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  “That has nothing to do with my reluctance to bare my head,” Hande said angrily. “The true reason is that I can’t concentrate, I can’t imagine myself without a head scarf. Whenever I try to concentrate, either I turn into an evil stranger like the ‘agent of persuasion’ or I turn into a woman who can’t stop thinking about sex. If I could close my eyes just once and imagine myself going bareheaded through the doors into school, walking down the corridor, and going into class, I’d find the strength to go through with this, and then, God willing, I’d be free. I would have removed the head scarf of my own free will, and not because the police have forced me. But for now I just can’t concentrate, I just can’t bring myself to imagine that moment.”

  “Then stop making so much of that moment,” said Kadife. “Even if you collapse then and there, you’ll still be our beloved Hande.”

  “No, I won’t,” said Hande. “That’s what’s caused me the most anguish since I left you and decided to bare my head—knowing that you despise me.” She turned to Ka. “Sometimes I can conjure up a girl walking into school with her hair flying all around her, I can see her walking down the hall and entering my favorite classroom—oh, how I miss that classroom!—I can even imagine the smell of the hallway and the clamminess of the air. Then I look through the pane of glass that separates the classroom from the hallway and I see that this girl is not me but someone else, and I start to cry.”

  Everyone thought Hande was about to start crying again.

  “I’m not all that afraid of becoming someone else,” said Hande. “What scares me is the thought of never being able to return to the person I am now—and even forgetting who that person is. That’s what makes people commit suicide.” She turned to Ka. “Have you ever wanted to commit suicide?” Her tone was flirtatious.

  “No, but after hearing about the women of Kars, one can’t help asking oneself difficult questions.”

  “If a lot of girls in our situation are thinking about suicide, you could say it has to do with wanting to control our own bodies. That’s what suicide offers girls who’ve been duped into giving up their virginity, and it’s the same for virgins who are married off to men they don’t want. For girls like that, a suicide wish is a wish for innocence and purity. Have you written any poems about suicide?” She instinctively turned to Ïpek. “Have I gone too far now; am I really bothering your friend? All right, then. If he would just tell me where they’ve come from, these poems that have come to him in Kars, I promise to leave him alone.”

  “When I sense a poem coming to me, my heart is full of gratitude to the sender because I feel so very happy.”

  “Is that the same person who breathes the soul into your poetry? Who is that person?”

  “I can’t be sure, but I think it is God who is sending me the poems.”

  “Is it that you can’t be sure of God, or simply that you can’t be sure it’s God who is sending them?”

  “It’s God who sends me poems,” Ka said fervently.

  “He’s seen the rise of political Islam,” said Turgut Bey. “Maybe they’ve even threatened him, scared him into becoming a believer.”

  “No, it comes from inside,” said Ka. “I want to join in and be just like everyone else.”

  “I’m sorry. You’re afraid, and I am reprimanding you.”

  “Yes, of course I’m scared,” Ka said, raising his voice. “I’m very scared.”

  Ka suddenly jumped to his feet, as if someone were pointing a gun at him—or so it seemed to everyone else at the table. “Where is he?” cried Turgut Bey, as if he too sensed there was someone about to shoot them.

  “I’m not afraid,” said Hande. “I couldn’t care less what happens to me.”

  Like everyone else, she was looking at Ka and trying to figure out where the danger was. Years later, Serdar Bey told me that Ka’s face turned ashen at this point, but there was nothing in his expression to suggest fear or dizziness; what Serdar Bey recalled seeing in his face was sublime joy. The maid went further and told me that a light had entered the room and bathed all those present with divine radiance. In her eyes, he achieved sainthood. Apparently someone then said, “A poem has arrived,” an announcement that caused more fear and amazement than the imaginary gun.

  According to the more measured account in Ka’s notes, the tense, expectant air in the room brought back memories of the séances we had witnessed as children a quarter century ago in a house in one of the back streets of Nişantaş. These evenings had been organized by the fat mother of a friend; she’d been widowed at an early age; most of her guests were unhappy housewives, but there was also a pianist with paralyzed fingers, a neurotic middle-aged film star (but only because we kept asking for her), her forever-yawning sister, a retired pasha who was “wooing” the fading star, and also, when our friend could sneak us in, Ka and myself. During the uneasy waiting period, someone would say, “Oh, soul, if you’ve come back to us, speak!” and after a long silence there would be an almost imperceptible rattling, the scraping of a chair, a moan, and sometimes the sound of someone giving a swift kick to a leg of the table, whereupon someone would announce in a trembling voice, “The soul has arrived.” But as he headed for the kitchen, Ka was not at all like a man who’d made contact with the dead. His face was radiating joy.

  “He’s had a lot to drink,” said Turgut Bey, and then, to Ïpek, who was already running after Ka, “Yes, go and help him, daughter.”

  Ka hurled himself onto a chair next to the kitchen. He took out his notebook and his pen. “I can’t write with you all standing about watching me,” he said.

  “Let me take you to another room,” said Ïpek.

  Ka followed Ïpek through the kitchen, which was full of the sweet smell of the syrup Zahide was pouring over the bread pudding; they passed through a cold room into another room half in darkness.

  “Do you think you can write here?” Ïpek asked, as she turned on a lamp.

  Around him Ka saw a tidy room with two perfectly made beds. There was a low table and a nightstand on which the sisters had arranged various tubes of cream, lipsticks, small bottles of cologne, books, a zippered pouch, and a modest collection of other substances in bottles that had once held alcohol and cooking oil. An old Swiss chocolate box lay open on the table, filled with brushes, pens, charms against the evil eye, necklaces, and bracelets.

  Ka sat on the bed, beside the frozen windowpane. “I can write here,” he said. “But don’t leave me alone.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. Then he added, “I’m worried.”

  He set to work on the poem, which began with a description of another chocolate box, one his uncle had brought from Switzerland when Ka was a child. The box was decorated with the same Swiss landscapes he’d been seeing all day in the teahouses of Kars. According to notes Ka would make later on, when he went back to interpret, classify, and organize the poems from Kars, the first thing to emerge from Ïpek’s box was a toy clock; two days later he would discover that Ïpek had played with this clock as a child. And Ka would use this clock to travel back in time and say a few things about childhood and life itself.…

  “I don’t want you ever to leave me,” Ka told Ïpek. “I’ve fallen wildly in love with you.”

  “But you hardly know me,” said Ïpek.

  “There are two kinds of men,” said Ka, in a didactic voice. “The first kind does not fall in love until he’s seen how the girl eats a sandwich, how she combs her hair, what sort of nonsense she cares about, why she’s angry at her father, and what sorts of stories people tell about her. The second type of man—and I am in this category—can fall in love with a woman only if he knows next to nothing about her.”

  “In other words, you’ve fallen in love with me because you know nothing about me? Do you really think you can call this love?”

  “If you fall head over heels, that’s how it happens,” said Ka.

  “So once you know how I eat a sandwich and what I wear in my hair, you�
��ll fall right out of love.”

  “No, by then the intimacy that’s built up between us will deepen and turn into a desire that wraps itself around our bodies, and we’ll be bound together by our happy memories.”

  “Don’t get up; sit there on the bed,” said Ïpek. “I can’t kiss anyone when my father is under the same roof.” She did not reject his first kisses but then she pushed him away. “When my father is in the house, I don’t like this.”

  Ka tried to plant one more kiss on her lips before sitting back down on the edge of the bed. “We’re going to have to get married and run away from this place as soon as it’s humanly possible. Do you know how happy we could be in Frankfurt?”

  There was a silence. Then: “How can you fall in love with me without even knowing me?”

  “Because you’re so beautiful … because I’ve already seen in my dreams how happy we will be together … because I can tell you anything without the slightest bit of shame. In my dreams I can never stop imagining us making love.”

  “What did you do while you were in Frankfurt?”

  “I’d think a lot about the poems I wasn’t able to write … I masturbated.… Solitude is essentially a matter of pride; you bury yourself in your own scent. The issue is the same for all real poets. If you’ve been happy too long, you become banal. By the same token, if you’ve been unhappy for a long time, you lose your poetic powers.… Happiness and poetry can only coexist for the briefest time. Afterward either happiness coarsens the poet or the poem is so true it destroys his happiness. I’m terribly afraid of the unhappiness that could be waiting for me in Frankfurt.”

  “Then stay in Istanbul,” said Ïpek.

  Ka looked at her carefully. “Is Istanbul where you want to live?” he asked in a whisper. His greatest wish just then was for Ïpek to ask something from him.

  Ïpek sensed this too. “I don’t want anything,” she said.

  Ka knew he was pushing her. Something told him he wasn’t going to be in Kars for very long—that before long he would be unable to breathe here—so he had to push as if his life depended on it. For a few moments they listened to snatches of a distant conversation; then a horse and carriage passed under the window and they listened to the wheels rolling over the snow. Ïpek was standing in the doorway, slowly and meticulously removing the hair from the brush in her hand.

  “Life here is so poor and hopeless that people, even people like you, forget what it’s like to want something,” said Ka. “One cannot think of life here, only death.… Are you coming with me?” Ïpek didn’t answer. “If you’re going to give me a negative answer, don’t answer me at all,” Ka said.

  “I don’t know,” said Ïpek, her eyes on the brush. “They’re waiting for us in the other room.”

  “There’s some sort of intrigue going on in there, but I have no idea what it’s about,” said Ka. “Why don’t you explain it to me?”

  The lights went off. When Ïpek didn’t move, Ka wanted to embrace her, but he was so wrapped up in fearful thoughts about returning to Frankfurt alone that he didn’t move either.

  “You’re not going to be able to write a poem in this pitch darkness,” said Ïpek. “Let’s go.”

  “What is the thing you want most from me? What can I do to make you love me?”

  “Be yourself,” said Ïpek. She stood up and headed for the door.

  Ka had been so happy sitting on the edge of the bed that it took a great effort to stand up. He sat down again in the cold room next to the kitchen, and in the flickering candlelight he recorded the poem entitled “The Chocolate Box” in his green notebook.

  When he rose again, he found Ïpek just in front of him; he rushed forward to embrace her and bury himself in her hair, but his thoughts got in the way; it was almost as if they too were stumbling in the dark.

  There, glowing in the candlelight from the kitchen, were Ïpek and Kadife. With their arms around each other’s necks, they were embracing like lovers.

  “Father sent me to find you,” said Kadife.

  “That’s fine, dear.”

  “Wasn’t he able to write his poem?”

  “I did write it,” said Ka, coming out of the shadows. “But now I was hoping to help you.”

  He went into the kitchen; in the light of the candle, he saw no one. He quickly filled a glass with raki and drank it neat. When the tears began to stream down his face, he poured himself a glass of water.

  When he left the kitchen, he found himself plunged into a menacing darkness. Then he saw a distant candle on the dinner table and headed toward it. The people sitting there turned to look at Ka and the gigantic shadow he cast on the wall.

  “Were you able to write your poem?” asked Turgut Bey. He prefaced the question with a few moments of silence, as if to convey a slight air of mockery.

  “Yes.”

  “Congratulations.” He pressed a raki glass into Ka’s hand and began to fill it. “What’s it about?”

  “Everyone I’ve interviewed since coming here, everyone I’ve talked to. I agree with them all. The fear I used to feel in Frankfurt when I was walking in the street, that fear is now inside me.”

  “I understand you perfectly,” said Hande, with a very knowing air.

  Ka smiled gratefully. Don’t bare your head, my little beauty, he wanted to say.

  “If, when you say you believe everyone you’ve heard here,” said Turgut Bey, “you mean to tell me that you believed in God while you were in the company of Sheikh Efendi, then let me make one thing clear. Sheikh Efendi does not speak for the God we worship in Kars!”

  “So who does speak for God here?” Hande asked.

  Turgut Bey didn’t get angry at her. Stubborn and quarrelsome though he was, he was too softhearted to be an implacable atheist. Ka also sensed that much as Turget Bey worried about his daughters’ unhappiness, he worried even more that his habits and his world might disintegrate. This wasn’t a political anxiety but the anxiety of a man who more than anything feared losing his place at the table, whose only pleasure was spending his evenings with his daughters and his guests, arguing for hours about politics and the existence or nonexistence of God.

  The electricity came back on, and suddenly the room was bright. They were so accustomed by now to the random coming and going of the lights that no one bothered anymore with the rituals of power outage Ka remembered from his Istanbul childhood—no one cheered when the lights returned or asked whether the washing machine might be stuck in the middle of a cycle; there was none of the joy he had once felt in saying, “Let me be the one to blow out the candles”—instead, everyone simply acted as though nothing had happened. Turgut Bey turned the television back on and, having taken possession of the remote control, began to surf the channels. Ka whispered to the girls that Kars was an extraordinarily quiet city.

  “That’s because we’re afraid of our own voices,” said Hande.

  “That,” said Ïpek, “is the silence of snow.”

  Feeling defeated, they stared grimly at the ever-changing television screen. As he held hands with Ïpek under the table, it occurred to Ka that if he spent his days doing nothing much at all, and his evenings holding hands with Ïpek and watching satellite television, he would live in bliss until the end of his life.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  There’s One Thing We All Want out of Life

  AT THE NATIONAL THEATER

  Exactly seven minutes after deciding that he and Ïpek could live happily ever after in Kars, Ka was racing through the snow to the National Theater, his heart pounding as if he were heading alone into a war zone. Everything had changed during that seven-minute interval, with a speed possessed of its own logic.

  It had begun when Turgut Bey switched back to the broadcast of the performance at the National Theater, where it was clear from the roar of the audience that something extraordinary had just happened. Although this awakened in them a longing for excitement, a desire to step outside their little provincial routines if only for one night, it
also made them anxious that something might be very wrong. With the camera showing only part of the hall, they were all very curious to know what was going on. As they watched the restless audience clap and shout, they sensed a certain tension between the notables sitting in the front rows and the youths sitting at the back.

  Onstage was a goalkeeper who had once been a household name all over Turkey, talking about a tragic match fifteen years earlier in which the English had managed to score eleven goals. He had barely finished the sad tale of the first goal when the emcee appeared on-screen; realizing that they were pausing for a commercial break, just as they did on national television, the goalkeeper stopped speaking. The emcee grabbed the microphone and after rattling off two advertisements (the Tadal Grocery Store on Fevzi Paşa Avenue was proud to announce that the spiced beef from Kayseri had finally arrived, and the Knowledge Study Center had opened registration for their university preparation course), he reminded the audience of the delights still to come; when he announced Ka’s name again he looked mournfully into the camera.

  “Missing this chance to see our great poet, who traveled all the way from Frankfurt to visit our border city, is a great sadness.”

  “Well, that does it,” said Turgut Bey at once. “If you don’t go now, you’ll give terrible offense.”

  “But they never even asked me if I’d like to take part,” said Ka.

  “That’s the way things are done here,” said Turgut Bey. “If they’d invited you, you’d have declined. But now you will go, because you don’t want it to seem as if you look down on them.”

  “We’ll watch you from here,” said Hande, with an enthusiasm that no one could have predicted.

  At that moment, the door opened. It was the boy who was the night receptionist. “The director of the Institute of Education has just died in hospital.”

  “Poor fool,” said Turgut Bey. Then he fixed his eyes on Ka. “The Islamists have embarked on a cleanup operation. They’re taking care of us one by one. If you want to save your skin, I would advise you to increase your faith in God at the earliest opportunity. It won’t be long, I fear, before a moderate belief in God will be insufficient to save the skin of an old atheist.”