The Time Regulation Institute (9 page)

And if the hunter Nasit Bey was in attendance, with his greyhound so decrepit it could barely rouse itself for a hunt, the tales grew longer still.

But when Lutfullah spoke with Abdüsselam Bey, he skipped over the hunts and concentrated on the lively hordes that peopled his world of bliss. In the palace of Aselban's father there were nearly a thousand children, and up to three times as many close relatives of all ages, forever overflowing with love and worry for one another, never apart for more than a moment. And when Lutfullah described the orgies that Aselban's father enjoyed with the forty young concubines who lived at his beck and call, Abdüsselam Bey nearly lost his mind.

Just one thing darkened Lutfullah's happiness: he could travel to the world beyond only at Aselban's invitation. When
none was forthcoming, he would wander, sometimes for months on end, through our worthless world, as worn as the rags that clothed him, as ruined as the ruin in which he dwelt. Ill-tempered and belligerent, he avoided human society, for he was given to violent bouts of rage that seemed very much like epileptic seizures; these horrifying episodes clearly took a toll on his constitution.

His chest pumping with pride and his mouth spewing foam, he'd sputter a string of strange and indecipherable profanities, inviting damnation upon his enemies, threatening to murder and destroy them with his own grisly hands. “I . . . Ah, yes, I . . . I . . . Does the individual not know who I am? The individual knows not who I am? I shall rain misfortune upon the head of this individual.” Lutfullah's opponent was always an “individual” or at least addressed in the third person: “Is he aware that I shall burn him to a crisp?”

His rage was like the opium, a kind of divine madness, and in those rages Seyit Lutfullah was himself the master of life and death, his hubris justified by a mad philosophy that claimed to explain both the animate and inanimate worlds. But when his rage subsided, he was overcome by sadness. “The other day my enemies—the ones from the world beyond, of course—they provoked me. I disclosed many secrets. Now the journey will be more difficult. Until further notice they will not allow me to exercise my powers to their full extent!”

My father actually believed in some of these powers.

“There's something about that brute,” he'd say. “The baker Ahmet Efendi would never have ended up as he did. In just three days his house and business were burned to the ground, his family destroyed. Now the fellow's ruined and living in the poor house.”

Shuddering at the thought of Lutfullah's gruesome powers, he'd adjust his collar and hock a ball of phlegm to the ground.

“He's not a man. He's a devil! God protect us from the stones this monster might send down upon us. Why doesn't the government put the evil wizard behind bars? Just last night I saw him hobbling toward the graveyard in Edirnekapı. Has he done someone in?”

It was rumored that whenever Seyit Lutfullah convened with his auspicious spirits by turning his head toward the wall, his prophecies always came true, and that his breath, and even his hand, had a healing effect on people afflicted with certain nervous disorders.

In
1906
, the year Lutfullah's fame began to spread, Abdüsselam Bey became convinced he'd lost a valuable gold watch. Through Nuri Efendi he consulted Seyit Lutfullah, who, after holding long talks with the world beyond, told Abdüsselam in his mangled Turkish:

“The watch a lady's trunk, the trunk the hull of a ship, the ship the middle of the sea . . . Send telegraph at once . . . For if not . . .”

Such was his answer.

Three days later we discovered that the truth was really quite different. The watch was found in the pocket of a waistcoat in the bedroom wardrobe of a chambermaid who had been brought from Egypt by Abdüsselam's second wife. But consider the coincidence: at around the same time, the following telegraph was received concerning a servant from Ünye who had left the household to return to her native village.

“Woman found. A cheap knock-off table clock in her trunk. Both clock and woman in custody. Waiting further instructions.”

One might say that Seyit Lutfullah owed his renown in Istanbul to this misinterpretation, which was somewhat correct in its details but muddled in its context.

Indeed this slight error in context was what made the man's astounding powers apparent. Seen through this distorting prism, his divine inspiration was as clear as a lone ship on rough seas in the dead of night. After all, when asked to account for the discrepancies, Seyit Lutfullah never once claimed that his mediation with the spirits was entirely conclusive.

So the discrepancy came to seem like no more than a missing link—very much like that mosque (I can never remember which one) with no fewer than nine hundred ninety-nine windows. For if Lutfullah's prophesy had come true, the whole thing would have been written off as mere coincidence, its assorted details forgotten. Yet not one of the details revealed by this
minor error was lost; in light of the mistake, all the particulars—the watch, the servant who left Abdüsselam Bey's villa, the hull of the ferryboat, the chest—were illuminated like roadside inns along an arduous journey. I am left to wonder whether there can be an example that better illustrates the crucial—and supportive—role error plays in human affairs.

From then on Seyit Lutfullah was one of the most esteemed guests at the Tunisian's villa. His every word was believed. His attire, his lifestyle, and his ruin of a
medrese
all helped to consolidate his position. He dismissed with a vague gesture any advice about moderate alterations to his dress; alluding to an ominous dark power, he'd say, “They'd never allow it.” He once accepted a robe and turban at Abdüsselam Bey's insistence, only to return them three days later, saying, “They were not authorized. May the patron forgive me.” Seyit Lutfullah knew how to forge a legend that would last.

He liked to say that it was his auspicious guardian spirits who had directed him to the
medrese
that was his home.

I've seen very few places like this ruin of a
medrese
: its every fragment spoke of the effort and precision of its creator. You might almost think that this building and its miniature neighboring mosque—attributed to the reign of
Mahmud I—began their slow descent into ruin the moment they left the hands of the architects, in strict accordance with a plan that foresaw its current state.

The paving stones in the courtyard had been either broken or dislodged by an enormous plane tree surging out in all directions. Most of the rooms on the three wings—save for Seyit Lutfullah's—were partly or completely in ruins. As for the little mosque on the left side of the courtyard, all that remained were four front steps leading up to the minaret. In a charming little graveyard off to one side lay four or five esteemed personages from the era, along with the
kahvecıbası
who built both
medrese
and mosque; it was separated from the street by a flimsy fence that was barely standing.

Trees and dry vegetation dominated the
medrese
's entire courtyard, as well as the graveyard and the plot where the mosque had once stood; a few trees had thrust their roots out
from beneath toppled columns. The oddest sight was the slender and elegant cypress sapling that grew on the roof of the room where Seyit Lutfullah slept, rustling in the wind like the flowers of a silk
oya
. On cloudier days it seemed no more than a smudge against the ashen void of the sky, an arrow pointing toward an infinite and unassailable nature.

Marked with this strange herald, the
medrese
teetered like a giant scale at the top of a hill from which it would one day fall. Seyit Lutfullah slept on a mattress tossed on the floor of the ruin's only intact room, which was mildewed and perpetually dark. Beside his mattress were a handful of large bottles that seemed to hold his provisions and, strange as it may seem, a tortoise—a gift from Aselban, coyly named Çesminigâr, “the fountain of beauty”—which trundled about under the feet of Lutfullah's visitors, entirely at ease with humans.

Rumor had it that auspicious spirits had directed Lutfullah to the
medrese
because it was close to the treasure of Andronikos. This tallied with Seyit Lutfullah's endless tales of his quest in the world beyond for this treasure dating back to the days of that emperor.

But, then again, judging by what my dear friend told me in strict confidence, the
medrese
was neither devastated nor in the ruined state that we saw before us. It was, on the contrary, a sumptuous and resplendent
saray
;
We were as incapable of seeing the true splendor of this palace as we were of seeing Seyit Lutfullah's true beauty. Only when the treasure was uncovered would its pillars of pure gold and its diamond-encrusted turquoise domes shine forth. Then everything would fall into place. Aselban would agree to appear in human form, her lover would be reunited with his true face, and at last they would be joined in eternal bliss.

“Thereafter I will reign over the entire world,” he would say, “and everything I desire will come true.” He'd banish misery and injustice from the world and govern with absolute justice. For this strange man had peculiar ideas about the struggle between justice and injustice, leading one to wonder whether his activities might not be directed by larger forces after all, and, in the end, casting some light on his true nature.

By this logic, Seyit Lutfullah was the type of man to scorn and repudiate the riches offered by chance, so he might attain the otherworldly pleasures and power of eternal life. He was an idealist with a lofty soul. To have “everything” in life, he chose to live in the barren desert of “nothing.”

When I explained these various eccentricities to Dr. Ramiz, he homed in on this one aspect of Lutfullah's personality, and on countless subsequent occasions he told me this problem of justice and injustice could very well be the key, or at least one of the keys, to unlocking the Seyit Lutfullah affair. My dear friend, so zealously devoted to avant-garde scientific methods, once went so far as to ask me if Seyit Lutfullah had read Marx. Quite often he'd flare up and say, “I am most certain the man has read either Engels or Marx. What a pity you have never inquired.”

“How could such a lowly creature have read the work of such lofty intellects? The miserable soul doesn't even speak proper Turkish!” I'd reply.

And he'd challenge me.

“Your kind is always the same. You lose sight of mankind's superior virtues, just as you are lost to the feelings of inferiority that constrict your soul. My dear friend, relinquish these airs. I am now thoroughly convinced the man knows German and has read the full body of socialist literature. Otherwise he never would have bent himself so forcefully to this question of justice and injustice—the question of our age—nor would he have made such sacrifices in its name.” And he'd silence me, vowing that the man must be one of the founders of socialism.

Conversations with Dr. Ramiz were always like this. He would pounce on a single minor point and within seconds be on the verge of an avalanche. Due to my modest understanding of matters intellectual, I never found the nerve to criticize the great scholar to his face. But why lie, considering all I knew about my friend's life? I had never encountered in his ideas anything that might have inspired people to such a cause.

The passions of Aristidi Efendi, Nasit Bey, and Abdüsselam Bey were more finite. After Aristidi Efendi learned from an elderly brother-in-law, a priest on the island of Heybeliada,
that the emperor Andronikos was in all probability the emperor Hadrian, he came to perceive the quest as a purely scientific enterprise. He had no faith in Seyit Lutfullah's deliberations or in the orders he received from the world beyond, instructing him to wait. Work should begin at once, with shovels and a pickax. But in the world of spirits, the rules were precise and the time preordained.

The great event of
1909
was Aristidi Efendi's decision to begin, alone, in the dead of night, his search for the treasure of the emperor Andronikos. But after several hours of digging, he found it necessary to reassign the treasure's true location, and so the secret search continued. What he found at the bottom of a shallow pit were not amphorae brimming with gold and jewels, or precious cloth and palatial treasures, or gilded manuscripts and miniature statues of saints made of ivory and gold; he found only a few bones and a jar that held a single coin dating back to the reign of Sultan Mahmud I, and it was at this point that Aristidi Efendi began to ask questions about the treasure's actual location. When Seyit Lutfullah told the chemist the following day that it had never been a question of
actually
finding the treasure, and that it would now take months just to reassign it to its
original
location, Aristidi Efendi nearly died of sadness and remorse. As with the story of Abdüsselam Bey's watch, this bungled operation drained Aristidi Efendi of any energy he might have mustered to oppose Seyit Lutfullah.

From then on, one could see the flicker of superstitious fear in the indulgent European smile Aristidi Efendi had once flashed in the face of Lutfullah's ignorance; in the company of our friend he became as restive and indecisive as an army with no option of retreat.

What Seyit Lutfullah really wanted was the power to unlock the mystery of the universe and thus gain spiritual control over matter. “Gold is not to be made in an alembic but forged of the soul. How much of it is already in the earth? The problem is to produce it without using our hands,” he would say.

But when leading experiments in the secret laboratory behind Aristidi Efendi's pharmacy, surrounded by alembics and vials and various bottles and stills, he was ready to try anything, as
were all the others; he'd present Aristidi Efendi with questionable formulae fished from old manuscripts, and heated arguments would ensue, often lasting days.