Ahmet Tanpinar - The Time Regulation Institute

Two days later Seyit Lutfullah (having been declared “a drug user and, while not in full possession of his mental faculties, nevertheless a madman and a risk to society at this point in time”) was exiled to Sinop on the coast of the Black Sea.

On the evening of the day Lutfullah left town, a police officer brought us a basket with Çesminigâr inside; using rather strong language, he urged us to do everything we could to look after the tortoise. “The hoca efendi took all his books with him,” he told us. Thus we inherited what you might call our share of Andronikos’s treasure.

But Çesminigâr did not prove to be as loyal as Safinaz. The creature never warmed to our home. While Safinaz Hanım never left the little bay window nook, the only spot in the house where you could actually breathe and observe the outside world, the tortoise escaped from the house, whenever it could, to trundle about the neighborhood. Almost every day one of us, or one of our neighbors, would find the little beast in the Mihrimah Mosque, in one of the neighbors’ gardens, or beneath the hooves of a carriage horse.

I have noticed that fairy tales always start with a name. Assign a name to your jacket or bow tie, and though they may be lacking in function or beauty, their identity suddenly shifts — voilà! they have acquired a personality. The people in our neighborhood gave Çesminigâr the name Emanet, or Bond, probably because they found the name Çesminigâr a little antiquated. And of course no one in the neighborhood wanted to lose their Bond. We all patrolled the streets with our eyes glued to the ground. The extraordinary attention we attach to benevolent deeds meant that someone was sure to find Bond in some secluded corner and hasten him back to our house, scolding us for having ever let him escape. To many on the outside, these hunts for Bond seemed futile, but with every escape, the tortoise internalized the topography of the neighborhood, until one day it went missing for good. It was with fear that I conveyed the terrible news to Lutfullah. The response we received from the castle in Sinop was truly remarkable. In his letter, scribbled in nearly illegible safranine ink, the political exile told us the tortoise had found him in Sinop and that we had nothing to worry about, that he — Lutfullah, not the tortoise — was in good health and busy in the region of Seyit Bilal with the hunt for the treasure of Gülsüm the Illiterate, which he would soon be unearthing, and upon doing so he would realize all his dreams, and, given these circumstances, he no longer needed the treasure of Andronikos and was bequeathing it to me. “I have been meeting with Aselban day and night, and during our travels together we converse. She has made you a brother of this world. And as a present she has given you the treasure of the emperor Andronikos. But you must come to know its true worth. As it now lies under the Maiden’s Tower, it might seem unattainable, but with our arrangements and our prayers, you need not harbor the slightest doubt that we shall have it transported to a neighborhood from which it will prove far easier to unearth. If not…”

So after losing almost everything, we found it all again — both the power and the fortune.

XIII

Following the banishment of Seyit Lutfullah, the question of my future was raised yet again. Like it or not, I had no choice but to return to the old watch repairman’s shop. The chief obstacle having been removed, the old master greeted me with open arms. But I was no longer the Hayri he once knew. The days when I would study watches and clocks and their secrets with love and admiration in Nuri Efendi’s Time Workshop were long over. I had been exposed to other ideas since then, and passed through many new forms during my schooling with Lutfullah. There was no longer any connection in my mind between the words “life” and “work.” For me, life was a fairy tale you invented while keeping your hands stuffed deep in your pockets. I found no joy sitting at the feet of an old man afflicted with rheumatism, listening to his endless complaints about whatever happened to cross his mind. So one day I placed before him the pin, the magnifying glass, and the key to the shop and dashed out to the street with the ten pennies or so I had left in my pocket from my earnings the day before. In one breath I was on the city walls. I was elated, as if all my problems had vanished in a flash. I spent that evening at one of the theaters in Sehzadebası. The whistles, the applause, the laughter, the cries of ticket salesmen on the streets, the lights on the stage, and above all the languorous look of that Armenian singer at the peak of her career, and her piquant voice — all seemed to promise new horizons. But what I loved most was watching how these men I met every day in the street or coffeehouse were made anew on the illuminated stage, as the brass band blared on. It was a dream come true! That night I made my decision. And three days later, I was a member of one of these improvisatory theater groups.

Naturally they never gave me an important role. And I was never under the illusion that we performed anything noteworthy. Nevertheless 1913 was perhaps my finest year. My days were my own, from start to finish. Toward evening we would congregate in the theater, as if plotting surreptitiously against someone’s life. Then it would all begin in a great fury. The drums, horns, and clarinet on the streets would announce that the night was now ours, and we’d prepare the stage as if it were a parallel world. The audience would gather on the other side of the curtain, and the sound of their footsteps, the commotion, the screams, the jostling of the crowd, the impatient catcalls shook the foundations of the makeshift theater before the curtain finally opened. We would watch the first cantos from behind the audience. The old woman would shake her great belly before the crowd, and all would roar with applause, wise to the buffoonery but perhaps enjoying it all the more for that very reason, their whistles cutting through the air like it was cloth.

Everything was shabby, old, miserable, and cheap. But because I had passed through the school of Lutfullah, these cheap and miserable things seemed all the more beautiful to me for the illusions they helped create. The first garment I wore — a pair of aristocratic pantaloons from the era of Napoléon III — was torn in three places. As for the lady, or rather the countess, with whom I was to fall in love, she easily could have given birth to my mother. But what did any of this matter? The important thing was that my name was no longer Hayri, and that I was able, for a time, to break free of reality’s grip. In a word, it was an escape. I was living in an enchanted world of lies and illusion, and that was all I wanted.

What didn’t we perform? Our repertoire included all the great works. No Don Quixote ever stormed the windmills with such courage or panache. Sadly, in my third month there were retrenchments. And I was among those who had to go. So I decided to join a troupe in Kadıköy that performed kusdili in a rundown hall. My earnings from such endeavors were meager. I made hardly enough to cover my transportation. But this time the women in the group were young — as the troupe was new and undiscovered — and I fell in love with each and every one of them.

I would return to the European side of Istanbul, in the solitude of the final ferryboat, my mind dazzled by images of their loveliness and my body infested with lice left behind by previous passengers. But I should say that for once fortune actually smiled on me. I had even managed to take second and third supporting roles in our plays.

The third stage of my career again took place in Kadıköy; this time it was an operetta. I was able to try out my voice in these musicals, which vacillated between alaturca and alafranga styles. I managed to infuse the performances with the Hüzzam and Hüseyin makams I sang with my father every Thursday evening and Friday at the dervish lodge we frequented. Our director had only one obsession: the cleaning of his monocle! And the light reflected from that monocle seemed to ennoble everything it touched.