The Time Regulation Institute (31 page)

This was perhaps why I mustered my most imposing voice as I explained the condition of Halit Ayarcı's watch.

“First of all,” I said, “you've dismantled this watch most brutishly on three occasions. These watches are delicate mechanisms that cannot sustain such crude handling. Look at the back of this piece. This wasn't made on a factory line. It was painstakingly crafted by hand! It's a letter from one master craftsman to another, but clearly it wasn't written for you!”

And I pointed to the designs engraved on the inside of the front cover. Then I slowly pursed my lips and said: “It truly grieves me to see a craftsman's place usurped by a merchant.”

Oh Nuri Efendi, my saintly master, may you rest in peace. You should have seen the state of the poor man as he listened to me. The victory was yours. Hearing just one of your words of wisdom, Horlogian's eyes were released from my shoes, as if he had suddenly grasped that they hadn't come to see him all by themselves, that surely they must have a master; it had finally occurred to him that the miserable man standing before him must also have a head, even a face.

No, I'll never give my daughter to that hound!

Having thanked him with an almost courteous smile for having remembered to look up at my face, I continued.

“It seems your apprentices have misplaced this one particular stone while repairing the watch. So if you would attend to this . . .”

Nervously rubbing his hands, Horlogian muttered something unintelligible, but by then I had lost all my patience.

“You,” I cried, “will do what I say. Everything that I say! First you will demagnetize this timepiece.”

Then I turned to Halit Ayarcı and said, “Once upon a time this kind of work wasn't done for mere financial reward. It was done by those who were apprenticed to the trade and by people who truly loved the work.”

I could almost hear Nuri Efendi's voice echoing in my ear: “Bravo, my son.”

Had I not been so racked with other worries at the time, had I not felt swept away on a sea of misadventures, with only five liras in my pocket to feed my family that night, I doubt I would have been so sharp with the watchmaker Horlogian. At one point I looked the poor man in the eye. I was ashamed of my behavior, but I thought to myself, “Let him get what he deserves. He's not worried about finding food for dinner tonight . . .”

By God, a man can be so snug behind a well-paid job. He can take on the entire world. Within a minute, Horlogian had pulled himself together. He could have handed us the watch and chased us out of his shop then and there.

Instead we stayed for an hour and a half. And over that time the grace of God and the spiritual presence of my master allowed me to bestow upon the watch merchant a precise and highly constructive lesson in the maintenance of a timepiece. When he replaced the stone, reestablishing the correct weight so as not to disturb the mechanics of the watch, I paid particular attention; the man's face was drenched in sweat.

Finally I warned the merchant against using too much oil when working with timepieces of this caliber.

“You're not roasting an eggplant! You're repairing a watch. Stop using this kind of oil! These days it's easy to find very light bone oil.”

Halit Ayarcı's eyes were riveted on me the whole while. By the time we left the shop, Horlogian seemed to have forgotten his French. Feeling compelled to pay me a compliment, he asked, “Is the esteemed gentleman from Switzerland? Or perhaps just educated there?”

“Why would you think that?”

“It's just that you have such an impressive understanding of timepieces.”

My answer was brief.

“I love them,” I said, “very much.”

Then I wished I hadn't berated the fellow so harshly: he might have taken me on as an apprentice.

Dr. Ramiz and Halit Ayarcı were engaged in a lively dispute at the shop entrance. Where would they go that evening? Or, rather, where would
we
go?

Finally Halit Ayarcı announced, “Off we go then up the Bosphorus. And Hayri Efendi is to honor us with his presence. We'll drink rakı together, won't we,
Beyefendi?”

“That makes four,” I said to myself. “In just one hour I have been addressed as beyefendi four times. What's more, Ismail the Lame was beaten to a pulp before my eyes. And perhaps for that very reason he would never again ask for my daughter's hand in marriage. And then, after that, I had ruffled the feathers of one of Istanbul's eminent watchmakers for an hour and a half. And all this was happening to me. My family was at home, starving, and I was now riding in a car whose make I
would never be able to divine, not even if it were mine. And to top it all off, we were on our way to Büyükdere to drink rakı.

My last visit to Büyükdere had been to attend the funeral of a relative of Selma Hanım. I will never forget how exhausted I was that day. My devotion to this woman was such that I nearly carried the casket on my back all by myself. And by the end I was on the verge of throwing myself into the grave with the deceased. What people won't do for love . . .

My worst memory from that day was locking eyes with Cemal Bey; he was having a private laugh about the state I was in. He had pouted throughout the entire ceremony, as aggravated as if his shoe were pinching a painful corn on the bottom of his foot. His demeanor had set me so on edge that more than once I had considered shoving him into the grave as an escort to the deceased before making my escape. After which I would climb to the top of Hünkartepe and sing that folk song to the cool breeze, “My Lover at Sea.” Why not some other song? I don't know. But naturally I'd done no such thing. To make matters worse, he'd asked me to take his arm on the way back, and I'd more or less had to carry the brute myself.

“Why is it that the poor and the downtrodden always get beaten? Take Cemal Bey, no one would ever dare lay a finger on such a man.”

I had picked up the habit of speaking to myself aloud. Dr. Ramiz turned to me with a teasing smile and said, “Again? What do you expect from the miserable man?”

Then turning to Halit Ayarcı, he said, “Hayri Bey simply cannot stomach Cemal.”

My face flushed to hear my secrets so baldly revealed, so I turned to the window.

“He's absolutely right!” Halit Ayarcı said. Then he turned to face me. “It's not like I haven't thought about doing it once or twice myself. But in the end I was a bit frightened by the thought of it. I realized that once I started I'd never stop. Just imagine . . . If someone actually planted a slap on that face, he wouldn't be able to stop at just one!”

I shot a glance at his enormous hands, saddened to think that nothing of the sort had ever occurred.

On the ferryboat returning from the funeral, Cemal had never once left my side. Practically every five minutes, as if to remind me just how tired I really was, he said, “Hayri Bey, you seem all puffed out! I'll never forget all your help today. She was such a strange woman. More of a nut than that aunt of yours, but the same sort of person . . . Of course Selma never liked her. And she harbored no goodwill toward us either. But all the same, she was a relative. We were under obligation not to neglect this last responsibility of ours. What to do? That's what I asked myself this morning. I asked Selma and she said, ‘Don't worry. Once Hayri Bey reads about it in the paper, he'll be over in no time.' As it happens, all those extra details in the obituary were added just for you. But the truth is, you really have overextended yourself . . .”

Yes, that was just how it happened. I had volunteered for the job.

Cemal Bey couldn't openly call me an idiot or an incurable moron. He could only repeat the story to me ten times over, to hammer home the fact that I was indeed a fool. “No, Selma never loved that woman. She'd been mistreated by her on many occasions. But still, she's ever so grateful to you for all you've done.”

Every time he opened his mouth I felt the ground shift beneath my feet. To think of how I'd gone to sit at the head of that grave without even having made my ablutions, to wail painful prayers for this relative they had never liked.

And oh, the fantasies I played over in my mind. One took me forward to the day after the funeral, or perhaps a week later, when I'd run into Selma Hanım, who, after greeting me with her most charming smile, would say, “Oh, Hayri Bey, Cemal Bey told me all about your devotion to my aunt. I can't tell you how touched I was. I am so grateful for your unfaltering friendship. But I knew, Hayri Bey, I always knew that you were my very best friend!” And she would carry on with similar flatteries, and I'd be so flustered that I'd begin to stammer until, finding nothing to say, I would throw myself down at her feet and, with a voice even sweeter than before, Selma Hanım would say, “No, no, I know everything . . . Don't do this to a miserable woman imprisoned by her true feelings!”

I had endured all the hardship as I kept imagining that scene straight out of a Turkish film—but of course Selma Hanım would never speak with that nasal voice our actors affected. But every five minutes Cemal Bey said something else, wrenching me from my sweet reverie.

At some point I drifted back to listen to what Halit Ayarcı was saying.

“It's simply not possible to know Cemal, even superficially, and not want to kill the man. I thought about it on more than one occasion when we studied together at Galatasaray Lycée.”

After that funeral I hadn't uttered the name Büyükdere again. But rakı was another matter altogether. My bond with the drink was stronger, deeper. But even the drink reminded me of the man. In fact, I had experience of rakı with Cemal Beyefendi himself, an episode that cast him in an unfavorable light. One day I paid him a visit and found him just settling down to drink at the dinner table; he promptly sat me down and offered me a rakı. As he took his first sip, his face contorted into such a miserable wince that I lost all my appetite, but, just to show the man how to drink rakı, I threw back eight glasses, one after the other, and left the house swooning. Thinking back now on all my experiences with Cemal Bey, I wonder if I wasn't actually right to feel the way I did about him. Clearly there was nothing, nothing at all, about the man I liked, save his wife . . .

The second time I found myself without a job there was a period when I was drinking a considerable amount of rakı. I owed a few liras to every little drinking hole from Sehzadebası to Edirnekapı that reeked of bitter beans and burnt olive oil. And my tab at the corner shop grew with the number of forty-fives of rakı I begged the shopkeeper to give me every evening; he only allowed me such credit because he had his eyes on the derelict plot beside our old house. Sometimes I didn't dare take the bottle home; I would knock it back then and there, right next to the counter, oblivious to the impertinence of the shop boys and Yusuf Efendi's insinuations about the state of my home and all my debt, not caring a whit for what they might say behind my back; and then, doing my best not to look them
in the eye, I would say, as I stared off into space, “Put this in a corner for me. I'll come by tomorrow evening and pick up where I left off.”

So I was familiar with both Büyükdere and rakı. Both evoked infinite memories. It was only natural for the two to come together. And of course there were those who drank rakı in Büyükdere. But how had I ended up in this scene? This was the strange part: me, rakı, and Büyükdere. No, that wasn't it. Büyükdere, rakı, me—no matter how I imagined it, the combination was still something my mind of two hours ago would never have accepted. And even more incredible, the me in this scenario had been addressed four times as beyefendi.

Hayri Bey, Hayri Efendi, Hayri my son, Hayri the Fortuneteller, Hayri l'Horloger, the orphan Hayri, the wizard Hayri, prodigal Hayri, Hayri the Tippler, the Addict, husband to Pakize Hayri, the brother-in-law to his wife's sisters Hayri—and now Hayri Beyefendi.

“Hayri Beyefendi, won't you have a cigarette?”

“Why, thank you, Beyefendi.”

That was how people should speak. It was something I would have said six or seven years ago. It was one more thing I had forgotten. In a rush I felt fire spreading over my lips and gums; it had been a while since I'd had a cigarette. When I heard the fifth “beyefendi,” I nearly leapt up from my seat in joy.

The car soared like an arrow cleaving the beautiful misty spring evening and pushing it to either side. In the fog over the hills of Çemberlikuyu, that evening unfurled like a ribbon whose colors ran from wine dark to golden, ever gaining in beauty, in a verdant lushness that stretched out as far as the eye could see and that was soft as fresh grass, timid and frail as wildflowers. It was as if we were at the end of that ribbon, rushing forward, collecting the many reflections around it.

Rakı, Büyükdere, and I, and the “I” in this equation was a beyefendi
.
And the car was soaring at seventy kilometers. And I was as elated as if I were a child all over again, speeding off to a holiday fair!

“You seem rather lost in thought, Hayri Beyefendi!”

Praise God that Dr. Ramiz was there. I never felt I had to speak when addressed in his company. He answered for me.

“Hayri Bey's always like that!”

Hayri Beyefendi, our Hayri, your Hayri, Hayri plunged in thought—there were so many different Hayris. Oh, if we could only drop a few of them off along the way. I could be just one person, just myself, like everyone else.

The car sped down the coast, pulling the trees out of the earth and tossing them over our head as we passed. Everything was as soft as the hair of a young child. My first child who died of neglect six years ago had hair like that. What could be wrong about running this old fellow down? He's more bedraggled than I—obviously not all quite there. Bravo, cabbie! You swept right by him without a scratch. Now he'll know the dangers around him and take better care. Perhaps he'll dream of it tonight. Perhaps he'll be torn from his loved one as abruptly as if he'd been in a car accident after all. But why did I keep thinking of Selma Hanım and Cemal Bey? I suppose it was being in a car.