The Time Regulation Institute

  Later on, Sabriye Hanım, who was on intimate terms with Zeynep, joined forces with her, using her spinster wits to engineer a double blackmail that almost led to a police investigation, for she believed that there was indeed a serious relationship between Nevzat Hanım and Tayfur Bey: this served only to increase the stress and strain on the young widow. And then there was Cemal Bey.

  But this much is clear: while Nevzat Hanım’s mother-in-law was still alive, Cemal Bey, Tayfur Bey, and Sabriye Hanım could never have gained easy access to Nevzat Hanım’s apartment. In fact the pseudoséances held at their home served no purpose other than to perpetuate the Murat story. But with the death of the old woman, all impediments were removed.

  According to Sabriye Hanım, Cemal Bey was after Nevzat Hanım’s money. Cemal Bey had been thrown out of his own firm for embezzlement and had only barely managed to cover his debt by dipping into Selma Hanım’s inheritance; now he wanted to marry Nevzat Hanım for her money. And this being his last and only hope, he was relentless in pressing his claim.

  Though Selma did not deny that money may have played a part in the affair, she also claimed that Cemal Bey had indeed fallen for Nevzat Hanım. “Cemal was a ladies’ man, and he always enjoyed a challenge. Most likely Nevzat’s monastic lifestyle had a certain appeal,” she said. In fact, and this again according to Selma, Cemal Bey had entered into a similar affair with Zeynep Hanım.

  As for Tayfur Bey, he had never understood Nevzat Hanım. He’d assumed that his young wife had surrendered to Cemal’s unctuous entreaties. For, yes, indeed, there was a letter Tayfur Bey wrote before he died in which he made only the briefest mention of his love for his wife, devoting most of his energies to expressing his jealous and aggressive hatred for Cemal.

  Nevzat Hanım’s sorry fate was to have been overwhelmed by these four men; just one of them would be enough to ruin any life.

  IX

  I assumed that the matter of personnel would be a tiring affair, not to mention their remuneration, and so I wanted to begin with as small a group as possible. Yet expansion was inevitable, given the exponential growth in the number of our own handpicked candidates, and in those recommended to us by our friends. We received several applications almost daily. The two office lines—Halit Ayarcı’s and my own—never stopped ringing. By the end of the first month, I came to understand how wrong I’d been to complain about not having enough friends or relations. I was amazed to discover just how large my family was. I was likewise impressed by the loyalty of old school friends and the continuing affection that my old neighborhood acquaintances still had for me. My quota had long since been exceeded in the applicant ledger. Most were people who had been sensitive enough to stay at arm’s length during the years when my spirits had been so dampened by misfortune; now they had entered into an all-out war as they struggled to give me the chance to prove that I too felt compassion for my friends and relatives.

  When I asked Halit Ayarcı what he thought I should do in the face of this barrage, he gave me the following answer:

  “My dear Hayri Irdal, in matters such as these there are two methods: either you put the whole affair out of your mind or you separate the applicants into prearranged categories and then choose one from each group. As I’m in the same boat, why don’t we ponder the two options together? If we agree to leave the affair to fate and fortune, we’ll have no choice but to draw lots. But I imagine the result would not necessarily turn out in our favor. And if word ever got out that we’d availed ourselves of such a method, then we’d almost certainly meet with stiff criticism.”

  “So shall we create categories!”

  “Yes, but what will we use as our criteria?”

  “We’ll select those with experience. For example, those people who have more or less worked for a certain period of time in a particular field.”

  “Oh no, never that. It seems you haven’t understood the true meaning of ‘experience.’ To be experienced means to be run down, frozen at some fixed point, and stuck with stagnant ideas. Such people are of no use to us.”

  There was no other choice but to choose from the inexperienced.

  “Well then, we’ll choose those without experience,” I said.

  Halit Ayarcı paused for a moment. He was scrutinizing a new chart on his office wall. Taking me by the arm, he pulled me over to it.

  “I designed this chart as part of a study evaluating the love children have for watches and clocks. But certain points don’t seem entirely right. This dark-blue column should have been assigned to the children of literate families! But I assigned it to timepieces given as gifts. No, we’ll have to move them to this smaller yellow column here . . . Could you kindly have this corrected for me?”

  I made the adjustments as requested, but I couldn’t help but ask him what use there was in doing so. He looked at me with a grave expression on his face.

  “To know is to be one step ahead.”

  We returned to the matter at hand.

  “How will you know which applicants have absolutely no experience?”

  “Well, for example, those who have never held a job before.”

  “But such people will have the experience of inexperience. They will be more difficult. Managing such people is bound to be difficult. Impossible.”

  “Then?”

  “There remains but one solution: a list of applicants, a list for everyone save those we’ve already accepted. Better yet, a list of applicants that follows no particular order—if it skips around then no one will see it as coincidence. This will also increase our chances. Do you see what I mean? You accept the first in your book, then skip the second, then accept the third, and so on . . . In fact we could have variations: for example, after the third person you’ll skip the fourth, fifth, and sixth, and then accept number ten. Who was your first choice again?”

  “Asaf Bey, as you already know. Now he’s receiving casual remuneration, but he hasn’t been assigned a position yet!”

  Halit Ayarcı scrunched up his face.

  “Asaf Bey’s a sloth of a fellow,” he said. “I don’t take well to lazy people. At an institute such as ours, which likes to assign predetermined positions to its staff, which champions personal freedom and expects its employees to increase their range and efficacy through exercise of their own creative powers, the lazy are always dangerous. Does he come in every day?”

  “He is always the first to arrive!”

  And it was indeed the truth: Asaf Bey came to work the earliest and was the last to leave.

  “What does he do?”

  “Right now, nothing. He just reads the papers. As a matter of fact, you yourself ordered him to do so!”

  “Well, is he reading them?”

  “No, but Nermin Hanım is reading them for him.”

  “Have him carry on, then.”

  “Fine, but we’ll have to move him to the permanent payroll once the budget for temporary salaries is exhausted.”

  Halit Ayarcı paused to give the matter more thought.

  “Find a job that suits this friend of ours,” he said. “A job that doesn’t require work, that will suit this lazy creature perfectly, and that will benefit the institute. Then the problem’s solved.”

  “Isn’t it a little strange to set aside staff for such a job?”

  “No,” he said. “In fact I really don’t know. I have no idea whatsoever. But I imagine that within such a vast institute such a position can be found. Perhaps an office to which we can transfer all work that needs to be deferred. Indeed I have no doubt that, given your dear friend’s affinities, we shall see certain jobs not just deferred but never done at all!”

  “But what about the name? What would the title of such a post be?”

  “Is there any need? Ah, such formalities . . . They give those who are actually trying to get things done no room for maneuver. How is one meant to work under
such tight restrictions, such rigid formalities?”

  He paced up and down the room, and then stopped just in front of me.

  “Do we really need a name?”

  “I would think so.”

  He let out a mournful and despairing sigh.

  “My dear friend Hayri Bey, if one day I must walk away from this institute I created with such passion, and so dearly love, be sure that formalities such as these will be the sole cause. This isn’t just about the name of one particular position. I made arrangements for that some time ago. But why waste our time on such trifling matters? This is what truly saddens me. To waste so much precious time, and in a Time Regulation Institute! Now, that is a terrible tragedy . . .”

  Then he rang the service bell. Dervis Aga stepped into the office:

  “Please tell Ekrem Bey to report to the Ping-Pong Room! We’ll play a set. And you’ll join us too?”

  Halit Ayarcı, who loved playing Ping-Pong, had arranged a room on the top floor for just this purpose. As I was often up there, I’d had a separate table set up, so that I could play solitaire if I was bored.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  Putting his arm in mine, he almost yanked me out of the room.

  “Yes,” he said, “we waste far too much time. We can budget our time more carefully just by circumventing obstacles such as these. I’ll draw up a chart. Don’t forget that we’ve been invited to your aunt’s tonight.”

  “Yes, of course . . . But the name?”

  “Ah, yes! The Completion Department! Do you understand? That’s where we’ll transfer all the work we want to put on hold. Two secretaries will suffice. But please, let’s not appoint too many people there.”

  “In fact one should be enough!”

  “No, let’s say two. One is a young man who has already been recommended by your aunt, and the other is a very refined young lady of my own acquaintance. But if you like, we could transfer the young fellow that your aunt recommended to another office and send in the woman instead. Two women together would make a more industrious pair. That’s to say, they would feel more at ease.”

  The matter settled, we left for the Ping-Pong Room, there to while away our time, for that was how things worked in the Time Regulation Institute, whose sole and earnest aim was to find new ways to economize on time.

  X

  I loved watching Halit Ayarcı and Ekrem Bey play Ping-Pong. They were both handsome men, and despite their age difference they both had the same agility and athleticism, not to mention a certain grace. Devoid as I was of such attributes, I never failed to be surprised by the harmony of their movements as they together formed a shape while still remaining separate. To watch them afforded me a strange pleasure, as if I were taking revenge on my own body—though I did feel the odd pang of jealousy.

  I had always been extremely fond of Ekrem. Like me, he was obliged to rely on other people and what they had to offer him. His affection for me over the last seven years had been constant. He’d shown me kindness even in my darkest moments and always treated me as a friend. He never charged me with ignorance or poor understanding. If ever he found me in one of my more temperamental moods, he would just give me a strange smile. I was quite pleased to have found a job for him at the institute, one that I recommended he leave at the first opportunity. I wasn’t frightened by Halit Bey’s affection for him. For Halit Bey lived in a world that was far beyond our ken; we both knew we had no chance of ever influencing him.

  Ekrem was playing quite badly that day. He wasn’t himself. He was what they call a changed man. His movements were awkward, he lacked concentration, his responses were slow, and his timing was all off. With every attack it seemed his hand was a little too far ahead of his body, hanging hesitantly in midair. His thoughts were clearly with Nevzat Hanım, and he couldn’t coordinate them with his body. Who knows just what he was thinking then? The terrible pain of losing a loved one forever, the gruesome manner of her demise, and the agony he and the community had had to bear—his grief had undone him.

  He had seen Nevzat Hanim as a being remote from the real world, a being content in a sphere of her own making—but now, alas, she must have taken on a new meaning in his mind. At long last he had begun to fathom that fixed smile of hers. It was the kind of smile you saw on the lips of a trapeze artist as she leaped into the void with her arms extended toward her partner, knowing all too well that the success of such a feat was measured in millimeters and that any miscalculation meant plummeting to her death. It was not an empty smile; it was heroic. Throughout her life, it masked her suffering. Poor Ekrem: in contemplating her smile, he might have at last understood that Nevzat Hanım was not just the shadow of the woman he loved and read about in books, but a human being. And perhaps this was why he seemed so full of regret. For her quiet smile seemed now a cry for help, drawing his attention above all others.

  For it had been Nevzat Hanim’s quiet smile that had led Ekrem to believe her to embody the aesthetic he’d expound upon at length in the days we spent together in the Sehzadebası coffeehouse. Though he had pilfered it from the annals of an outrageous, if not downright ludicrous, English author whose name now escapes me, he called it his aesthetic of poetic purity. To the mind of Dr. Ramiz, women had absolutely nothing to do with poetry, pure or otherwise. When he was in the right mood, Dr. Ramiz was given to analyzing the objects of Ekrem’s desire, most of them dead, more often than not by their own hand, and if ever he happened to be playing the part of a medical doctor, he would diagnose the root cause as anemia. Ekrem Bey never paid much attention to the doctor’s ramblings, which he dismissed as incoherent hogwash, and it was, perhaps, because I was a most compliant listener that he spoke to me at such length about his precious aesthetic, which though it offered the illusion of simplicity, was utterly impenetrable, drawing as it did on seven or eight poets and philosophers whose names he was inclined to confuse.

  You can probably imagine how much sense I made of my conversations with Ekrem Bey. But this much is true: the day I first met Nevzat Hanımfendi I said to myself, now here is a woman Ekrem Bey could love for a lifetime. There is a point in life when we have so accustomed ourselves to the slings and arrows of fate that we seem to carry their sadness inside us. Ekrem Bey had prepared himself for his romance with Nevzat Hanım by reading enough books to fill a library. But the manner of our formation does not always suit the shape of the lives we end up living. At the very moment when Ekrem Bey believed himself to have discovered his aesthetic in the flesh, he was confronted by a triple homicide.

  And no longer was Nevzat Hanım’s smile the emanation of a splendid soul, glimmering like a distant star before the naked eye, no longer was it a work of art casting its light on the world from above; it was not the solution to all Ekrem’s woes. Behind that smile was a woman entrapped by hopelessness and all manner of oppression. It was only now that Ekrem could see her desperation.

  I spoke with Nevzat Hanim that evening at my aunt’s soiree (which I mentioned earlier). Somehow she’d managed to escape from Cemal Bey’s clutches. The truth of the matter is that my aunt had captured Cemal Bey for herself, and Nevzat Hanım, profiting from the freedom that this brief interlude allowed her, had retreated to a window in a far corner, to watch the world go by. For just a moment, she had dropped her light mask of sweetness. The lines on her face were deep and even animated. She was perhaps more beautiful than ever, like a loaded gun. Slowly I approached her, and with the courage that came from playing the uncle, I said:

  “You seem so sad here all alone! Look—Ekrem is waiting for you just over there. Why don’t you say something nice to the poor fellow? He’s been waiting for years.”

  Her face suddenly softened, losing its chill, but it did not revert to the one we all knew; it lingered somewhere in between.

  “Ekrem Bey,” she mumbled. “If he’d been just a little stronger, none of this would have happened.”

  Th
en I put to her perhaps the most idiotic question in the world:

  “Shall I tell him this myself?”

  Her face grew tense again.

  “Of course not! What use would that be? Such things must happen on their own accord. Don’t misunderstand me. Perhaps the fault’s all mine. I’m just so disgusted by everything that . . .”

  Then she took my arm.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’ll be all right. Please just leave me alone. You remember when you were close to Sabriye Hanım. Oh, how I hated you then. You were always poking around, hoping to win her favor . . . but then you disappeared.”

  She closed her eyes and leaned her head back as if in search of a pillow.

  “But you came looking for me at home.”

  “I know. I wanted to know what Sabriye said about me. If possible, I would have teased it out of you. Anyway, that’s all behind us. Now you’re back on center stage! So is everyone else. Do you know what it means to be in such crowded company?”

  She paused to look at me, and then she cried:

  “Leave me! And please don’t speak about me to anyone.”

  And with firm steps she made to lose herself in the crowd gathered around Halit Bey. Our conversation that night weighed heavily upon me. I knew just how far I had compromised myself to be a part of this enterprise, to be treated like anybody else. But I had never fully grasped how much others had suffered for the same privilege. Nevzat Hanim had a place in my heart that she shared with no other, and now I saw the world through the eyes of a woman I had only wanted to help.

  A fortnight after our conversation, I had a second encounter with Nevzat Hanım, this time at the home of Seher Hanım. I was with my aunt. When I first heard Nevzat Hanım’s voice floating in from the living room, my first instinct was to turn back. But I couldn’t. We sat opposite each other for two hours. She didn’t say a word to me. As we were leaving together—my aunt had offered to take her home—we found ourselves alone for a moment and she whispered: