Ahmet Tanpinar - The Time Regulation Institute

After the operetta we dabbled in traditional Ottoman mime theater, and then, at the insistence of Abdüsselam Bey, I joined the Municipal Theater Group, but I understood nothing of Antoine’s lessons. It was the Great War that rescued me from the chaos of this strange and tiring world that largely eluded my understanding. With the war, it seemed I finally set my feet on firm ground. But as always it felt too late.

I

Following my discharge from the army, I returned to Istanbul, where I found the city and its people much changed. Signs of poverty were everywhere; chaos and desperation reigned. My father had died in the war. My stepmother was living alone. The moment I set foot in the house, I knew those four years had been spent in vain. At home nothing had changed: The same calligraphic panels hung on the walls, and the same curtains, now more tattered and worn, hung from the doorways leading to rooms and the entrance hall; the house was as closed to the outside world as ever. In the front room, the lone straw mat on the floor, a footstep away from disintegration, filled the place with the stench of mold and mildew; and the Blessed One (our dustier-than-ever grandfather clock) huddled in the same old corner, calling to mind a decrepit camel fallen ill somewhere in the Caucasian deserts, dreaming deliriously of a time beyond all order.

As soon as I stepped inside I knew I had returned to my paternal home, to my childhood, to my youth — or whatever you would like to call it. What could I expect after those four years? I was as indolent as ever, indifferent to everything around me.

But those first days were not unduly depressing. My stepmother was born to show compassion. She was pitifully lonely, accustomed to living with only the idea of me; the day I arrived in person I thought she might die of joy. During those four desperate years, she had tended fastidiously to the great array of fruits in our large garden, making and then stockpiling preserves. I was shocked to see all the jars lined up on the breakfast table. “Have some of this plum jam. I made it when your father was still alive… And this sour cherry jam… I made last year. I kept it for you. No, dear, this sort of jam doesn’t go bad… And this apricot one here, oh, come now, just a little spoonful…” And so in one sitting I was force-fed jams for all seasons. The poor woman wouldn’t stop crying or throwing her arms around me. She thought me handsome, heroic, and resourceful; she wanted to hear of my noble adventures. If I tried to express my fears about the future, she would interrupt me and say, “Oh, come now. A man like you? How could a man like you not find a job?” And slowly I began to believe her.

I looked for work constantly, but at the time there were tens of thousands of other newly discharged young men like me looking for work in Istanbul. Every day the boats would bring in hundreds of new prisoners of war. I simply couldn’t find employment. My back wages provided a degree of comfort, but my life became a precarious balancing act on a wire spanning an abyss.

Not wishing to get tangled in the web of the past, I refrained from seeing my old acquaintances. Besides, there was no one left save for Abdüsselam Bey. To guarantee I would not cross paths with the poor man I’d once loved so dearly, I changed my walking route, avoiding the direct road to the War Office, which I visited quite frequently in those days, and taking the streets behind the Sehzade Mosque and Direklerarası instead.

But in the end the old man came and found me. This was three months after my return. Early one morning a carriage pulled up in front of our house and with some reluctance I peered out of the window and saw Abdüsselam stepping down. “Where’s that unfortunate son of yours?” he bellowed at the doorstep.

He didn’t come up to find me but waited for me in the courtyard as I dressed. Then he took me to his new villa in Soganaga, a smaller and more modest abode.

The splendor of his former villa, with its carriages and horses, its servants and abundant comforts, was not yet a distant memory. But its denizens had dispersed. Now the poor man lived with only his youngest daughter and his son-in-law, their children, Ferhat Bey (whose wife had died), two old servants, and Emine the chambermaid, who had been raised in his household, and whom I was to marry in two weeks’ time, as if there were nothing more important for me to do.

We went up to his room on the second floor. He sat me down on the divan, on which was perched a small chest of drawers from India. On top of the chest was a pile of envelopes, and from these he pulled out photographs one by one, describing where each had been taken.

I told him about my difficulties finding work, and he promised to help with my search. But nothing came of it. Abdüsselam Bey’s former friends had either vanished or changed so much that they no longer considered the man of any real import. After a few days pursuing leads, we decided it would be best for me to complete my studies. With his encouragement, and Ferhat Bey’s even more enthusiastic support, I enrolled in the Post and Telegraphy Academy. I don’t know why they chose this particular school, which seemed rather modest, at least from the outside; it was, after all, a time when most schools were so hard up for students that they had no choice but to rely on recruiting agents, even offer financial incentives to recruit students. Though the two men were very fond of me, their feelings about me hadn’t really changed. And Abdüsselam Bey had more important considerations in mind. My education wouldn’t last long; moreover, students were given a little pocket money. We came to the conclusion that working with telegraphs was not so different from working with watches and clocks — perhaps because they too ticked and had inside them this thing known as a mechanism.

“You already have this penchant for fiddling with such things — now at least you’ll be able to fiddle with them for a living,” they said.

After I had enrolled in the academy, or rather after I had negotiated the first step into a moderately secure future of my very own, Abdüsselam Bey announced that I was to marry Emine as soon as possible. The fact was that by that point I hardly ever left his home. Day and night he badgered me to propose. Marriage, I thought, might lessen my intimacy with him.

As he was almost a father to me already, an exchange of vows with Emine could serve only to formalize our relationship. It is unlikely she would have found anyone better than me; but, on second thought, she might have. As indeed she should have. Poor Emine! It’s hard to imagine myself ever finding anyone more perfect! There was never any strangeness between us; we had no problems getting along. And as we were all going to live together in the house in Soganaga, there was no need to worry about the things that impoverished newlyweds might find daunting, such as decorating a new home or making ends meet, and certainly not the “loneliness” of suddenly being left to ourselves — Abdüsselam made a point of stressing the loneliness. And so for all parties God’s will was done, bringing me comfort and peace of mind. Moreover — of course Abdüsselam never openly admitted this — in such a troubled time, when his business affairs, to use market terminology, were approaching collapse, new members could always join the household and, if pushed, my stepmother too. By drawing her into his home, he would have his revenge on the misfortune that had dogged him for so long.

My stepmother didn’t come to live with us. She was reluctant to leave the home where she believed she had been happy with my father. A human being’s conception of happiness can be very strange indeed. Consulting books or listening to what people have to say on the matter, you might well conclude that we are creatures of reason — that mental faculty meant to distinguish us from animals. To use a tired phrase, man is king of the jungle. But if we examine how we manage our affairs, we are hard-pressed to find any trace of reason at all. And neither does reason influence our apprehensions or affections. When my stepmother turned down the invitation to come live with us in the house in Soganaga, it would have made more sense for her to justify her decision by saying, “What business do I have in someone else’s home? Perhaps if I were your biological mother, but even then… Anyone can tell with a glance that we aren’t family.” But after keeping her distance for so many years, the old parasite had burrowed her way into our home. Saddled with an invalid husband, and perpetually ill-tempered, before the war she’d never fully accepted the place as her own — so it drove me to distraction to hear her say it was her happy memories of the place that prevented her from leaving. It was beyond all logic or reason — as absurd as Abdüsselam Bey’s insistence on my marrying Emine or Emine’s exuberant acceptance of my proposal. The two reactions were no different. My stepmother was under the delusion that she had been happy in our home. She had so inflated the joy of being a part of the family (for years, before marrying my father, she had lived in a separate world, even imagining our family beyond her reach) that she was now unable to leave, but the fact remained that her arrival at our home was entirely inauspicious and not at all a source of happiness. Founded on supposition and hinged on the loosest of recollections, her happy memories proved so powerful that Abdüsselam Bey was obliged to respect her choice.