The Time Regulation Institute

by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

  It goes without saying that Selma was not just my lover. She was also my revenge against the monstrous thing called my past. It was thanks to her that I could turn to the dark days I’d left behind and say, “So there you have it! What have you got on me now? I am presently in the arms of the one person before whom I was so cruelly humiliated. What more could I ask for?” It was strangely pleasing to see my former boss so jealous, and it only added to my sense of well-being. This woman was the amulet who protected me from my past.

  Both Halit Ayarcı and I responded to Cemal Bey’s attack. In my written responses I assumed the air of a man unjustly treated. It could have happened to anyone. But I was the victim. The injustice was clear. I did not expect Cemal to furnish any proof of perjury or any evidence of an ethical breach. I was a man with inherently good moral values, whom he had dismissed after accepting that he couldn’t corrupt me. In my second statement, I continued as I had begun, assuming the same victimized tone, but this time taking care to disclose inside information about his company. Halit Ayarcı was a little more vindictive in his meetings with the press. And in the official statement released by the Clock Lover’s Society, the fury was positively volcanic. But Cemal Bey was undeterred; he carried on with his offensive. We needed something else, something new, something that would erase all memory of the matter and absolve us forever. I cannot remember a time I cudgeled my brains more desperately. But it was hopeless: neither Halit Ayarcı nor I could come up with any idea that might swing public opinion back in our favor. We were floundering in a void. We could not manage a single step beyond the ordinary.

  Meanwhile Cemal Bey was paying close attention to my affair with Selma. Wherever we met, we almost always received a telephone call from him. And Pakize received countless anonymous letters.

  It was just around this time that I thought up the cash-punishment system I brought to the reader’s attention at the beginning of these memoirs; the idea came to me one evening, while I was watching Halit Ayarcı play a round of backgammon with my wife, but when I first blurted it out, it was only to underline the hopeless intractability of our predicament.

  “I’ve racked my brains and that’s all I could come up with. Could our situation be any worse?”

  But Halit Ayarcı had already thrown down the dice and was on his feet. There was a strange stillness in his eyes.

  “Now, just say that again, will you?”

  And before I could finish, he threw his arms around my wife.

  “We’re saved! A clear victory, Hayri Bey—a resounding triumph,” he cried.

  Three days later we had finalized our cash-fine program, complete with an elaborate system of bonuses, lotteries, time agreements, and reductions. Halit Ayarcı announced my innovation in the Hollywood method par excellence, and within a few weeks everyone had forgotten all about Ahmet the Timely, and the Time Regulation Institute was garnering unprecedented attention and growing steadily in prestige. On the heels of this new success, the Clock Lover’s Society succeeded in setting up Time Regulation Teams in the villages across the country. The number of Time Regulation Stations had already multiplied. The city was ours. An army of young girls and boys donning uniforms designed by Sabriye Hanım and wearing our rosettes on their collars were soon to be found throughout the city, to the delight of all who saw them.

  And so everything was back on track. Once again we were the champions of the day, more powerful than ever before. I was indulged like an uncle. With every passing day, I received more praise for my eccentric past, my knack for invention, and my sincerity. There wasn’t a circle of society that didn’t seek my company. And to be honest, I wasn’t shy in making the best of my newly acquired fame. Everything was designed to complement this success: my spectacles, my umbrella, my hat that never sat just right on my head, my suits that were a little too baggy, my fatherly airs—even the prayer beads I twirled in my fingers. Wherever I went, I was the center of attention; I was quizzed on every topic under the sun. I was loved because I lived in a manner that never disturbed the balance set by public opinion.

  Yet Cemal Bey still dogged my life, as ever the ambassador of my ill fortune. One day he would rear his ugly head, and it would be all over. When I told Halit Ayarcı of my fears, he lost his temper and reprimanded me:

  “You’re only thinking this way because you don’t really believe in your work. If a person undertakes a job for no reason other than personal gain, and if he thinks of nothing else, well then, surely he will blame himself in the end, just like you are doing now!”

  “That’s all fine and well, but isn’t this a little different?”

  “No, not at all. If you didn’t have this worm gnawing inside you, then you wouldn’t fear Cemal Bey or anyone else, for that matter. Your fear stems from your lack of self-confidence. You’re a cynic. And you’re only working for money, pursuing your own personal happiness and nothing more. Weren’t you this way when the institute first opened? Weren’t you afraid of your office boy’s wages being cut? Didn’t you take every opportunity to remind me?”

  Once the dust had settled, my good benefactor reverted to his usual tone, speaking now of our lofty ideals. He wasn’t entirely incorrect. He was the play’s producer. He had to act accordingly.

  But for me it was a different matter. Cemal Bey was an ache from the past. He was part of my life; waiting inside me, ready to lash out at a moment’s notice, like a cancer in remission.

  VIII

  And that’s just what happened. My final encounter with Cemal Bey caught me entirely off guard. Yet this last surprise encounter didn’t spell the end for the institute, nor did it generate any undue financial strain or alter my station. Nevertheless both Selma and I remained profoundly affected for many months to come.

  I saw the story the moment I picked up the morning paper: Nevzat Hanım and Cemal Bey had been murdered by Zeynep Hanım’s ex-husband, Tayfur Bey, who, following the double murder, took his own life. The suicide note revealed the mystery Sabriye Hanım had been so assiduously, if also hesitantly, trying to solve for all those years. Sabriye Hanım was right. Contrary to public opinion, Zeynep Hanım hadn’t committed suicide; she’d been murdered by her own husband, Tayfur Bey, who was desperately in love with Nevzat Hanım. The police had just discovered the diary he had been keeping for all those years, or so they said.

  As tragic as these three deaths were, they carried another significance for me. Cemal Bey had been a repulsive, temperamental, supercilious, and utterly unbearable man; wherever the beast went he acquired a host of new enemies; he scrambled in and out of human society like a scorpion wagging its poisoned tail; but he died the hero of a love story, an ending that no one on earth deserved less than he. It was so absurd, so needlessly preposterous. Perhaps fortune had arranged this fate just to mock him, to extract a revenge for his pride at presuming himself above human frailty, for his unshakable confidence and self-possession. It was impossible to think of Cemal Bey in love, or Cemal Bey dying for love, or even knowingly playing a part in such a love affair. But I know he would have been the first to laugh at this overblown drama, had he not known it was at his expense. “Me?” he would say, pursing his lips. “Impossible!” Cemal liked to squeeze his victims in his tongs, drive them in his filthy and invisible yokes, poison them with his serpent’s tail. He would have it no other way. Yet the manner of his death had so changed his public persona that even those who had known him were easily deceived. And as for those who had never known him, who had only come to know him through the story of his death, he lived on in their minds as a man of pure fiction. And so it was that the mysterious wheel of fortune allowed Cemal to die a well-respected man, and a generous saint of the community, at least in the minds of those who first made his acquaintance when reading in the papers of his death. Murder, of course, is a terrible fate. Yet if indeed it was Cemal’s inescapable fate to be felled by the hand of another man, well then, he should have been killed by the first
person he came upon for no other reason, save the fact that he was Cemal Bey: with his stub of a nose and that narrow, wrinkled brow above his plucked and polished face, and his cloying, stuffy voice, and those little glimmering raptor’s eyes darting about the room; yes, by rights he should have been struck down long ago. But that’s not how it happened. Somehow he managed to weasel his way into a tragic novel, lurching from one misunderstanding to the next, to become the cause of the untimely murder of a lovely, bashful, but unhappy woman who had never managed to learn how to express herself. This simply didn’t make sense. It boggled my mind when I considered how lucky this man had been in the manner of his death, a man who had, when he was only five, profited from the inattention of his mother during a visit to a friend, plucked fish out of an aquarium, poking out their eyes with his fingers before tossing them back into the tank, only to laugh as he watched them suffer. This was Cemal’s life in its essence. In adulthood he had never actually poked out anyone’s eyes, but he might as well have. In one way or another, he manipulated everyone. Selma only really started to live after she left him; she was so very beautiful, but her years with him were spent in vain. The day Cemal died, the well-mannered and well-versed lawyer Nail Bey was instantly cured of asthma. Nail Bey never told anyone what had happened between him and Cemal Bey. Even our mutual friend Sabriye Hanım, ever alert to such affairs—indeed I had learned quite a lot about Selma Hanım from her, never asking her directly, of course, but by eavesdropping on various conversations—knew nothing. But on the day we paid our last respects to Cemal Bey, Nail Bey and I found ourselves in the same car, and I found him a changed man. A man reborn! At one point he turned to me and said, “I’m so ashamed!”

  The perpetrator of these reprehensible deeds had imposed himself on a young and beautiful woman who should have shunned him, and now he had been embraced as a tragic hero by hundreds of thousands of simple souls who had never known the man, who knew nothing of romance either. He had played his part in Nevzat’s death, just as he had in Selma’s tumultuous life.

  I’d seen Tayfur Bey once or twice. He struck me as cold and calculating, and inclined to self-reliance. His urbane manner might have concealed any number of character flaws. He was clearly capable of murder, given the chance to prepare. He hadn’t seemed the kind of murderer who could have hacked his victim into pieces without difficulty. Yet he’d done such a job on Cemal Bey as to render him virtually unrecognizable. Many thought it strange that Cemal Bey had been stabbed mostly in the face. But this made perfect sense to me. Although he’d been sufficiently clearheaded to leave behind a detailed confession, the killer had clearly lost his mind at the sight of that horrific face. Indeed he said as much in his suicide note.

  Cemal Bey was a man who forced himself on people. And that was just how he had insinuated himself into Nevzat Hanım’s life. He was a man who sought his death in other people. But Nevzat Hanım’s life story was truly absurd, enough to drive a man to perdition.

  Could anything be more natural than for our good friend Ekrem the Poet to nurture a love for this quiet woman who lived cloistered in her own little world? But he played no part in the Nevzat Hanım affair. For in all her life Nevzat Hanım had only ever really known one man, her husband. As I mentioned earlier, the woman’s very face had shut down on the day her husband died. Her earlier life had been plagued by Tayfur Bey, who was so bent on marrying her, and so zealous in his efforts to remove all obstacles, that he’d even murdered his wife. And then, to make a bad business worse, Cemal Bey, who was somehow privy to all this, began pestering the poor woman too.

  Nevzat Hanım had spent her entire life oppressed by those around her. Jealousy, love, obsession, egotism, persecution, womanizing of the basest sort, paranoid possessiveness, and compulsive curiosity—she excited the soul’s most cruel passions, reducing this blameless creature to a shadow of herself. Smothered by attention, she was understood by no one.

  In childhood her temperamental and less-attractive older sister had envied Nevzat Hanım. After this sister was married off—their father was rather wealthy—Nevzat Hanım at last had room to breathe, but almost at once her own future husband, Salim Bey, entered the picture. A feeble, cowardly, arrogant, and even irascible man of no distinction, he, having convinced himself that he was in love, had managed, after years of stubborn insistence, to convince the innocent girl to love him in return, or rather he had contrived to convince her that she was in love. But by the second week of their marriage, the young woman had already discovered that she had never loved her husband and never would. Salim Bey was a man devoid of character and, above all else, mean. The truth was that he had never really loved his wife either. Indeed for him love was nothing more than a needling obsession. He was concerned only with possession. There were times when he might have experienced something like love, but only if he feared losing his possession. In spite of all this, he had a rather lofty opinion of himself. As is often the case with those who lack a clear sense of themselves, he lived in the world but was not of it. When Nevzat came to see their marriage as untenable and suggested divorce, his response was clear: “Out of the question! What will my friends and everyone else say? Do you want to make me a fool in their eyes? In any case, how could I ever live without you?” It went on like this for three years. Then one night Nevzat Hanım’s father, who had been suffering from serious heart problems, died of a heart attack. The man had loved his daughter deeply, and he had known she was unhappy. According to what her family said afterward, the two had spoken briefly a few days before his death, and it was agreed that it was the daughter’s unhappy marriage that had caused the father’s fatal attack. Poor Nevzat Hanım was thus caught in the crossfire. In the third year of this risible and indeed unconscionable marriage (in which she had remained only out of fear of what her husband’s relatives, her neighbors, her friends, even the doorman of their apartment building might say), Salim Bey died in active military service, in an accident that was no one’s fault but his own. It was rather unfortunate for Nevzat Hanım in that—three days before her husband died before his entire battalion as a result of his own cowardice—she received a letter from the front, in which this man who had taken no pleasure from his life with her, who understood neither women nor love, who showed his wife affection only in response to jealousy or fear, confessed to despair and thoughts of suicide. But those who had witnessed the accident said it couldn’t have been premeditated. The horse Salim Bey had been riding at the time was one of the calmest training horses, not known for being particularly skittish. If Salim Bey hadn’t been so frightened when the horse jumped, it wouldn’t have bucked so furiously. Had Salim just allowed himself to fall, the animal would certainly have calmed down. Another rider even tested the horse and found that it quickly stopped bucking if the rider kept calm. At the end of the day, Salim Bey’s accident was not an accident: he had provoked the animal through fear and lack of experience.

  But the fiction of the accident persisted. While Nevzat Hanım, mindful of his last letter, remained convinced that her husband had committed suicide, Salim Bey’s relatives were of the same opinion, as they too had received disturbing letters from the front. But these were quite different in tone; his complaints were of another kind: for in them he named the very source of his discontent.

  To make matters worse, Salim’s mother, who had never loved her son, finding him spineless, tightfisted, and altogether useless, took advantage of his death and moved into the widow’s home. It nearly gave Nevzat Hanım a nervous breakdown. It wasn’t long before Zeynep Hanım—already terribly distraught—suspected that her husband, Tayfur Bey, was in love with Nevzat Hanım. Indeed hopelessly in love with Nevzat Hanım, Tayfur Bey was driven to murder his wife, Zeynep, in the hope of marrying Nevzat Hanım, and, stranger still, he confessed his crime to his beloved, in the belief that she would be left with no choice but to marry him. So poor Nevzat Hanım had to bear the burden of three deaths, of which one was her own father’s. We had alw
ays thought of Nevzat Hanım as a woman undone by the oppressive weight of her dreams, when in fact, beneath her quiet and well-meaning smile, she’d been struggling with a bitter fate. Though it was no fault of hers that people died, and even killed one another, she was burdened with the blame. If only she’d had the wherewithal to exercise her will, if only she’d been a bit more selfish or better at defending herself, she might have found the strength to cast off her burdens and find a modicum of freedom. No one understood why she’d not told the police the truth about Zeynep Hanım’s suicide.

  When I first heard the news, I could not help but think of something my daughter had said to me, something I in fact mentioned earlier in these memoirs. When struggling to understand the madness that had descended on our home, she had mourned the fact that we were the kind of people who bore the blame. And that, I believe, is the crux of the matter. Nevzat Hanım was the kind of person who blamed herself for things she never did. Perhaps this came from her strict family upbringing or a childhood discolored by her elder sister’s jealousy. According to Sabriye Hanım, it had all begun with her sister staging a suicide attempt when they were young. At no point in her life had she been properly protected.

  But more than anything else, she blamed herself for Salim’s death. It was his death that had drawn her to spiritualism. Murat was but a fiction, conjured up by a mother-in-law who did everything in her power to isolate the young widow. It was she who had answered the phone as Murat. In fact I’d been quite startled by her strident and oddly familiar voice on the occasion of our first meeting. Trumpets and foghorns were but remote figments of the auditory imagination next to this awesome voice. Throughout my life I have seen how lies are propped up, not only by those directly involved with them, but also by people with no particular reason to perpetuate them, which is why Sabriye Hanım’s explanation of the affair didn’t surprise me at all.