Ahmet Tanpinar - The Time Regulation Institute

“Where is that brute of a man, your father?”

Awestruck, I could only indicate with a trembling nod that he was upstairs.

“Well then take me upstairs. At once!” she cried.

But without waiting a moment for assistance, she flew up the stairs. The crowd stood stunned. My crippled aunt, who had been at death’s door, who had in fact just returned from the dead, was now walking unassisted — indeed she was bounding up the stairs!

I had never loved my father in the same way after his second marriage. Unable to distinguish the genuine man among his many masks, I was rarely convinced by his shows of suffering. But I shall never forget his face that day. The moment he saw his sister in her funeral shroud — his stingy and cantankerous sister, whom he thought he had sent off to heaven just a few hours ago — the poor man was rendered speechless by shock, or rather fear. His face trembled, white as waxed cloth, and his whole body shook. Not a word passed between them until my aunt calmly intoned: “Put everything down.”

Trying his very best to mumble something along the lines of “Welcome home, sister,” my father pulled out the various items he had stuffed into his pockets and down his shirt, his hands still trembling with fear. Five minutes later he resembled a leech dipped in ash. He had given back all he had taken, in fact even more. He’d given back more because he had, at just that precise moment, given up all hope for the future. My aunt waited patiently, clocking my father’s every movement until she was sure there was nothing left on his person save his soul, and then said:

“Now leave. And take all these people and that dimwit son of yours too. But at the very least you can make my bed before you go, and brew me some linden tea. Hurry up now, I seem to have caught a chill. It is rather cold outside.”

Father and son, we stumbled out of the house in a daze.

Now, I must confess that this ghastly business did not have the same effect on me as it had on my father. Undoubtedly my aunt was being entirely unfair with us. But I had never believed I had any right to her fortune in the first place. Like so many others born aggrieved, I tended to weigh any misfortune that befell me against those tragedies I had been able to avoid. It was never a matter of right or wrong. It was more complicated than that. Looking back on my life — and I am of course of an age to be doing such a thing — I see I have always had a spectator’s frame of mind. My concern with the welfare and demeanor of others has always distracted me from my own woes.

This was certainly the case that day. For despite all we lost on the day my aunt came back to life, I still found enchantment in the miracle that had unfolded before my eyes.

But there was more. Even if my father had not been so devastated as to hire a car to take us home, I would still have found delight in witnessing an event never before seen or heard in the history of our family.

There was nothing comical about my aunt’s imperial posturing, or my father’s frozen shock, or Ibrahim Bey’s dramatic retelling of the affair — even when he pounded his fists against his chest to illustrate the losses suffered. In the end what mattered most was not the great fortune, even though it had been my family’s last hope, nor was it the announcement of my aunt’s death in the papers, conveyed in the biggest and most brightly lit letters the world has ever seen; it was the one thing passed on to us from the fortune of the warden of the street sweeper’s trade guild: the enormous pendulum of the villa’s clock, which was buried deep in one of my pockets, taken from the villa that we, as father and son, had conquered, if only for a fleeting spell.

Let my father say whatever he may, but I for one got my share of the inheritance. At one point Ibrahim flashed my father a fearful look and wailed, “It’s all my fault. I could have finished the job sooner.”

My father lifted his head and mumbled, “There’s no need for you to worry, Ibrahim Bey. It was the will of God.” And after a moment’s pause he added: “Then things would have been far worse. God willing, this will be a lesson to her that will encourage her to fulfill her grandfather’s will. If only he were still alive…”

My father never recovered from this affair, one that few in this world ever suffer through. He was never able to shake off the tremor it gave to his hands or the heaviness that remained in his tongue.

There comes a point in any man’s life when he becomes conscious of his destiny. My father discovered his in the cruelest way imaginable. Once aware of his fate, he saw no point in curbing his carelessness or impatience, though it had been these very shortcomings that had led to our ruination. He sank into a strange silence. He became a quiet and gentle man who kept to his own corner. Yet occasionally he would glance at the pendulum (which for whatever reason he had hung on the entrance wall, never to be removed), and as he jumped to his feet, a strange and tortured smile would flash across his face.

I still marvel at how this tempestuous and eternally dissatisfied man could sink so abruptly into silent defiance.

All of us — even those not endowed with a hopeful disposition — have thought, even dreamed, of life after death. It is the reward we project onto the unknown and distant future, promising consolation for this string of catastrophes we know as life. It is a game of cards played with the very best hand, one we’re always destined to win, a wild desire that no man is ready to relinquish: the dream of living another life, provided of course there remains a narrow recollection of the past to make him conscious of the change and pleased to have left the other world behind. My aunt was the one person out of a million to taste such happiness. Sadly, her life after death — her resurrection — proved not to be the hoped-for empyrean.

Despite the unexpected manner of her return from the cliffs of eternity, on the surface she was still the same old aunt we had always known. But deep down she had undergone a profound change. This might be better understood as a revolution, seeing as my aunt’s return from the grave overturned what we, along with all her acquaintances, saw as the regulated order of her life — and in my view it rests on the following three fundamental points:

First, my aunt no longer despised the body that had carried her back in such a miserable state from the world beyond, following a death that had proved temporary. Confronted by the faults she was incapable of changing — her age, her malformations, her overall unseemliness — she no longer condemned herself. Having accepted her body as her sole source of support in this game of blindman’s bluff that we call life, she came to appreciate its value.

The second change could be seen in her regard for her wealth. Her fortune (to which formerly she had been so attached, thinking herself its sole custodian) had, if only for a few hours, found its way into her brother’s hands and pockets, and although her brother was in some way dear to her, he was still another human being; having seen how easily a fortune could change hands, she set about changing her relationship to it. Until then my aunt would have said, “I’ll hide it whatever the cost — it can only increase in value.” She had transformed her coal cellar into a kind of bank vault. But that day it was as if suddenly she had decided, “No, I shan’t keep a penny of it, and I shall no longer worry about the return. I shall sit right here and eat my way through it!”

Having turned against all those she assumed had their sights set on her money, my aunt now turned against her own fortune.

But whatever the peacemakers among us might have insisted, this did not lead to a dramatic change in the way she treated it. My aunt and her fortune had long lived in opposition to one another, like two radically different spheres, coexisting as polar opposites, and it was the conflict itself that brought about a certain equilibrium. At the time of her provisional death, my aunt had relinquished everything, but following her miraculous resurrection she took possession of her fortune most forcefully.