Ahmet Tanpinar - The Time Regulation Institute

Despite the fact that there was nothing even remotely resembling an inheritance, most of the potential heirs believed — among other far-fetched scenarios — that we had taken advantage of the old man’s dementia to trick him into thinking our daughter was his mother.

And when we claimed, in self-defense, that the man had not been in full possession of his mental faculties during the last few years of his life, we were accused of disrespecting our dear benefactor and making a mockery of his memory. “Slander!” they cried. “Slander, defamation, ingratitude…” No sooner had we turned our backs than they interpreted everything in their favor: “Did you hear that? How they confessed to it all?”

Good God! so much was jointly owned, and the legal formalities were endless. If ever a sixth, seventh, or even a tenth of a plot of land or property had gone up for sale, my late father-in-law had bought in. Who knows, perhaps he thought he might extract a profit when the prices rose. His drawers were crammed full of property deeds, but every year he accrued an equivalent bill of debt. His real estate was not a source of revenue but, rather, a kind of stamp collection. At first the judges we spoke with found humor in the thought of this grown man taking his adopted maid’s daughter for his mother, but with time the deceitful statements made by Abdüsselam Bey’s many heirs led them to suspect us of foul play. I did my best to explain the situation:

“Sir, the late efendi was a playful man at heart. This is just the kind of little joke he liked to play on my daughter, whom he treated as his own child…”

“Are you trying to say he played jokes on a three-year-old child?” the judge asked reproachfully. “First you say he treated her like his child, and now you’re saying he acted clownishly, taking her to be his own mother. Make up your mind!”

“I am in no position to choose. The deceased availed himself of both techniques.”

“Some of the wills date back to when she was only six months old. What is this? What part of this joke would a six-month-old baby understand?”

“Nothing at all, absolutely nothing, but everyone does this sort of thing. Who doesn’t change his voice when speaking to a child? And we don’t limit this role-playing to children. Consider when we play with cats and dogs — we either stoop to their level or demand they rise to our own. In this regard the deceased had struck just the right balance. The parties were engaged in mutual dependency but were in fact independently at variance.”

I had picked up some legal terminology.

“Well fine, then. But how do you account for the child — or the mother, if you will — referring to the deceased as her son? The witnesses’ statements are quite clear: Since he passed away, the child weeps and cries out, ‘Oh, where’s my son?’”

Indeed this was the case. Abdüsselam Bey had even managed to teach our daughter Zehra to address him as her son. Now the little girl drowned herself in tears as she cried out for her missing son. Again I did my best to interpret this conundrum for the court.

“That’s right, sir. This is what he taught her. The two would spend the entire day together. Besides, isn’t that how all this started in the first place? In his last years, the poor man just wasn’t thinking very clearly…”

Feelings were running so high by now that it was extremely difficult to speak without offending someone. Oh how happy and relieved I would have been if I could have just shouted at the top of my lungs that this man I had loved so dearly had gone senile. Had he not been demented, he would never have bombarded us with stories of incest as bizarre as any story ever told about the Egyptian pharaohs. In the end the will (which in any case had never been legally binding) was annulled, and I was merely reprimanded, first for showing disrespect to the memory of my guardian, and then for speaking nonsense in a court of law.

By the time it looked as if the matter had been resolved, I had genuinely begun to fear that the words “guardian,” “father,” and “inheritance” would be my undoing. But it didn’t end there: next the public entered into the fray.

III

The annulment of the will left our small circle reeling. Everyone we knew, or at least a significant majority, claimed that we, and in particular my daughter, had been deprived of what was legally our due. By now I had left the Tünel for a private institution, and everyone in my office, as well as in my neighborhood, was up in arms about the injustice that had been visited upon us, with each of our supporters reacting in his own particular way. Some took pity on me and my daughter. Others forgot us altogether, so angry were they with the heirs for disrespecting their father’s last wishes at a time when he had only scant worldly possessions to his name. Others avowed that it was through my own foolish incompetence that the fortune had slipped from my grasp. In heated debates, the matter might be swept away with a quick gesture or built up into an avalanche or deemed to be of no significance whatsoever, depending on the speaker’s mood and inclination. Those who viewed the matter in moral terms had little concern for the fortune itself, preferring to leave it in the hands of God. And those who believed man to be inherently avaricious and conniving took pleasure in calculating our losses and my ineptitude.

But they all had one thing in common: they never listened to what I had to say. It would have made no difference had I said, “But the man had no money. He was up to his ears in debt. I actually haven’t lost a thing. For there was nothing I ever wanted to begin with!”

Even my employer was swept up in the tide of public opinion. So convinced was he that I’d been robbed that he offered me a sudden five-lira raise in consolation.

My boss’s gesture of pity served only to deepen the compassion that surrounded me. Some even thought I had suffered a blow from which I would never recover. One night, as I left the office, a friend took me by the arm and said:

“Come now, good Hayri. Let’s go round the corner and knock back a few glasses of rakı together. It’s the cure to all misery.”

“Let’s drink, yes, let’s have a drink, but not out of misery, for I’m not at all troubled. We’ll drink for the pleasure of the drink itself. But if you like, why not come to our house? We can drink there. It wouldn’t be right for me to leave my wife alone at a time like this.”

My wife was then pregnant with our second child, Ahmet. But Sabri Bey was set on misinterpreting everything I said:

“Of course… You’ve both suffered a terrible blow. The poor woman has every right to feel…”

And so he used all his powers to persuade me. He wouldn’t come home with me as he didn’t want to put us out any further; he was determined to console me in a meyhane , and I agreed, hoping this might give me a chance to explain how the inheritance had been misunderstood. At least in a public tavern he’d have to relinquish his grip on my arm when he sat across from me at the table. Sabri was a rather ugly man, but his great bulk was somehow reassuring.

When at last we were settled in the meyhane , I did my best to explain how I’d landed in this predicament:

“I loved the man like my own father. And I was a witness to his many kind deeds. But I never expected more from him — I had no right. Anyway he’s been penniless for the past six years. He survived on loans. As for the will and all that, well that’s just what happens when a man loses his mind. If there had been anything like a real inheritance, I doubt I’d ever have been able to sleep at night, but the man was so deep in debt…”

And so on and so forth. But Sabri Bey pursued the issue: