Ahmet Tanpinar - The Time Regulation Institute

One day Abdüsselam Bey, former member of the Council of State, revealed his secret to me:

“My poor son-in-law, the truth is his work made him all too anxious and ashamed. He had absolutely no idea that I submitted my own weekly report on him .”

Around the time I began frequenting Nuri Efendi’s workshop, there were just thirty-seven people still living in Abdüsselam Bey’s villa. Not counting the children, the house was only inhabited by semiretired servants (one of life’s odd reversals), distant relatives of Abdüsselam’s siblings, and aged aunts whose affiliation with the family was debated daily. Abdüsselam was deeply saddened by all this and could not understand how independence — which we had apparently all been longing for in secret — had deprived his home of the cheerful cries of children. He could not understand why his domestic expenses kept rising. As he struggled to make ends meet, Abdüsselam was further confounded by all these distant relatives, whom he found as unreadable as texts whose principle sentences had been effaced or rendered indecipherable; all the same, he still welcomed this absurd crowd with open arms, for fear of ending up alone.

VII

Though Abdüsselam Bey squandered much of his fortune on passing fancies, he was also indulgent of those around him, particularly his nephews. He called to mind those kindly uncles one meets in operettas, those comical creatures who are either quietly brooding or flying off the handle, and who fritter their lives away on little pleasures before suddenly, and outrageously, coming to the rescue of a young relation. Whatever his quirks and idiosyncrasies, they combined to suggest a man of consequence.

Seyit Lutfullah was something else altogether: a ghostly shadow in the void, a mask on loan, a living lie: Imagine the lead actor in a fantastical play who — still wearing his costume and cloaked in his assumed personality — springs off the stage to continue his performance in the crowded city streets. Seyit Lutfullah was such a man. He inspired his little coterie to all kinds of pastimes and passions, taking people who would otherwise have led rather mundane existences and turning their worlds upside down. But with him it was never clear where his strange beneficence ended and his lies began.

He was not from Medina, as most people claimed, nor was he a descendant of the prophet Mohammed. In fact he probably adopted his name somewhere along the way. According to Nuri Efendi, he took the name Seyit, given to descendants of the prophet Muhammad, when he was engaged to a woman during his time in Iraq. But he actually hailed from the province of Baluchistan in Afghanistan. He left his native land when he was still quite young and, after traversing the Orient, arrived at last in Istanbul, where his beautiful and moving recitations of the Koran at the Arab Mosque attracted much attention, which made it possible for him to marry the daughter of a gardener who tended the grounds for a rich family in Emirgân, and even afforded him the opportunity to proselytize at a local mosque. Those who had known him from his first appearance described him as a morally upstanding and rather fanatical exponent of sharia law who, in his sermons and deliberations, would vociferously berate his flock. According to what my father reported, the man prohibited most everything in life save prayer, going so far as to place restrictions on eating, drinking, and sometimes even speaking.

His first stint in Istanbul lasted only three years. Then his wife died, and he resumed his travels, leaving everything behind. He returned to Istanbul ten years later, and two years before the reinstatement of the constitution he settled into the ruined medrese . But Seyit Lutfullah was no longer the same. One of his eyes had turned entirely white, his lips were slightly parted, and his body was at the mercy of a tic that left his primary motor functions intact but sent a continuous series of short, awkward, involuntary spasms through his entire body. His left arm swung back and forth, as if he were soothing a sleeping child in a perambulator, and his neck twitched violently, as if he were working out a painful cramp. With his dark and leathery half-paralyzed face, his humpback, his enormous height, and one foot forever dragging behind him, Seyit Lutfullah seemed more evil djinn than human being. He might have been a creature standing guard over treasure at the end of an epic journey. Yet in his youth he’d been considered rather handsome.

Seyit Lutfullah attributed his transformation to his battles in the world beyond. By his own account, while preparing most fervently to become a medium to the spirit world, he had stumbled upon a disgruntled group of guardian spirits, and it was they who had left him in this horrific state. When Nuri Efendi spoke of him, he said, “This is just what the holy Koran tells us. Such is the fate of those who meddle with spirits.” But in truth he was hoping to hear the whole lurid story — curiosity being Nuri Efendi’s only real shortcoming — and so he could never quite bring himself to forsake the man who rubbed shoulders with blasphemy.

Almost everyone had an opinion of Seyit Lutfullah. Dismissing him as a charlatan, Aristidi Efendi attributed his physical transformation to either a congenital condition or rampant syphilis. For Abdüsselam Bey’s sake, the pharmacist tried to cure Seyit Lutfullah with various concoctions prepared according to old manuscripts in which he had little faith. While Abdüsselam Bey remained wary of Seyit Lutfullah’s dealings with the spiritual world, he still considered the man a vast repository of ancient lore and hoped the experiments carried out in Aristidi Efendi’s laboratory might help him regain his squandered fortune — a case in point being that he sincerely believed one day they would discover, for indeed it had been promised them, the treasure of the emperor Andronikos. Seyit Lutfullah had long since become a native of Istanbul and had even forgotten his Arabic, but as with Abdüsselam Bey, the old Maghrebi of Tunisia, his ancient superstitions endured.

In those days it was hard not to see Abdüsselam Bey as a gambler with a few cards perennially up his sleeve, poised for the most improbable of exploits.

Convinced that one day they would succeed in making gold, Abdüsselam covered all the costs of Aristidi Efendi’s researches in his secret laboratory, located just behind his pharmacy. But Aristidi Efendi’s approach was different from that of his friends: he believed the project was achievable through the application of modern chemistry alone. Abdüsselam Bey, on the other hand, was eager to try both magic and the questionable chemical formulae Seyit Lutfullah brought to the laboratory.

The truth of the matter is that each of these men was mired in a tireless search for a tunnel that would take him to the other side of the wall he called reality. Did Abdüsselam Bey really believe in Seyit Lutfullah? I cannot say. To my mind, these men acted in response to something more important than mere belief. All three held most fervently that there should be no limit to the concept of the “possible.” Everything existed within a universe in which anything could happen: objects, matter, human beings — all stood on a threshold of infinite potential, waiting for a magic word, prayer, or experiment to transform them in an instant. The flaw these men shared was to mistrust anything they could see with their own eyes or touch with their own hands.

Though he was the most realistic member of this entourage, my ruined father was nevertheless susceptible to its mad schemes, and in Seyit Lutfullah he saw his final hope of bringing his grandfather’s pious mission to fruition. But his partners never really accepted him, for they saw themselves in him; that is to say, they recognized his desperation to sacrifice everything he owned, and this led my father to feel a certain animosity toward them. Even so, Nuri Efendi still repaired my father’s watch for free, and Abdüsselam Bey was always willing to extend a helping hand, while the hunter Nasit Bey’s support for my father was boundless. Deep down, if only intermittently, my father did enjoy the company of these men, and so he never showed his anger; it was with the fury of a man brutally scorned and cast aside that he leveled his ire against Seyit Lutfullah. To my father, Lutfullah was “a miserable dope fiend and a liar.” He wasn’t a medium in contact with guardian spirits, nor did he have anything to do with treasure or the world beyond. The stroke that had turned his face into a heap of ghastly junk was brought about by opium, wild philandering, and a blatant disregard for his health. But in denouncing him as a sloth, a swindler, an adulterer, and a trickster, my father was in fact echoing views Aristidi expressed in more measured terms.