Ahmet Tanpinar - The Time Regulation Institute

From then, all she had to do was sit down at a desk with pencil in hand for a few minutes before starting her involuntary scribbling. At first her writing was no more than disjointed, meaningless words jumbled together into obtuse sentences, but with time they came to focus on a wide range of topics: there were news flashes on current events and personal or family matters, and even commentaries on city life. After testing this newfound talent on several friends, and at the insistence of the society, she came to learn how, by concentrating her powers on particular points of interest, she could find the answers people were likely to accept.

Before long, she would find herself yanked out of bed by an overwhelming force, to be dragged to her desk to fill page after page. She often wrote all night long, but by morning neither the authoress nor her friends could make any sense of her scribbling. Sometimes they found no more than a tangled string of meaningless words, names, and numbers — with the numbers 17 and 153 occurring most frequently. She wrote in a smattering of Italian, Greek, French, and Turkish.

Aphrodite’s father was Genoese. An event of major significance in his youth having put his life in danger, he had no choice but to flee to Izmir, and from there to Istanbul, where he married a Greek girl and settled down. He was a fine jeweler and an excellent tenor. He opened a very popular little shop near the funicular in Beyoglu and soon enough he became a man of means. But he severed all ties with his family because he didn’t feel safe, even after so much time had passed. So it was only when he died in 1915 that people found out he was Genoese and had a mother, father, and sister living in Italy. When Scarrechi died, his brother-in-law (formerly his apprentice) took over the running of the business, implementing changes during the Armistice years that transformed the little shop into an enormous shopping center. But by then the high craftsmanship of Aphrodite’s father’s time was a thing of the past. Customers to this vast and luxurious new emporium that employed the best goldsmiths in the trade still longed for the quality of his craftsmanship, or so it was said.

In the years following his death, Aphrodite and her mother brooded a great deal on the man’s early life and his relatives abroad. It was because she was curious to know about them that Aphrodite first undertook to advance her career as a spiritual medium. In the séances she conducted with friends, she concentrated her efforts on this matter in particular, and though its importance waned over time, she came to see that the force rousing her in the middle of the night (compelling her to roll back her eyes and give it voice in the indecipherable automatic writing she produced) was none other than her paternal aunt, who had died in 1923, still waiting for her brother and his family to return to their homeland at long last.

And then the pleas from the other side became clearer and the deceased more direct in applying pressure:

“Why won’t you come? Why won’t you come live with us in our home? Why won’t you come to collect your inheritance?” she scolded them. “I never married. I lived on next to nothing, saving it all for you. Why won’t you come?”

Aphrodite’s poor mother knew nothing about her husband other than that he had once lived in Genoa, under a certain name, so she was reluctant to accept these ever-more-insistent invitations: it was out of the question, and, anyway, she did not possess a single official document that established her as a member of his family. But soon enough she gave way to her determined daughter and the insistent community to which Aphrodite belonged; when she at last capitulated, she said, “Well, if nothing else, we’ll have gone on a journey.” Whereupon, following a string of strange and startling coincidences, the matter of the inheritance was settled with some ease.

As it turned out, there really wasn’t much of a fortune. Along with a modest sum of money the woman had saved, she’d left behind two houses on a long and narrow street, numbers 17 and 153. Yet the costs incurred by Aphrodite and her mother on their journey came to more than the value of both properties combined. Even so, it was a source of great pride to them that they had succeeded in their quest, and under circumstances that knew no precedent: in this they were a great inspiration to others. They could not help but be impressed by the many sacrifices this relative had made to hold on to these two fully furnished homes for so many years. She’d made her living running a boarding house and tatting her own lace — her legacy included vast quantities of the stuff. But, sadly, the woman’s obsession with collecting and hoarding meant the houses themselves were in rather poor condition.

Aphrodite and her mother didn’t have the heart to sell these properties that had come to them by such a bizarre route, and as neither of them was willing to follow the old auntie’s directive to resettle in Italy — in any event their livelihoods were in Istanbul — they oversaw a little restoration work on the houses and left.

From that day on, the aunt was nowhere to be found. Whenever Aphrodite had a free moment she would sit down at her desk and take hold of her pen with softly furrowed brow and creased forehead, there to wait as her countenance turned as hard as marble, her every contour erased, and thus she would wait for hours on end for her loving aunt to communicate with her once more.

She never reappeared. It was as if, freed of her heavy burden, this self-sacrificing soul had at last allowed herself to drift off into the pure sleep that she had been promised. And she deserved so much. She had devoted her entire life to her lost brother and his children, though they lived so very far away. In truth, she’d never known how many children he had or if he had any at all, for that matter, but all the same she always set aside for them all that she came to own, with her eyes forever fixed on the horizon so that she might say to them upon their return, “This is your home, and here is everything that I have saved for you.”

Even in death she remained mindful of her sacred mission; lost in the eternal void, and bereft of clues, she continued to search for her brother far and wide, until, after untold years, she found her way to the bedside of the young girl, Aphrodite. This alone should have been cause for thanks.

But it was not enough for Aphrodite. Having bound herself up in her auntie’s will — the Spiritualist Society had named her the Will — she longed for her return, and her continuing absence plunged the young woman into misery. She hadn’t even been able to thank her properly; not even had she said, “But, dear Auntie, why so much trouble? If only you knew how very touched we were by your sacrifices…” With time, a certain sort of sorrow ate into her expressions of gratitude:

“What’s it to me, an inheritance? I have my own money. Why did she go to so much trouble? Why didn’t she just get married? How could someone do such a thing? She did all this, but why hasn’t she come back to me?”

It seemed that all Aphrodite wanted to do was embrace her aunt, if only just the once, and after thanking her properly, she would have liked to explain how all her sacrifices had been in vain, and perhaps even reprimand her auntie for having abandoned her so abruptly. But try as she might, she couldn’t bring herself to understand how a compassionate and determined soul like her aunt could lose faith in her cause so suddenly:

“There’s most definitely something wrong. Either she’s angry with us or there’s been an accident…”

She imagined her aunt on the roadside of the wide and heavily trafficked interstellar highways — wounded, paralyzed, and abandoned and more helpless than ever.