The Time Regulation Institute

by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

  Two weeks later the very same dispute sprung up between the heir and the two friends. This time it was the benefactor’s turn to be relegated, in similar fashion, to the curb. Yet the result of that evening’s fracas was not what we had expected. The following morning the two remaining friends decided to air their troubles to the entire coffeehouse, and within a few days their complaints had traveled so far as to reach the highest star in heaven. No doubt they had had quite a jolly year together, but now there was nothing left to show for it. Somewhere along the line the heir had managed to divest the two friends of all their legal rights via a rather complex business arrangement; he had even succeeded in appropriating one friend’s family home as well as the profitable business that the other friend owned somewhere—who knows where. Both were now penniless. And to top it all off, the friend ousted from his profitable business had fallen madly in love with one of the girls who’d been coaxed into their pleasure dens, thus ensuring her fall from grace.

  None of this stopped the heir from sitting down with us one day, wearing the world’s most serene and cloying smile. He spoke in private with the coffeehouse proprietor for nearly two hours. As he listened to the heir, the proprietor grew increasingly angry, the blood racing to his head. The very next evening there was an extended backgammon game with the former owner of the profitable business. The heir shook the dice ferociously in the palm of his hand before hurling them onto the board, and then, his face as innocent as a child’s, he leaned over the board as if he might actually dive in after the bouncing dice and clapped his hands in delight every time he rolled double sixes. Two weeks later we heard that the bankrupt former owner of the profitable business had married his paramour. Then three months later—miracle of miracles—a baby was born. The joyous news sparked raucous discussions in the coffeehouse, and with a majority vote the child was given the name Potpourri.

  With all its unexpected developments and digressions, this episode kept us entertained for months. But then something else happened, and it was quickly consigned to the shadows. Two Bulgarians had come to Istanbul in search of a treasure that had been buried in some village in Thrace during the Balkan Wars. Who had given these men the address of our coffeehouse? What had led them to us? Needless to say, a committee was formed that spring, after which camping supplies fit for a North Pole expedition were procured and a little steamboat rented for the journey. Within two weeks, the area in question had been subjected to an exhaustive search. Those who stayed behind followed each new development in eager anticipation. The size of the fortune changed from day to day. It began at ten thousand pieces of gold, descended to five, then shot up to twenty before finally peaking at a hundred thousand. Quite possibly the entire summer would have carried on like this had it not been for the local council, which finally intervened, thank God, putting an end to the search. When the expedition returned, an argument broke out over the costs incurred. But calm was soon restored when one of our acclaimed historians began a riveting recitation of the battle of Holy Ali, a performance that lasted nearly three hours. That was one of the most emotional evenings the coffeehouse has ever known. Though Emine was unwell at the time, I accepted, instead of going home, Dr. Ramiz’s rather uninspiring offer of rakı and a few simple mezes.

  That night we lost the two Bulgarians, but a Swiss-German orientalist arrived to fill their shoes. How happy the miserable man was to have stumbled upon a community as high-minded and intellectual as ours. His face was as yellow as a potato, and a broad smile split it into two halves that seemed incapable of ever reuniting. His poor Turkish prevented him from following discussions and becoming a close friend, but he certainly found us at just the right time: a week after his arrival his money ran out, and the community took him on as its ward. Then he decided he could earn a living as an architect. So he set up his office at a table on the right side of the coffeehouse, where he negotiated with customers and constructed scale models with matchboxes, making the necessary alterations before offering the final plans, all under the attentive eye of the regulars. There couldn’t have been an easier or more practical way of running a business.

  He carried on his work like this for four whole years. No architect could have been more patient, thoughtful, or attentive to the needs of his clients. If a client asked, “Now, what if we place these two boxes here?” Dr. Mussak would close his eye and think for a moment before knocking down his model building and starting again from scratch. It was then that I understood the vast difference between designs drawn up on paper and those realized in solid materials of three dimensions. As his work was conducted out in the open, for all to see, it was not just the coffeehouse proprietor but also his customers and even the waiters who were involved in the process; we all offered suggestions, and Dr. Mussak would hear us out with unflagging interest, on many occasions even agreeing with us. I don’t really know who invented cooperative housing, but clearly this friend of ours had discovered cooperative architecture. Sadly, a freak accident put a sudden end to his work: Our dear friend forgot to install stairs in a three-story house he had constructed near the Ibrahim Pasha Fountain in Süleymaniye. Once the scaffolding was taken down, it became clear that the three floors were not separate so much as completely cut off from one another. Even the enormous villa that Dr. Ramiz used to illustrate the configuration of the conscious and subconscious minds in his lectures on psychoanalysis at the Department of Justice Medical Facility seemed somehow more logical and correct—and while its cellar and attic were complete, the first floor was either empty or unfinished.

  But allow me to say this: these two buildings—which at the time utterly confounded me, being beyond my comprehension—these two buildings, along with the models Dr. Mussak built out of matchboxes, later proved extremely valuable to me, for when they decided to commission a new institute building, I rejected all proposals and took on the job myself. Drawing on what I had learned from these two men, I created the acclaimed institute building so admired by the public. In due course I shall discuss the building in more detail; after all, for three years it was a topic of intense debate all over the world. But for now suffice it to say that this building, whose second floor was left unfinished like some kind of covered terrace—it contained nothing but structural pillars, an elevator, and a cavity where the staircase should have been—was directly inspired by the house in Süleymaniye and the aforementioned villa as described to me by Dr. Ramiz.

  So the house in Süleymaniye was the next source of vigorous debate in the coffeehouse, and for whatever reason, it seemed to have fallen to us to assign a function to the two floors unconnected by stairs.

  It was always the same: any enterprise, however serious at its outset, would soon be undone by an inscrutable logic. Once handed over to the crowd inside, what had seemed crystal clear just two steps away from the coffeehouse would be twisted into a muddy mockery of fate.

  This was the marshland we knew as “the absurd.” And though I couldn’t see it, I was up to my neck in it.

  I was as in thrall to this world, as if I had fallen into the grips of a densely feathered beast, engulfed by its many soft arms and ticklish wings while its husky voice lulled me into a languid stupor. I was living in a world without connection, or without any connection that wasn’t meaningless or absurd: I felt myself to be in a fairground torn asunder by a violent tornado that had come out of nowhere. Where had the storm started? What uncanny worlds of opposites had it plundered, which disparate armadas had it so rattled to the core that it was now quite impossible to identify the true faces of those who are blown our way? Objects would appear one after the other, as if pulled out of a magician’s hat, and then it would emerge that they were somehow linked to one another. At the time I found the experience quite pleasant, but when I consider it in retrospect, I see the traces of a nightmare.

  I was fording a deep-sea cavern lined by the remains of knowledge and by all the ideas I had ever failed to grasp. As they swirled around my feet I move
d forward, and with every step I felt the coil of unfounded beliefs, ungrounded frustrations, and unending despair tightening around my chest and arms; whereupon, like rotten seaweed, they pulled me deeper into the depths of the sea; and every time I opened my eyes, gruesome leviathans larger than the eye could see would lunge toward me through the murky void. Then suddenly they would vanish, like giant squid eclipsed by their own clouds of ink, and I found myself face to face with Dr. Ramiz or Lazybones Asaf, my head turned toward the wild laughter that was cutting through the thunderous chaos in my head—a clanging in my ears rising from the depths I had just been wandering—and I would look around me as if I’d just woken from a dream, recognizing nothing.

  “Yes, my dear friend,” Ramiz Bey was saying. “There’s no end to all this! The youth must take action and cast off the shackles of this fatalisme `a l’Orient!”

  The doctor’s face darkened. As if in response to a command, Asaf Bey dragged his feet and arms away from the four chairs he usually commandeered, and then, as if to reward himself for this arduous task, nested his head on the table, in his crossed arms, and fell into a deep sleep.

  Lazybones Asaf was forever lethargic, and his sleep was the most sublime, the most innocent in all the world. When he closed his eyes, a gentle hum would fill the room, inviting reveries of a hundred angels with effervescent wings flittering about in the air above him, singing or softly whispering lullabies into his ear as they filled the honeycomb of his sleep with the ambrosia of innocent dreams.

  Then all at once I felt a painful knot in my stomach. “Emine!” I cried, and I leapt from my chair and hurried home. She was ill. What the doctors had diagnosed as a minor case of fatigue had become a dangerous condition of fatal consequence. I had seen this coming long before the doctors did. I had known about it since I had dreamed that dream at the Department of Justice Medical Facility. The fatal alembic had boiled away before my eyes, and inside had been Emine’s face; she was always on the other end of my pillow, on my lips, and in the palms of my hands, but slowly slipping away from me, and staring at me with wide-open eyes. Let her speak to her heart’s content, I tried to say, let her laugh and dream about the future, and see Zehra marry one day, and Ahmet’s graduation from medical school, but still her face was fading into the distance, and still her eyes were looking at me, even from so far away, looking at me as if to say, “Try what you like, but there’s no cure!” It was hideous and cruel. Emine was falling into death as the tears fell from my eyes. And I could do nothing about it, nor could anyone else.

  VII

  Emine’s death sent me headlong into a void, as if the branch I’d been clutching had suddenly snapped. So overwhelmed was I by the loss that at first it made absolutely no sense to me. Nor could I grasp how deeply I’d been affected. All I felt was a dark and terrible heaviness deep inside me. But there was also something else—a sense of liberation. The ordeal had come to an end. Emine would never die again; she’d never have to suffer another illness. In my mind she’d remain as she was. No doubt other terrors awaited me; other catastrophes were in store. But my worst fear—that of losing Emine—was gone. No longer would I view the world through the prism of her pain and ill health; never again would fear well up inside me to smother my entire being.

  Our home had been destroyed; left alone with our two children, I lost the will to work, and, even worse, I lost all faith. But I was no longer afraid. The worst that could happen had happened. Now I was free.

  With no Emine to keep my feet on the ground, I was ready to be swept away by any passing current. And the closest current was the coffeehouse and my friends there. Just a week after Emine’s death, I found myself among the regulars once again. I sat there, in the second hall behind the shops on the main boulevard, with playing cards in one hand, a glass of rakı in the other, a cigarette in my mouth, and the din of stories in my ears; I was, in short, at ease with my surroundings, joking and smoking and for all appearances having a jolly good time. Had I forgotten everything? Was I really having fun? Absolutely not.

  I felt anguish like never before. It wasn’t fear or pain but the grief suffered by only those who have betrayed themselves—an odd sensation I greeted with revulsion. It was on a day like this that it happened. All at once my reflection in the mirror melted into my impression of myself. The face I saw between the coats hanging on either side of the mirror was smug but hopeless, despicable and weak willed, irresolute and resigned to his fate, so much so that for a moment I thought the glass might vomit back my image and toss my head onto my feet. But no, nothing of the sort happened. On second and third glance I grew more comfortable with the apparition. A balance had been regained.

  I hired an old woman to look after the children at home. When I managed to get myself up in the morning, I’d go to work, and after that it was straight to the coffeehouse before rolling out to a local meyhane, with Dr. Ramiz or some other companion, to drink the night away, returning home late. I’d be pleased to find the children already fast asleep, and on some nights I’d go straight to bed myself—another day done, and I had made it through unscathed. But all too often I found the children waiting up for me, huddled in a corner. Thus the most wrenching part of the day would begin.

  I had to take them up in my arms and lift their spirits without once giving them the faintest idea of what was running through my head: I had to tousle their hair and dry their tears—make them laugh. Why were they so sad? Why did they cry so much? Why were they so needy? Didn’t their very existence make it difficult enough? Hadn’t they tied me to one place with their very presence, condemning me forever to circle like a workhorse around the same little spot?

  The moment I saw them I’d crumble in compassion; cursing myself for my spinelessness and ill fortune, I’d fight the urge to pound my head against the wall for hours on end. At times like these Emine would appear from the shadows of the house and waft toward me, placing her hand on my shoulder, as she always did, and saying, “Pull yourself together!”

  And I would do just that. Decisions, promises, and resolutions came one after the other: tears were shed in darkness. But to what end? I detested the life I was living but lacked the strength to start another. I had severed all ties. I had no bonds with the world save the compassion I felt for my children. I had no choice but to endure it all—or at least tolerate the world around me. The moment I set foot outside I was a prisoner of my wandering and endlessly colluding mind, which led me off to exotic worlds whose enticements beckoned, only to stay beyond my reach.

  I was driven wild by letters and postcards from distant lands. They came from all over the world: Peru, Argentina, Canada, Egypt, and the Cape of Good Hope . . . The old Jewish woman who lived amid fleas in her single room just two streets down from us had a brother in Mexico, and her neighbor—the sister of a rabbi—traded in Argentinean furs. The son of the Greek grocer across the way lived in Egypt. And his nephew was a teacher in Chicago. When I saw their letters, my eyes would shut of their own volition—I became someone else, somewhere else. Oh, to leave everything behind and just go!

  But no, I would have to be a different sort of man to do such a thing. I would have to push myself beyond the shackles of my habits and routines, not just run, move, jump, and desire but also persevere. Such things were not for me. I was a hopeless shadow: a miserable, slovenly shadow who followed any man who happened to brush by, who, the moment after breaking company with this man, found himself bound to his children, huddling in each other’s arms like kittens, laughing, crying, but most of all crying—a man who laughed when told to laugh, cried when told to cry, spoke when told to speak, wept when told to weep. I was a miserable creature who became interesting only when considered so by others, who existed on those rare days when people looked him in the eye.

  This of course reminded me to hurry to the coffeehouse, where I could be among people whose lives were more or less different from my own and who, unlike me, did not suffer the gaze of others.
When I was with them, I felt I had a life of my own; I could live and I could think.

  But perhaps it wasn’t quite like that. There were other factors at play. I didn’t actually like the people there. I took refuge among them. I was like a man who flees a snowy night on the peak of a lonely mountain battered by heavy winds, to take refuge in one of those caravanserais that double as stables, where the warm aroma of manure mingles with the fragrance of freshly made tea and coffee amid the hum of human voices and the shuffling of horses’ hooves. It was this happy, saturated chaos that kept me warm.

  No doubt a day would come when I would forget the dissatisfaction I felt for the place and its people and leave myself entirely at their mercy. Already from time to time I’d say, “Ah, now this is life! Such peace and happiness . . . What a delightful cast of characters!” And I lived like this until my son Ahmet’s grave illness brought me back to my senses. My fear of losing him compelled me to accept my fate.

  It was at around this time that Dr. Ramiz finally realized the project he’d been mulling over for the last six years: the Psychoanalytic Society. I was one of the twenty members of the society—none of whom, apart from Dr. Ramiz, were medical doctors; I was even made its director. So, yes, I must concede that when I was made deputy director at the Time Regulation Institute, I was not completely without experience. Before becoming director of the Society for Psychoanalysis, I’d been the accountant for the Spiritualist Society, which was more or less the same sort of organization. As director I was the holder of the key to the society’s meeting room, whose rent was paid over the years by my dear friend the founder of the organization. Only twice did the society open its doors to the public for conferences. At his first conference, Dr. Ramiz introduced me as the first patient he’d treated in Turkey, providing details that made my hair stand on end. It was thanks to these mentions that my second wife, Pakize, first took a shine to me. At his second conference, the doctor read a lithographed reproduction of an entire seventy-page-long dream manual, annotated with his own comparisons and explanations along the way.