The Time Regulation Institute

by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

  Halit Ayarcı was silent for several minutes. I clasped my fingers around the watch as if it were the key to my fate. Indeed I was no longer even looking at it.

  Meanwhile the argument at the table beside us gathered force, and there was a sudden outburst of punching and slapping before chairs flew up to smash into each other in midair. With his face a bright shade of yellow and his hair standing on end and his Adam’s apple twitching like an eagle eyeing its prey, my future son-in-law lashed out at the men who were restraining him as he sputtered every curse in the book.

  “Good God,” I thought to myself. “Good God, he’s going to kill someone, and maybe not just one. You can tell just looking at the brute’s eyes, at his teeth. He’ll be hanged or get life at the very least! Dear God, it’s hopeless. My daughter will be left with no choice, no choice but to live with us forever.”

  How I regretted having disregarded, disdained, and even toyed with the golden chance that had fallen on our doorstep.

  “You never liked the man? Well, then leave it to God. He will have the brute in prison for the night and hanged before the week is out. Your daughter will become a widow before she ever marries. The poor girl, God knows she’ll be devastated when she hears the news.”

  How could I have predicted the punishment I would suffer for the thoughts that had flitted through my mind only minutes before this fracas? But such is the lot of the poor. The office charged with our affairs in the palace of the preordained never errs, never neglects its responsibilities. We allow ourselves to be distracted by a scenario that is as unlikely as it is innocent, and we are made to pay for it; we dream vaguely of violence and repudiation and are called to account.

  On this occasion, it seemed my future son-in-law had decided to refute the sciences of physiognomy and phrenology. No one was killed. In fact, he never managed to land the slightest blow. On the contrary, he received two resounding slaps to the face before I could ask his attackers to desist for the love of God. Then a premium-sized fist tickled his upper lip before one of the sturdier wooden chairs in the coffeehouse landed flat on his head. Later a progression of relentless kicks unhinged him from the earth, sending him soaring into the air before he collapsed in a heap on the pavement just outside the front door. Dear Lord, what a joy to behold!

  Oh yes, it was truly exhilarating. First of all, he didn’t kill anyone. So he wouldn’t be imprisoned or hanged. Naturally, if my daughter hadn’t been involved in the matter, I’d not have felt the slightest remorse. But she was involved. He wasn’t to be hanged or imprisoned, and so I could, if I wished, still accept him as my son-in-law.

  Then there was the thrashing he’d received before my very eyes. No longer would he be able to strut about in front of me like a rooster. Now when he said, “What’s up, old geezer?” I could volley back with “Not too bad, Ismail, my boy. I was just at the coffeehouse. You know, the one where you got thoroughly trounced just the other day? I’m just coming back from there.” Or I’d just shout, “The coffeehouse! The chair! Sabri the proprietor!” and carry on my way. Or better yet, “Ismail, my lamb, have you reimbursed the coffeehouse for that chair? Goodness, my dear boy, you really must be more careful with such things. Your skull smashed it to bits, after all. That’s no fault of the proprietor, now is it? Why should Sabri suffer such a loss on your account?”

  There was a third reason to be happy. After his thrashing, Ismail would be out of commission for at least three days, and if nothing else, his mind would be far from the subject of marriage. That gave me time to think. Some people spend their lives making good use of time, but in my life it has always stuck a foot out in front of me. I have tripped over time.

  But why had I sat quietly through the pummeling? Why hadn’t I jumped up to applaud the people who had given the miserable brute his comeuppance? Why had I not kissed their foreheads?

  “You scoundrel,” I might have cried. “You cast your greedy eye on my pearl of a daughter and then you grin at me with such impertinence, stare at me so vacantly, like some moron. May God bless the hands that struck you!”

  Halit Ayarcı interrupted my musings.

  “Would they be able to fix it so quickly?”

  “An hour at the most. They’ll have to find the stone first and then remount it.”

  He turned to Dr. Ramiz.

  “Off we go then, Doctor! Let’s be off to settle this straightaway! And you, good sir, will have everything done in just the way you have described it to us. That is, of course, if it isn’t too much of an inconvenience. Then afterward we’ll spend some time together . . .”

  “But, sir, in such clothes . . .”

  It was not really because I was ashamed of being seen with them in such clothes that I objected. At the time I had no choice but to accept my sorry state and the clothes and possessions that came with it. Matters of honor, glory, and attire are of no consequence to a man who has—however fleetingly—considered giving his pearl of a daughter away to Ismail the Lame. I hesitated in the hope that they might pity me with a few liras if I stayed behind. All too often I’d been sent away from those places to which I had been so exuberantly invited and obliged to walk home by foot. But how could Halit Ayarcı have known what I was thinking at the time?

  “But what’s the problem with your clothing? People understand who you are from your face.”

  So he understood. I already knew that my fate was inscribed on my face. Allow me to say that Halit Ayarcı never considered my clothing: unlike all the others, Halit Ayarcı considered only my face.

  They hailed the first taxi they could find. I stepped toward the front door, as I planned to sit beside the driver; surely that was where I was expected to sit. But, taking me by the arm, Halit Ayarcı pulled me away and, opening the other door with his other hand, he seated me in the back of the car. He sat Dr. Ramiz down next to me and took the place beside him. What a strange man. Even his courtesy came in the form of an order—the man’s great girth gave a certain weight to his words, and he had no qualms about using his hands if necessary.

  How many years had passed since my last jaunt in a private car? It was a winter evening and I was taking Selma Hanım her ball gown; not a moment passed without my kissing and caressing the cardboard box that never left my lap; I might have been bearing the cloak of the Holy Prophet himself. That was perhaps the happiest night of my life. Selma Hanım invited me upstairs and offered me a coffee; after donning the gown for which I had searched high and low, from four o’clock to nine, she came and sat beside me. Cemal Bey was on a business trip, and Selma was waiting for the friends who would accompany her to the ball. She had never been so cordial: she had forgotten the distance between us. At one point she said, “Hayri, why don’t you come along too? It shouldn’t be any problem. Cemal Bey has so many suits . . . You’ll just have to shave.” Then, as if mindful of the panic in my eyes, she said, “Oh never mind, then, but on one condition: remember that I must attend this ball, and if my friends don’t show up, I shall have no choice but to go with you.” And I began to pray for her friends to come late, for them to not come at all, for them to come as soon as possible, for them to save me from the ache of ecstasy. That night I came to understand that there was more to Selma Hanım than just style, elegance, and a well-chosen dress; she was more than the height of grace and more than just an intoxicating flurry of laughter. That night I came to understand that she also had a body, a very fine female body, a ship that could take a man on the world’s most alluring cruise. Her back held more delights than a palatial mirror; her arms were like moonlit silver streams.

  Perhaps it was the delight of seeing my future son-in-law mangled before my eyes that had led me to revisit this rare moment of bliss.

  However hard I tried, I could not put the great thrashing out of my mind: the more I went over it, the more I recalled. There was a particular snort every time his nose suffered a blow that I am quite sure I will treasure for the rest
of my life. Only a nose as vile as his could have performed so well. I could not let my sweet memories of Selma Hanım distract me from this fortuitous beating and the bounties it had brought me. What might have happened had I not been in the coffeehouse to witness it? How differently life would have played itself out. Had I only read about his getting pulverized, or killed, in the paper, had someone from the neighborhood just relayed the event to me with disingenuous concern, while secretly relishing every detail, I would have said, “Oh, what a scoundrel,” and moved on. But now the memory of that day would, like Selma Hanım’s intoxicating compliments on that other night, stay with me forever. I could return to them whenever I liked, recalling the spot where each sweet blow had landed, and where he had collapsed on the floor, and in what position, and how he’d got up, his face smeared with blood, and how he’d again fallen, face first, onto the ground. And ah, how he looked at me when he finally left the coffeehouse—he knew just what I was thinking, the lousy wretch, the miserable cretin, the lowly brute. For I knew he had suffered far more at that moment than at any other during the entire affair. He was the sort of man who had come into this world to be punished. And the most devastating blow was to be trounced before my eyes. Humiliation coursed through every fiber of his being. The accursed scoundrel! How dare he take a fancy to my daughter? Had he no idea just how low he had sunk?

  Arriving in Beyazıt Square, I fished about in my pockets for my watch, as usual. But of course it wasn’t there. I’d sold it eight months earlier. I looked up at the clocks in the square. One had stopped at half past three and the other seemed to be racing like a train that had been running late since eleven o’clock the night before, desperately trying to get back on schedule by evening. Just to make conversation, I said, “These clocks never tell the correct time.”

  Having just cast off the memory of my future son-in-law like a dead snake, I felt comfortable in my own skin, so I added, “Do you know that no two city clocks ever tell the same time? If you like, just have a look at the clock in Eminönü, and then we’ll compare it with the one in Karaköy.”

  No one replied. Both men seemed to be daydreaming. I shrugged my shoulders. What did I care? I was no longer under any obligation to give Zehra to that brute. Nothing else mattered. But, dear God, however was I going to provide for her?

  To dispel my grief, I turned my thoughts back to the thrashing of Ismail the Lame, but to no avail; then I tried thinking about Selma Hanım, but that didn’t work either. The heaviness prevailed. Dr. Ramiz finally spoke when we reached Eminönü.

  “You’re absolutely right, my good man. A difference of twenty-five minutes.”

  In Karaköy, Halit Ayarcı added, “And here we’re half an hour ahead!”

  The watchmaker was a rich Armenian obsessed with faux politesse. There was no way you could look at the man without marveling at his shirtmaker, and what a barber! As for the shine on his shoes, the scoundrel clearly slept in his footwear. Upon seeing Halit Ayarcı, he greeted him in a splattering of French, but his words went unnoticed. Taking out his watch, Halit Ayarcı turned to me and said:

  “Would you kindly explain the matter to this gentleman, Hayri Bey?”

  Agop Horlogian betrayed both compassion and contempt as he inspected me from head to toe, finally settling his fascinated eyes on my shoes. Surely if I had presented myself to this man in any other circumstance, he would have dismissed me, without a moment’s hesitation, as a beggar.

  This was perhaps why I mustered my most imposing voice as I explained the condition of Halit Ayarcı’s watch.

  “First of all,” I said, “you’ve dismantled this watch most brutishly on three occasions. These watches are delicate mechanisms that cannot sustain such crude handling. Look at the back of this piece. This wasn’t made on a factory line. It was painstakingly crafted by hand! It’s a letter from one master craftsman to another, but clearly it wasn’t written for you!”

  And I pointed to the designs engraved on the inside of the front cover. Then I slowly pursed my lips and said: “It truly grieves me to see a craftsman’s place usurped by a merchant.”

  Oh Nuri Efendi, my saintly master, may you rest in peace. You should have seen the state of the poor man as he listened to me. The victory was yours. Hearing just one of your words of wisdom, Horlogian’s eyes were released from my shoes, as if he had suddenly grasped that they hadn’t come to see him all by themselves, that surely they must have a master; it had finally occurred to him that the miserable man standing before him must also have a head, even a face.

  No, I’ll never give my daughter to that hound!

  Having thanked him with an almost courteous smile for having remembered to look up at my face, I continued.

  “It seems your apprentices have misplaced this one particular stone while repairing the watch. So if you would attend to this . . .”

  Nervously rubbing his hands, Horlogian muttered something unintelligible, but by then I had lost all my patience.

  “You,” I cried, “will do what I say. Everything that I say! First you will demagnetize this timepiece.”

  Then I turned to Halit Ayarcı and said, “Once upon a time this kind of work wasn’t done for mere financial reward. It was done by those who were apprenticed to the trade and by people who truly loved the work.”

  I could almost hear Nuri Efendi’s voice echoing in my ear: “Bravo, my son.”

  Had I not been so racked with other worries at the time, had I not felt swept away on a sea of misadventures, with only five liras in my pocket to feed my family that night, I doubt I would have been so sharp with the watchmaker Horlogian. At one point I looked the poor man in the eye. I was ashamed of my behavior, but I thought to myself, “Let him get what he deserves. He’s not worried about finding food for dinner tonight . . .”

  By God, a man can be so snug behind a well-paid job. He can take on the entire world. Within a minute, Horlogian had pulled himself together. He could have handed us the watch and chased us out of his shop then and there.

  Instead we stayed for an hour and a half. And over that time the grace of God and the spiritual presence of my master allowed me to bestow upon the watch merchant a precise and highly constructive lesson in the maintenance of a timepiece. When he replaced the stone, reestablishing the correct weight so as not to disturb the mechanics of the watch, I paid particular attention; the man’s face was drenched in sweat.

  Finally I warned the merchant against using too much oil when working with timepieces of this caliber.

  “You’re not roasting an eggplant! You’re repairing a watch. Stop using this kind of oil! These days it’s easy to find very light bone oil.”

  Halit Ayarcı’s eyes were riveted on me the whole while. By the time we left the shop, Horlogian seemed to have forgotten his French. Feeling compelled to pay me a compliment, he asked, “Is the esteemed gentleman from Switzerland? Or perhaps just educated there?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “It’s just that you have such an impressive understanding of timepieces.”

  My answer was brief.

  “I love them,” I said, “very much.”

  Then I wished I hadn’t berated the fellow so harshly: he might have taken me on as an apprentice.

  Dr. Ramiz and Halit Ayarcı were engaged in a lively dispute at the shop entrance. Where would they go that evening? Or, rather, where would we go?

  Finally Halit Ayarcı announced, “Off we go then up the Bosphorus. And Hayri Efendi is to honor us with his presence. We’ll drink rakı together, won’t we, Beyefendi?”

  “That makes four,” I said to myself. “In just one hour I have been addressed as beyefendi four times. What’s more, Ismail the Lame was beaten to a pulp before my eyes. And perhaps for that very reason he would never again ask for my daughter’s hand in marriage. And then, after that, I had ruffled the feathers of one of Istanbul’s eminent watchmakers fo
r an hour and a half. And all this was happening to me. My family was at home, starving, and I was now riding in a car whose make I would never be able to divine, not even if it were mine. And to top it all off, we were on our way to Büyükdere to drink rakı.

  My last visit to Büyükdere had been to attend the funeral of a relative of Selma Hanım. I will never forget how exhausted I was that day. My devotion to this woman was such that I nearly carried the casket on my back all by myself. And by the end I was on the verge of throwing myself into the grave with the deceased. What people won’t do for love . . .

  My worst memory from that day was locking eyes with Cemal Bey; he was having a private laugh about the state I was in. He had pouted throughout the entire ceremony, as aggravated as if his shoe were pinching a painful corn on the bottom of his foot. His demeanor had set me so on edge that more than once I had considered shoving him into the grave as an escort to the deceased before making my escape. After which I would climb to the top of Hünkartepe and sing that folk song to the cool breeze, “My Lover at Sea.” Why not some other song? I don’t know. But naturally I’d done no such thing. To make matters worse, he’d asked me to take his arm on the way back, and I’d more or less had to carry the brute myself.

  “Why is it that the poor and the downtrodden always get beaten? Take Cemal Bey, no one would ever dare lay a finger on such a man.”

  I had picked up the habit of speaking to myself aloud. Dr. Ramiz turned to me with a teasing smile and said, “Again? What do you expect from the miserable man?”

  Then turning to Halit Ayarcı, he said, “Hayri Bey simply cannot stomach Cemal.”

  My face flushed to hear my secrets so baldly revealed, so I turned to the window.

  “He’s absolutely right!” Halit Ayarcı said. Then he turned to face me. “It’s not like I haven’t thought about doing it once or twice myself. But in the end I was a bit frightened by the thought of it. I realized that once I started I’d never stop. Just imagine . . . If someone actually planted a slap on that face, he wouldn’t be able to stop at just one!”