The Time Regulation Institute (14 page)

But he didn't believe me.

“You don't know my father,” he asserted. “There's money somewhere—that's for sure. Who knows where he's hiding it.”

“Fine,” I replied. “But if something happens to him, we'll be ruined. And Emine and I will be incriminated. That would
be uncalled for, wouldn't you say? Why don't you come and live with the man. Come and claim what is rightfully yours!”

He shrugged off my proposal. By then his father was already in the room with us. As he left, the son looked long and hard at me. “I have faith in you,” he said. But it was not a look I could trust. A strange fear came over me.

That year, after
Kurban Bayram, Ferhat Bey married a widow in Kadıköy and left the house. Echoing the old man's other son-in-law, he said, “May God give you patience and lighten your burden!” Then he added before he left, “And if there's a shred of reason left in your head, you should by all means follow my lead.”

Now we were alone with Abdüsselam Bey in his home. Here was the man who had once lived in that enormous villa behind the
Burmalı Mescit, amid a vast tribe of sons, grandchildren, and relatives close and distant. Now he would die in the hands of two virtual strangers. Such was his fate.

Throughout my life I have seen how it is often the case that a man ends up with the very thing he fears most. Not long after the night Aristidi Efendi burned to death following an explosion in one of his alembics, I found myself back in Nuri Efendi's Time Workshop. Everyone had something to say about the accident. Someone—I cannot, just now, recall whom—spoke of it as a curious coincidence, seeing as Aristidi Efendi had always feared this eventuality. Nuri Efendi had been listening to us in silence when suddenly he dropped the watch he was holding and said:

“As far as I am concerned there's nothing strange about it at all. Indeed we might even consider it natural. For there's no such thing as the present: there is only a past, and a future at its beck and call. In our subconscious minds we are forever constructing our futures. From the moment Aristidi Efendi began conducting his experiments, his fate shifted. He became, in effect, the architect of his own death. Why are you gentlemen so surprised to hear that he had sensed this all along?”

Abdüsselam Bey may have set the stage for this ultimate solitude
through his overabundance of affection—one might even see it as a kind of addiction—for humankind and his overwhelming love for his family, near or far. Had he not been burdened with an overabundance of love and a dread of solitude, then surely those near and dear to him would not have abandoned him so hastily, and he wouldn't have suffered the desolate loneliness that marked his decline.

The following year not one relative came to see Abdüsselam Bey over Seker Bayram. Yet for each holy night of Kandil, and on all the other religious holidays, he would purchase gifts for every son-in-law, daughter-in-law, and grandchild, as well as all his other living relatives, and perhaps even some no longer alive, according to their age and standing in the family hierarchy. Who could say how he found the money for all this.

Silk handkerchiefs and ties and shirts by the dozen, cheap jewelry for the girls, watches for the boys, and flowing robes for retired servants—it was all piled up in a room. And dressed in his old redingote and a freshly starched shirt, his gleaming spectacles perched on his nose, his hand stroking his neatly trimmed beard, his eyes glued to the clock on the opposite wall, and his ears alert to the slightest movement on the street, he sat and waited three long days, convinced the doorbell would ring at any moment, and when he heard footsteps at the door he would leap up to see who was there.

Great holiday feasts were prepared—enough to feed all who had once lived in the old villa, enough to give them all a taste of the dishes they liked best. We knew only too well that we'd have no visitors, and yet the table was ready to be set at a moment's notice. On the evening of the fourth day of Kandil, Abdüsselam Bey would turn to Emine with a look of despair that he could no longer mask and say:

“Emine, my good child, take these packages away and put them in the children's room. They can pick them up when they stop by.”

The children's room had become a sort of emotional depot for Abdüsselam. A mountain of meaningless castaway objects accumulated dust: eleven cradles, two or three mattresses (all victims to Abdüsselam Bey's conjugal nights), wardrobes,
mirrors, old toys, and chests—in short, a whole collection of odds and ends his daughter and son-in-law couldn't bring themselves to pass on to junk dealers when they moved out of that monstrous villa. Abdüsselam Bey called it the children's room, though not a single child was born there or ever lived there, and the strange thing was that the name somehow stuck. Perhaps it was the name alone that made the room feel haunted—for eventually we all came to believe that the spirit of the old villa resided in that room. It was a room of remembrance and loss, piled high with farewells, with the dead stacked one on top of the other, where each of us could see the death of our own childhood and youth; the furniture heaped together in its center like a ship run aground was a steadfast reminder. The room was Abdüsselam Bey's heart, in every sense of the word. Only those who ventured inside could begin to grasp how disturbing it might be to share a life with this good-natured man, because here, in this realm beyond time, he had drained all these objects of their indifference. The key hung on the door, but no one dared venture inside.

Despite her sunny disposition and her rational frame of mind, Emine had so absorbed her master's misery that she wouldn't so much as walk past the door. She carried inside her all the psychological traumas of the house that had been her home since childhood.

Faced with Emine's refusal to carry the packages into the room, I was the one left to do it, albeit with reluctance. Tripping over the old, abandoned furniture, when I crept into the room I'd be startled by a faded, ghostlike, and altogether unfamiliar reflection of myself in a mirror that was suddenly illuminated by a beam of light from the outside; and a peculiar fear of unknown origin would pass through me.

Where did it come from? And how very strange that it could take dominion over my entire person. These were, after all, the days when I was meant to be dizzy with love. My wife and I were expecting a baby. Every now and then Emine would turn to me, smiling, and say, “Kicking up a storm down there . . . must be a girl!” She complained constantly of these little kicks
and affected serious concern when she said, “But how will I ever manage?” Even the low-spirited Abdüsselam Bey was overjoyed, and he never tired of saying, “How many days left? Go and ask.” And he would always insist that I do so. Then he would do the calculations on his fingers, measuring each new answer against its predecessor. It had been some time since a child had been born in the house. The man couldn't stop exclaiming, “Oh, I shall be a grandfather once again!”

When it came time to put away the packages, he would give us a meaningful look and say, “Let's hold on to these—their rightful owners will be here soon enough.” Emine would blush deeply as she left the room. And Abdüsselam Bey's face would light up with one of his rare smiles.

“Haven't you spoken with Ferhat Bey? Why did he go off to live with his wife in Kadıköy rather than bring her here? We could have all lived together. How could someone up and leave the house that was his home for so many years?”

“The woman refused to leave her father's house. She simply wouldn't leave!”

Abdüsselam Bey looked me directly in the eye. “Then why did he marry her? Couldn't he have found himself a poor and wretched wife?”

I was shocked. That old fear of mine now took on a sharper form, gripping me more violently. Where a pure love for humanity had once resided, there now was only the terror of solitude. But that wasn't all: something more significant was happening. We had surrendered ourselves to this miserable man because I lacked the will to stand up to him.

Zehra's birth eased Abdüsselam's anguish at being forgotten by all his relatives. He called for the most splendid cradle in the house to be rescued from the children's room. The latest grandchild in the family of Ahmet the Signer took her first sleep in this heavy cradle, made of walnut, inlaid with silver and mother-of-pearl, and as large as a train compartment. It goes without saying that Abdüsselam never left it untended from the day the baby was born. In line with an old custom of the villa, it was he who named the baby, not me. And though he had
intended to give the child the name of my mother, Zahide, in the confusion of the moment he chose his own mother's name, Zehra.

II

This tiny mistake set off a series of catastrophes. At first the old man was able to laugh with us about it, but soon he became distressed and accused himself of having committed a terrible offense. In the end it became a full-blown crisis of conscience: He came to believe he had robbed us of our child. And he was convinced he would be held accountable in the afterlife for doing so. However, this served only to strengthen his bond with Zehra, and he even took to addressing her as “Mother” on account of her name. He began to plan for her future. Soon the house was awash in legal documents willing to the child what remained of his fortune. God knows how many he drew up on a daily basis. During the last three years of his life, such documents could be found almost anywhere in the house: hidden under carpets, kilims, and pillows or stashed away in desk and dresser drawers. Though Emine and I would tear up at least a few of these every day, great piles of them emerged after his death; almost all stated that he was bequeathing his remaining wealth to his “mother Zehra Hanım” and strongly urged us to give the utmost attention to her education and up-bringing.

“That her mother and my daughter, Emine Hanım, and her father and my son, Hayri Efendi, look after Zehra and pay due attention to her education and upbringing until she is married . . . ,” and so on—thus a gentle old man's will entrusted us with the care of our own daughter.

As the
war in Anatolia had long since finished and a good number of soldiers had already returned to Istanbul, many of Abdüsselam's relatives and friends were in the city when he passed away. They flocked to the house the following day, each with a different version of his will. But of course by then their
wills were out-of-date and legally void. Some time ago we had, however, agreed that we would take only our child and our personal effects when we left the house. And that's just what we did. But a few days after our departure, the atmosphere changed. In a number of his wills, Abdüsselam Bey had bequeathed to my daughter a great many things he had already pawned, and for quite considerable sums, and for some reason he had left wills with two different notaries. And so to settle the affair we were obliged to go to court.

Despite the fact that there was nothing even remotely resembling an inheritance, most of the potential heirs believed—among other far-fetched scenarios—that we had taken advantage of the old man's dementia to trick him into thinking our daughter was his mother.

And when we claimed, in self-defense, that the man had not been in full possession of his mental faculties during the last few years of his life, we were accused of disrespecting our dear benefactor and making a mockery of his memory. “Slander!” they cried. “Slander, defamation, ingratitude . . .” No sooner had we turned our backs than they interpreted everything in their favor: “Did you hear that? How they confessed to it all?”

Good God! so much was jointly owned, and the legal formalities were endless. If ever a sixth, seventh, or even a tenth of a plot of land or property had gone up for sale, my late father-in-law had bought in. Who knows, perhaps he thought he might extract a profit when the prices rose. His drawers were crammed full of property deeds, but every year he accrued an equivalent bill of debt. His real estate was not a source of revenue but, rather, a kind of stamp collection. At first the judges we spoke with found humor in the thought of this grown man taking his adopted maid's daughter for his mother, but with time the deceitful statements made by Abdüsselam Bey's many heirs led them to suspect us of foul play. I did my best to explain the situation:

“Sir, the late efendi was a playful man at heart. This is just the kind of little joke he liked to play on my daughter, whom he treated as his own child . . .”

“Are you trying to say he played jokes on a three-year-old
child?” the judge asked reproachfully. “First you say he treated her like his child, and now you're saying he acted clownishly, taking her to be his own mother. Make up your mind!”

“I am in no position to choose. The deceased availed himself of both techniques.”

“Some of the wills date back to when she was only six months old. What is this? What part of this joke would a six-month-old baby understand?”

“Nothing at all, absolutely nothing, but everyone does this sort of thing. Who doesn't change his voice when speaking to a child? And we don't limit this role-playing to children. Consider when we play with cats and dogs—we either stoop to their level or demand they rise to our own. In this regard the deceased had struck just the right balance. The parties were engaged in mutual dependency but were in fact independently at variance.”

I had picked up some legal terminology.

“Well fine, then. But how do you account for the child—or the mother, if you will—referring to the deceased as her son? The witnesses' statements are quite clear: Since he passed away, the child weeps and cries out, ‘Oh, where's my son?'”

Indeed this was the case. Abdüsselam Bey had even managed to teach our daughter Zehra to address him as her son. Now the little girl drowned herself in tears as she cried out for her missing son. Again I did my best to interpret this conundrum for the court.