The Time Regulation Institute (23 page)

So the house in Süleymaniye was the next source of vigorous debate in the coffeehouse, and for whatever reason, it seemed to have fallen to us to assign a function to the two floors unconnected by stairs.

It was always the same: any enterprise, however serious at its outset, would soon be undone by an inscrutable logic. Once handed over to the crowd inside, what had seemed crystal clear just two steps away from the coffeehouse would be twisted into a muddy mockery of fate.

This was the marshland we knew as “the absurd.” And though I couldn't see it, I was up to my neck in it.

I was as in thrall to this world, as if I had fallen into the grips of a densely feathered beast, engulfed by its many soft arms and ticklish wings while its husky voice lulled me into a languid stupor. I was living in a world without connection, or without any connection that wasn't meaningless or absurd: I felt myself to be in a fairground torn asunder by a violent tornado that had come out of nowhere. Where had the storm started? What uncanny worlds of opposites had it plundered, which disparate armadas had it so rattled to the core that it was now quite impossible to identify the true faces of those who are blown our way? Objects would appear one after the other, as if pulled out of a magician's hat, and then it would emerge that they were somehow linked to one another. At the time I found the experience quite pleasant, but when I consider it in retrospect, I see the traces of a nightmare.

I was fording a deep-sea cavern lined by the remains of knowledge and by all the ideas I had ever failed to grasp. As they swirled around my feet I moved forward, and with every step I felt the coil of unfounded beliefs, ungrounded frustrations, and unending despair tightening around my chest and arms; whereupon, like rotten seaweed, they pulled me deeper into the depths of the sea; and every time I opened my eyes, gruesome leviathans larger than the eye could see would lunge
toward me through the murky void. Then suddenly they would vanish, like giant squid eclipsed by their own clouds of ink, and I found myself face to face with Dr. Ramiz or Lazybones Asaf, my head turned toward the wild laughter that was cutting through the thunderous chaos in my head—a clanging in my ears rising from the depths I had just been wandering—and I would look around me as if I'd just woken from a dream, recognizing nothing.

“Yes, my dear friend,” Ramiz Bey was saying. “There's no end to all this! The youth must take action and cast off the shackles of this
fatalisme `a l'Orient
!”

The doctor's face darkened. As if in response to a command, Asaf Bey dragged his feet and arms away from the four chairs he usually commandeered, and then, as if to reward himself for this arduous task, nested his head on the table, in his crossed arms, and fell into a deep sleep.

Lazybones Asaf was forever lethargic, and his sleep was the most sublime, the most innocent in all the world. When he closed his eyes, a gentle hum would fill the room, inviting reveries of a hundred angels with effervescent wings flittering about in the air above him, singing or softly whispering lullabies into his ear as they filled the honeycomb of his sleep with the ambrosia of innocent dreams.

Then all at once I felt a painful knot in my stomach. “Emine!” I cried, and I leapt from my chair and hurried home. She was ill. What the doctors had diagnosed as a minor case of fatigue had become a dangerous condition of fatal consequence. I had seen this coming long before the doctors did. I had known about it since I had dreamed that dream at the Department of Justice Medical Facility. The fatal alembic had boiled away before my eyes, and inside had been Emine's face; she was always on the other end of my pillow, on my lips, and in the palms of my hands, but slowly slipping away from me, and staring at me with wide-open eyes. Let her speak to her heart's content, I tried to say, let her laugh and dream about the future, and see Zehra marry one day, and Ahmet's graduation from medical school, but still her face was fading into the distance, and still her eyes were looking at me, even from so far away,
looking at me as if to say, “Try what you like, but there's no cure!” It was hideous and cruel. Emine was falling into death as the tears fell from my eyes. And I could do nothing about it, nor could anyone else.

VII

Emine's death sent me headlong into a void, as if the branch I'd been clutching had suddenly snapped. So overwhelmed was I by the loss that at first it made absolutely no sense to me. Nor could I grasp how deeply I'd been affected. All I felt was a dark and terrible heaviness deep inside me. But there was also something else—a sense of liberation. The ordeal had come to an end. Emine would never die again; she'd never have to suffer another illness. In my mind she'd remain as she was. No doubt other terrors awaited me; other catastrophes were in store. But my worst fear—that of losing Emine—was gone. No longer would I view the world through the prism of her pain and ill health; never again would fear well up inside me to smother my entire being.

Our home had been destroyed; left alone with our two children, I lost the will to work, and, even worse, I lost all faith. But I was no longer afraid. The worst that could happen had happened. Now I was free.

With no Emine to keep my feet on the ground, I was ready to be swept away by any passing current. And the closest current was the coffeehouse and my friends there. Just a week after Emine's death, I found myself among the regulars once again. I sat there, in the second hall behind the shops on the main boulevard, with playing cards in one hand, a glass of rakı in the other, a cigarette in my mouth, and the din of stories in my ears; I was, in short, at ease with my surroundings, joking and smoking and for all appearances having a jolly good time. Had I forgotten everything? Was I really having fun? Absolutely not.

I felt anguish like never before. It wasn't fear or pain but the grief suffered by only those who have betrayed themselves—an
odd sensation I greeted with revulsion. It was on a day like this that it happened. All at once my reflection in the mirror melted into my impression of myself. The face I saw between the coats hanging on either side of the mirror was smug but hopeless, despicable and weak willed, irresolute and resigned to his fate, so much so that for a moment I thought the glass might vomit back my image and toss my head onto my feet. But no, nothing of the sort happened. On second and third glance I grew more comfortable with the apparition. A balance had been regained.

I hired an old woman to look after the children at home. When I managed to get myself up in the morning, I'd go to work, and after that it was straight to the coffeehouse before rolling out to a local
meyhane
, with Dr. Ramiz or some other companion, to drink the night away, returning home late. I'd be pleased to find the children already fast asleep, and on some nights I'd go straight to bed myself—another day done, and I had made it through unscathed. But all too often I found the children waiting up for me, huddled in a corner. Thus the most wrenching part of the day would begin.

I had to take them up in my arms and lift their spirits without once giving them the faintest idea of what was running through my head: I had to tousle their hair and dry their tears—make them laugh. Why were they so sad? Why did they cry so much? Why were they so needy? Didn't their very existence make it difficult enough? Hadn't they tied me to one place with their very presence, condemning me forever to circle like a workhorse around the same little spot?

The moment I saw them I'd crumble in compassion; cursing myself for my spinelessness and ill fortune, I'd fight the urge to pound my head against the wall for hours on end. At times like these Emine would appear from the shadows of the house and waft toward me, placing her hand on my shoulder, as she always did, and saying, “Pull yourself together!”

And I would do just that. Decisions, promises, and resolutions came one after the other: tears were shed in darkness. But to what end? I detested the life I was living but lacked the strength to start another. I had severed all ties. I had no bonds with the world save the compassion I felt for my children. I had
no choice but to endure it all—or at least tolerate the world around me. The moment I set foot outside I was a prisoner of my wandering and endlessly colluding mind, which led me off to exotic worlds whose enticements beckoned, only to stay beyond my reach.

I was driven wild by letters and postcards from distant lands. They came from all over the world: Peru, Argentina, Canada, Egypt, and the Cape of Good Hope . . . The old Jewish woman who lived amid fleas in her single room just two streets down from us had a brother in Mexico, and her neighbor—the sister of a rabbi—traded in Argentinean furs. The son of the Greek grocer across the way lived in Egypt. And his nephew was a teacher in Chicago. When I saw their letters, my eyes would shut of their own volition—I became someone else, somewhere else. Oh, to leave everything behind and just go!

But no, I would have to be a different sort of man to do such a thing. I would have to push myself beyond the shackles of my habits and routines, not just run, move, jump, and desire but also persevere. Such things were not for me. I was a hopeless shadow: a miserable, slovenly shadow who followed any man who happened to brush by, who, the moment after breaking company with this man, found himself bound to his children, huddling in each other's arms like kittens, laughing, crying, but most of all crying—a man who laughed when told to laugh, cried when told to cry, spoke when told to speak, wept when told to weep. I was a miserable creature who became interesting only when considered so by others, who existed on those rare days when people looked him in the eye.

This of course reminded me to hurry to the coffeehouse, where I could be among people whose lives were more or less different from my own and who, unlike me, did not suffer the gaze of others. When I was with them, I felt I had a life of my own; I could live and I could think.

But perhaps it wasn't quite like that. There were other factors at play. I didn't actually like the people there. I took refuge among them. I was like a man who flees a snowy night on the peak of a lonely mountain battered by heavy winds, to take refuge in one of those caravanserais that double as stables, where the
warm aroma of manure mingles with the fragrance of freshly made tea and coffee amid the hum of human voices and the shuffling of horses' hooves. It was this happy, saturated chaos that kept me warm.

No doubt a day would come when I would forget the dissatisfaction I felt for the place and its people and leave myself entirely at their mercy. Already from time to time I'd say, “Ah, now this is life! Such peace and happiness . . . What a delightful cast of characters!” And I lived like this until my son Ahmet's grave illness brought me back to my senses. My fear of losing him compelled me to accept my fate.

It was at around this time that Dr. Ramiz finally realized the project he'd been mulling over for the last six years: the Psychoanalytic Society. I was one of the twenty members of the society—none of whom, apart from Dr. Ramiz, were medical doctors; I was even made its director. So, yes, I must concede that when I was made deputy director at the Time Regulation Institute, I was not completely without experience. Before becoming director of the Society for Psychoanalysis, I'd been the accountant for the Spiritualist Society, which was more or less the same sort of organization. As director I was the holder of the key to the society's meeting room, whose rent was paid over the years by my dear friend the founder of the organization. Only twice did the society open its doors to the public for conferences. At his first conference, Dr. Ramiz introduced me as the first patient he'd treated in Turkey, providing details that made my hair stand on end. It was thanks to these mentions that my second wife, Pakize, first took a shine to me. At his second conference, the doctor read a lithographed reproduction of an entire seventy-page-long dream manual, annotated with his own comparisons and explanations along the way.

It was summer; waves of hot air blew in through the society's windows, singeing our faces and dragging us down to the depths where, yawning, we surrendered to the good intentions of the orator. A bee buzzing overhead seemed to be drilling through several layers of steel, belying its small size with the deafening roar of several diesel engines combined—at first
smothering the voice of Dr. Ramiz, and then drowning it out altogether.

The first to drop off was Lazybones Asaf Bey, in the back row. In the role of honorary director, I sat just below the speaker, my hands politely poised on my knees as I tried to hide the gaping holes in my shoes—this was supposedly how it was done in Europe (I am referring to the seat I was assigned as director, and not to the shortcomings of my shoes). For a moment it seemed as if Lazybones Asaf, his arms sliding off the chairs he'd been using as his bed, had set his sights on the nape of a woman in a monstrous hat in the seat right in front of him. But then, as his head dove below the hat and out of sight, the divine hum of a thousand angels serenaded by violins rose from the back row. At around the third page of the dream manual, the divine hum and the buzzing bee became a small bay of cool and rippling waters over which the dreams of a young poet in our group might sail, to wage alone the epic sea battles of another age: the ship's hawsers groaned, and the cannonballs roared out in blasts of black smoke as flames spread amid the charges and the battle cries. A woman of forty in the front row took advantage of the clamor to release a dozen ducklings she seemed to have stowed in her pocket, masking herself behind their quacking. And just beyond her someone else did the same and soon the meeting hall had become a draining bathtub insatiably gobbling up air.

By the tenth page almost everyone was fast asleep with the exception of those who'd already left for home to sleep in greater comfort. Once everyone was secured in slumber, each larynx settled into its usual repertoire, its racket and rhythm offering us swift and unadulterated consolation.