Ahmet Tanpinar - The Time Regulation Institute

The following year not one relative came to see Abdüsselam Bey over Seker Bayram. Yet for each holy night of Kandil, and on all the other religious holidays, he would purchase gifts for every son-in-law, daughter-in-law, and grandchild, as well as all his other living relatives, and perhaps even some no longer alive, according to their age and standing in the family hierarchy. Who could say how he found the money for all this.

Silk handkerchiefs and ties and shirts by the dozen, cheap jewelry for the girls, watches for the boys, and flowing robes for retired servants — it was all piled up in a room. And dressed in his old redingote and a freshly starched shirt, his gleaming spectacles perched on his nose, his hand stroking his neatly trimmed beard, his eyes glued to the clock on the opposite wall, and his ears alert to the slightest movement on the street, he sat and waited three long days, convinced the doorbell would ring at any moment, and when he heard footsteps at the door he would leap up to see who was there.

Great holiday feasts were prepared — enough to feed all who had once lived in the old villa, enough to give them all a taste of the dishes they liked best. We knew only too well that we’d have no visitors, and yet the table was ready to be set at a moment’s notice. On the evening of the fourth day of Kandil, Abdüsselam Bey would turn to Emine with a look of despair that he could no longer mask and say:

“Emine, my good child, take these packages away and put them in the children’s room. They can pick them up when they stop by.”

The children’s room had become a sort of emotional depot for Abdüsselam. A mountain of meaningless castaway objects accumulated dust: eleven cradles, two or three mattresses (all victims to Abdüsselam Bey’s conjugal nights), wardrobes, mirrors, old toys, and chests — in short, a whole collection of odds and ends his daughter and son-in-law couldn’t bring themselves to pass on to junk dealers when they moved out of that monstrous villa. Abdüsselam Bey called it the children’s room, though not a single child was born there or ever lived there, and the strange thing was that the name somehow stuck. Perhaps it was the name alone that made the room feel haunted — for eventually we all came to believe that the spirit of the old villa resided in that room. It was a room of remembrance and loss, piled high with farewells, with the dead stacked one on top of the other, where each of us could see the death of our own childhood and youth; the furniture heaped together in its center like a ship run aground was a steadfast reminder. The room was Abdüsselam Bey’s heart, in every sense of the word. Only those who ventured inside could begin to grasp how disturbing it might be to share a life with this good-natured man, because here, in this realm beyond time, he had drained all these objects of their indifference. The key hung on the door, but no one dared venture inside.

Despite her sunny disposition and her rational frame of mind, Emine had so absorbed her master’s misery that she wouldn’t so much as walk past the door. She carried inside her all the psychological traumas of the house that had been her home since childhood.

Faced with Emine’s refusal to carry the packages into the room, I was the one left to do it, albeit with reluctance. Tripping over the old, abandoned furniture, when I crept into the room I’d be startled by a faded, ghostlike, and altogether unfamiliar reflection of myself in a mirror that was suddenly illuminated by a beam of light from the outside; and a peculiar fear of unknown origin would pass through me.

Where did it come from? And how very strange that it could take dominion over my entire person. These were, after all, the days when I was meant to be dizzy with love. My wife and I were expecting a baby. Every now and then Emine would turn to me, smiling, and say, “Kicking up a storm down there… must be a girl!” She complained constantly of these little kicks and affected serious concern when she said, “But how will I ever manage?” Even the low-spirited Abdüsselam Bey was overjoyed, and he never tired of saying, “How many days left? Go and ask.” And he would always insist that I do so. Then he would do the calculations on his fingers, measuring each new answer against its predecessor. It had been some time since a child had been born in the house. The man couldn’t stop exclaiming, “Oh, I shall be a grandfather once again!”

When it came time to put away the packages, he would give us a meaningful look and say, “Let’s hold on to these — their rightful owners will be here soon enough.” Emine would blush deeply as she left the room. And Abdüsselam Bey’s face would light up with one of his rare smiles.

“Haven’t you spoken with Ferhat Bey? Why did he go off to live with his wife in Kadıköy rather than bring her here? We could have all lived together. How could someone up and leave the house that was his home for so many years?”

“The woman refused to leave her father’s house. She simply wouldn’t leave!”

Abdüsselam Bey looked me directly in the eye. “Then why did he marry her? Couldn’t he have found himself a poor and wretched wife?”

I was shocked. That old fear of mine now took on a sharper form, gripping me more violently. Where a pure love for humanity had once resided, there now was only the terror of solitude. But that wasn’t all: something more significant was happening. We had surrendered ourselves to this miserable man because I lacked the will to stand up to him.

Zehra’s birth eased Abdüsselam’s anguish at being forgotten by all his relatives. He called for the most splendid cradle in the house to be rescued from the children’s room. The latest grandchild in the family of Ahmet the Signer took her first sleep in this heavy cradle, made of walnut, inlaid with silver and mother-of-pearl, and as large as a train compartment. It goes without saying that Abdüsselam never left it untended from the day the baby was born. In line with an old custom of the villa, it was he who named the baby, not me. And though he had intended to give the child the name of my mother, Zahide, in the confusion of the moment he chose his own mother’s name, Zehra.

II

This tiny mistake set off a series of catastrophes. At first the old man was able to laugh with us about it, but soon he became distressed and accused himself of having committed a terrible offense. In the end it became a full-blown crisis of conscience: He came to believe he had robbed us of our child. And he was convinced he would be held accountable in the afterlife for doing so. However, this served only to strengthen his bond with Zehra, and he even took to addressing her as “Mother” on account of her name. He began to plan for her future. Soon the house was awash in legal documents willing to the child what remained of his fortune. God knows how many he drew up on a daily basis. During the last three years of his life, such documents could be found almost anywhere in the house: hidden under carpets, kilims, and pillows or stashed away in desk and dresser drawers. Though Emine and I would tear up at least a few of these every day, great piles of them emerged after his death; almost all stated that he was bequeathing his remaining wealth to his “mother Zehra Hanım” and strongly urged us to give the utmost attention to her education and up-bringing.

“That her mother and my daughter, Emine Hanım, and her father and my son, Hayri Efendi, look after Zehra and pay due attention to her education and upbringing until she is married…,” and so on — thus a gentle old man’s will entrusted us with the care of our own daughter.

As the war in Anatolia had long since finished and a good number of soldiers had already returned to Istanbul, many of Abdüsselam’s relatives and friends were in the city when he passed away. They flocked to the house the following day, each with a different version of his will. But of course by then their wills were out-of-date and legally void. Some time ago we had, however, agreed that we would take only our child and our personal effects when we left the house. And that’s just what we did. But a few days after our departure, the atmosphere changed. In a number of his wills, Abdüsselam Bey had bequeathed to my daughter a great many things he had already pawned, and for quite considerable sums, and for some reason he had left wills with two different notaries. And so to settle the affair we were obliged to go to court.