Ahmet Tanpinar - The Time Regulation Institute

“Ahmet the Timely? Never heard of him…”

“The eminent seventeenth-century scholar. He lived during the reign of the Mehmed IV, our golden age.”

“What was his claim to fame?”

“He was the most important clock smith of his time. In fact they even say he discovered rabia calculations before Graham. Hayri Bey was the pupil of Nuri Efendi, a man who came directly from the school of this clock smith and religious time setter.”

Once again all eyes turned to me.

“Have you finished writing your book?”

Now it was my turn to speak. It was the least I could do. Halit Ayarcı had taken me this far. The rest was up to me. I knew what I had to do.

“To be honest, no, not yet. That is to say, there are a few remaining issues, but it’s nearing completion. In fact it’s practically done.”

Once again Halit Ayarcı shook off his indifference:

“I imagine we’ll have it ready by this coming April.”

Then turning to his guest, he said:

“This April will be the hundred and eightieth anniversary of the death of Ahmet the Timely.”

He did the calculations in his head.

“Yes, that will make exactly one hundred eighty years.”

“That means we could mark the occasion with a ceremony worthy of it?”

Halit Ayarcı left the ball in the mayor’s court.

“That is Halit Bey’s intention, sir,” the mayor said. “Though it could prove difficult for Hayri Bey.”

“An opportunity not to be missed. We can make it part of the institute’s official opening, can’t we, Hayri Bey? It would only add to the magnificence of the occasion.”

Halit Ayarcı rejoined the conversation once more.

“I had anticipated an opening ceremony in the new building,” he said.

For the first time both parties objected.

“Oh no, no, it’d be too late then. Besides, we can always have a ceremony for the inauguration of the new building. The more such ceremonies the better!”

The esteemed personage looked at me again:

“Hayri Bey, this book must be finished by the end of February. I want the completed book from you by then, and this is an order. It’s just not right for us to have neglected such an important person from our past. Recognize the importance of the work you are doing and work accordingly. And remind me of the matter of publication…”

“Right away, sir. It’s already in my project submission.”

And Halit Bey added:

“It’s just that the actual name of the work isn’t specified. I’ll add it to a supplementary list.”

I had never known anyone by the name of Ahmet the Timely. In fact this was the first time I had ever heard the name. Oh, dear Lord! Why didn’t you just give me a meager salary instead of turning me into someone else’s lie? Indeed this was what I now was. I had become a confabulation and the term of my sentence was indefinite; my life was presented to me in daily installments like a serial in a magazine.

The great man kept returning to Ahmet the Timely.

“An important discovery,” he said. “But how can it be that he’s still unknown?”

I answered without haste, in the most persuasive voice I could muster, so as not to appear to be making it up on the spot.

“It’s a known fact, sir, that our predecessors perceived fame as a catastrophe. And the sage of whom we speak died at a very young age — he was forty-two or round about there, I suppose…”

“Split figures way back then… Discovered by one of our own?”

All at once I couldn’t breathe. I was flush out of inspiration. The facts such as they were seemed self-evident. But Halit Ayarcı was in the room:

“And why not, sir?”

But instead of continuing he looked down at the enormous palm of his hand firmly pressed down on the glass tabletop.

“That period, was it an extremely important time? We know so little about our forebears…”

“The age — it was an extremely important age. There was of course a tremendous interest in the mechanical. Almost everyone was busy inventing things, in ways great and small. People were flying from one minaret to the next.”

His eminence turned to me once again.

“What kind of man was he?”

Halit Ayarcı was fiddling with the buttons on his jacket. This meant it was all up to me now. I rallied all my courage and strength. “Well, he was a patron saint!” But who was the patron saint of liars? I wondered.

“He was a tall man, fair but with a brown beard and black eyes. He had a slight lisp when he was a child, but they say he overcame the impediment with the application of willpower. Well, that is to say, that’s what my late master Nuri Efendi told me. He had a number of peculiar quirks of personality. For example, though he grew a variety of excellent fruit, he ate nothing but grapes. And he didn’t eat either sugar or honey. He was a member of one of the Mevlevi Sufi lodges, the son of a rich man, but very well received in his lifetime, being opposed to the custom of taking more than one wife…”

“So he was a modern man! Practically one of us!”

“More or less… He loved the color yellow. Indeed my master Nuri Efendi told me he wore a yellow robe and a yellow fur coat, though it was not the fashion at the time. ‘Yellow is the color of the sun,’ he would say, or so they say. I have done research into this, but I still haven’t tracked down the source of his conviction.”

The mayor and the esteemed personage beamed with delight as I said all this. Ah, the magic of little details… Just a few personality traits, a few snippets of conversation, and there you have a full life before you. This could explain why our ancient forefathers read only poetry!

“Did he have a profession or something of that sort?”

I couldn’t stop here, and it was too late to turn back; I had to carry on whether I liked it or not, dreaming up new details as I went along.

“He was the muezzin in a little mosque in Çengelköy. But they drove him out because of his ideas about marriage, so he created a selamlik in his own home and invited people to come for evening prayers. He recited the call to prayer directly from his own window!”

Halit Bey turned back to me:

“Didn’t you mention that he corresponded with Western mathematicians through a Venetian contact?”

“That’s right, but nothing has been proven. If only that tome hadn’t been lost by the Nuruosmaniye Library…”

The great man was flabbergasted.

“Truly an important discovery… A man of such…”

In an expert intervention, Halit Ayarcı made the story a little more believable.

“It seems to me that he must have been a disciple in the Çelebi circle — there’s really no other possible explanation.”

This explanation satisfied both gentlemen. Pleased that the matter had been settled so smoothly, the mayor suggested a tour of the office.

This was more or less the same tour he’d taken two months earlier. Yet now our office was a little larger, and as the esteemed personage was far more important than he, the mayor was careful to reflect that fact in his degree of fastidiousness. The tour lasted two hours. The man paused in front of nearly everything in the office and picked up almost every available object, turning it over and over again in his hands, inspecting each piece from all angles before replacing it. He peeked into each and every one of our empty notebooks, almost meditating over the diagrams on the wall.

At one point he turned to me, as he tried to unsheathe one of the typewriters, and asked:

“Do you know how he died?”

“Unfortunately not, sir… but…”

“Shall I venture a guess? Let’s see if I get it right. Diabetes,” he said. “I’ve got it too, so I should know.”