Ahmet Tanpinar - The Time Regulation Institute

Emine was a charming and innocent young woman; above all she had a good heart. In the face of adversity she showed remarkable courage. Her life in Abdüsselam Bey’s villa had been that of a caged bird. Her world was made up of only the people she knew there. At the time of our marriage she was a stranger to the outside world; taking her first tentative step into it, she nearly turned around and scampered back inside. But she seemed to have been wise since birth: almost never was she caught off guard. Not even the strangest situations fazed her. Always possessed of sound judgment, she was brave and affable to the end.

Our first years together were happy. Once I finished school I took a position at the Post and Telegraph Office. Later on, with the help of one of Abdüsselam Bey’s friends, I found a job at the Tünel management office. At the time I was earning a respectable sum of money. I had no complaints, apart from the loss of our first child at birth. But the fact remained that we had no life to ourselves. Yes, everything at home was comfortable, plentiful, and secure, but we were never truly free and were certainly never left alone.

There was no escaping Abdüsselam Bey’s ministrations; no one in the house could elude him. If he heard so much as a footstep or a light cough, be it in the entrance hall or in one of the bedrooms, and at any time of night, Abdüsselam Bey would race to the rescue, never allowing anyone to remain alone for more than a minute. Except for my time at work, I lived under his thumb. We would have breakfast together. And before I left, he would give me the name of the coffeehouse where I could find him that evening, and he would be sure to arrive there an hour early. Ferhat Bey, who had recently retired, would usually be there with him. Later in the evening we would go home together and sit and talk until bedtime, which he never failed to find a way to postpone. Meanwhile his real son-in-law — his youngest daughter’s husband — would be out carousing, on behalf, he claimed, of all the men in the household; sometimes he even took his wife along with him.

Emine and I made the decision to move out at the first opportunity. In fact Emine had already visited my old home several times to see how she might put the place in order, while always taking care to show due respect to my stepmother’s fond memories of the past; after throwing away the moldy wicker mats in the front hall, she took the clock pendulum off the wall and hid it somewhere in the attic — my aunt having told her long before we were married the story of how it came into our possession.

“I don’t understand why you don’t like it! It’s a charming little home. You’ll see. I’ll make it a paradise. We must free ourselves of the smothering love in our present home.”

Emine couldn’t have known anything of the language of the melodramatic Turkish cinema in those days, but describing our predicament in Abdüsselam Bey’s home, she’d naively say we were “slaves to love.”

It wasn’t just Abdüsselam Bey’s attentions that convinced us to leave. The old man’s ever-worsening financial woes made us more and more uncomfortable. Everything he owned had been sold, and whatever was left had been pawned. Deep in debt, Abdüsselam Bey hid the severity of his financial problems from us all. Despite our concentrated efforts, Ferhat Bey and his stepson and I were unable to persuade him to let us share the household expenses. And so his good cheer slowly faded. He became distracted and pensive. The man who had never before set foot outside unaccompanied now crept out alone at night in secret search of loans. In the end, Emine and I decided it would be wrong to continue to burden him.

But we were unable to carry through with our plan. The very day we’d hoped to tell Abdüsselam Bey of our decision, his son-in-law managed to get himself posted somewhere in Anatolia. After protracted deliberations, protests, and complaints, Abdüsselam Bey at last gave up and let his son-in-law and daughter go. As she left the house, Ayse Hanımefendi cried out to us, “Our father’s now in your hands. In a way, he’s your father too.” Her husband, standing at her side, said more or less the same thing. But after she moved out of earshot, he whispered, “God give you patience.” We were stuck. We simply couldn’t abandon the old man. And the fact was that he needed to be cared for by someone truly committed. His body, like his memory, was failing. And it was more than just forgetfulness: he was becoming increasingly confused.

So I contacted his eldest son, who lived in Çamlıca, as well as the middle son in Anatolia, asking them to come and take him. It was the least I could do for this poor man who had done so much for me over the years.

The middle son simply sent a telegraph, during Seker Bayram, with his salutations to his father and a few photographs of his family. The son living in Çamlıca came to pay his respects over the holiday, along with his younger brother, as he always did, taking this opportunity to explain just how difficult it would be for him to welcome his father into his home. “My wife made me swear on the matter. I just couldn’t,” he said.

“At least you could help him a little,” I said. “He has no money, and he’s up to his eyes in debt. I give him everything I earn, but secretly. I’m always afraid he’ll find out. He’d never accept money from me. If things continue like this, you’ll wind up in debt yourself.”

But he didn’t believe me.

“You don’t know my father,” he asserted. “There’s money somewhere — that’s for sure. Who knows where he’s hiding it.”

“Fine,” I replied. “But if something happens to him, we’ll be ruined. And Emine and I will be incriminated. That would be uncalled for, wouldn’t you say? Why don’t you come and live with the man. Come and claim what is rightfully yours!”

He shrugged off my proposal. By then his father was already in the room with us. As he left, the son looked long and hard at me. “I have faith in you,” he said. But it was not a look I could trust. A strange fear came over me.

That year, after Kurban Bayram, Ferhat Bey married a widow in Kadıköy and left the house. Echoing the old man’s other son-in-law, he said, “May God give you patience and lighten your burden!” Then he added before he left, “And if there’s a shred of reason left in your head, you should by all means follow my lead.”

Now we were alone with Abdüsselam Bey in his home. Here was the man who had once lived in that enormous villa behind the Burmalı Mescit, amid a vast tribe of sons, grandchildren, and relatives close and distant. Now he would die in the hands of two virtual strangers. Such was his fate.

Throughout my life I have seen how it is often the case that a man ends up with the very thing he fears most. Not long after the night Aristidi Efendi burned to death following an explosion in one of his alembics, I found myself back in Nuri Efendi’s Time Workshop. Everyone had something to say about the accident. Someone — I cannot, just now, recall whom — spoke of it as a curious coincidence, seeing as Aristidi Efendi had always feared this eventuality. Nuri Efendi had been listening to us in silence when suddenly he dropped the watch he was holding and said:

“As far as I am concerned there’s nothing strange about it at all. Indeed we might even consider it natural. For there’s no such thing as the present: there is only a past, and a future at its beck and call. In our subconscious minds we are forever constructing our futures. From the moment Aristidi Efendi began conducting his experiments, his fate shifted. He became, in effect, the architect of his own death. Why are you gentlemen so surprised to hear that he had sensed this all along?”

Abdüsselam Bey may have set the stage for this ultimate solitude through his overabundance of affection — one might even see it as a kind of addiction — for humankind and his overwhelming love for his family, near or far. Had he not been burdened with an overabundance of love and a dread of solitude, then surely those near and dear to him would not have abandoned him so hastily, and he wouldn’t have suffered the desolate loneliness that marked his decline.