The Time Regulation Institute

by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

  “This is true, quite true . . . But what can be done? Such is your condition. Your own words indicate as much. Didn’t you say the deceased was not the kind of man to be loved, respected, or esteemed? Yet a father should always be loved—should be someone who is always respected. This is the case whether you like it or not. You see, you aren’t at all envious of your father, but normally a father is envied. Things would be quite different if there were envy. But you were never envious of your father.”

  “What aspect of the man could I envy?”

  Every time I spoke, the doctor’s smile took on new shades of meaning.

  “You were never envious of him because you never found anything of merit in the man! Now, now—there’s no need to panic. These kinds of conditions are found in almost everyone. You’re just a little late in this regard. You still haven’t become a father. But when you do, all this will pass.”

  “I never became a father?! But I have two children. I even named the second child myself. Goodness me, I was the one who decided on the name Ahmet.”

  “Because Abdüsselam Bey is now dead. But with the death of your father you should have achieved a certain freedom or maturity. The question now is how to free yourself of the consequences of this complex. Yet as the complex exists in the subconscious mind it’s insignificant, as long as it remains the same—insignificant and in fact entirely natural, especially in today’s society. For in today’s world almost all of us suffer from this condition. Just look around: we all complain about the past; everyone is preoccupied with it. This is why we seek to change it. What does this mean? A father complex, no? Don’t we all, both young and old, wrestle with this very condition? Observe our obsession with the Hittites and Phrygians and God knows what other ancient tribes. Is this anything but a deep father complex?”

  I stood up again. I wanted to flee, but our coffees had just arrived and so I sat down.

  “Isn’t this enough for today?” I begged.

  “No, sit down and listen. You know well enough that psychoanalysis . . .”

  I lowered my head and opened my arms.

  “But Doctor, whatever could I possibly know about it? I’m an uneducated man. You’ve heard my life story ten times over. I never really went to school. My father never demanded anything of me. He never forced me to go to school.”

  I suddenly stopped. I was giving myself away again. I was yet again speaking unfavorably of my father. I tried to change the topic.

  “All I know is a bit of this and that about watches and clocks, nothing more!”

  Of course once I mentioned clocks, the Blessed One and my supposed second father, the late Nuri Efendi, came to mind, and I went quiet. This father complex was a terrible thing. It could stop you from speaking at all.

  Thank God, Dr. Ramiz wasn’t listening. He never really did.

  “Yes, I know all this . . . I’m aware. But you mustn’t worry. Do you think anything would be different if you had completed your studies? If you do not understand psychoanalysis, then everything is . . .”

  He thought for a moment, opened his briefcase, and took out his cigarettes. He offered me one and then lit his own before locking the pack back in his briefcase.

  Why doesn’t he keep them in his pocket? I thought angrily. Then I felt angry with myself. I had contracted the most ridiculous disease in the world, and here I was worrying about other people.

  Dr. Ramiz looked at me with something akin to compassion.

  “Best would be to start from the beginning. I will teach you the basics. Psychoanalysis—”

  “Have mercy, gracious no! Fire! Anything but psychoanalysis . . .”

  My first lesson continued until nightfall. Before he left he gave me one of his conference papers published in German. That night, as I lay on my bedroll, I began mulling over everything that had befallen me. It was nearing the end of the second week, and still there was no sign of a report. And even worse, I’d seemingly just enrolled in a course on psychoanalysis. I picked up the publication; it was written in that horrible language, German. But had it been composed in my dear native tongue, what would I have understood? I tucked it under my pillow, thinking the subject matter might be revealed to me in a dream.

  The following day I was informed I had a visitor. It was Emine. Her face was even paler than before, and her cheeks were drawn. She looked at me hopefully, but she could hardly hold back her tears. I tried to seem cheerful so as to offer some consolation.

  “Haven’t you been released yet?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “We’ve just begun. I had my first lesson yesterday.”

  “Lesson? Have you lost your mind?”

  “Just a lesson really. I’m studying psychoanalysis!”

  I gave her a brief account of what had happened. It was heartbreaking to see the shadow of a smile pass over her face beneath her teary eyes. She understood the absurdity of the situation but didn’t have the heart to laugh.

  “Are these people mad?” she asked. “This is all we need at a time like this.”

  Then in consolation she said, “There’s no such condition. Don’t pay any attention to them! Just say, ‘yes, of course, sir,’ and get them to write the report! Beg them, pretend you’re sane, or you’re insane, whatever you have to do. Just get yourself out of here!”

  That day Ramiz Bey said nothing about my report. He did however continue his lecture on psychoanalysis. Only, this time he began to explain the science using everyday analogies. And so everything went a little haywire: on the one hand, I knew I really didn’t understanding anything, yet I supposed there were a few things I did comprehend. At one point he brought up the conference paper he’d left with me the night before.

  “Did you have a look at it?” he asked.

  “But how could I? I don’t know a word of German. And even if I did, this is advanced science.”

  “Ah, of course,” he mumbled. “I forgot about that. Not to worry. I’ll just explain it all to you.”

  Thank God this time the memory of a German girl he had met at the conference waylaid his lecture, and from the girl we moved on to her friend who was a nurse. Throughout his musings he never stopped opening and closing his briefcase. He would take out his cigarettes and then promptly lock them up. A little later he would do the same with his English pocketknife: he would open the briefcase all over again, rummage through it, pull out the knife, and begin cleaning under his fingernails. Later it was the cologne, which of course needed to be extracted from the briefcase before he could douse his hands with its lemony vapors. Meanwhile all the young girls he’d ever known were paraded before our eyes: one connected to the next like the cars on a funicular moving up and down a mountainside. At close to two in the afternoon he told me he had important business to attend to and left.

  The next day we occupied ourselves entirely with my dreams. This time the doctor behaved as if he’d never known a single woman in Germany. Quite unlike the day before, he was irritable and tired. There were bulging purple bags under his eyes; maybe he hadn’t slept much the night before. And perhaps, aggravated and tired, he wasn’t pleased with any of the dreams I recounted. He accused me of not having the kinds of dreams that someone like me—who didn’t like his father and who replaced him with anyone suitable who came along—should have.

  “How can this be? It’s inconceivable that an individual like you hasn’t had a single dream that befits your condition. You might at least try a little harder.”

  And with this last pronouncement, he began a new stage in my treatment. That day he was silent until evening, angrily pacing the room, virtually ignoring me before coming to a sudden stop in front of me and intoning, in the most imperious voice he could muster:

  “I want you to have dreams that are more in line with your illness. Do you understand me? Use everything in your power to try and have the right kind of dreams. First you must free yourself o
f symbols. Once you see your father’s true face in your dreams, everything will change, and from there everything will fall into place.”

  “I always see the true face of my father in my dreams. Besides, if it’s not his face, then naturally it’s not my father but someone else.”

  “It’s not that simple. Such things occur without you commanding them. This is why you need to rally your willpower and do your best to free your father of the symbolic associations he has taken on. When these symbols are removed, it will be that much easier for you to free yourself from him—which is to say, from this inferiority complex you have inherited from him. I shall write you a list of the dreams you shall have this week.”

  And a few minutes later he handed me a piece of paper.

  “But, Doctor, can dreams be ordered up in such way? A prescription for dreams . . . ? This is impossible.”

  “This is a forward-thinking science, my good friend. No objections allowed!”

  All this contributed to my moving that much closer to bona fide insanity, and without recourse to any of the spurious fire and light shows that my lawyer had recommended if I ever needed to prove I was insane. But really I had no choice. It was thanks to my illness that I was not sharing an overcrowded cell with madmen, murderers, and opium addicts and instead spending my days in the company of this intelligent, well-mannered, knowledgeable, warmhearted, and most humane man, having as many cigarettes and cups of coffee as I desired, or, rather, as many as he desired.

  Naturally I wanted to give at least something in return for all the kindness the doctor had shown me. So before going to bed I did everything in my power to conjure up thoughts of my father, recalling him in all the various stages of my life. But as if to spite me, he never appeared in my dreams, or if so, only as one of Dr. Ramiz’s symbols. I would see in my dreams either a dangerously narrow bridge nearing collapse or a smashed sidewalk covered with mud puddles, or occasionally I was in a little canoe being tossed by rough seas, a pitch-black ferry bearing down on me. I would wake up fearful that I hadn’t followed the doctor’s orders, and, squeezing my eyes shut, I’d concentrate on my father’s face. Having exhausted this method, I would drift back to sleep where—as the doctor put it—I exhibited an absence of self-control and had dreams of a different nature.

  The truth was that I couldn’t stop worrying about my family’s future or Emine’s worsening health. Asleep or awake I thought only of Emine. Plagued by visions of misery and chaos that belied my actual state of mind, I would wake up to her pale face and reproachful eyes. Dr. Ramiz was angry with me for this and elaborated on his techniques:

  “I am using the very latest methods with you, a personal method I discovered myself. I call it the ‘directed dream’ method. After diagnosing a patient according to his or her prior dreams, the treatment begins with the examination of subsequent dreams that are strictly guided and controlled. Though you were the patient that inspired the method, you are now showing no effort to help the treatment succeed. What a strange person you are! Have you no willpower whatsoever? Are you concerned only with the present day? Try thinking about your life as a unified whole.”

  Sadly, I lacked sufficient willpower for the treatment. In fact the problem was universal. But willpower was everything (if nothing else). According to Dr. Ramiz, willpower was the one thing that could be placed alongside psychoanalysis, fit to share a life with it, as a king might share his reign with his queen. All the great philosophers spoke of it, which of course meant all the names came flooding in, names that might be seen as willpower embodied: Nietzsche, Schopenhauer . . . And because Dr. Ramiz assumed I had read them all, he would make vague references to their work and apply models drawn from their books to daily life, to his own life, to my life, and to the matters facing our country; and from there we moved on to German music. According to him—later I learned that most people who had studied in Germany were the same—it was mandatory to be as familiar with Beethoven as with the man who lived around the corner. As for Wagner, well, there was no doubt in his mind that we were both related to the man. We would often finish our discussions by listening to either the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth or the “Grand March” from Tannhäuser, followed by the doctor’s personal reflections on his past. His reminiscing complete, he would jump to his feet and stand above me like a god poised to create the world out of the abyss, intoning once again that powerful and mysterious word that could save humanity from the void:

  “Will!” he boomed. “Do you understand? Will . . . Everything lies in this very word.”

  And with his raincoat and briefcase tucked under his arm, he would bound out of the room, whistling either the “Grand March” or “Ode to Joy,” and leaving me alone with the mysterious word he had entrusted to me.

  Alone in the room with my head between my hands, I repeated the words over and over in numb confusion: “Beethoven, Nietzsche, willpower, Schopenhauer, psychoanalysis . . . Oh, words and names and the happiness that comes to us through our belief in them . . .”

  That night I was attacked by a lion in my dream. Thank God, I escaped unscathed. In my childhood, well before I became the thief of the Serbetçibası Diamond, a swindler of inheritances, or a patient of Dr. Ramiz, when I was happy and in good health, we would all share at the breakfast table the dreams we had had the night before. That’s how I learned that—at least according to the prevailing interpretation of the time—a lion represented justice. The lion I had seen in my dream never touched me, which certainly meant I would be saved. In the morning I greeted Dr. Ramiz with the wonderful news and recounted my dream to him. At first he seemed pleased.

  “Yes . . .”

  Then he stepped past me without a word, whereupon his expression abruptly changed.

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes, that’s all. I woke up immediately, in a terrible fright, but not without some joy, as a lion symbolizes justice or political power.”

  But he wasn’t listening:

  “How unfortunate! You’ve missed a golden opportunity. What a terrible shame!”

  Thinking a little more on the matter, he added: “You should have fed yourself to the lion.”

  Shivers went down my spine:

  “Dear Lord, Doctor!”

  “Yes, it’s true . . . Or you should have slain the beast and donned its fur. Either way, somehow you should have lost yourself inside the creature so you could be reincarnated later on. Only then would everything be resolved. Haven’t you noticed how this works in fairy tales? People get lost . . . they get lost—that is to say, they die before being born anew. There’s no more certain way to break free from a complex than this. But you were unable to do so. Indeed you failed to do so. You missed your chance!”

  Wringing his hands, he paced the room, sadness and despair written all over his face.

  “You were unable to do it. You have ruined all my efforts. You were to be reborn, but you have remained exactly the same.”

  I did the best I possibly could to console him.

  “Please don’t be discouraged by this, Doctor. I shall try hard tonight. Besides, the beast never really went away. Perhaps he will return tonight.”

  “There’s no use. With such incompetence . . . don’t even bother!”

  Then he set his eyes on mine again and with obvious despair said: “My dear friend, let us not deceive each other any longer. You simply do not want to get better! How could the creature ever return? Does the departed ever return?”

  He had a point; he must have understood that the lion, just like my father, would never again appear in my dreams.

  Nevertheless, the lion had somehow brought me a little peace of mind. A day later Dr. Ramiz asked me, “You said the lion in your dream symbolized justice. What did you mean by that?” And I told him about our old dream-interpretation manuals.

  “Our forebears considered the interpretation of dreams to be of the utm
ost importance. But not as in psychoanalysis, nothing at all like that . . .”

  “You mean we have our own manual for dream interpretation?”

  “No, no, not just a manual . . . A whole book! With descriptions and analysis for everything you might dream about.”

  Dr. Ramiz was always charmed by things that were particular to our country, but they troubled him too—not because he had lived abroad for several years, but because they lit up the void he inhabited, suspended between two lives. “That’s right, yes. That’s right,” he muttered, and as he recalled the aforementioned dream-interpretation books, he began nodding his head.

  “My dear friend,” he said, “it is truly vast, even endless, this treasure trove we’ve inherited from the people of the past.”

  Why must we always nod our heads when remembering our ancestors? Was this some kind of custom, a tradition, or a new malady we’d contracted?

  That day we talked about the dream-interpretation manuals until evening. Dr. Ramiz planned to write a report on them for a congress to be held in Vienna. Assuring me that I was well versed in the topic, he asked for my help. His opinion of me suddenly had changed: he was no longer my doctor; he no longer saw me as a patient committed to the Department of Justice Medical Facility; we were now just two good friends. Every other moment he slapped me on the back and told me how important it was that we succeed.

  Leaving him that evening, I asked which dreams I should have that night. He looked at me with confusion in his eyes. “The paper,” he said, “just write the paper! The congress is right around the corner!”

  Naturally the paper was never written. But my new friend had inadvertently introduced me to an entirely new field of research. All at once he had recognized the importance of our old practices: onomancy, numerology, alchemy, sensology—the full gamut of Seyit Lutfullah’s repertoire (to use the parlance of the theater) and every other bit of hopeless, shoddily conceived science I might find hidden in a vast expanse of old manuscripts. The strangest thing was that he planned to acquire all this learning through me.