Ahmet Tanpinar - The Time Regulation Institute

Pakize misjudged the effect this so called sanction had on me. She thought she caused me deep distress whenever she banished me to the divan. But the truth is that, despite her thirty-five years, she still didn’t sleep properly. So a night on the divan was a welcome change from my usual nightly struggle to keep my feet from hanging off the edge of the bed.

Convinced that the divan was the worst possible punishment I could ever receive, Pakize refused to listen when I suggested we sleep separately.

“Oh please! Heaven forbid,” she would say, dismissing my proposals, “I should sleep in the bedroom while my husband sleeps on the divan in the living room. I could never reconcile myself with that. Just the thought of you suffering such discomfort… I wouldn’t be able to sleep at all.”

But the most uncomfortable spot was right beside her. In her waking hours, my wife was so very calm, sweet, and listless — save when she was arguing or out at the cinema — but the moment she drifted off to sleep she became an acrobat, her legs and arms and hands multiplying to enhance the feats to be performed; as she lay facedown, her body would jerk in fits and starts, like a spider striking a wild variety of poses, swirling from modern dance into African ritual as her ever-growing limbs came flinging at me from all directions, poking and pushing and clinging to my body in the strangest formations before brutally thrusting me away.

If you add to this the restless snoring, snorting, and mumbling (all consequences of her malfunctioning thyroid gland), you might just begin to have a sense of the mad festivities I was obliged to endure each night.

Pakize also liked to jolt me awake in the middle of the night to give me passionate accounts of her dreams. That was how I came to learn that she experienced in her dreams all that she lacked in her waking hours. So no matter how wrenching an argument, I quietly rejoiced if it ended in my sleeping alone.

So I was sleeping in the living room. After everyone had gone to sleep, my daughter tiptoed into the room and told me she had decided to marry Ismail the Lame. Her eyes were full of tears. “I can’t take it anymore,” she said. “I’ll take Ahmet with me — maybe the family can care for him. Ismail’s mother will be here again tomorrow. Every day she asks me if I’ll marry him. This time I’m going to say yes.” Muffling her sobs, she tiptoed out of the room as silently as she had come in.

And now Ismail the Lame sat there before me. I saw him in all his ugliness. I saw how his vile disposition had eaten through his gross form, seeping into the depths of his mortal soul. He bore all the unsavory traits recorded in the science of phrenology: His forehead was so narrow it was hardly even there, meaning he was vain; he had gangly arms and stubby fingers, and the palms of his hand were deep, coarse, and crimson, as if they were festering wounds; his jutting lower lip and his eyes’ sideward glances showed him to be a cruel, moronic trickster and a liar; his voice grated like a steel brush, in itself enough to confirm that he was uncivilized and utterly lacking in social grace; and he had yellow, crooked teeth, all mashed one on top of another, a testament to his miserly nature and unfortunate fate. That he possessed every human flaw imaginable was clear beyond doubt. What business did poor Zehra have with such a man?

It was getting harder and harder to keep calm. Every moment I felt like packing up and leaving the coffeehouse. But I was waiting for Dr. Ramiz and so was forced to endure the poisonous presence of my future son-in-law.

His chin and upper lip twitched like cogs in a watch; his Adam’s apple jerked back and forth in his neck as he played cards. Worst of all were his hands: those thick, gnarled fingers, untouched by profession or trade, seemed to have been made expressly for crimes too egregious for a civilized mind even to contemplate.

“I’ll take Ahmet with me,” Zehra had said the night before, as if to console me, but now the words horrified me. We were to sacrifice two people instead of just one. I brought my hand to my forehead. “Come now, Hayri Irdal, pull yourself together,” I thought. “There is no way you can care for this boy. It’s out of the question.” But what difference would it make? My fortune would stay the same, I thought, even as disaster loomed.

Twice I tried to force myself to get up. Each time I was pushed back into my chair as if directed by my future son-in-law’s curses. How foul tempered and evil. How ugly and crude. No, sir, I was not going to give any daughter of mine to that man. Oh, and the way he played cards — such gruesome avarice. The game more than just a pastime playing itself out in the physical world: it took over his body, operating each part separately, pecking at this and probing at that. His right foot (inside a poorly patched shoe that exposed his shredded sock) pumped up and down like the pedal of a sewing machine; his Adam’s apple bulged now in this direction and now in that; his hooklike fingers were either grasping at things or hanging from them; he wheezed in air between his teeth as his chin jutted forward as if to spit out whatever had just been sucked in; as he struggled to befoul all around him, he let out the most preposterous snarls.

“Vile, I tell you, sir, utterly vile! Vile and moronic, moronic and beastly…”

A hand fell onto my shoulder.

“Daydreaming again?” asked Dr. Ramiz. He was smiling broadly. Next to him stood a man, probably forty-two, forty-three years old, tall, with light wheat-colored skin, smartly dressed, rather flamboyant, indeed a rather handsome man.

“Allow me to introduce to you my good friend Hayri Bey,” Dr. Ramiz said to the man. “He’s quite an interesting fellow. Don’t be fooled by his attire!” And then, turning to me, he said:

“Halit Ayarcı, a friend of mine from school.” There followed the usual polite exchange. As the doctor continued to quiz me about this and that, his eyes kept drifting to the empty table beyond me.

Humans are such strange creatures. At the time I thought it unfortunate that Halit Ayarcı had chosen just this moment to arrive: his appearance had made it impossible for me to ask Dr. Ramiz for the few liras he owed me. How could I have known then that this man accompanying Dr. Ramiz to the coffeehouse was the harbinger of my good fortune? He brought with him the prosperity of my children and a future for my wife and her sisters.

“What an arrogant man,” I thought. “He sizes people up as if he might buy them.” Thus my anger toward this stranger was doubled. Yet his eyes brought no discomfort; his gaze was like no other’s; I could find in it not the slightest hint of contempt or mockery. He studied people with the same detachment he might accord an object. He wished only to understand the thing before his eyes, nothing more.

We were preparing to part company; I was sinking into my chair, ruefully aware that the chance for demanding those liras had come and gone: meanwhile Dr. Ramiz was turning toward the table he’d been eyeing in the distance, even as he went through the usual motions, giving me a thorough looking over while slapping my shoulder, pinching my cheeks, and chucking my chin (this being the standard routine in the coffeehouse at the time, no one ever took his leave without first taking a thorough inventory of my attire). Then he stopped and said to his friend:

“Weren’t you having problems with your watch? Why don’t you let Hayri Bey have a look at it? He’s quite remarkable with watches and clocks.”

With the passing of the years Dr. Ramiz was ever more inclined to excessive chatter.

“I’ll have you know the man’s one of a kind, a truly magnanimous soul. He might not have his own shop, but he most certainly has a keen grasp on watches and clocks, yes, sir…”