The Time Regulation Institute (56 page)

The only good thing that came out of all this was the time I got to spend with my son, Ahmet. I had truly missed having my son in my life. And so I was sad as our collaboration came to a close. We were destined to live apart. Ahmet loved me dearly but detested the way I lived and the work I was doing. We spent our last night together in front of the strange models we'd constructed out of hundreds of matchboxes, thinking of Dr. Mussak. We were making the final changes.

As my son teased me about the building and its pillars and stairs, I looked at his eyes, which were dark like grapes, and his thin lips and his stubble of a mustache slowly altering his face. I thought of all the things that made him so different, this fragile little man who was a part of me, who helped me as a friend, yet never fully opened himself up to me as he glided over so many of his thoughts. It did not upset me in the least that he didn't take after me, that in his mind he rejected me. I harbored no resentment. I knew that his only salvation was in being unlike me, and that was fine by me. Indeed it even made me happy. But I wondered where he found his strength. Here was the last man in the line of Ahmet Efendi the Some Timer—what had driven him to this point? I was, nevertheless, truly surprised to find no anger or hatred between us. I took this to mean that my son had
not just overcome close family ties and the comforts that came with our new wealth and prosperity but that he had also taken on a far more difficult challenge: he had overcome himself.

Suddenly my mind went back to the years after Emine's death, when Ahmet and Zehra would wait for me on the front stoop every night, fighting tears as they embraced each other in desperation. I felt the tears well up in my eyes. If I'd had the courage, I would have told him everything and asked for his forgiveness. But Ahmet had become that lycée student who, after completing his studies with due seriousness, erases all problems from his mind, and so he left me no opening. At one point, I asked:

“How are you getting on with your sister?”

A beautiful light shone in his eyes.

“I love her very much,” he said.

Then his hand rose to his chest and gently tugged on his sweater.

“She knitted this for me.”

We fell back into our usual silence. I thought that although my son was right there before me, we had again drifted far apart in our thoughts. With the end of our shared project, the chasm between us reopened. Once again I became a man he would only visit if I was ill or by appointment.

What a terrible thought, and what an impenetrable maze. “Perhaps to become his own person,” I told myself, “he has no choice but to forget about me, yet only through him do I feel remotely like the person I should be.” Perhaps this was something he'd never understand. He'd guessed that my run of good luck would soon be over, and he was right. But I could only tremble helplessly as I watched his life unfold.

There would always be a chasm between us. Every so often we would extend our hands to each other, only to return to our separate worlds; meanwhile my heart filled with bitterness and his with hope. Such were the poignant thoughts that weighed on me during the night we spent together. When morning came, I would be a different man, as I stuffed the matchboxes into a basket and marched off to work. And perhaps the very next day I'd meet with thundering applause. Halit Ayarcı would have to pay through the nose for the pleasure he'd taken in angling for the
upper hand. And that wasn't all. Tomorrow night was my night with Selma. Once in her arms, I'd forget everything. And in two or three weeks' time, I would perhaps sleep with that young girl Sabriye Hanım had offered me as a gift; Sabriye had been holed up in the institute for three months and was keen to cause trouble for Pakize and Selma. This was yet another way to forget, and to change. And just the other day I had quite an interesting talk with Seher Hanım over afternoon prayers. I'd left knowing I'd not be able to neglect that woman any longer. I was doomed, therefore, to sink into the bog of forgetfulness I'd claimed as my own, and to forget. Never again would I experience such joy as I did over the three months I spent working on the clock building.

All this had come of a single event. None of this would have happened had Emine not died. As if hearing my thoughts, my son stood up slowly:

“There's no need to worry,” he said. “I'll come visit you more often. I'm strong enough now.”

And for the first time he gave me a genuine kiss. He had accepted me for who I was. I watched him as he left the room. And I thought of the girl he might have been in love with then, or perhaps the one he'd fall in love with in the future. I thought about his fate and fortune. Every child breaks with his father at that age. But my child had done so twice. That night, as I lay in bed, I thought of our old, humble home. I kept remembering the geranium that a tiny Ahmet had planted in a broken-rimmed pot that hung from our crumbling bay window. Every now and then I shivered in my bed, but I was pleased to know that I would see him one more time, at breakfast, in the morning.

II

Halit Ayarcı greeted my project with much enthusiasm, or rather he welcomed the strange architectural model made of empty matchboxes I had constructed in accordance with my son's entirely unprofessional designs. With each new detail I explained, his delight rose to new heights. When I finished, he
leaped to his feet to offer me his heartfelt congratulations. On several occasions, I reminded him:

“But let's not be too rash! There's still so much to do, and so many flaws in the design. We have twelve large meeting rooms and forty smaller rooms—how shall we ever fill them?”

He wasn't even listening.

“My good friend,” he said. “There is no need to disparage your wonderful work. You've done a sterling job. The hardest part is behind you. This central hall has been bothering me for the last two months now. And here you have hit upon a capital solution!”

“But that's not at all what I mean—”

“By now we should no longer need to share all our thoughts—we should understand one another implicitly! We each made the same mistake, basing the building's design on a pocket watch. But then we remembered the Blessed One instead and presto! Everything changed. But you have surpassed me. As for the meeting rooms and offices, there's no need to worry. We each have plenty of relatives and then, of course, there will be the others who come recommended, not to mention the people in the regulation stations who will wish to be promoted. What I'm trying to say is that an empty office or meeting room will find its own function, much in the way that a civil servant's function is guided by his title. And this spot you've set aside for Sabriye Hanım—it couldn't be better. How happy I shall be to see our dear friend perched at the top of the building, in her very own eagle's crag! But we'll think about these things later. Our next step is to arrange a press meeting, to alert the public to your achievement.”

Of course a good many of my readers will remember those pictures of me posing before the outlandish and frankly grotesque model I had made out of detachable and expandable matchboxes—for why not admit now that the game was up. Even as I was applauded so vigorously for my building and its model, I was being subjected to criticism just as loud: it was perhaps fitting that I became known as something of charlatan, a cross between an amateur genius and a fraudster. But by then I'd become used to such things; those who looked kindly on
innovation were enthralled with the novelty of the main hall's four ornamental pillars and the entirely original way in which different stairs ran in and out of the different floors of the six o'clock pavilion. One friend of mine praised me lavishly in the paper almost daily: “Innovation! From top to bottom, unfathomable innovation beyond our wildest dreams! Three cheers for innovation!” Another friend praised us for “our departure from dusty classical forms.” And to quote a third commentator, who had earlier heaped me with praise for my unusual staircases and the two unnecessary bridges connecting them to the main building, the ample space left between three pavilions was only to allow for these: “As a new era of Turkish syntax dawns, a new architectural language has been given voice. Let's see what those opposed to inverted syntax will say in the face of Hayri Irdal's resounding success!” The fourth critic was even more ebullient. In his view I had not just designed a building worthy of inverted syntax: I had also created a work of abstract architecture. As for my matchbox model, it had a clear effect on the market. As the new architectural language took root, the state monopoly of matchmakers struggled to keep up with demand. We issued regular statements to the press that only served to add heat to the debate. And when I declared that I'd paint each pavilion a different color, the discussion lit up like a bonfire.

But still professional architects rejected my work out of hand. Such was their opposition that we had difficulty finding anyone willing to oversee construction or do so much as calculate the required amount of reinforced concrete.

As I mentioned earlier, I was very much indebted to Dr. Mussak, be it for his modeling techniques or the matter of my stairs. I'd now like to pay tribute once more to this dear friend of mine, a kindred spirit; indeed I never could understand why he'd not been born in our part of the world. Surely he would congratulate me when the building was finished. He would have been proud to see the way I avenged myself against those who refused to see daydreaming as a virtue. Indeed I felt I was atoning for him, with every round of applause I received. I was more than willing to share with him the bonuses I
received from the Timely Banks and the institute for my work on the new building.

So how strange it was, when it came time to begin work on our Clock Houses, and Halit Ayarcı suggested I should draw up the plans for our residential neighborhoods; despite my brilliant success with the institute building, he could not find a single friend, even among those who had formerly admired my work, who thought I was the man for the job. Even our closest friends, who for months had claimed the institute to be the pinnacle of innovation, who had seemed so very pleased with it, who had come, if not every day then at least once or twice a week, to watch the new building go up, these dear friends of mine who had dropped by on the way home to push and shove outside my office door, just to offer me their congratulations—they all protested. The most levelheaded of them cried:

“These are private homes that we'll leave to our children! There's no need for any originality! Just let them be well built, affordable, and safe!”

Some of them went even further, shouting:

“We're not about to experiment with our hard-earned wages. We want a home, not a clever work of art!”

Even Dr. Ramiz, who knew me so very well, was of the same opinion.

“Impossible, my dear friend, impossible!” he ejaculated. “Who knows, you might just place the stairs on the wrong side of the house! It's simply out of the question.”

As best I could, I explained to Dr. Ramiz that he himself had been more than a bit responsible for a floor inaccessible by stairs, and that my original inspiration for such a design had in fact been his description of the human mind. But my every attempt brought the answer:

“Don't confuse such things, my dear friend! A house is one thing—science and the subconscious quite another!”

Lazybones Asaf was the only one who kept his opinion to himself. With his fly swatter in hand—it was toward the end of summer and our friend had got in the habit of hunting flies—he sat through three meetings without understanding much at all, but during the fourth he came over to me and whispered:

“My dear friend Hayri, it's best you just drop it. There's a house I've inherited from my father, if you like I can have it fixed up and then give it to you! You can satisfy your curiosity there!”

My wife agreed. Though Pakize had posed for thirty-five photographs beside the matchbox model, she nearly lost her head when she heard that I might be designing our home. For the first time ever, my wife, my daughter, and my son-in-law were all of the same mind. My wife kept saying, “God forbid! Could anyone actually live in one of your houses?” while Zehra used all her womanly charms to convince me to give up the idea.

Truth be told, I really had no desire to design the Clock Houses. My interest—and frankly, my passion—was with the human soul. Were other people like me, or were they just a bit different? I was determined to find the answer. Surely they were like me, or even worse. Clearly they were self-centered. When public funds were involved, they were generous, enthusiastic, proud of my work, and enthralled by its innovation, but when it touched on their personal interests, they flipped sides. Indeed they even stopped listening to Halit Ayarcı.

“But please, you can only joke around with people up to a certain point.” That was the common refrain. All in all, people showed their true colors. In this aspect at least they all seemed the same. Halit Ayarcı was really quite distraught and didn't have the slightest idea what to do; every now and then he came to me and complained.

“How is this possible?” he cried. “Here we have people who work in the world's most modern institute, steeped in innovations, and in conditions they acknowledge to be the best and most advanced in the world—how could they not understand this? If they do not understand, then for goodness sake, what are they doing at the institute? Why did they applaud the new building? Why did they congratulate us? Nothing but lies!”

I tried to explain the situation to Halit Ayarcı.

“No, they weren't lying,” I said. “They were sincere on both occasions. They adore innovation providing it doesn't affect them personally. And they continue to adore it but with this
one condition. In their personal lives they prefer to be safe and secure.”

“How can that be? Can a human being think about something in two entirely different ways? Can two different sets of logic coexist in their heads?”