Ahmet Tanpinar - The Time Regulation Institute

“Why is it that the poor and the downtrodden always get beaten? Take Cemal Bey, no one would ever dare lay a finger on such a man.”

I had picked up the habit of speaking to myself aloud. Dr. Ramiz turned to me with a teasing smile and said, “Again? What do you expect from the miserable man?”

Then turning to Halit Ayarcı, he said, “Hayri Bey simply cannot stomach Cemal.”

My face flushed to hear my secrets so baldly revealed, so I turned to the window.

“He’s absolutely right!” Halit Ayarcı said. Then he turned to face me. “It’s not like I haven’t thought about doing it once or twice myself. But in the end I was a bit frightened by the thought of it. I realized that once I started I’d never stop. Just imagine… If someone actually planted a slap on that face, he wouldn’t be able to stop at just one!”

I shot a glance at his enormous hands, saddened to think that nothing of the sort had ever occurred.

On the ferryboat returning from the funeral, Cemal had never once left my side. Practically every five minutes, as if to remind me just how tired I really was, he said, “Hayri Bey, you seem all puffed out! I’ll never forget all your help today. She was such a strange woman. More of a nut than that aunt of yours, but the same sort of person… Of course Selma never liked her. And she harbored no goodwill toward us either. But all the same, she was a relative. We were under obligation not to neglect this last responsibility of ours. What to do? That’s what I asked myself this morning. I asked Selma and she said, ‘Don’t worry. Once Hayri Bey reads about it in the paper, he’ll be over in no time.’ As it happens, all those extra details in the obituary were added just for you. But the truth is, you really have overextended yourself…”

Yes, that was just how it happened. I had volunteered for the job.

Cemal Bey couldn’t openly call me an idiot or an incurable moron. He could only repeat the story to me ten times over, to hammer home the fact that I was indeed a fool. “No, Selma never loved that woman. She’d been mistreated by her on many occasions. But still, she’s ever so grateful to you for all you’ve done.”

Every time he opened his mouth I felt the ground shift beneath my feet. To think of how I’d gone to sit at the head of that grave without even having made my ablutions, to wail painful prayers for this relative they had never liked.

And oh, the fantasies I played over in my mind. One took me forward to the day after the funeral, or perhaps a week later, when I’d run into Selma Hanım, who, after greeting me with her most charming smile, would say, “Oh, Hayri Bey, Cemal Bey told me all about your devotion to my aunt. I can’t tell you how touched I was. I am so grateful for your unfaltering friendship. But I knew, Hayri Bey, I always knew that you were my very best friend!” And she would carry on with similar flatteries, and I’d be so flustered that I’d begin to stammer until, finding nothing to say, I would throw myself down at her feet and, with a voice even sweeter than before, Selma Hanım would say, “No, no, I know everything… Don’t do this to a miserable woman imprisoned by her true feelings!”

I had endured all the hardship as I kept imagining that scene straight out of a Turkish film — but of course Selma Hanım would never speak with that nasal voice our actors affected. But every five minutes Cemal Bey said something else, wrenching me from my sweet reverie.

At some point I drifted back to listen to what Halit Ayarcı was saying.

“It’s simply not possible to know Cemal, even superficially, and not want to kill the man. I thought about it on more than one occasion when we studied together at Galatasaray Lycée.”

After that funeral I hadn’t uttered the name Büyükdere again. But rakı was another matter altogether. My bond with the drink was stronger, deeper. But even the drink reminded me of the man. In fact, I had experience of rakı with Cemal Beyefendi himself, an episode that cast him in an unfavorable light. One day I paid him a visit and found him just settling down to drink at the dinner table; he promptly sat me down and offered me a rakı. As he took his first sip, his face contorted into such a miserable wince that I lost all my appetite, but, just to show the man how to drink rakı, I threw back eight glasses, one after the other, and left the house swooning. Thinking back now on all my experiences with Cemal Bey, I wonder if I wasn’t actually right to feel the way I did about him. Clearly there was nothing, nothing at all, about the man I liked, save his wife…

The second time I found myself without a job there was a period when I was drinking a considerable amount of rakı. I owed a few liras to every little drinking hole from Sehzadebası to Edirnekapı that reeked of bitter beans and burnt olive oil. And my tab at the corner shop grew with the number of forty-fives of rakı I begged the shopkeeper to give me every evening; he only allowed me such credit because he had his eyes on the derelict plot beside our old house. Sometimes I didn’t dare take the bottle home; I would knock it back then and there, right next to the counter, oblivious to the impertinence of the shop boys and Yusuf Efendi’s insinuations about the state of my home and all my debt, not caring a whit for what they might say behind my back; and then, doing my best not to look them in the eye, I would say, as I stared off into space, “Put this in a corner for me. I’ll come by tomorrow evening and pick up where I left off.”

So I was familiar with both Büyükdere and rakı. Both evoked infinite memories. It was only natural for the two to come together. And of course there were those who drank rakı in Büyükdere. But how had I ended up in this scene? This was the strange part: me, rakı, and Büyükdere. No, that wasn’t it. Büyükdere, rakı, me — no matter how I imagined it, the combination was still something my mind of two hours ago would never have accepted. And even more incredible, the me in this scenario had been addressed four times as beyefendi.

Hayri Bey, Hayri Efendi, Hayri my son, Hayri the Fortuneteller, Hayri l’Horloger, the orphan Hayri, the wizard Hayri, prodigal Hayri, Hayri the Tippler, the Addict, husband to Pakize Hayri, the brother-in-law to his wife’s sisters Hayri — and now Hayri Beyefendi.

“Hayri Beyefendi, won’t you have a cigarette?”

“Why, thank you, Beyefendi.”

That was how people should speak. It was something I would have said six or seven years ago. It was one more thing I had forgotten. In a rush I felt fire spreading over my lips and gums; it had been a while since I’d had a cigarette. When I heard the fifth “beyefendi,” I nearly leapt up from my seat in joy.

The car soared like an arrow cleaving the beautiful misty spring evening and pushing it to either side. In the fog over the hills of Çemberlikuyu, that evening unfurled like a ribbon whose colors ran from wine dark to golden, ever gaining in beauty, in a verdant lushness that stretched out as far as the eye could see and that was soft as fresh grass, timid and frail as wildflowers. It was as if we were at the end of that ribbon, rushing forward, collecting the many reflections around it.

Rakı, Büyükdere, and I, and the “I” in this equation was a beyefendi. And the car was soaring at seventy kilometers. And I was as elated as if I were a child all over again, speeding off to a holiday fair!

“You seem rather lost in thought, Hayri Beyefendi!”

Praise God that Dr. Ramiz was there. I never felt I had to speak when addressed in his company. He answered for me.

“Hayri Bey’s always like that!”

Hayri Beyefendi, our Hayri, your Hayri, Hayri plunged in thought — there were so many different Hayris. Oh, if we could only drop a few of them off along the way. I could be just one person, just myself, like everyone else.