The Time Regulation Institute (11 page)

This must mean that Seyit Lutfullah was not exaggerating when he spoke of the effect names can have on our destiny. I am quite sure that if I had given Halide another name, she would not seem so very much like my late benefactor.

X

Nineteen twelve was one of the most painful years of my life, as Nuri Efendi passed away at the very start. His death set in motion a series of events that caused me no end of trouble. Returning from the funeral, I had to face the fact that I was already unemployed at seventeen. Up until the age of fourteen, I had managed to continue my studies at college, but after my friendship with Seyit Lutfullah intensified, I had stopped attending school altogether. I was adrift. School is of course extremely important for children. Above all else, it allows us to put off answering childhood's most troubling question: what will I be when I grow up? School reminds me of a train that carries you to a destination—providing you arrive on time, make all the right connections and wait patiently for the journey's end. But I had jumped off the train in the middle of a desert, far from my destination.

Gradually I became the subject of magnanimous and high-pitched concern. My mother never stopped asking, “What will become of this child?” And when entering into conversation with my father, the neighbors said, “Whatever will you do with your son?” Some thought I should concentrate on my studies, while others believed I should be schooled in a trade. But all were united in the opinion that my father had no choice but to take a forceful stand.

There were even those who said, “There's no way that boy will ever find a job. You might as well marry him off.”

I too was asking questions, which is not to say that I was
considering a career or a job or even remotely thinking about a way to earn money. But still there was this thing we call time, this thing we deem the day. And I had to find some way to make short shrift of it. Up until that point in my life, I hadn't been interested in anything but watches and clocks; matters more profound than these were beyond my comprehension. I had acquired from the late Nuri Efendi a vast store of knowledge about timepieces and their vicissitudes, but I had never seriously considered the profession of horology. I was all thumbs. My hand-eye coordination was unremarkable; the two seemed to exist in entirely separate worlds. And I was a born amateur. I quickly lost interest in anything undertaken as work. A path would unfurl in my mind, and I'd meander toward it, leaving behind the work at hand. I had always been like this: at school, at Nuri Efendi's workshop
,
and at the dervish lodge I visited with my father on Thursdays and Fridays from the age of seven. Yet I had to do something. So I began to work as an apprentice for a clockmaker just a little way down the road from Nuri Efendi's workshop. The poor man was penniless and had almost no customers; he hardly made his daily bread. But he took me in all the same. He was even willing to give me a few pennies from the clock and watch repairs I undertook myself. But—just my luck—not one customer came into the shop on the days I worked. So, as master and apprentice, we sat opposite each other in silence.

Asım Efendi was not at all like Nuri Efendi. He possessed neither ideas nor any particular philosophy pertaining to watches and clocks. One day I felt I should share with him some of what I had learned from Nuri Efendi, but the man could not comprehend a word I said. When I said that watches and clocks were just like human beings, he cried, “Look here, I don't humor that kind of claptrap!”

Meanwhile Seyit Lutfullah never left me alone. He had become accustomed to my assistance in his finagling with the world beyond. He would drop by the shop almost every other day and cry, “On your feet, look alive. An order has arrived. Onward to Etyemez!” Then he'd entreat my master to give me leave, and if he protested, Lutfullah would threaten the old man
with his demons. Etyemez, Eyüpsultan, Vaniköy—in short, all Istanbul was ours. With a dirty turban wrapped around his head and his robes billowing out in the slightest breeze, Lutfullah took the lead, dragging his half-crippled leg in his wake, while I trailed behind in my bedraggled and patched attire, and we wandered the streets of Istanbul.

All the same, and for better or worse, I managed to work with Asım Efendi for a few months. True, the old man lacked a philosophy of timepieces, but he did know how to repair them, and he was able to teach me a thing or two. Sadly, I was forced, through an unfortunate turn of events, to leave his shop. One day Seyit Lutfullah absconded with a watch that was waiting to be repaired. When the crime was discovered, I was blamed. They detained me at the police station for hours. Finally they remembered that Lutfullah had come into the shop the day before, and he was promptly called in. In his defense the wretched creature explained that he had stolen the watch to buy incense to burn at the foot of the treasure of the emperor Andronikos. And he showed them where he had pawned the watch for next to nothing. He claimed he had done everything at the insistence of a spirit medium who had told him his quest would not move forward without the theft of such an object. Once it became clear that he was the true culprit, I was released. But I couldn't just abandon the miserable fellow—I didn't have it in my heart. In the end I thought of Abdüsselam Bey, and it was with his assistance that Lutfullah was spared prosecution for both drug use and theft. Abdüsselam bought the watch back from where it had been sold for a few silver coins, but Asım Efendi refused to take me back. And he was right: it was dangerous to keep an apprentice with such irresponsible and good-for-nothing friends.

XI

This episode with the watch would no doubt have had far more significant (and disquieting, even dangerous) repercussions at home than at the police station. But as luck would have it, a
momentous event on the very next day shook our family to its core, igniting my father's fury and raising my mother's complaints to an unprecedented pitch.

This is how it always happens. Such crises never simply vanish of their own accord; other ones arrive to push the previous one aside, lightening the impact of the former and dissolving any possibility of blame. Thus only one day after my father had been summoned so abruptly to the police station to account for his son, my paternal aunt passed away. And just as she was being lowered into the earth—following the late-afternoon call to prayer—she sprang briskly back to life. This second catastrophe turned our lives inside out, and my father never recovered from the shock.

My aunt was the only family my father had in the world. And perhaps it was this enforced intimacy that led them to become so dramatically different in temperament, disposition, and even appearance.

My father was a vigorous man, the kind who could devour a stone. He had a colossal and consuming appetite for life. For him the universe was like a heap of grain to be threshed and sold, or at least that's what those who knew him liked to say. But my aunt, she had been sickly since childhood. She was feeble, malicious, and self-absorbed. Though reasonably devout, my father had a cheerful disposition and a taste for music and conversation. My aunt, however, was dark and moody, fervently pious, proud, yet fragile—she was a miserable little woman who loved nothing more than to descry the work of the devil in the sensual. These two had but one thing in common: each lived under the weight of a terrible depression. My father was depressed because he was penniless; the man was forever chasing after chimeras, kept afloat by hopes of the impossible; my aunt was burdened by a meanness that propelled her into an existence so frugal she could barely make ends meet, despite a good-sized fortune accruing interest in the hands of money lenders, an assortment of stocks and bonds, her grand villa in Etyemez (left to her by her late husband, the warden of the street sweeper's trade guild) and several Ottoman
hans
and hamams. In fact she never risked remarriage for fear she might
lose her fortune, preferring to live like a lonely owl in her monstrous sixteen-room villa with no one save the half-crazed chambermaid she'd adopted as a child and an old servant who was just as fervent and mean as she was, not to mention a terrible busybody. It was no more than a week after her husband's death that she put an end to my father's visits, he being inclined to probe into her affairs. This is why we saw her only on religious holidays such as
Ramadan and
Kandil, when we would visit to pay our respects and kiss her hand. She also made it her custom to come and stay with us on the second week of Ramadan, as we lived closer to various mosques. Whenever we went to visit her, we were offered the cheapest refreshments, cakes, and cookies Istanbul could provide, and, along with mountains of advice and admonishments, we would be given tawdry little presents of nominal value. Yet when she came to visit, she expected us to observe full decorum in what we offered her, and when displeased she would fly into a gruesome rage. The prospect of having to host this bilious guest and her two servants would strike fear into our household a full two months before their arrival. Our aunt would never have been able to change her eating habits so dramatically from the moment of her arrival—suddenly she became ravenous—had she not followed a diet beginning on
Saban, the eighth holy month of the Muslim calendar, which became ever stricter with the approach of the holy month of Ramadan
.
But nothing was more difficult than enduring the barrage of advice and criticism she dispensed over the course of the holy week.

Truth be told, she liked neither my father nor me. And it was a joy for her to make this perfectly clear. There was no doubt she considered us more legal inheritors than close family. For her, our household was nothing more than the lever of a great machine that groaned behind that terrible eventuality, death, when in fact, considering the finality of the affair, we were really the entire contraption itself. Weighed down as she was with this vast inheritance, my aunt couldn't think of dying without recalling that she would be dying for our sake. She interpreted almost everything we did in this light, lambasting us even when we had spoken with the best intentions. Naturally
all the advice she meted out on this matter revolved around her paranoia. Her favorite motto was, “The greatest mortal sin is wishing death upon someone other than oneself!” This despite the fact that no one harbored such a morbid desire, to begin with. My father took pity on his sister and even wished for her to be happy. After she was widowed, he strongly encouraged her to marry Nasit Bey. But my aunt refused even to entertain the idea, so convinced was she of the hunter's moral repugnance. “I'm not looking for a man to gobble up my fortune,” she'd mutter. She even suspected my father of some deviant ploy in his wish to marry her off, especially since he had just arranged for my engagement to Nasit Bey's daughter—though we were both far too young.

Once, when my aunt fell ill, my father sent a doctor to her villa, paying for the visit out of his pocket. No one there could ever forget how she screamed at my father as she drove him and the doctor away: “Why the rush? Sooner or later it'll all be yours!” I won't deny the fact that as my father's financial situation worsened he came to see my aunt's estate as his only hope for salvation. Moreover, my aunt's health had sharply declined—a result of her peculiarly sparse diet, her ceaseless agitation, and her paranoia about her wealth. Her spirits were at an all-time low. She refused to leave my father alone, demanding unimaginable sacrifices in return for the inheritance he was soon to receive and taking every opportunity to shame and abuse him. Gradually my aunt ceased to be my father's sister: she became his burden.

Toward the end my aunt lost control of half her body. My father just could not understand how she could carry on living semiparalyzed, especially since she continued to harangue him as vigorously as ever, and he put it down to rancorous sentiments she must have harbored for him since childhood. According to my father, she continued living only to spite him. After suffering a day of malicious torment at the invalid's bedside, he would return from the villa in Etyemez and whimper: “Is it really possible? Who would continue to live like that? The miserable creature is tormenting me, just out of spite. But God is great . . .”

All this goes to show that my father saw himself as the oppressed party.

But at last the fateful day arrived. With tears pouring from her eyes, the half-crazed chambermaid came to inform us that my aunt had passed away. My father rushed off to her villa to take the required preliminary measures. Funeral prayers were performed in Lâleli. My father delegated the burial to our neighbor Ibrahim Bey, so he could return directly to the villa in Etyemez after prayers, to watch over its contents so that nothing might go missing. To my mind, this was his gravest mistake in the whole affair. For if he hadn't been swept away by the fear of losing her estate and its property, my aunt would have been buried in a timely fashion, thereby reducing the likeliness of her resurrection. And—even if she had been destined to rise again from the dead—my father would have been standing at the head of her grave, desperate and aggrieved, beating his head with his hands and tearing at his clothes, with tears flowing from his eyes—all of which would have ensured a happy outcome. Instead we were met with a very unhappy outcome indeed. Ibrahim Bey had arranged a pauper's funeral, entirely unbefitting the bride of the warden of the street sweeper's trade guild, just so he could skim from the money my father had given him for the burial proceedings. And because it proved difficult to locate her late husband's tomb—not a soul from the family was there to watch her burial beside it—the grave diggers began late: from start to finish, the entire operation was marred by infelicitous delays. When at last the coffin lid was cut open to tip the corpse into the freshly dug grave, my aunt awoke from a deep coma, and because she was the type of creature who was never caught unawares, even in the most extraordinary of circumstances, she heaved the coffin lid aside and assessed the scene, and with what she later viewed as her eternal powers of perspicacity, she grasped the situation immediately, shouting out to the only person she recognized there, the imam from Etyemez: “Quick, hurry up and take me home!”