Ahmet Tanpinar - The Time Regulation Institute

“Tomorrow, at eleven o’clock… You won’t forget, now? Yes, at eleven o’clock, at precisely eleven, you understand?”

He would say all this in a voice so sharp and strident that it made me lightheaded and nauseous; it was as if he took a pocketknife and carved every word into my brain. Then, without warning, a dark curtain would drop over my eyes and I’d be clenching my fists. In moments such as those I would have happily given away half my life for the chance to bash in his chin and rearrange his face — knocking his fat, oily jowls right up into his finely plucked eyebrows, smashing him to bits like a broken old record. But this storm would be short-lived, for now Selma Hanım came to life in my mind, her voluptuous body overflowing like the tide, her fine, supple curves swelling as if her corset had just been loosened, with the modesty of her measured gaze tempered by the sweet tickle of her laugh; until I could think only of the prize I’d be granted for my patience:

“Yes, sir.”

Sometimes he’d rattle off the name of a tailor, cobbler, or department store or give me the name and address of a wealthy Jewish merchant I was to meet on the dock before helping him carry his luggage to his car — or rather I’d carry all his luggage myself: he made sure I had all the details of the assigned task. As the strain of work mounted, I’d nearly choke on the rage and disgust I felt for the man. It wasn’t enough for him write the names and addresses and the task to be done on a simple piece of paper. He would have me read his lists back to him, as many as ten times over — this to convince himself that I’d memorized not just the errands but the order in which I was to carry them out.

I tolerated all this in the hope of catching a glimpse of Selma Hanım, if not sooner then later. Sometimes, in a last attempt at self-defense, my lips would twist into a smile that was, I hoped, a subtle blend of pride and mockery, as with my eyes I made as if to say, “Can’t you see how I’m suffering for this fool? But I’m just having him on — don’t get the wrong idea. I’m just enjoying this while it lasts as…” It was, I hoped, a glare that drew my cohorts at the coffeehouse into my game, making them my playmates and partners in crime.

But whoever even noticed my furtive glances or pathetic smiles? Cemal Bey was possessed of an autocrat’s diminishing gaze: he might have been viewing us from his own personal fire tower; and so blinding was the force of his personality that no one could have seen those changes in my expression, even if I’d held a lantern to my face.

So, no, charm was not Cemal’s strong point; the only thing (remotely) bearable about the man was the warmth of his greeting. But his friendly overtures were more difficult to bear than his indifference. Should this man link his arm in mine, to whisper words meant for my ears only, I would shiver so violently one might have thought I’d succumbed to a ferocious stroke. Others suffered similarly. If Cemal happened to sit down next to him on the sofa, Suayp Bey would withdraw his hands ever so slowly and return them to his lap, and the lawyer Nail Bey seemed to freeze altogether. Yet everyone remained solicitous, respectful, fearful, and anxious to get along. He was the dangerous reptile, and we were his paralyzed prey. With such powers, he could have achieved great things in the underworld. But (as we shall see in due course) he too had come into this world with a certain weakness. It was as if fortune and chance had stripped his will of a clear purpose so as to shield themselves from its full power.

The deeper my own involvement, the more clearly I saw the effect he had on others. One day Cemal’s tailor showed me the running tab in his ledger. The figures were astounding. The man looked at me long and hard, and then shook his head as he pointed to the last figure noted: “It was only yesterday that I refunded him two hundred lira. He insisted…” And then, as if gripped by sudden madness, he made a terrifying display of tearing up the receipt. Three days later I saw Cemal Bey reprimand the tailor for a crease in the very suit he was wearing — though there was, if you ask me, no crease whatsoever — and I was flabbergasted by the poor man’s patience in the face of it. It was the sort of thing you wouldn’t believe unless you saw it with your own eyes. As he sank into shame, the poor man was almost swallowed up by his shoulders. And he kept saying, “As you wish, sir,” as if he had no other words.

He extracted money from his haberdasher, cobbler, and landlord in the same way. When his landlord finally mustered enough courage to remind his tenant that he owed two hundred liras in back rent, this poor browbeaten man was subjected to a vigorous lecture on a landlord’s sacred duties, which ended only when he promised to change the bathroom tiles and install glass around the back balcony. In his shrill Bosnian accent, Cemal Bey kept shrieking, “The tiles, the tiles!” Apparently the bathroom tiles didn’t match his madam’s nightgown. He made as if this terrible stroke of ill fortune had shaken him to his very core.

There was only one person in the Spiritualist Society who dismissed Cemal Bey’s imperial presence, and that was Mlle Aphrodite; in fact she did not even see it. With her smooth, firm skin and her thirty-two teeth flashing like flaming paraffin whenever she opened her mouth, and her suggestive eyes deepening beneath those long lashes like the setting sun, and a light and lilting accent (inherited from her Italian father) whose aftertaste — sharp as mustard — lodged in your throat but still lightened your heart with sweetness, and with her hands darting about without design but, like a spider, stunning all it touched, in wave after wave of warm allure, as she secured her conquest, she was, perhaps without knowing it, the pure embodiment of womanhood.

Every aspect of Aphrodite took the form of a command: she was inspiration personified, though she seemed sometimes saddened to be burdened with gifts she couldn’t hide.

On seeing Cemal Bey, she’d bring her hand to her cheek and pretend to shave as she squealed, “Ouch! I’ve just cut myself!” before taking shameless flight to my office, or to the kitchen, where she’d rest against the closed door to giggle in that mustardy voice. We could forgive her playful provocations, for none of us doubted their intent. We all knew that what drove her away from Cemal Bey was an absolute and insuperable disgust. And she made no secret of it:

“What am I supposed to do? I just can’t stand the man. There’s something so repugnant about him. I don’t know what.”

But Cemal Bey, who ignored all this, remained kind and condescending, affecting an air that seemed to say, “Beauty and Youth will always forgive such faults. How could we blame such a creature so pitifully ignorant and uneducated?” But in fact he found her behavior upsetting, grating as it did against the pride he wore like armor. Cemal Bey was a proud man and such pride is always kept close at hand, where it is most visible: it is the rich man’s automobile, the general’s aide-de-camp, the policeman’s revolver, the traffic warden’s whistle. No one could engage with him in any way without sensing this pride or thinking about it obsessively or feeling deeply disturbed.

When Aphrodite was twenty, her mother fell gravely ill, after which time the girl spent her evenings at her bedside. One evening she began scribbling something on a table in the room; not finding this odd, she did the same thing at just the same hour the following evening, and the next, without quite knowing what she was doing. When, on the morning after the third night, Aphrodite realized what was happening, she took a closer look at the pages she’d assumed were nothing but thoughtless scribbles, and between the doodles and the crooked words she spied a sentence: “Find a new doctor!” Too frightened at first to breathe a word to anyone, she confided in a friend, following which, and upon the insistence of an uncle then residing in their home, they found a new doctor — and her mother was saved.