Ahmet Tanpinar - The Time Regulation Institute

Truth be told, she liked neither my father nor me. And it was a joy for her to make this perfectly clear. There was no doubt she considered us more legal inheritors than close family. For her, our household was nothing more than the lever of a great machine that groaned behind that terrible eventuality, death, when in fact, considering the finality of the affair, we were really the entire contraption itself. Weighed down as she was with this vast inheritance, my aunt couldn’t think of dying without recalling that she would be dying for our sake. She interpreted almost everything we did in this light, lambasting us even when we had spoken with the best intentions. Naturally all the advice she meted out on this matter revolved around her paranoia. Her favorite motto was, “The greatest mortal sin is wishing death upon someone other than oneself!” This despite the fact that no one harbored such a morbid desire, to begin with. My father took pity on his sister and even wished for her to be happy. After she was widowed, he strongly encouraged her to marry Nasit Bey. But my aunt refused even to entertain the idea, so convinced was she of the hunter’s moral repugnance. “I’m not looking for a man to gobble up my fortune,” she’d mutter. She even suspected my father of some deviant ploy in his wish to marry her off, especially since he had just arranged for my engagement to Nasit Bey’s daughter — though we were both far too young.

Once, when my aunt fell ill, my father sent a doctor to her villa, paying for the visit out of his pocket. No one there could ever forget how she screamed at my father as she drove him and the doctor away: “Why the rush? Sooner or later it’ll all be yours!” I won’t deny the fact that as my father’s financial situation worsened he came to see my aunt’s estate as his only hope for salvation. Moreover, my aunt’s health had sharply declined — a result of her peculiarly sparse diet, her ceaseless agitation, and her paranoia about her wealth. Her spirits were at an all-time low. She refused to leave my father alone, demanding unimaginable sacrifices in return for the inheritance he was soon to receive and taking every opportunity to shame and abuse him. Gradually my aunt ceased to be my father’s sister: she became his burden.

Toward the end my aunt lost control of half her body. My father just could not understand how she could carry on living semiparalyzed, especially since she continued to harangue him as vigorously as ever, and he put it down to rancorous sentiments she must have harbored for him since childhood. According to my father, she continued living only to spite him. After suffering a day of malicious torment at the invalid’s bedside, he would return from the villa in Etyemez and whimper: “Is it really possible? Who would continue to live like that? The miserable creature is tormenting me, just out of spite. But God is great…”

All this goes to show that my father saw himself as the oppressed party.

But at last the fateful day arrived. With tears pouring from her eyes, the half-crazed chambermaid came to inform us that my aunt had passed away. My father rushed off to her villa to take the required preliminary measures. Funeral prayers were performed in Lâleli. My father delegated the burial to our neighbor Ibrahim Bey, so he could return directly to the villa in Etyemez after prayers, to watch over its contents so that nothing might go missing. To my mind, this was his gravest mistake in the whole affair. For if he hadn’t been swept away by the fear of losing her estate and its property, my aunt would have been buried in a timely fashion, thereby reducing the likeliness of her resurrection. And — even if she had been destined to rise again from the dead — my father would have been standing at the head of her grave, desperate and aggrieved, beating his head with his hands and tearing at his clothes, with tears flowing from his eyes — all of which would have ensured a happy outcome. Instead we were met with a very unhappy outcome indeed. Ibrahim Bey had arranged a pauper’s funeral, entirely unbefitting the bride of the warden of the street sweeper’s trade guild, just so he could skim from the money my father had given him for the burial proceedings. And because it proved difficult to locate her late husband’s tomb — not a soul from the family was there to watch her burial beside it — the grave diggers began late: from start to finish, the entire operation was marred by infelicitous delays. When at last the coffin lid was cut open to tip the corpse into the freshly dug grave, my aunt awoke from a deep coma, and because she was the type of creature who was never caught unawares, even in the most extraordinary of circumstances, she heaved the coffin lid aside and assessed the scene, and with what she later viewed as her eternal powers of perspicacity, she grasped the situation immediately, shouting out to the only person she recognized there, the imam from Etyemez: “Quick, hurry up and take me home!”

As Ibrahim Bey told me later, most of the mourners were terrified, and at once took to their heels, thus making the task of returning the casket from the cemetery in Merkezefendi to my aunt’s villa all the more difficult. Had she not given a ferocious scolding to those who had not been so quick off the mark, it’s unlikely she would have made it home at all.

First she ordered the imam to give her a coatlike cape that had been abandoned by one of the diggers at the graveside, and after wrapping it tightly around her, she proceeded to direct the procession from the stretcher that held the coffin. With half her body jutting out of the casket, and shouting out instructions to the luckless souls charged with carrying her back to her villa in Etyemez (she had the gall to order them to take her all the way back home in the very manner they had brought her to the graveyard — no less would have been expected of her), she even managed to stop off at the first pastry shop they came across after entering the city, purchasing a savory bun to relieve her hunger.

This bizarre return from the world beyond, and the fantastical death of my aunt, now alive in her coffin and nibbling on her savory bun, attracted much attention in the backstreets of various neighborhoods as they lumbered along, so that by the time they reached the home my aunt had once entered as a bride, they had almost half the population of the district behind them; the procession had taken on the aura of a victory march.

Meanwhile my father, knowing nothing of the resurrection, was still at the villa. He had seized the premises and terrorized its servants before extracting everything that seemed of any value, including items buried in the coal cellar, light in weight but heavy in worth, and he had strewn it all in the middle of the floor; his pockets were stuffed with jewels, bonds, and gold that he had rustled out from the drawers of my aunt’s bedside table, and his eyes were still searching as if to say, “Where’s the rest?” In the meantime I had dismantled the dining room clock, which had captured my imagination as a child — and always been kept well out of my reach — and was busy fiddling with its pieces in a vain and furious attempt to repair it.

I was the one who opened the door. My aunt brusquely ordered her removal from the casket they had by then lowered. There cannot have been a commander in recorded history who, after seizing victory in the battlefield, showed as much composure as my aunt when her coffin was lowered to the ground. She was in complete command, calling to mind the pictures of Caesar I’d seen in history books. Sadly, she didn’t afford me the chance to express my admiration. In fact she hardly even gave me the chance to applaud. Thrusting me aside, she stepped into the foyer, whereupon, without even looking me in the face, she cried: