The Time Regulation Institute (36 page)

But allow me just to say in advance that these humbly furnished rooms bore no resemblance whatsoever to the quarters of what was to be Istanbul's most advanced and modern institute. Indeed the difference between them wasn't even a question of degree. They were two different worlds altogether.

At one point I asked Nermin Hanım just what it was we were meant to be doing. After a prolonged exposé of the habits of her first husband and his extended family, she told me that there was nothing to do for the time being and that we were to wait for Halit Ayarcı's arrival. And so we spent our first month there doing just that. Every now and then Halit Ayarcı would telephone and check up on us, telling us to keep up the good work and always reminding us to replenish the stationery supplies. Curtains and typewriters arrived toward the end of the month.

In the middle of the second month, Halit Ayarcı came by the office. Together we compiled a list of almost a hundred slogans based on what I could remember from my time with Nuri Efendi: “Metals are never regulated on their own,” or “Regulation is chasing down the seconds
.”
Sometimes Halit Ayarcı
added his own, more meaningful, creations: “Shared time is shared work,”
“A true man is conscious of time,” “The path to well-being springs from a sound understanding of time,”
and so on and so forth.

After that came the task of having them printed. We printed a thousand copies of every slogan and distributed them throughout the city. One morning toward the end of the third month, a joyous Halit Ayarcı announced that the preliminary work on our institute was complete. Then he set out to compose the official terms of institutional justification. Little by little our once calm institute came to life.

Those three months were unlike anything I had ever experienced. I shall never forget them. It was a strange and confusing period in which I fluctuated between elation and fear: there was the pride I felt in having achieved something at long last, and there was the fear of losing it. I had to keep reminding
myself I was employed again, with a regular income. After a long and heavy sleep, I was living life to the fullest. I no longer dashed from one coffeehouse to the other in search of a familiar face. I was freed from that terrible question, what should I do now? No longer was I despised by my family for being unemployed; no longer was I obliged to recount my misfortunes to all and sundry. Because I now spent all day in the office, I no longer had to suffer acquaintances turning away to ignore me in public places. I was starting my life all over again. I was an ordinary citizen of the world. Endowed now with a surging sense of purpose, I felt I could move mountains.

But there was a problem: I had a job but no work. This new job was unlike any other I had known. It seemed to have nothing to do with people or even life itself, for that matter. I believed, for example, that I had done real work for the Spiritualist Society—if that doesn't sound too absurd, bearing in mind that all I'd done was report to a group of people who delighted in lying to one another and to themselves. But there wasn't even that much to be found in my new employment. It was an undertaking born of a few words. It had the logic of a fairy tale. I mentioned this to Halit Bey, but he was only interested in the problem of unsynchronized public clocks and cognizant of the fact that he wasn't engaged in a major project at the time. Other people had put their faith in his idea. And just around then, a very important man missed the funeral of another very important man because the city clocks weren't synchronized. Thereafter, in the space of ten days, a budget was earmarked to provide us with our reasonably well-furbished office space, and as if that were not enough, they undertook to supply us with any other office equipment we happened to lack. Could such a job really exist? What was its purpose? And why?

The most confusing thing of all was that Halit Ayarcı was almost never to be found at our offices. If for no other reason, he could have stopped in more often because his presence alone would have made us more secure. And perhaps, had he graced us with his presence, he might have drummed up some work for us to do. But he rarely did; he was out of the picture almost entirely. He did no more than to call in now and then to see
how we were getting on or to give us orders that seemed of little importance.

But we were treated to continuous updates on the institute's shiny future. Nermin Hanım was always babbling on about the new structure and the tremendous staff it would house. While I continued to view my days in our humble little office as somewhat absurd, she would ramble on and on about the new branches and departments and ideas her so-called uncle Halit Ayarcı had in store for us. I found it all rather disconcerting. I could not see our office even attempting an expansion along such lines. Better to remain as inconspicuous as was practical. The most sensible course would be for us to surface at the beginning of every month, just long enough to collect our salaries, and in the interim to remain invisible. But that's not at all how it happened. After some time had passed, Halit Ayarcı began flooding us with draft versions of documents and letters to be sent all over the city, and he petitioned to have the office refurbished in a manner befitting its station, at the same time instructing us to order additional stationery. But there was more: he became so preoccupied with my attire that you might have thought he was outfitting me for the stage.

One day, while dictating one of Halit Ayarcı's drafts to Nermin Hanım, I nearly burst into tears of despair. The letter began by describing the Time Regulation Institute as something along the lines of “an invaluable institution” that had not yet been granted the status it deserved and went on to insist upon a reappraisal of the budget to give the institute sufficient funding to allow for a full staff to run it, as well as an accountant and an additional secretary.

But how strange that three days later we received a response that, after tabling objections to our proposals on many different counts, stated that our situation would be taken into consideration. Not a day went by without a new shipment of furniture arriving at the doorstep of our humble little office. First they redid the linoleum floors, and then supplied me with my own telephone, as if the one only fifteen steps away from my desk wasn't good enough. The following day we received half a dozen desk lamps. Then they replaced our desks. Halit
Ayarcı received a first-class American desk, mine was only one notch less commanding, and Nermin Hanım's was so finely varnished you would slide right off it. Halit Ayarcı knew exactly when all the new furnishings were due to arrive and gave instructions over the telephone as to where they should be placed. He explained to me just how I was to arrange my desk lamp, black writing pad, and penholder.

All of this could mean one thing: without a supply department or some kind of warehouse, our office would eventually have to be liquidated and we'd all go hungry. I didn't care that much if I was promoted to assistant manager or not, but I was keen to hold on to the salary that was the equivalent of three office boys' combined. Just the thought that I might lose it was enough to drive me mad.

Once I tried to convey these feelings to Halit Ayarcı over the phone, and after listening to all I had to say, he replied: “My dear Hayri Bey, we keep coming back to the same old point. Be a realist!”

And he hung up.

Naturally this harked back to what he had told me in Büyükdere, but this time he seemed on the verge of laughter. He called back an hour later.

“Hayri Bey,” he roared. “Still afraid of losing that little wage? Stop entertaining such nonsense and be realistic!”

And he hung up on me again.

I no longer concealed my concerns from Nermin Hanım. When she actually allowed me to speak, or rather to finish what I had to say, I tried to explain to her as best I could why this job had no future. But she had complete confidence in Halit Ayarcı.

“Impossible!” she cried. “Uncle Halit's never wrong. He's a man of action. He'd never take on a job he didn't completely believe in. You still don't really know him.”

“But why doesn't he ever come to the office?”

“He'll come . . . But only when everything is in place. He's going to Ankara tomorrow to discuss the project!”

What else could I do but quietly pray that he wouldn't actually explain anything to anyone.

Perhaps my paranoia began to get to her, because Nermin Hanım began to worry too:

“I really don't need the money,” she said. “But I certainly don't like the idea of shutting myself away at home again, right under my mother-in-law's nose, strapped with all those household chores. She's a good woman, but she never opens her mouth. She just scurries away. How can anyone live with such silence? But, you know, ever since I got this position my mother-in-law's completely changed, and she's doing all the housework herself.”

Even so, Nermin Hanım was nothing like me. Her manner of speaking could not have been more different. She leapt from one thought to the other like a sparrow prancing from one branch to the next; by the time she reached her third sentence, she had left her original point far behind to dive into a subject that had nothing to do with it. Her life was governed by her tongue and her two lips. No sooner had she begun discussing the travails of being pent up at home with her mother-in-law than she was expounding on her first husband with some fury, and then, before you knew it, she was delving into her childhood in a family kiosk somewhere near Küçükmustafapasa, only to stop in midflow to ask if you thought the hat she had recently purchased truly became her.

All this was amplified by digressions both major and minor. Each began the same way: “Maybe you know . . .” She could have been referring to at least twenty different people, and if I told her that I didn't know the person in question, she would seem temporarily undone, but then she'd rally, supplying me with such descriptions as to make the individual worthy of my notice; but then, in the middle of her description, the man's daughter or wife would be mentioned, and it was back to the beginning.

One encounter was enough for Nermin Hanım to adopt a new friend, and to each new friend she related her life story, in installments. The man who put in our linoleum floors, the electrician, the upholsterer, the porters, the public notaries who came to sign our accounts—each had at one time or another listened to some saga from her life. But she was beginning to
suspect that perhaps this job wouldn't last for much longer. Eventually her idle talk, previously content to flutter from one branch to the next, came to hover around one central point.

Soon our office assistant, Dervis Efendi, was also infected by our concerns. The poor man had truly warmed to the new office, even though there weren't many visitors, and not much in the way of tips. But he was comfortable, and no one bothered him. He wasn't made to wait beside the door or anything like that. He sat in a chair next to Nermin Hanım's desk, listening to her stories and praising her hats—there was a new one every day and each one deserving of a
masallah
! If he ever bored of her conversation, he could always leave with the good intention of making Turkish coffee.

Surely this job was the easiest he could ever find. Thirty-five years working as an office assistant, and suddenly he'd found himself in an office managed the way an office should have always been managed. But he too wasn't sure what work we were meant to be doing; he was more than a little surprised that an entire company had been formed just so he could watch me tinker with watches until nightfall and listen to Nermin Hanım's life story as she knit sweater after sweater. He never tired of us, or told us to do anything else; he was content enough, but it simply did not make sense. One day he came to me and said rather sheepishly:

“Sir, I too am a little confused by this job. I'm beginning to feel a little suspicious about the whole thing. Sometimes I even wonder if I've died and gone to heaven.”

Until then, it had never once occurred to me that these creatures called office assistants might conceive of a paradise designed to fit their lifestyle. But why couldn't our ideas about happiness comply with our standards of living?

Our fragile peace was disrupted toward the end of the third month by a great upsurge of activity. One morning Halit Ayarcı arrived at the office with the mayor of Istanbul and one of his assistants. Nermin Hanım was engrossed in knitting Halit Ayarcı's third sweater, and I was busy regaling everyone with tales of Seyit Lutfullah's romantic adventures with his beloved Aselban. Needless to say, we were thrown into a great
confusion by this unexpected visit, and we sprang to our feet at once. Before I could begin to think of how to welcome a man of the mayor's stature, Halit Ayarcı was already introducing me:

“My most valuable assistant, Hayri Irdal Bey. We are so fortunate to have him working on the project with us.”

Then he added:

“Do you know, Beyefendi, that for the sake of the institute Hayri Irdal is working here more or less as an honorary member?”

The mayor grasped my hand as if to say, I shall never let go of this—our only chance to bring success to our institute.

“His remuneration is truly shameful. Something to be ashamed of indeed . . .”

My dear benefactor spoke as if he might weep over the injustice I had to endure. The strange thing was that even the mayor seemed truly concerned; he lowered his head and stared at his shoes.

“There's no other way this will work, Halit Bey.”

And then he shook my hand more firmly than before, as if to thank me from the bottom of his heart for all my sacrifices.

“Of course the current situation is temporary. When, thanks to his efforts, we finish organizing everything, Hayri Bey will be appointed our assistant manager.”

This bit of good news seemed to revive the mayor. He lifted his head from his shoes to look joyfully into my eyes. And for the first time in my life I beheld a man who was happy for the happiness of another man.