Halit Bey didn’t even bother to listen. It was his way or the highway.
“We’ve no need for foreigners. This isn’t the kind of work they would understand. We shall train our own specialists from our own people.”
He spoke with such decisiveness, showing no regard for what the mayor or anyone else might think. What if the mayor wanted but a few foreign specialists to set an example? Had I been in his shoes, I would have acted more cautiously; I would have given due consideration to the mayor’s ideas. And I’d have continued to mull them over afterward. Whenever I am engaged in official proceedings, I acquire a tired and bedraggled look and become evasive, allowing my interlocutor his full say on the matter and deciding for myself later on, because in such situations the actual decision isn’t what really matters but, rather, how people shape it. Man is not a noble thing for naught.
“I’m of the same mind. But will the public place sufficient trust in us? We’ve become so dependent on foreign specialization that—”
“And just for that very reason we shall not include them. What have we become? Must we learn everything from them? Will the young boys of our country ever attain positions of any real import? Halit Bey’s system has promised us so much. We shall see this to the very end. And the public will soon see that we do.”
The mayor clapped his hands and cried:
“Now, here’s where I disagree. For I am no longer of an age when I can relish things that make life any more difficult than it need be.”
Ever magnanimous and realistic, Halit Bey chose not to take the comment personally.
“If only we could be sure of their making a real difference,” the mayor continued, “we might just be willing to make sacrifices . . .”
Halit Ayarcı suddenly became stern:
“No, sir. Our own people must train our personnel. Did we march all the way to the gates of Vienna with foreign specialists? In those days everyone was a specialist, because we had faith in ourselves.”
Ah, such lofty language, such irrefutable analogies! Whatever could the mayor say in the face of Süleyman the Magnificent and his army of who knows how many hundreds of thousands, not to mention their armor, their cannons, their guns and spears? His only hope was a proud retreat.
“Yes, the very heart of the matter.”
“In fact we have many people. Hayri Bey has just completed the list.”
The mayor still seemed to have his hesitations.
“It’s just that, as we all know, in these kinds of affairs . . . To find such a diverse staff so suddenly . . . I mean, people will gossip and soon they’ll claim favoritism.”
Halit Bey dismissed his fears with a simple wave of his hand:
“We’ve already thought of that. Unknown entities and applicants without proper references shall be refused admittance to the institute. In this respect our principles are quite sound. Half our staff will be made up of people from our own families and people we know personally. And the other half will come to us on the recommendation of esteemed individuals in whom we have complete trust. Thus we will nip all gossip in the bud. Each and every employee will enjoy a public guarantee.”
The mayor seemed quite pleased with all this.
“I had never thought of this before. You do indeed find all the shortcuts, Halit Bey. This principle will clear a good many obstacles. This means, then, that you will have an entrance exam?”
“Oh no, no such thing.”
“A diploma of sorts?”
“Oh no, sir, nothing of the sort. Those are the requirements for run-of-the-mill civil servants, whereas this line of work delves into life itself. We need specialists, not civil servants. And by taking this route, we can extricate ourselves from the legal requirements of pay scales.”
As they both nodded, they looked meaningfully into each other’s eyes.
The mayor paused for a moment. He had more to say.
“You have presented me with a flawless system, and I simply have no objection.”
Halit Ayarcı flashed a modest smile. “Thanks to you, we have been able to make the necessary preparations.”
“In that case we must make due preparations on our end, which means finding you qualified people.”
“I was going to ask you the very same. It’s just that for now let’s try not to generate false hopes.”
“Quite true, yes, you’re right indeed.”
Halit Ayarcı once again looked down at the notebook he was still holding. Just then I took the opportunity to stand up, as I wanted to see just what was in Halit Ayarcı’s miraculous notebook. Apart from a few figures, I saw only a few block letters.
“Eventually we’ll need typists and office boys, and later on controllers and suchlike, to see to secondary office affairs. But we shall appoint these people as and when we need them, and only after we have established our permanent staff. What we do need at once is another secretary. That will be our first concern.”
Then he turned to me:
“Perhaps your own Zehra Hanım would accept the position? There would of course be a modest remuneration. She’d feel quite at home at the institute. It would be something like a second home to her.”
Then he turned to the mayor:
“Zehra Hanım is Hayri Bey’s daughter.”
In the face of this sound evidence and support, the mayor had but one reply:
“May God grant it so!”
Three days later Zehra began work at the Time Regulation Institute, under the supervision of Nermin Hanım—meaning she came to the office with her handbag full of toiletries and the wool she would use to knit Halit Bey a thank-you sweater.
But allow me to add that, within just a few years, Halit Ayarcı came to own what may be the most extravagant sweater collection the world has ever known. There was hardly a typist in the office who hadn’t knitted him one or two. The most beautiful were undoubtedly those made by Nermin Hanım; they were genuine masterpieces: replete with all the colors of an arc-en-ciel and adorned with motifs suggesting timepieces, they sparkled like crystal in sunlight.
The mayor now returned rather abruptly to a previous point, asking if we genuinely needed a head of office operations. He was really quite pleased that we had sacrificed the position of administrative head. If we were to make this additional sacrifice, he would be entirely satisfied.
“I have always been sensitive to such particulars. Later on you’ll be able to promote someone from the auxiliary staff. And the name itself is rather unseemly: head of office operations. In fact it’s rather unfortunate to have to besmirch the institute with such a name. This is an era of pure and unadulterated Turkish.”
Halit Bey seemed to me to have been outplayed by this last objection.
“Well if you say so, sir . . .”
The poor mayor seemed as delighted as a child to have scored a victory in the name of the public good. Then suddenly he remembered:
“Naturally you’ll be submitting a memorandum of justification.”
Halit Ayarcı smiled:
“Don’t worry about that. It’s long since prepared. We’ve been working on this for the last two months. Just the other night I went over it once again with Hayri Bey. This morning I made a few alterations before consulting you, but they are really not so important, one or two minor points, and then I will send it on to you.”
As he uttered these final words, he looked in my direction.
“If you like, I could just go over the main points, or better yet I’ll read them to you.”
And he made a motion to retrieve something from his jacket’s inner pocket.
A glum expression settled on the mayor’s face.
“By all means,” he said.
And he closed his eyes as if surrendering to whatever torment was in store for him. But the mayor was just as clever as Halit Ayarcı and not one to be taken off guar
d. So with a glance at his watch he suddenly leapt to his feet and cried:
“Oh my, it’s lunchtime. Why not leave that for some other time. We’ve achieved so much today already as it is.”
Then he looked at all of us.
“We’ll all eat together, won’t we?”
Nermin Hanım and I both protested and Halit Ayarcı said:
“They’re fine. Who knows what Nermin Hanım has brought in today for lunch. As I mentioned before, she’s a wonderful housewife.”
He was right. There wasn’t anything the poor woman’s mother-in-law wouldn’t do to ensure Nermin Hanım’s comfort at the office, sacrificing any amount of money or time just so she wouldn’t have to endure her nattering on all day long at home. Dervis Efendi went to their home every day around eleven in the morning and returned with ample provisions.
Upon leaving the office with Halit Bey, the mayor paused at the door and asked me to think a little more about the future staff:
“It’s a good thing we cut those two management positions. We might be able to cut even more!”
Halit Bey answered on my behalf:
“Hayri Bey’s even worse than I am, sir. I might be willing to make the slight cut here or there, but as the primary specialist in the institute I don’t think he would be ready to sacrifice much more.”
Like a baby swallow on its first flight, I leapt into the conversation:
“In an enterprise like ours, the best approach is the one that achieves the highest efficiency.”
Oh my Lord, if only I could tell you how much I longed to be facing a mirror at just that moment, to catch a glimpse of my hungry reflection. For the first time—yes, perhaps for the first time in all of my life—I had uttered words of true importance.
They left the office arm in arm. Nermin Hanım and I escorted them as far as the stairwell, where, for the last time, the mayor extended his thanks to us both.
Having returned to the office, I sat down, took my head in my hands, and set about rubbing the top of it with great vigor. I had been doing this ever since our famous night in Büyükdere. I felt as if I’d been walking on my hands ever since, with my two feet waving in the air; everything seemed upside down, obeying a logic I did not recognize.
Nermin Hanım was entirely charmed.
“Isn’t the mayor just the most delightful creature? Once I finish this sweater for Uncle Halit, I’ll start working on one for him.”
Before I could come up with an apposite reply, Dervis Efendi stepped in, holding an enormous tray of food.
And so it was that I came to understand why the institute was a success and how its staff was to be organized. But when it came to the organization of our statistical studies, and in particular the graphic representation of such studies, I was quite the tyrant. It took Halit Ayarcı no more than three or four days to fill in the gaps. I found him, one morning, working in front of my desk. He’d taken off his jacket and hung it on the chair behind him. He’d rolled up his sleeves and was leaning over a large and almost completed chart. You could see from his face and shoulders that he was engrossed in the work at hand. I went over to him and said:
“May your work come easily, Beyefendi.”
Without looking up at me, he replied:
“Yes, that’s it! The regulation of time will always vary according to occupation. For example, just have a look here: laborers, menial workers, civil servants, and clerics are more exacting in their regulation of time, and teachers are the same, whereas businessmen, housewives, and in particular servants—in other words, those who in fact don’t really work, which is to say, those with no work apart from their actual work . . .”
I was baffled by this last expression: “those with no work apart from their actual work.”
“In other words, those people who don’t do anything save the work they have been instructed to do, or, to put it another way, those who devote all their time to one particular job. For example, a woman who knows how to read and write and who enjoys music will feel the need to finish with her domestic duties quickly, because she has other things to do. So for such a person time is a valuable commodity; the same goes for a housewife who works outside her home, as well as for servants who work day shifts, but as for the others, the concept of time is less pronounced.”
Halit Ayarcı bent over his diagram.
“The colors are wonderful, aren’t they? Nermin Hanım did them. I explained the method to her, and she prepared all this in just one night. Now it’s up to me to find an occupation for every colored column.”
This was perhaps the strangest thing I had ever heard or seen.
I tried to object:
“But, sir,” I said, “shouldn’t this be done in just the opposite way? That is to say, first a survey is conducted, and then the figures, or rather the results, are collected. Then columns that represent these results are arranged accordingly. At least that’s as much as I know about—”
Halit Ayarcı looked at me as if for the first time.
“The old method,” he said. “Obsolete and absurd, and it gobbles up a terrible amount of time, offering no conclusive evidence. This method is far more reliable. Here the margin of error is reduced as there’s no possibility for any verification. For example, have a closer look at this little yellow column between the red one and the purple. It’s shorter than all the others. Nermin Hanım may not have consciously considered this, but she made it this way all the same. And so there must be a reason. I asked her about it this morning, and she told me that she really didn’t know, and that it just came to her like that. So it was a flash of inspiration. And inspiration is never wrong. So then it falls to me to assign a function to this column, and I’ve been racking my brains for half an hour trying to do precisely that: I cannot imagine a mathematical equation capable of uncovering a more suitable occupation than the one that will eventually emerge from my cudgeled brain. Numbers are deceptive. They lead us to absurd and faulty results. In any case, it’s impossible to count anything properly. I’d believe in statistics if human beings were one-dimensional. But humans are complex beings, forever in a state of flux. And if that’s the case, then why get bogged down in tasks so arduous? I’m setting aside this yellow column for patients with grave illnesses, as they are less concerned with the regulation of time. The fact that it is six times smaller than the columns next to it attests to this discrepancy. And this single black line shows that the dead are no longer concerned with time.”
“Yes, I see—but is it really necessary to include that in the diagram? It seems only natural . . .”
“I believe so. In fact it is vital that we include it in this diagram. If we don’t, how will we teach the public to understand that true consciousness in a human being derives from the relationship between timepieces and time? But how strange, it’s as if you’ve forgotten the very reason our institute was established. We are challenging the order of society itself. We are here to serve the common good. Or did you assume I haven’t got anything better to do?”
“I don’t know about you, but for me there’s nothing more important. And never has been. Of this I am convinced.”
He made a few final changes on the chart and then turned to me.
“Forget about such questions. You’ll get used to these things in time. One day they’ll be like second nature. What you said to the mayor the other day was entirely and absolutely wonderful.”
“Oh, but it was what you said that was truly admirable.”
“We’re old friends. We went to school together and we’ve been close ever since.”
“It’s just that . . .”
“Yes?”
“That whole discussion about our ‘success’ rather surprised me. We haven’t done anything yet!”
“Well, you’re wrong about that, Hayri Bey. Just to start is success in itself. Think about it: we have established ourselves in this l
ittle office, and we have managed with these conditions, sacrificing ourselves to do this vital work. Is this not success?”
Suddenly he stopped; looking me directly in the eye, he asked, “Hayri Bey, don’t you believe in what we’re doing?”
I glanced at the personal effects I had arranged around the edge of my desk. I thought it might be time for me to collect myself and my things and leave. When he realized what I was thinking, he smiled as if to reassure me.
“Don’t worry. I don’t intend to let you go. There’s still so much work waiting for us at the institute. But still I’d like to know why—why don’t you believe in what we’re doing?”
“It’s just that we don’t seem to be engaged in meaningful activity.”
“What do you mean by meaningful? Are the meanings we share not plucked from the air at a moment’s notice? Take a porter, for example. There’s a piece of furniture, and he has to carry it from one place to another.”
“Is that all?”
“But to your mind, or rather your logic, everything and anything can be refuted! Thinking about any kind work for ten minutes, no five, even three, can render it utterly absurd. You need but ponder something closely to extract it from any system of logic.”
For more than a moment he was lost in thought. Then he leaned back over his diagram. Then he got up to have a look at the chart from a distance. Wheeling around to face me, he declared:
“My good man, first there was man and then work. Work was created by man to be executed by man. And we have created this. Are you suggesting that because no one ever thought of such a thing before, or approached the idea in such a way, our endeavor cannot be construed as meaningful work? We are indeed engaged in work, and work that is vital. Work is a matter of mastering one’s time, knowing how to use it. We are paving the way for such a philosophy. We’ll give our people a consciousness of time. We’ll create a whole new collection of adages and ideas, and spread them all over the country. We shall declare that man is first and foremost a creature who works, and that work itself is time. Is this not a constructive thing to do?”
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