The Time Regulation Institute (50 page)

“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.”

Then 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:

“I offended you that evening . . . Forgive me.”

“I'm not angry with you, but with myself,” I replied.

Whenever I saw Ekrem after that, I would remember what Nevzat had said, and I could not help but pity the young man. He seemed to be half-missing. At one point it looked as if the game was turning in his favor. He went for three full minutes without offering Halit a single chance to regain the upper hand. Then he faltered and never came back. His life was no different. What could I say?

Then Sabriye Hanım tapped me on the shoulder. My entire body went stiff. It had been like this for days. It had gotten to the point where I would cross the street to avoid her. But I was the one who had invited her to come and work with us! Seeing that I had no desire to talk to her, she moved away, walking around the Ping-Pong table to sit down at a small desk and fiddle with a pack of cards. She pursed her lips; her body was as stiff as mine. Her face was strangely pale.

For a minute or two, Halit Bey tried to lure Ekrem back into the game, but he soon gave up hope and brought the match to an end. Ekrem Bey mopped the sweat off his brow. In my mind was the image of Cemal Bey's body, chopped into pieces. How much longer was this going to last? On our way downstairs we peeked into Asaf Bey's office. The future head of the
Completion Department was struggling to get his arms around the unfortunate Gülsüm Hanım, our fifty-five-year-old office assistant. It was such an absurd and unexpected sight that we couldn't help but burst out laughing. Halit Ayarcı took me by the arm, and we tiptoed away from the door.

“What do you say, sir?” I asked. “Perhaps we should begin with the second name on the list!”

So I had quite the knack for choosing them: Ekrem had sunk into depression, Sabriye Hanım had become a miserable witch, and Asaf Bey was going senile.

“Thank God you know Dr. Ramiz.”

Throwing on his coat, Halit Ayarcı replied:

“The Completion Department will come together just fine. In fact it's already looking rather promising, but could you please have those young girls I suggested for the department work as assistants to another friend. Or better yet, let's pool together all the women who type. As for you, my dear friend, there's no need to worry. Be sure that you wouldn't have selected those friends of yours if you were in the state you are in now. You are under the impression that their affection for you is inspired by pity, while in fact you have provided them a safe haven.”

“And Sabriye too?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “She wanted to use you. That much is clear, but still, you can never be sure.”

On our way out, he told me how frustrating it was to play Ping-Pong with Ekrem these days:

“I have always avoided love. I've never loved anyone. Perhaps it's a shortcoming. But I don't lose any sleep over it. The problem with love is that, in the end, its pleasures come at a cost: one way or another you end up having to pay. That aside, there's nothing more gruesome than a needless entanglement . . .”

And true enough, I had started to pay. Poor Selma was now a hopeless wreck. She couldn't stop thinking about Cemal Bey and Nevzat Hanım. She'd wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night.

But who could ever forget such a thing? I had no pity
whatsoever for Cemal Bey. Had he not come to such a violent end, I would have rejoiced just to be free of the man. But still there was something gnawing away at me, and I couldn't pretend things were as they had been. Try as I might, I could not chase away the image of Nevzat Hanım's head leaning back in search of a pillow, nor could I forget the words we had exchanged that night.