Ahmet Tanpinar - The Time Regulation Institute

That was Nermin Hanım. The most surprising thing of all is that she was the one who wanted to divorce each of her three husbands, whereas — considering the monologue she’d just delivered — one would have imagined it would be her unfortunate ex-husbands who were desperate for divorce. Indeed she was the kind of person who spent all twelve waking hours chattering.

The office consisted of two adjacent rooms. My desk was in the first, directly opposite Nermin Hanım’s desk; and this room led to Halit Ayarcı’s office.

But allow me just to say in advance that these humbly furnished rooms bore no resemblance whatsoever to the quarters of what was to be Istanbul’s most advanced and modern institute. Indeed the difference between them wasn’t even a question of degree. They were two different worlds altogether.

At one point I asked Nermin Hanım just what it was we were meant to be doing. After a prolonged exposé of the habits of her first husband and his extended family, she told me that there was nothing to do for the time being and that we were to wait for Halit Ayarcı’s arrival. And so we spent our first month there doing just that. Every now and then Halit Ayarcı would telephone and check up on us, telling us to keep up the good work and always reminding us to replenish the stationery supplies. Curtains and typewriters arrived toward the end of the month.

In the middle of the second month, Halit Ayarcı came by the office. Together we compiled a list of almost a hundred slogans based on what I could remember from my time with Nuri Efendi: “Metals are never regulated on their own,” or “Regulation is chasing down the seconds .” Sometimes Halit Ayarcı added his own, more meaningful, creations: “Shared time is shared work,” “A true man is conscious of time,” “The path to well-being springs from a sound understanding of time,” and so on and so forth.

After that came the task of having them printed. We printed a thousand copies of every slogan and distributed them throughout the city. One morning toward the end of the third month, a joyous Halit Ayarcı announced that the preliminary work on our institute was complete. Then he set out to compose the official terms of institutional justification. Little by little our once calm institute came to life.

Those three months were unlike anything I had ever experienced. I shall never forget them. It was a strange and confusing period in which I fluctuated between elation and fear: there was the pride I felt in having achieved something at long last, and there was the fear of losing it. I had to keep reminding myself I was employed again, with a regular income. After a long and heavy sleep, I was living life to the fullest. I no longer dashed from one coffeehouse to the other in search of a familiar face. I was freed from that terrible question, what should I do now? No longer was I despised by my family for being unemployed; no longer was I obliged to recount my misfortunes to all and sundry. Because I now spent all day in the office, I no longer had to suffer acquaintances turning away to ignore me in public places. I was starting my life all over again. I was an ordinary citizen of the world. Endowed now with a surging sense of purpose, I felt I could move mountains.

But there was a problem: I had a job but no work. This new job was unlike any other I had known. It seemed to have nothing to do with people or even life itself, for that matter. I believed, for example, that I had done real work for the Spiritualist Society — if that doesn’t sound too absurd, bearing in mind that all I’d done was report to a group of people who delighted in lying to one another and to themselves. But there wasn’t even that much to be found in my new employment. It was an undertaking born of a few words. It had the logic of a fairy tale. I mentioned this to Halit Bey, but he was only interested in the problem of unsynchronized public clocks and cognizant of the fact that he wasn’t engaged in a major project at the time. Other people had put their faith in his idea. And just around then, a very important man missed the funeral of another very important man because the city clocks weren’t synchronized. Thereafter, in the space of ten days, a budget was earmarked to provide us with our reasonably well-furbished office space, and as if that were not enough, they undertook to supply us with any other office equipment we happened to lack. Could such a job really exist? What was its purpose? And why?

The most confusing thing of all was that Halit Ayarcı was almost never to be found at our offices. If for no other reason, he could have stopped in more often because his presence alone would have made us more secure. And perhaps, had he graced us with his presence, he might have drummed up some work for us to do. But he rarely did; he was out of the picture almost entirely. He did no more than to call in now and then to see how we were getting on or to give us orders that seemed of little importance.

But we were treated to continuous updates on the institute’s shiny future. Nermin Hanım was always babbling on about the new structure and the tremendous staff it would house. While I continued to view my days in our humble little office as somewhat absurd, she would ramble on and on about the new branches and departments and ideas her so-called uncle Halit Ayarcı had in store for us. I found it all rather disconcerting. I could not see our office even attempting an expansion along such lines. Better to remain as inconspicuous as was practical. The most sensible course would be for us to surface at the beginning of every month, just long enough to collect our salaries, and in the interim to remain invisible. But that’s not at all how it happened. After some time had passed, Halit Ayarcı began flooding us with draft versions of documents and letters to be sent all over the city, and he petitioned to have the office refurbished in a manner befitting its station, at the same time instructing us to order additional stationery. But there was more: he became so preoccupied with my attire that you might have thought he was outfitting me for the stage.

One day, while dictating one of Halit Ayarcı’s drafts to Nermin Hanım, I nearly burst into tears of despair. The letter began by describing the Time Regulation Institute as something along the lines of “an invaluable institution” that had not yet been granted the status it deserved and went on to insist upon a reappraisal of the budget to give the institute sufficient funding to allow for a full staff to run it, as well as an accountant and an additional secretary.

But how strange that three days later we received a response that, after tabling objections to our proposals on many different counts, stated that our situation would be taken into consideration. Not a day went by without a new shipment of furniture arriving at the doorstep of our humble little office. First they redid the linoleum floors, and then supplied me with my own telephone, as if the one only fifteen steps away from my desk wasn’t good enough. The following day we received half a dozen desk lamps. Then they replaced our desks. Halit Ayarcı received a first-class American desk, mine was only one notch less commanding, and Nermin Hanım’s was so finely varnished you would slide right off it. Halit Ayarcı knew exactly when all the new furnishings were due to arrive and gave instructions over the telephone as to where they should be placed. He explained to me just how I was to arrange my desk lamp, black writing pad, and penholder.

All of this could mean one thing: without a supply department or some kind of warehouse, our office would eventually have to be liquidated and we’d all go hungry. I didn’t care that much if I was promoted to assistant manager or not, but I was keen to hold on to the salary that was the equivalent of three office boys’ combined. Just the thought that I might lose it was enough to drive me mad.