The Time Regulation Institute

by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

  I thought of myself sitting on a stone in the Kamburkarga cul-de-sac just behind our home, with my sister-in-law singing her heart out as she hacked away at her oud.

  “Of course not. A thousand times over, no!”

  “Can you change her?”

  I jumped up out of my seat.

  “Not one bit! Impossible! Entirely out of the question!”

  “Then you’ll do what I just told you. Remember that in this day and age, and especially with matters of this sort, all you need to do is desire the change. Life goes on, Hayri Bey. As you go on your way, stymied by words at every step, life discovers something new every day. Consider how just four or five hours ago I discovered you—and now I am discovering a singer, your sister-in-law.”

  “May God make it so, sir.”

  What else could I do but thank him. He had discovered my baldız. Grace upon her! Since I was born, people have taught me to look through the wrong end of the telescope. But I simply never could. I was stubborn. Why bother? My entire life was absurd. So why wouldn’t I just give this a try?

  Nevertheless, I garnered my strength for one last act of resistance.

  “Ah, but if you could only see her, or rather listen to her, singing there right before you like a great barrel wobbling on her crimson high heels, her sweat streaming like a fountain as she snaps along and sings, ‘If only my love would come join this joyful scene . . .’”

  Halit Ayarcı looked at me warmly.

  “So she snaps her fingers does she, eh? How nice. That’s perfect, but, my good man, this is a success all on its own. Think about it for a minute: she won’t be one of those singers who twirls a scarf around her finger while she sings, unable to ever unwind it, nor will she be one of those who tear up napkins as they go along. What more could you ask for? She’ll have both hands free, she’ll be able to wave to the crowd and blow kisses, and she’ll receive thunderous applause in return! You possess a veritable treasure, and you don’t even know it. Let’s try to sum up, then: You say she’s ugly, so from a contemporary perspective she’s sympathetic. You say her voice is wretched, which means it is emotive and conducive to certain styles. You say she has no talent—well then, without a doubt she is an original. I will see to your baldız tomorrow. And soon she’ll be on the stage. She’ll be famous and her name will be in all the papers.”

  This is as much as I can remember clearly from that night. In fact I have the vague recollection that following Halit Ayarcı’s final words to me I thought something to the effect of, “You and your promises . . . You’ll forget all about it tomorrow morning.” And the rest is just a blank—though toward morning I did find myself belly dancing with someone from the next table. It was a soft, gentle morning shrouded in mist. A breeze rushed through the open window, bringing with it the putter of motorboats and swaying the still-lit lamps. We carried on with our belly dance through the break of day and into the beautiful morning. I was overcome by the most blissful sensation of lightness imaginable. I still didn’t know if Halit Ayarcı’s promises of that evening would come true, but he had already shown me which end of the telescope I was to look through from here on in.

  II

  Yet Halit Ayarcı kept all his promises. Within a week, my sister-in-law began singing in a small club; both Halit Ayarcı and Dr. Ramiz attended the premiere, along with Pakize and the rest of our family. It was indeed a triumph, though I had the feeling that Halit Ayarcı provided both the venue and its audience simply to fulfill his promises of that night. Every time my sister-in-law committed an error in style, she was met with maniacal applause. With every passing moment, I sank deeper into my chair with shame, but in the end the poor girl was hailed as the star of the evening, and cries of “Brava!” were followed by hysterical screams erupting from her sisters and aunts. From time to time, Pakize turned to me with a look that said, “Didn’t I tell you?” Halit Ayarcı watched the entire performance in silence. But as we left the club he said to me:

  “Yes, just as I expected. The hanımefendi will be a great success indeed. You need to believe in life, Hayri Bey. But you have more belief in the Acemasiran makam than you do in life itself! Didn’t you just see how well she was received? This is the impact a living human being can have on others. There’s simply no way on earth your classical makams could ever achieve such success. It’s smooth sailing from now on. Oh, you’ll see what she can do.”

  And this wasn’t all he did. It was around this time that Halit Ayarcı opened the little office that would become the nucleus of the Time Regulation Institute. One fine morning I stepped through the front door of that little office near the municipality building, wearing a suit Halit Ayarcı had sent me the night before. I was ushered inside by a wise and elderly servant. Nermin Hanım, our head secretary, who was also a relative of Halit Ayarcı’s, jumped up at the first sight of me, as delighted as if she had just set eyes on an old friend. She showed me my desk. She even stopped knitting to do so. That day I learned that Nermin Hanım was always either knitting or talking; she never did anything else. Or, rather, she talked unless she was alone, in which case she knitted.

  She was unlike any woman I had ever known. It took no more than a second for her to make a new friend. She had no secrets and no interest in silence. And she never held a grudge: She had even succeeded in divorcing three different husbands without resentment or rancor. Indeed she was still on rather good terms with them. She launched right in:

  “The suit looks good. From what Halit Bey told me about you, I figured it would be perfect on you. But really, your shoes do need shining. And you must find another barber. This one seems to have no idea how to cut hair. I can’t tell you how happy I am to have found a friend like you here. I did worry a bit when my uncle first asked me to stay on here. The idea of an office can be so unappealing. I said to myself, if anything, there’d be all sorts of strangers there, and I wouldn’t know what to do. But I felt much better when he said we’d be together, especially after he told me what you were like. We’re about the same age, so I knew we’d be good friends. And my husband’s not a jealous man. Besides, in this day and age a wise husband’s never jealous of his wife. Today’s family is an institution founded on friendship—though the men in this country haven’t reached that level of maturity. Oh, but I’m tired of it all. In the past it was such a cinch getting divorced, but now it’s so difficult. The judges keep trying to get you reunited, and they stall the trials. I divorced my first husband without even really knowing how it all happened. For the second one, the trial lasted a year, and then they wouldn’t allow me to marry for a whole year after. Then, the third time, it was practically impossible. Anyway, we’re no more than secretaries, you and I, but once my uncle has the organization all stamped and approved, you’ll be assistant director and I’ll be head secretary! My uncle Halit is a great organizer. And he’s already organized this whole exciting project. We live nearby, in Sisli, so I’ll be bringing my own lunches, and if you do the same, you won’t waste any time going out for lunch. But, then, come to think of it, there’s no need for you to bring lunch. I can bring yours too. My mother-in-law’s a wonderful cook. And she’ll make us tray upon tray of all sorts of food just to make sure she doesn’t have to see me. But to tell you the truth, I was trying to get her to work here as a secretary too. But my uncle said it wouldn’t do. This is a modern institution, he said, and we need young women. But, then again, you never know who’s young or old anymore. You shorten your skirt and cut your hair short and, well . . . And then if you wear a beret . . . One of my friend’s husbands was a little too interested in young girls. The poor thing didn’t know what to do. Finally I had to intervene. I said, ‘Sister, all you have to do is throw on a middle school uniform and get one of those caps.’ At first she said, not a chance, but now the silly man never leaves home. Oh, it’s so nice to have you here . . . I thought maybe you wouldn’t be able to find the office this morning, and I was just about to send a ca
r for you. Then I was worried I might disturb Mrs. Irdal, so I changed my mind. My uncle said you are quite good at reading coffee grounds. Oh, I was so excited when I heard that! You’ll read my grounds every day, won’t you?”

  That was Nermin Hanım. The most surprising thing of all is that she was the one who wanted to divorce each of her three husbands, whereas—considering the monologue she’d just delivered—one would have imagined it would be her unfortunate ex-husbands who were desperate for divorce. Indeed she was the kind of person who spent all twelve waking hours chattering.

  The office consisted of two adjacent rooms. My desk was in the first, directly opposite Nermin Hanım’s desk; and this room led to Halit Ayarcı’s office.

  But allow me just to say in advance that these humbly furnished rooms bore no resemblance whatsoever to the quarters of what was to be Istanbul’s most advanced and modern institute. Indeed the difference between them wasn’t even a question of degree. They were two different worlds altogether.

  At one point I asked Nermin Hanım just what it was we were meant to be doing. After a prolonged exposé of the habits of her first husband and his extended family, she told me that there was nothing to do for the time being and that we were to wait for Halit Ayarcı’s arrival. And so we spent our first month there doing just that. Every now and then Halit Ayarcı would telephone and check up on us, telling us to keep up the good work and always reminding us to replenish the stationery supplies. Curtains and typewriters arrived toward the end of the month.

  In the middle of the second month, Halit Ayarcı came by the office. Together we compiled a list of almost a hundred slogans based on what I could remember from my time with Nuri Efendi: “Metals are never regulated on their own,” or “Regulation is chasing down the seconds.” Sometimes Halit Ayarcı added his own, more meaningful, creations: “Shared time is shared work,” “A true man is conscious of time,” “The path to well-being springs from a sound understanding of time,” and so on and so forth.

  After that came the task of having them printed. We printed a thousand copies of every slogan and distributed them throughout the city. One morning toward the end of the third month, a joyous Halit Ayarcı announced that the preliminary work on our institute was complete. Then he set out to compose the official terms of institutional justification. Little by little our once calm institute came to life.

  Those three months were unlike anything I had ever experienced. I shall never forget them. It was a strange and confusing period in which I fluctuated between elation and fear: there was the pride I felt in having achieved something at long last, and there was the fear of losing it. I had to keep reminding myself I was employed again, with a regular income. After a long and heavy sleep, I was living life to the fullest. I no longer dashed from one coffeehouse to the other in search of a familiar face. I was freed from that terrible question, what should I do now? No longer was I despised by my family for being unemployed; no longer was I obliged to recount my misfortunes to all and sundry. Because I now spent all day in the office, I no longer had to suffer acquaintances turning away to ignore me in public places. I was starting my life all over again. I was an ordinary citizen of the world. Endowed now with a surging sense of purpose, I felt I could move mountains.

  But there was a problem: I had a job but no work. This new job was unlike any other I had known. It seemed to have nothing to do with people or even life itself, for that matter. I believed, for example, that I had done real work for the Spiritualist Society—if that doesn’t sound too absurd, bearing in mind that all I’d done was report to a group of people who delighted in lying to one another and to themselves. But there wasn’t even that much to be found in my new employment. It was an undertaking born of a few words. It had the logic of a fairy tale. I mentioned this to Halit Bey, but he was only interested in the problem of unsynchronized public clocks and cognizant of the fact that he wasn’t engaged in a major project at the time. Other people had put their faith in his idea. And just around then, a very important man missed the funeral of another very important man because the city clocks weren’t synchronized. Thereafter, in the space of ten days, a budget was earmarked to provide us with our reasonably well-furbished office space, and as if that were not enough, they undertook to supply us with any other office equipment we happened to lack. Could such a job really exist? What was its purpose? And why?

  The most confusing thing of all was that Halit Ayarcı was almost never to be found at our offices. If for no other reason, he could have stopped in more often because his presence alone would have made us more secure. And perhaps, had he graced us with his presence, he might have drummed up some work for us to do. But he rarely did; he was out of the picture almost entirely. He did no more than to call in now and then to see how we were getting on or to give us orders that seemed of little importance.

  But we were treated to continuous updates on the institute’s shiny future. Nermin Hanım was always babbling on about the new structure and the tremendous staff it would house. While I continued to view my days in our humble little office as somewhat absurd, she would ramble on and on about the new branches and departments and ideas her so-called uncle Halit Ayarcı had in store for us. I found it all rather disconcerting. I could not see our office even attempting an expansion along such lines. Better to remain as inconspicuous as was practical. The most sensible course would be for us to surface at the beginning of every month, just long enough to collect our salaries, and in the interim to remain invisible. But that’s not at all how it happened. After some time had passed, Halit Ayarcı began flooding us with draft versions of documents and letters to be sent all over the city, and he petitioned to have the office refurbished in a manner befitting its station, at the same time instructing us to order additional stationery. But there was more: he became so preoccupied with my attire that you might have thought he was outfitting me for the stage.

  One day, while dictating one of Halit Ayarcı’s drafts to Nermin Hanım, I nearly burst into tears of despair. The letter began by describing the Time Regulation Institute as something along the lines of “an invaluable institution” that had not yet been granted the status it deserved and went on to insist upon a reappraisal of the budget to give the institute sufficient funding to allow for a full staff to run it, as well as an accountant and an additional secretary.

  But how strange that three days later we received a response that, after tabling objections to our proposals on many different counts, stated that our situation would be taken into consideration. Not a day went by without a new shipment of furniture arriving at the doorstep of our humble little office. First they redid the linoleum floors, and then supplied me with my own telephone, as if the one only fifteen steps away from my desk wasn’t good enough. The following day we received half a dozen desk lamps. Then they replaced our desks. Halit Ayarcı received a first-class American desk, mine was only one notch less commanding, and Nermin Hanım’s was so finely varnished you would slide right off it. Halit Ayarcı knew exactly when all the new furnishings were due to arrive and gave instructions over the telephone as to where they should be placed. He explained to me just how I was to arrange my desk lamp, black writing pad, and penholder.

  All of this could mean one thing: without a supply department or some kind of warehouse, our office would eventually have to be liquidated and we’d all go hungry. I didn’t care that much if I was promoted to assistant manager or not, but I was keen to hold on to the salary that was the equivalent of three office boys’ combined. Just the thought that I might lose it was enough to drive me mad.

  Once I tried to convey these feelings to Halit Ayarcı over the phone, and after listening to all I had to say, he replied: “My dear Hayri Bey, we keep coming back to the same old point. Be a realist!”

  And he hung up.

  Naturally this harked back to what he had told me in Büyükdere, but this time he seemed on the verge of laughter. He called back an hour lat
er.

  “Hayri Bey,” he roared. “Still afraid of losing that little wage? Stop entertaining such nonsense and be realistic!”

  And he hung up on me again.

  I no longer concealed my concerns from Nermin Hanım. When she actually allowed me to speak, or rather to finish what I had to say, I tried to explain to her as best I could why this job had no future. But she had complete confidence in Halit Ayarcı.

  “Impossible!” she cried. “Uncle Halit’s never wrong. He’s a man of action. He’d never take on a job he didn’t completely believe in. You still don’t really know him.”

  “But why doesn’t he ever come to the office?”

  “He’ll come . . . But only when everything is in place. He’s going to Ankara tomorrow to discuss the project!”

  What else could I do but quietly pray that he wouldn’t actually explain anything to anyone.

  Perhaps my paranoia began to get to her, because Nermin Hanım began to worry too:

  “I really don’t need the money,” she said. “But I certainly don’t like the idea of shutting myself away at home again, right under my mother-in-law’s nose, strapped with all those household chores. She’s a good woman, but she never opens her mouth. She just scurries away. How can anyone live with such silence? But, you know, ever since I got this position my mother-in-law’s completely changed, and she’s doing all the housework herself.”