Ahmet Tanpinar - The Time Regulation Institute

Every year Nuri Efendi published an almanac. Toward the end of November, he would begin compiling the material, transferring a large part of the almanac from the previous year, so by the middle of February it would be ready for me to take to the printer in Nuruosmaniye. I would watch in awe as the work unfolded before my very eyes: the months from both Arabic and Gregorian calendars; other divisions of time and years, from elsewhere, that were older than the seasons to which they were respectively aligned; the solar and lunar eclipses; the meticulously calculated times for morning, noon, afternoon, sunset, and evening prayers; the great storms and the seasonal winds, the latter, according to his calculations, no less relevant than the former; the solstices; the days scheduled to be bitterly cold or unbearably hot. Dream after dream came to life from his brass inkpot as he sat on his low divan in the small room beside the mosque, a skullcap on his head and a reed in his hand; he would line up his calculations like little grains of rice on the scrolls propped up on his right knee, and they all swirled together in a corner of the room where the light was most dim and the sound of all the watches and clocks was most concentrated, as if waiting for their time to rule the world.

On days when he was working on his almanac, I would lose myself in a mysterious haze as I watched the miracle unfold. Knowing that the previous year’s almanac had been similarly elaborated, and that the accumulated work would embrace all the various stages of our lives, I felt myself bathed in a light born of its creator’s will, in a world rearranged by his very hand, as the passionate connection I felt to my late master was infused with a little fear.

VI

Among those who came to visit Nuri Efendi were Seyit Lutfullah the Mad, who lived like an owl in a dilapidated medrese on the hill between Vefa and Küçükpazar; Abdüsselam Bey, a Tunisian aristocrat who indulged in an extravagant lifestyle in an enormous villa with a broad ocher facade, near the Burmalı Mescit and just below the Sehzade Mosque; the hunter Nasit Bey, who lived behind the Halveti dervish lodge in Hırkaiserif; and the pharmacist Aristidi Efendi, a Christian of modest repute who managed his apothecary in the largely Muslim neighborhood of Vezneciler.

Abdüsselam Bey was a wealthy, exuberant man whose entire tribe lived with him in his villa of some twenty or thirty rooms. The house had an uncanny way of trapping anyone who had the misfortune of being born there and many, it seems, who merely set foot inside. This old Istanbul aristocrat, so distinguished and refined in his starched white shirts, had stuffed his vast mansion with relatives and servants from every corner of the Ottoman Empire: the in-laws, young brides and grooms, countless children, ancient maternal and paternal aunts, youthful nephews and nieces, pages, and at least a dozen female slaves. At my father’s insistence, my mother visited the lady of the house on several occasions and each time returned home exhausted and exasperated, her head still reeling from the ordeal. Once, when I was very young, I tagged along.

I shall never forget that day, which I spent dazed and bewildered in a throng of nearly twenty women, young and old (and just as many children), dressed in extravagant headdresses, petticoats, gowns of white silk, and low-cut lace blouses whose sleeves billowed down to their wrists, finishing with ornaments and gently undulating lace fringes. Although the house looked infinite from the outside, the people inside it lived virtually on top of one another. And for all the domestic confusion, there was no denying that we were in distinguished company. Abdüsselam’s first wife was a close relative of the bey of Tunis and a direct descendent of the Serif line. His second wife was an elegant Circassian who had served in the Ottoman palace and was said to have once been intimate with Sultan Abdülhamid. The wife of one of Abdüsselam’s many brothers was from the eminent Hidiv family, and the wife of another was the daughter of the warlord of a far-flung Caucasian tribe. If the brides were not daughters of famous field marshals or grand viziers, they were granddaughters of Albanian beys. Fearing that under the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid a family so disordered might give rise to gossip and endless paranoia, Abdüsselam succeeded in marrying one of his brother’s daughters to an agent who was highly praised by the sultan himself. This honored individual was a secretary to the Council of State, of which Abdüsselam was also a member; thus the agent was able to keep a close eye on Abdüsselam Bey, both at home and at work. People who knew them took great delight in watching Abdüsselam and Ferhat Bey, his brother’s son-in-law, travel together to and from the Council of State in their rubber-wheeled phaeton. The strange thing about it was that while the above-mentioned relation felt oppressed by his obligation to spy on a man he truly loved and considered something of a benefactor, Abdüsselam Bey was more than pleased with this friendship of forced circumstances, for Abdüsselam Bey was the sort of man who would scream “fire!” if left alone for more than an hour — the sort of man who always sat next to the only other passenger on a trolley or, if it was empty, hovered over the conductor.

I became much more intimate with Abdüsselam during the Armistice years, from 1919 to 1922. Although he had grown rather old by then, his memory was more or less intact. When he reminisced about the old days, he would remember Ferhat Bey’s timid demeanor and burst out laughing. After I returned from military service, Abdüsselam took pity on me for being alone — both my mother and my father had passed away. Having welcomed me into the small home in Beyazıt where he then lived with his youngest daughter, he arranged for me to marry a young girl they had raised there. And so, yes, my first wife, the mother of Zehra and Ahmet, had grown up in his villa.

Abdüsselam Bey’s villa carried on in the same way until the declaration of the reinstated constitution. To give you an idea of the colorful crew that populated the villa and the expenses it accrued, suffice to say that the neighborhood’s sweetshop, butcher, and two grocery stores survived pretty much on the villa alone. The lion’s share of the pharmacist Aristidi Efendi’s revenue came from the residence as well. Following the Declaration of Independence, the villa began slowly to dissolve, a decline that in some aspects echoed that of the Ottoman Empire. First there was the fall of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, eastern Thrace, and northern Africa, whereupon Abdüsselam’s brothers and their wives departed; this was followed by the Balkan Wars, when the younger men and their wives also abandoned the estate. Toward the end, only the spying Ferhat Bey and a few of his children remained. Ferhat Bey and Abdüsselam lived together until the end, harnessed to each other like the swarthy steeds of Hungarian and British blood that pulled their rubber-wheeled phaeton to the Council of State every morning and back home in the evening. In the end conversation between the two men went no further than recitals of the weekly reports on life in the villa that Ferhat Bey submitted to Sultan Abdülhamid.

Though these bulletins flushed Abdüsselam Bey’s face a deep crimson, with each week they revealed to him a new aspect of the ancient villa’s inner world, transporting him back to the time when fortune still smiled on him, when he was still young, rich, and virile — the master of a household arranged just to his liking, where no one language held sway for long, strong personalities jostled for space, and life was infused with the warmth of humankind.

Yet there was something a little odd about the way Abdüsselam Bey would conjure up his lost world during these recitals losing himself in its immensity before my very eyes. As he listened to Ferhat Bey, his nostalgia would take on a sinister aspect: his eyes sparkling with a strange malice and with a smile that seemed to mock the frailty of humankind, he would launch into stories that only deepened Ferhat Bey’s embarrassment.