Ahmet Tanpinar - The Time Regulation Institute

As tragic as these three deaths were, they carried another significance for me. Cemal Bey had been a repulsive, temperamental, supercilious, and utterly unbearable man; wherever the beast went he acquired a host of new enemies; he scrambled in and out of human society like a scorpion wagging its poisoned tail; but he died the hero of a love story, an ending that no one on earth deserved less than he. It was so absurd, so needlessly preposterous. Perhaps fortune had arranged this fate just to mock him, to extract a revenge for his pride at presuming himself above human frailty, for his unshakable confidence and self-possession. It was impossible to think of Cemal Bey in love, or Cemal Bey dying for love, or even knowingly playing a part in such a love affair. But I know he would have been the first to laugh at this overblown drama, had he not known it was at his expense. “Me?” he would say, pursing his lips. “Impossible!” Cemal liked to squeeze his victims in his tongs, drive them in his filthy and invisible yokes, poison them with his serpent’s tail. He would have it no other way. Yet the manner of his death had so changed his public persona that even those who had known him were easily deceived. And as for those who had never known him, who had only come to know him through the story of his death, he lived on in their minds as a man of pure fiction. And so it was that the mysterious wheel of fortune allowed Cemal to die a well-respected man, and a generous saint of the community, at least in the minds of those who first made his acquaintance when reading in the papers of his death. Murder, of course, is a terrible fate. Yet if indeed it was Cemal’s inescapable fate to be felled by the hand of another man, well then, he should have been killed by the first person he came upon for no other reason, save the fact that he was Cemal Bey: with his stub of a nose and that narrow, wrinkled brow above his plucked and polished face, and his cloying, stuffy voice, and those little glimmering raptor’s eyes darting about the room; yes, by rights he should have been struck down long ago. But that’s not how it happened. Somehow he managed to weasel his way into a tragic novel, lurching from one misunderstanding to the next, to become the cause of the untimely murder of a lovely, bashful, but unhappy woman who had never managed to learn how to express herself. This simply didn’t make sense. It boggled my mind when I considered how lucky this man had been in the manner of his death, a man who had, when he was only five, profited from the inattention of his mother during a visit to a friend, plucked fish out of an aquarium, poking out their eyes with his fingers before tossing them back into the tank, only to laugh as he watched them suffer. This was Cemal’s life in its essence. In adulthood he had never actually poked out anyone’s eyes, but he might as well have. In one way or another, he manipulated everyone. Selma only really started to live after she left him; she was so very beautiful, but her years with him were spent in vain. The day Cemal died, the well-mannered and well-versed lawyer Nail Bey was instantly cured of asthma. Nail Bey never told anyone what had happened between him and Cemal Bey. Even our mutual friend Sabriye Hanım, ever alert to such affairs — indeed I had learned quite a lot about Selma Hanım from her, never asking her directly, of course, but by eavesdropping on various conversations — knew nothing. But on the day we paid our last respects to Cemal Bey, Nail Bey and I found ourselves in the same car, and I found him a changed man. A man reborn! At one point he turned to me and said, “I’m so ashamed!”

The perpetrator of these reprehensible deeds had imposed himself on a young and beautiful woman who should have shunned him, and now he had been embraced as a tragic hero by hundreds of thousands of simple souls who had never known the man, who knew nothing of romance either. He had played his part in Nevzat’s death, just as he had in Selma’s tumultuous life.

I’d seen Tayfur Bey once or twice. He struck me as cold and calculating, and inclined to self-reliance. His urbane manner might have concealed any number of character flaws. He was clearly capable of murder, given the chance to prepare. He hadn’t seemed the kind of murderer who could have hacked his victim into pieces without difficulty. Yet he’d done such a job on Cemal Bey as to render him virtually unrecognizable. Many thought it strange that Cemal Bey had been stabbed mostly in the face. But this made perfect sense to me. Although he’d been sufficiently clearheaded to leave behind a detailed confession, the killer had clearly lost his mind at the sight of that horrific face. Indeed he said as much in his suicide note.

Cemal Bey was a man who forced himself on people. And that was just how he had insinuated himself into Nevzat Hanım’s life. He was a man who sought his death in other people. But Nevzat Hanım’s life story was truly absurd, enough to drive a man to perdition.

Could anything be more natural than for our good friend Ekrem the Poet to nurture a love for this quiet woman who lived cloistered in her own little world? But he played no part in the Nevzat Hanım affair. For in all her life Nevzat Hanım had only ever really known one man, her husband. As I mentioned earlier, the woman’s very face had shut down on the day her husband died. Her earlier life had been plagued by Tayfur Bey, who was so bent on marrying her, and so zealous in his efforts to remove all obstacles, that he’d even murdered his wife. And then, to make a bad business worse, Cemal Bey, who was somehow privy to all this, began pestering the poor woman too.

Nevzat Hanım had spent her entire life oppressed by those around her. Jealousy, love, obsession, egotism, persecution, womanizing of the basest sort, paranoid possessiveness, and compulsive curiosity — she excited the soul’s most cruel passions, reducing this blameless creature to a shadow of herself. Smothered by attention, she was understood by no one.

In childhood her temperamental and less-attractive older sister had envied Nevzat Hanım. After this sister was married off — their father was rather wealthy — Nevzat Hanım at last had room to breathe, but almost at once her own future husband, Salim Bey, entered the picture. A feeble, cowardly, arrogant, and even irascible man of no distinction, he, having convinced himself that he was in love, had managed, after years of stubborn insistence, to convince the innocent girl to love him in return, or rather he had contrived to convince her that she was in love. But by the second week of their marriage, the young woman had already discovered that she had never loved her husband and never would. Salim Bey was a man devoid of character and, above all else, mean. The truth was that he had never really loved his wife either. Indeed for him love was nothing more than a needling obsession. He was concerned only with possession. There were times when he might have experienced something like love, but only if he feared losing his possession. In spite of all this, he had a rather lofty opinion of himself. As is often the case with those who lack a clear sense of themselves, he lived in the world but was not of it. When Nevzat came to see their marriage as untenable and suggested divorce, his response was clear: “Out of the question! What will my friends and everyone else say? Do you want to make me a fool in their eyes? In any case, how could I ever live without you?” It went on like this for three years. Then one night Nevzat Hanım’s father, who had been suffering from serious heart problems, died of a heart attack. The man had loved his daughter deeply, and he had known she was unhappy. According to what her family said afterward, the two had spoken briefly a few days before his death, and it was agreed that it was the daughter’s unhappy marriage that had caused the father’s fatal attack. Poor Nevzat Hanım was thus caught in the crossfire. In the third year of this risible and indeed unconscionable marriage (in which she had remained only out of fear of what her husband’s relatives, her neighbors, her friends, even the doorman of their apartment building might say), Salim Bey died in active military service, in an accident that was no one’s fault but his own. It was rather unfortunate for Nevzat Hanım in that — three days before her husband died before his entire battalion as a result of his own cowardice — she received a letter from the front, in which this man who had taken no pleasure from his life with her, who understood neither women nor love, who showed his wife affection only in response to jealousy or fear, confessed to despair and thoughts of suicide. But those who had witnessed the accident said it couldn’t have been premeditated. The horse Salim Bey had been riding at the time was one of the calmest training horses, not known for being particularly skittish. If Salim Bey hadn’t been so frightened when the horse jumped, it wouldn’t have bucked so furiously. Had Salim just allowed himself to fall, the animal would certainly have calmed down. Another rider even tested the horse and found that it quickly stopped bucking if the rider kept calm. At the end of the day, Salim Bey’s accident was not an accident: he had provoked the animal through fear and lack of experience.