtues, just as you are lost to the feelings of inferiority that constrict your soul. My dear friend, relinquish these airs. I am now thoroughly convinced the man knows German and has read the full body of socialist literature. Otherwise he never would have bent himself so forcefully to this question of justice and injustice—the question of our age—nor would he have made such sacrifices in its name.” And he’d silence me, vowing that the man must be one of the founders of socialism.

  Conversations with Dr. Ramiz were always like this. He would pounce on a single minor point and within seconds be on the verge of an avalanche. Due to my modest understanding of matters intellectual, I never found the nerve to criticize the great scholar to his face. But why lie, considering all I knew about my friend’s life? I had never encountered in his ideas anything that might have inspired people to such a cause.

  The passions of Aristidi Efendi, Nasit Bey, and Abdüsselam Bey were more finite. After Aristidi Efendi learned from an elderly brother-in-law, a priest on the island of Heybeliada, that the emperor Andronikos was in all probability the emperor Hadrian, he came to perceive the quest as a purely scientific enterprise. He had no faith in Seyit Lutfullah’s deliberations or in the orders he received from the world beyond, instructing him to wait. Work should begin at once, with shovels and a pickax. But in the world of spirits, the rules were precise and the time preordained.

  The great event of 1909 was Aristidi Efendi’s decision to begin, alone, in the dead of night, his search for the treasure of the emperor Andronikos. But after several hours of digging, he found it necessary to reassign the treasure’s true location, and so the secret search continued. What he found at the bottom of a shallow pit were not amphorae brimming with gold and jewels, or precious cloth and palatial treasures, or gilded manuscripts and miniature statues of saints made of ivory and gold; he found only a few bones and a jar that held a single coin dating back to the reign of Sultan Mahmud I, and it was at this point that Aristidi Efendi began to ask questions about the treasure’s actual location. When Seyit Lutfullah told the chemist the following day that it had never been a question of actually finding the treasure, and that it would now take months just to reassign it to its original location, Aristidi Efendi nearly died of sadness and remorse. As with the story of Abdüsselam Bey’s watch, this bungled operation drained Aristidi Efendi of any energy he might have mustered to oppose Seyit Lutfullah.

  From then on, one could see the flicker of superstitious fear in the indulgent European smile Aristidi Efendi had once flashed in the face of Lutfullah’s ignorance; in the company of our friend he became as restive and indecisive as an army with no option of retreat.

  What Seyit Lutfullah really wanted was the power to unlock the mystery of the universe and thus gain spiritual control over matter. “Gold is not to be made in an alembic but forged of the soul. How much of it is already in the earth? The problem is to produce it without using our hands,” he would say.

  But when leading experiments in the secret laboratory behind Aristidi Efendi’s pharmacy, surrounded by alembics and vials and various bottles and stills, he was ready to try anything, as were all the others; he’d present Aristidi Efendi with questionable formulae fished from old manuscripts, and heated arguments would ensue, often lasting days.

  Through these battles, Aristidi Efendi’s well-mannered European patience and indulgence were challenged by Seyit Lutfullah’s humility, as well as his proud and powerful hold on the spiritual world, and the two opposing powers swirled around each other as if melding in a great cauldron set over an open fire. All I remember of the great debates I myself witnessed are Lutfullah’s favorite terms: “purification,” “putrefaction” “thickening,” “marriage,” “birth,” “dissolution,” and “connections”; they shimmered like doors to a greater world, answering only to powerful displays of will.

  And yet we have all witnessed, in the most unexpected of circumstances, such doors bursting open before us. Aristidi Efendi (who liked to claim all the glory for these experiments, despite the fact that they were funded mainly by Abdüsselam Bey) was working alone one night when an alembic cracked and his laboratory went up in flames. Only an hour later did the fire department and neighborhood volunteers make it to the scene and find the body of Aristidi Efendi half-consumed by the fire. It was February 1912, and with Aristidi Efendi’s death all effort to make gold in an alembic came to an end. And so the only hope that remained for the small group was the treasure.

  VIII

  But why have I burdened my chronicle of the Time Regulation Institute with these distant reveries? And why have I allowed myself to be seized by these shadows of the past? People today fail to grasp the importance of such questions. They overlook the truths and absurdities that lie beneath. I myself am now far too old to take pleasure in visits to the past or even, for that matter, from simple reminiscing. But even so, there is no disputing the fact that from the moment Halit Ayarcı came into my life I became a new man. I became more at ease with reality, more accustomed to confronting it. Indeed the man created a whole new life for me. I now feel distant from all these characters and long-ago events; a part of me has turned away from the past, though I still claim it as my own. But however I might regret it, I cannot explain myself without looking back. I lived among these men for years and with them chased after their dreams. There were times when I even dressed like them, adopting aspects of their personalities. Without my quite knowing, I would on occasion even become Nuri Efendi or Abdüsselam Bey or, yes, even Seyit Lutfullah. They were my models, the masks I hardly knew to be masks. I would don one personality or another before heading out to mingle with the crowds. And still today when I look in the mirror I can see these men reflected in my face. First I see Nuri Efendi’s indulgent smile, and then Lutfullah’s deceitful gaze, and I shudder at the thought of the horrible things I might have done. Or I am devastated to detect the desperate jealousy and impatience of my father. I can see these men’s traits in my attire too. The moment I put on a suit sewn for me by one of those celebrated tailors, I can be no other than Abdüsselam. And just the other day I noticed I needed new spectacles: off I went to look for a new pair with gold rims exactly like the ones Aristidi Efendi used to wear, though I knew the style was well out of fashion. Perhaps this is what we mean by “personality”: the rich array of masks we store in the warehouses of our minds and the eccentricities of those who manifest themselves in our person.

  But there may be a deeper and more powerful force that intervenes on occasion to obstruct these inherited traits. This is something I’ve always had in me. I cannot say that the same goes for everyone. Naturally there are those who live differently, those who consider themselves stronger and closer to reality, and unique.

  Such matters are distant from the memoir I am writing. I am busy with my own chronicle. But to return to my earlier point, I was never quite able to escape the hold these friends had on me. As my son once told me, I had no experience of what he called “proper, organized employment.” Like my friends, I wandered from whim to whim. Ahmet was never like me; indeed he made a concerted effort not to be. And for this he deprived himself of numerous opportunities. Nevertheless, as soon as he finished high school he won himself a state scholarship. And although I suggested he continue his studies in America after completing medical school, a choice befitting our wealth and position at the time, he rejected the idea out of hand and instead went to Anatolia. Thereafter he lived without ever consulting me on such matters, forever refusing all I offered.

  It would be wrong to say he never loved me. Yet he was vehemently opposed to my mode of thinking, which was not in harmony with his way of seeing the world. Nevertheless I maintain that a part of me lives on in him. I even saw this for myself one day, as I watched him examining a patient at his clinic. I would have examined a watch in exactly the same way. Or rather it was how Nuri Efendi would have examined a watch; I always wished my son would one day resembl
e this man, for he was always more master of the trade than I.

  For whatever reason, it is my past, and not my current position in life, that holds the key to my problems; I can neither escape from it nor entirely accept its mandate.

  IX

  Some four years ago, I discovered a piece of an old balustrade. Having bought it on the spot, I had it mounted over the French door in my office, which looks out onto the Clock Villa’s veranda and garden, with its seasonal flowers. I am in no doubt that this balustrade is what has led me to labor over certain points in my memoirs. When I look up at its star-and-tulip motif I have the impression of looking deep into my despairing and poverty-stricken past, but at the same time I can see through to my childhood and its days of fantasy and hope. Whenever, in those days, I went to see Seyit Lutfullah, to give him various items people had abandoned at Nuri Efendi’s workshop, and would pass through that ruined medrese, I would stop before this same balustrade and daydream about the share I would receive of the treasure Lutfullah was sure to unearth one day, or the mercury that Aristidi Efendi would one day transmute into gold—though no one had ever actually promised me a share, I was convinced that someday, somewhere, something would come to me—and I would dream, too, of repairing the cemetery and its toppled walls and maybe even the mosque itself.

  But fortune and chance ushered in quite the opposite. Although I had vowed to bequeath our grandfather clock to a mosque when I was older and in secure financial circumstances, I eventually, some twelve years ago, sold it; and something similar happened with this balustrade. One day I’d found it dangling from the wall, like the wings of one of the hunter Nasit Bey’s birds, and I made off with it in broad daylight and sold it to an antique dealer for just thirty liras.

  At the time those liras filled me with the thrill I might once have felt on discovering Andronikos’s glorious treasure or turning all the mercury in the world into gold in Aristidi’s alembics.