The Time Regulation Institute (6 page)

The worst of it was that he was entirely devoted to my mother—he married the wretched lodger only because he thought she was rich. But the poor creature was penniless. Her wealth amounted to no more than the silver pieces stashed in the oversized coin purse she kept buried in her bosom, of which we caught a glimpse only when she had to pay rent or a long-overdue court fee. All the same, my father never managed to divorce the woman and remained a bigamist for the rest of his life.

My aim here is not to speak ill of the dead. From the beginning of time, our family has been afflicted by a fixation with marriage, and I too have suffered my share of this misfortune.

So, yes, like anyone else, my father had his shortcomings, and our neighbors were right to take advantage of them. But to accuse him of stealing—and from a mosque!—the property of a pious institution that had been ravaged by fire! No, sir, this is not the sort of thing my father would ever do.

In any case, the story of this grandfather clock is really quite unique. My father's grandfather, Ahmet Efendi the Signer, was a civil servant at the Sublime Porte; having suffered the shame and frustration of slander during the
Egyptian Affair—indeed there was even a period when his life was in danger—vowed that if he ever disentangled himself from the debacle, he would fund the construction of a mosque. The affair was finally settled, and after taking a moment to catch his breath, he took to the task; but fearing he might not have sufficient funds to
complete the project, he did not proceed with construction beyond buying the plot. In any event, it was only after this mosque of his dreams was granted the status of a charitable foundation that he purchased, in addition to several other buildings, the large villa in Edirnekapı whose stable and servant quarters housed our entire family for many years.

He went on to use any remaining funds to procure furnishings that were eventually to be destined for the mosque: large wool carpets and kilims, a grandfather clock to stand by the door, and lamps and calligraphic panels to be hung on the walls. However, after taking care of these finer details, and before he could begin construction, he lost his job once again, and as such troubles were to plague him for the rest of his life, he was forced to pass on the fulfillment of his good deed to the next generation, although it shouldn't be forgotten that the foundations for the mosque already had been prepared.

If anyone asked when he thought his charitable endeavor would be complete, he would always reply, “God willing, it will come to pass sometime in the next year!” And so toward the end of his life, he, his wife, and close friends knew him as Ahmet Efendi the Some Timer, not the Signer.

After Ahmet Efendi's death it came out that his son Numan Bey, my grandfather, had been mentioned in his will in connection with the mosque: “My responsibility remains, as I was unable to realize my goal. God never granted me the chance. So it now rests in your hands. Finish the job as quickly as you can!” The imperative was Numan Bey's ruination, for he inherited hardly a kurus apart from the house, which he was all but forced to sell, along with just about everything else, in order to meet his father's obligation; but still he was never able to begin construction, and so it was that our family lived in that little house, surrounded by furnishings destined for a mosque.

As it was with my grandfather, so it was with my father: the inheritance virtually destroyed his life. Though he'd once enjoyed a respectable position as a civil servant at a pious foundation, he was, after a series of bungled affairs, demoted to the modest post of caretaker of a small mosque.

My father saw the clock as a kind of creditor and held it re
sponsible for his misfortune; it irked him terribly to have to walk past it every day. And he suffered the neighborhood gossip in silence, not wishing to dredge up the story of the abandoned project, a story he himself would never tell. In time that clock would become his single most secret obsession—and his downfall.

It might have been the gossip that turned me against the clock, or it might have been the gloom it cast over the room. But still it was a beautiful piece. With a rhythm all its own, it was like a packhorse that had strayed from its caravan. Following whose calendar? In which year? What was it waiting for when it stopped running for days before suddenly heralding some mysterious event with a resounding clang that filled the space around it? We hadn't the slightest idea. The free-spirited clock never submitted to adjustments or repairs. It followed a time all its own, far removed from human affairs. On occasion it would release an unexpected sequence of deep chimes, after which its pendulum would swing silently for months on end. My mother looked kindly on the clock's elderly disposition. To her mind it was either a prophet or a being blessed with mystical powers. A fearful reverence for the clock was ingrained in us all on the death of Ibrahim Bey, for it sounded its deepest chimes that evening, perhaps at the precise time he passed away. The clock had been in disrepair for weeks. From that day on, my mother referred to it as the Blessed One. Despite all his religious fervor, my father maintained a more humanist outlook on life and called the clock the Calamity. Saint or calamity, the clock still embodies the spirit of my childhood.

In addition to the grandfather clock, a small clock sat on a table in my parents' bedroom. Unlike the aforementioned timepiece, this one was neither religious nor destined for the world beyond. On the contrary, it was a secular clock with a unique spring mechanism that when properly set played a popular Turkish song at the start of every hour. When radios became popular, song-playing alarm clocks disappeared. Truth be told, I much prefer the singing alarm clock to the radio—though it might not seem entirely fair to harbor such an opinion, considering how my oldest sister-in-law, buoyed by our esteemed institute, has become a renowned chanteuse of popular songs, in a voice reminiscent of a door's ungodly squeak, utterly failing to
identify more than three basic Turkish
makamsher
. Her rise to stardom was essentially made possible by the support of Halit Ayarcı. But, then, what can I say? The radio was a needless invention. If nothing else, an alarm clock doesn't warble without respite throughout the day, or bounce about to dance numbers as if possessed by an evil djinn, nor does it vex its listeners with warnings of a dangerous storm, and of course just when your radio goes quiet your neighbor's cranks into action. In my opinion, as much as I am capable of judging the matter, of course—for, dear reader, as you listen to these ideas you mustn't forget that they come from an old man who had a patchy education at best and has spent the better part of his life on wooden benches in coffeehouses!—the radio does little more than feed people useless ideas. Sometimes I consider just what strange creatures we are: we bemoan the brevity of our lives but do everything in our power to squander this thing we call “the day” as quickly and mindlessly as we can. Even at this age, I sit beside a radio for hours when I should be working, listening endlessly to commentaries on boxing and football matches I've only ever seen in the newsreels they show before films.

The third timepiece in our household was my father's pocket watch, a strange contraption equipped with a compass, a hand that showed the direction of Mecca, and a calendar of universal time that told both existent and nonexistent
alaturca
and
alafranga
time. It had but one flaw: that even a master watchmaker found it impossible to familiarize himself with its many functions. Even Nuri Efendi wasn't convinced he could bring all its features to optimum working order. Once the thing broke, it was no small task to repair it. Half of the watch remained out of order, like a house whose middle floor was lived in but whose ground and upper floors were vacant and silent. But the watch did strengthen my father's friendship with Nuri Efendi.

My master Nuri Efendi, a true practitioner of the art, became so exasperated with having to repair the watch over and over again that he finally went so far as to forbid my father to wind it himself.

So as you can see, my uncle's gift to me of a watch was not wholly surprising. The place it would fill in my life had long
since been primed. Could a boy that age receive a watch and not wonder what made it tick—especially a boy who spent his entire childhood in a house with a grandfather clock that to all intents and purposes had cast a spell over its surroundings? Up until that point, I had seen only the exteriors of timepieces, fearing I would be scolded if I looked inside. I would only observe them, taking pleasure in their presence. But my uncle's gift sparked my desire to know timepieces more intimately, to plumb their depths. The first day I held it in my hand, my intellectual plane was elevated tenfold. And from that moment, I was plagued by questions: Whither? Whence? And how?

Need I say that only a few weeks after I received my uncle's gift, it had become nothing but a mass of twisted and jagged bits of shiny and rusty metal, and no longer served any purpose at all? The experience revealed two things to me: my overwhelming desire to take apart and understand every watch and clock I came across, and my total indifference to the rest of the world.

I had to repeat a year at school because of that watch, and the same happened the following year, when I found another very old watch on the way to school. By the end of my third year, I was able to begin my second year of college, both because the administration took pity on my father and because the entire school and neighborhood supported my cause. But I had lost all desire to study. And so I began to spend most of my time at Nuri Efendi's time-setting workshop. Strange how my truancy had a positive effect on my school life: As my teachers saw less of me, they saw fewer of my flaws. So I never again had to repeat a year at college. I became one of those dim students left to God. For the rest of my life, I was greeted with short, dismissive nods and pitying smiles or the sniggers and grins of the less polite.

V

In Nuri Efendi's workshop, where I passed my days, there was no room for nods, insinuating smiles, or laughter. There were only watches and clocks: elaborate table clocks ticked on every
windowsill; grandfather clocks lined up against the walls like the very guardians of time; a suspended clock dangled over the master's divan, just to its right; and in every corner of the room—scattered along the windowsills, strewn over the divans, and on every little shelf—piles upon piles of watches and clocks waited to be repaired, some half-finished, some still in pieces, others entirely bare, and some with only their cases removed. Nuri Efendi busied himself with these throughout the day, and when his eyes grew tired, he would lean back on his divan and cry, “A coffee!” Resting for a spell in the little stone room, listening to the din of ticking clocks, he would dream of all the clocks in the world he had not yet seen and might never see—the clocks whose hands he would never touch and whose voices he would never hear.

When I first became acquainted with Nuri Efendi, he was already in his late fifties, of average height, thin, shriveled, but robust. He told me he'd never once fallen ill, never once suffered so much as a toothache, and that he attributed this to his Thracian roots. “My father was a wrestler, and I too did my share of wrestling when I was young,” he explained as he flexed his powerful biceps, a true sight to behold in a man so frail. When he was angry, or simply in a sour mood, he would throw his arms around one of the gigantic stones in the courtyard of the mosque—left over from an old restoration project—and heave it around the grounds.

With large chestnut-colored eyes, an elongated square face, and a straggly white beard, he had an unearthly look. His was the gentle gaze of a man who could do nothing but good. There was something to him of the old man in a fairy tale who appears out of nowhere to give you three hairs from his beard, so that later, when you find yourself in a tight spot, you can burn them and he will swoop in to rescue you. Though he'd been in the same workshop for thirty-five years, no one had ever seen him lose his temper or so much as raise his voice.

Nuri Efendi had a charming way of speaking: he would choose his words carefully, intoning each and every syllable. And the topic he especially enjoyed was horology. Some friends and acquaintances took him for a great scholar, while others
thought him a kind of quasi saint. In reality he had had little education, managing only a few years of religious study at a mosque, but he never tried to hide this from anyone and would often proclaim, “Watches and clocks made me the man I am!”

I suppose he was the best clock repairman in the neighborhood. But he was no mere artisan: he had the joy of a man who was passionate about his work. He never haggled with those who brought him a watch or clock to repair, accepting whatever he was offered.

Upon receiving a timepiece from a customer, he'd say, “Now, don't come back to pick this up until I send word that it's ready!” Or sometimes he'd cry out to a customer already halfway out of the workshop, “Now, don't you rush me! For I won't be rushed!” After opening up the watch or clock entrusted to him, he would place it in a glass jar and simply observe it, sometimes for weeks, without laying a hand on it, and if it began to tick, he would lean over the jar and listen. These deliberations gave me the impression that Nuri Efendi was more clock doctor than repairman.

Nuri Efendi equated people with clocks. He'd often say, “The Great Almighty made man in his image, and men made watches in theirs.” Sometimes he'd expound on this idea, adding, “Man must never forsake his clocks, for consider his ruination if forsaken by God!” And there were those times when his musings on watches and clocks became far more profound: “The clock itself creates space, and man regulates the clock's tempo and time, which means time coexists with space within man.”

He came up with countless other adages that proposed similar comparisons: “Metals are not forged on their own. The same follows for man. Righteousness and goodness come to us through the grace of God. Such values are manifest in a watch or clock.” For Nuri Efendi, love of timepieces was rooted in morals: “Accustom yourself to observing a broken watch as if tending to the sick or needy.” And he practiced what he preached. Here I should mention that the watches and clocks that most fascinated him were the trammeled and broken ones destined for the dump; indeed they were the very ones that were already there! And whenever he came upon a watch in
such a sorry state, his face would soften and, trembling with compassion, he would say, “His heart no longer beats—his cranium has been crushed,” or ask, “How will you ever turn again, my poor soul, when you are deprived of both your hands?”