The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar Page A

and repudiate the riches offered by chance, so he might attain the otherworldly pleasures and power of eternal life. He was an idealist with a lofty soul. To have “everything” in life, he chose to live in the barren desert of “nothing.”
    When I explained these various eccentricities to Dr. Ramiz, he homed in on this one aspect of Lutfullah’s personality, and on countless subsequent occasions he told me this problem of justice and injustice could very well be the key, or at least one of the keys, to unlocking the Seyit Lutfullah affair. My dear friend, so zealously devoted to avant-garde scientific methods, once went so far as to ask me if Seyit Lutfullah had read Marx. Quite often he’d flare up and say, “I am most certain the man has read either Engels or Marx. What a pity you have never inquired.”
    â€œHow could such a lowly creature have read the work of such lofty intellects? The miserable soul doesn’t even speak proper Turkish!” I’d reply.
    And he’d challenge me.
    â€œYour kind is always the same. You lose sight of mankind’s superior virtues, just as you are lost to the feelings of inferiority that constrict your soul. My dear friend, relinquish these airs. I am now thoroughly convinced the man knows German and has read the full body of socialist literature. Otherwise he never would have bent himself so forcefully to this question of justice and injustice—the question of our age—nor would he have made such sacrifices in its name.” And he’d silence me, vowing that the man must be one of the founders of socialism.
    Conversations with Dr. Ramiz were always like this. He would pounce on a single minor point and within seconds be on the verge of an avalanche. Due to my modest understanding of matters intellectual, I never found the nerve to criticize the great scholar to his face. But why lie, considering all I knew about my friend’s life? I had never encountered in his ideas anything that might have inspired people to such a cause.
    The passions of Aristidi Efendi, Nasit Bey, and Abdüsselam Bey were more finite. After Aristidi Efendi learned from an elderly brother-in-law, a priest on the island of Heybeliada,that the emperor Andronikos was in all probability the emperor Hadrian, he came to perceive the quest as a purely scientific enterprise. He had no faith in Seyit Lutfullah’s deliberations or in the orders he received from the world beyond, instructing him to wait. Work should begin at once, with shovels and a pickax. But in the world of spirits, the rules were precise and the time preordained.
    The great event of 1909 was Aristidi Efendi’s decision to begin, alone, in the dead of night, his search for the treasure of the emperor Andronikos. But after several hours of digging, he found it necessary to reassign the treasure’s true location, and so the secret search continued. What he found at the bottom of a shallow pit were not amphorae brimming with gold and jewels, or precious cloth and palatial treasures, or gilded manuscripts and miniature statues of saints made of ivory and gold; he found only a few bones and a jar that held a single coin dating back to the reign of Sultan Mahmud I, and it was at this point that Aristidi Efendi began to ask questions about the treasure’s actual location. When Seyit Lutfullah told the chemist the following day that it had never been a question of
actually
finding the treasure, and that it would now take months just to reassign it to its
original
location, Aristidi Efendi nearly died of sadness and remorse. As with the story of Abdüsselam Bey’s watch, this bungled operation drained Aristidi Efendi of any energy he might have mustered to oppose Seyit Lutfullah.
    From then on, one could see the flicker of superstitious fear in the indulgent European smile Aristidi Efendi had once flashed in the face of Lutfullah’s ignorance; in the company of our friend he