Ahmet Tanpinar - The Time Regulation Institute

“Didn’t you say it was broken?”

“Broken? Just in need of a little repair!”

He thought for a moment:

“Yes, of course, that must be it…”

But what was it that must be? I couldn’t quite understand what he meant. Nuri Efendi said a watch or clock should always be in working order, in fact it should never stop at all. I shrugged my shoulders. When would our conversation return to my present situation? Perhaps never. After many hours had passed, Dr. Ramiz moved the subject to my father. And after my father, it was my mother, and after my mother, Nuri Efendi. He was curious to know about all my acquaintances. And then he zeroed in on the story of the mosque that Ahmet the Signer had never found the wherewithal to build.

“Was this mosque discussed often at home?”

“No,” I said. “Or at least not very often. Whenever my father had the slightest hope of a little money coming his way, he might bring it up. Otherwise he’d never let anyone even mention it. Actually the clock reminded him of the mosque, so he harbored rather hostile feelings toward it.”

“Which clock?”

“The big one.”

“You mean the Blessed One? But why don’t you use its proper name?” he scolded me. “When something has a name, it should be addressed with that name.”

Saddened that I had overlooked this simple truth, and delighted that he had discovered a new aphorism, I let the discussion return to the Blessed One. The doctor presented me with a steady stream of questions, and I explained everything as best I could remember, innocent of what lay ahead:

“One night we were all sitting together at home when suddenly the clock began to chime. My father flew into a rage. ‘Enough!’ he shrieked. ‘You know just like everyone else that I’m broke. It’s simply impossible right now. We can barely get by as it is. Things are not like they used to be. Why do you keep harassing me?’”

“He said all this to the Blessed One?”

“Yes, I mean, I suppose so… I don’t know!”

“Yes, it must be… A very interesting case indeed… Extremely typical, but, then again, just as rare. Thank you very much. Thank you very much indeed…”

The man was thanking me for having gotten myself into this sorry state.

“And those were the man’s very words, right?”

His attentions and intentions were evident from head to toe as he peered into my face. “I will most certainly write a report about this for the congress… Now, tell me again what you just said a moment ago?”

I went over the episode again.

“This is a rare case of tremendous significance — one might almost call it a taboo encircled by a web of complexes. But similar cases have been documented.”

And he told me how infertile women on a Javanese island, or some such place, were in the custom of visiting an ancient cannon that their people venerated as a prophet, tying strips of cloth to it in the hope of curing their condition. Hoping to change the subject, I said:

“We have similar stories too. The old war ship Mahmudiye was like that. You know, the one that supposedly had three hulls? At night the ship sailed by stealth across the Black Sea to attack Sebastopol, unloading its cannons on the bastions and returning before morning. My father remembers it well. The inside was as large as the Selimiye Barracks—”

“It was inside your house?” he asked me.

Was he daydreaming, or did he just assume I was completely out of my mind? Or even more terrifying…

“No, no!” I cried. “In our country. I mean, it was in Istanbul.”

And so I tried my best to articulate my thoughts clearly so as to prove I was sane.

“How could such a battleship ever fit inside a house? You would need something the size of Hagia Sophia to hold such an enormous vessel.”

“Hagia Sophia?”

I saw now where I had gone wrong.

“I mean, these are merely figures of speech,” I said. And without allowing him a chance to speak, I returned to my story.

He listened with grave attention, all the while taking notes. Then, thanking me once again, he offered his opinion:

“This, too, is extremely interesting, but rather different. Which is to say, it’s something else entirely…”

At various points in our discussion he stopped to clean his fingernails with the pocketknife he’d taken from his briefcase. When he finished the job, I was sure he’d pass the knife to me, which really wouldn’t have been all that bad, seeing as the best thing to do would be to fiddle with something, anything to keep my mind off the absurdity of my situation. But he didn’t offer me the knife, instead placing it back in his briefcase before we doused ourselves in more lemon cologne. Then out came the cigarette pack all over again, and I could bear it no longer.

“Doctor,” I cried. “Why not just keep all these things out on the table?”

For a moment terror overtook me, but then he smiled softly and said, “It’s easier this way.”

The doctor’s conception of ease was no different from my stepmother’s conception of happiness. Ah, humankind…

“You are quite a wonderful fellow, Hayri Bey. If only we had met in Vienna.”

And of course we went right back to talking about Vienna — Dr. Ramiz’s beloved city always took precedence over my case. Then we turned to a more inauspicious topic of discussion.

“The Blessed One was quite important for your mother, wasn’t he?”

“I suppose.”

“Try to remember.”

He was looking me straight in the eye again.

“Perhaps what I mean to say is, it was a quirky old clock with its own strange moods. It had a whimsical — or, rather, idiosyncratic — way of working, though perhaps that was only because it was broken. And the things it would do in its different moods — well, we found them rather strange.”

As I spoke, his face radiated joy, and he nodded eagerly as he listened. Then he read over his notes.

“Strange, quirky, odd, strange moods, idiosyncratic, whimsical, the things it could do… That’s right, isn’t it? Very interesting… And then?”

“That’s it.”

By then I had had enough. What about my examination? He had made absolutely no mention of it.

“Yes, I’m listening. And your mother?”

“In the end she was terribly frightened of the clock. You know the type, from the older generation — she was a superstitious woman.”

“There’s no such thing as old or new in our field. The most primitive person is no different from ourselves. Conscious and unconscious lives are the same anywhere. Psychoanalysis…”

And that was how the word I would hear so often for the rest of my life popped out of his mouth and plopped down before me like a soft-boiled egg.

He got up.

“We’ll continue tomorrow. Now let’s make sure you get some rest! Has your bed arrived?”

“My wife’s sending it over.”

“Well, that’s good, then. You’ll sleep here in this room. You’d only be bored in the reformatory, and uncomfortable. I’ll have a word with the director about it.”

He seemed distraught.

“They don’t like me here. They never listen to what I have to say. But seeing that you are now my patient…”

“But, Doctor, I’m not ill. Now you know everything. And still you believe I am ill?”

Without listening to me in the slightest, he left the room.

I stood there, thinking for a while as I watched him leave.

I dashed to the sink to splash water on my face. The discussion had worn me out. The doctor had left the door open, and a cold draft blew into the room, carrying with it painful cries, sharper now and all the more horrifying. What was going on? Were these the voices of the truly insane? Or were they just patients? That man who had come in earlier had said something about opening a cadaver. I wondered if they’d started dissecting. Perhaps they were just now closing it up! The doctor hadn’t shut the door behind him. Perhaps they hadn’t closed the body. But why were they opening it in the first place? Suddenly I was overwhelmed with a desperate desire to flee. I fearfully stepped out of the office, heading in the direction from which I assumed we had come. As I tiptoed down the corridor, the screams grew only louder. This can’t be the way, I said to myself. But it was as if the screams were drawing me to them. There were voices behind a half-opened door. I poked my head in and then instantly leapt back, my entire body trembling in fear. No, they hadn’t finished closing it up. I turned on my heels, scrambled back to the office, slammed the door shut, and hunkered down in my chair.