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  Another impression, and it may be false too: that life here is so much humbler. And the people too: The people I met in the coffeehouses and while walking the streets were in my view much simpler and plainer than the characters in my novel, who come from the outside. Perhaps it is everyday life—the ordinariness of everyday life—that gave me this impression. Perhaps if at a particular moment someone commits suicide, or commits murder in the coffeehouse where I am sitting half asleep, life will continue to seem ordinary.

  During the second half of the 1970s, Kars went through a period of extreme violence. Oppressive measures instigated by the state and its intelligence services changed the course of the city’s history. In the mid-nineties, Kurdish guerrillas came down from the mountains. Despite all this (perhaps because of all this), it seems almost to be bad manners to mention political violence or political disasters, an almost shaming sense of having exaggerated—as if I’ve told a lie, yes, an actual lie.

  A painter who has spent his entire life trying to paint a tree will—when finally able to paint that tree in an interesting and enchanting way, when he has brought that tree to life in the language of art and has returned to the painting in creative euphoria to look once more at the tree that inspired it—that painter will feel a certain defeat, a certain betrayal … this is what I felt while walking the streets of Kars today. I’ll continue walking, feeling that deep sense of loneliness, of remoteness, that the streets still give me.

  MONDAY, FEBRUARY 25

  I’m back in the Unity Teahouse, where I have been writing since early in the morning. An old man is trying to draw me into conversation; I say old but he may not be much older than I am. Powerfully built, curly hair, wearing a cap and a gray jacket, healthy-seeming with a cigarette hanging from his mouth.

  “So you’re back again, are you?” he says.

  I stand up and shake his hand. “Yes, I’m back,” I say with a smile.

  He takes a coat off the hook on the wall, and I return to my writing, to this notebook. As he is leaving the Unity Teahouse, his coat in hand, he says, loud enough for me to hear, “Go ahead, then, write how much they paid the officials! Write how much they charge for coal in Kars!”

  As he says this, the busboy is opening the lid of the stove to shift the coal with a pair of tongs. Whenever I visit the teahouses of Kars and turn on my tape recorder, and the people around me begin to register their complaints, the price of coal is always high on the list. This tells you how people see me when I am wandering around the teahouses, notebook in hand. Few people know I am a novelist, and those who do know are not aware that I am writing a novel set in Kars. When I say I am a journalist, they immediately ask, “From what newspaper? I saw you once on television. Write, journalist, write!”

  Without worrying about my being close enough to hear them, one will say, “Of course he’s writing; he’s a journalist,” and the other will ask, “What is he writing?” In the mornings, the Unity Teahouse is almost empty. Across the room is a table where they started playing cards at around eight. And over there is a man not yet forty who is telling his own fortune. Two retired men sit across from each other at another table, watching this man as they converse. At one point, the man doing his fortune takes his eye off the cards and says some harsh things about Prime Minister Ecevit. His words have to do with the ridiculous fracas between him and the president, and Ecevit going on television to blame the president, and the ensuing stock market crash and the value of the Turkish currency plummeting. At that moment someone from a neighboring table offers a comment. The twelve men in the coffeehouse (I have counted them with my own eyes) gather around the stove, about three paces away from where I am sitting. Tired, lifeless joking and needling. The expression “early in the morning” comes up quite a lot. “Don’t do something like that, don’t say something like that, so early in the morning!” The stove heats up, casting its sweet warmth on my face…. Now silence has fallen over the Unity Teahouse.

  The door opens, and a man comes in, and then another. “Good morning, friends!” “Good morning, friends, may things go well for you!”—because a game has begun at another table. It’s now half past eight. There is a whole winter day to fill. The börek seller comes inside: “Börek börek börek!” Why do I love sitting in the teahouses of Kars, and most especially in the Unity Teahouse? (The börek seller has come in again with that tray of pastries he balances on his head.) I think it must be because I write so well here “early in the morning.” In the morning, when I walk through the cold, wide, windy, and deserted streets of Kars, I feel as if I am able to write anything, that I will be able to write without ever having to stop, that everything I see will excite me, and that I will be able to express everything that excites me with the tip of my pen. A calendar on the wall. A portrait of Atatürk. A television—a moment ago, they cut off the sound (with God’s will, the prime minister and the president will be able to come to some agreement at the meeting that was broken off halfway through). Hopelessly rickety chairs, the stovepipe, the playing cards, the dirty walls, the soiled carpets.

  Later Manuel arrives with his camera and we walk the streets of Yusufpağa, Kars’s most beautiful neighborhood. The Ismet Pasha Primary School is housed in a beautiful old Russian building. Through an open window on the top floor comes the angry hectoring voice of a teacher scolding her pupils with all her might. “If we could get inside, I could take pictures.” What if they throw us out? “Maybe they’ll recognize you!” says Manuel.

  They do. They offer us tea and cologne in the teachers’ room. I shake quite a few teachers’ hands. Walking down the high-ceilinged corridors past the closed classroom doors, we can sense the crowds inside. Looking at the gigantic poster of Atatürk that the art teacher has made, we think what it means to be a pupil in this school.

  We visit the city’s first “restored mansion,” which is just next door. An Ankara builder bought this beautiful building and poured a lot of money into it, furnishing it in the style so loved by interior design magazines. It’s strange to see such well-ordered affluence amid the poverty of the city: While you appreciate its beauty, you feel it’s almost rude to say so.

  We walk through the streets again, for a very long time, along the frozen Kars River and over those iron bridges. This is one of my favorite places in Kars. But still, whenever I walk here in the middle of the day, I am somehow overtaken by feelings of sadness and defeat. I’ve now written most of my novel; it’s almost complete and now as compelling to me as the city itself; all I want to do now is work on my novel. The city has begun to look as if it holds no more secrets. We visit the building that once served as the Russian consulate. In the old days, it was the home of a rich Armenian. When the Russian armies conquered the city, they kicked out the Armenian and turned it into a military headquarters. Then the city passed into the hands of the Turks. In the early years of the Republic, the house passed into the hands of a rich Azeri who did business with the Russians. After that it was rented to the Soviets for their consulate. Then it passed to the family who lives there today. The well-meaning man who shows us around tells me that they’re not renting the mansion, they own it.

  In the novel I made this into a much bigger house and rented it not to the present owner but to the religious high school. The real religious high school is quite a long distance from here, down the hill. Why did I make this small adjustment? I don’t know, I just wanted to. Because this made the story more believable, more real. Anyway, the location of the religious high school is not particularly significant in the novel. At the same time, it is small changes like these that take the novel out of the realm of “reality” and made it possible for me to write.

  For me to believe in my own story, I was well aware that I would need, from time to time, to narrate not the real Kars but the Kars of my imagination—it is the story in my mind that I must tell—and it is when I narrate the legend inside me (laden though it is with political violence) that everything becomes beautiful to me. On the other hand, these
alterations awaken lies and obsessions, faint pangs of conscience, and feelings of guilt whose hidden symmetry I have no desire to explore. Another cause for anxiety is knowing that my novel will upset my friends in Kars—for example, Sezai Bey or the courteous mayor—who both expect good things of me. I live with this constant contradiction. Whenever I turn on my tape recorder, whenever I try to find out what I should write about Kars, everyone complains vociferously about the poverty, the state’s neglect and oppression, the injustices, the cruelties. As I thank them, they all say, “Write about it all!” then, “But say good things about Kars.” The things they have told me are not “good things” at all.

  In Kars, there is no “political Islamist movement” as powerful as the one in the book. On the other hand, only yesterday the mayor was telling us that the Azeris were slowly falling under the influence of political Islam, that those going to Qum in Iran for their education felt more tied to their Shiite identity, that the Hasan-Huseyin-Kerbala rituals were being performed here now, where before this had never happened.

  TUESDAY MORNING, FEBRUARY 26

  I woke up at half past five this morning. It was daylight but there was no one in the streets. So I sat down at the little table with the mirror in my hotel room and began to write. I felt only joy to be in Kars so early in the morning, to have awoken here, to know I would again walk its deserted streets, again go into its teahouses to jot a few things down in my notebooks. As always when the time of my return to Istanbul approaches, I long to record the whole of Kars—its mournful streets, its dogs, its teahouses, its barbershops—to fix it on film and to hide it away.

  THE LAST MORNING IN KARS

  My last hours in Kars. Perhaps I’ll never come back. I walked for some time through the ice-cold streets. A deep melancholy overtakes me each time I’ve known I am soon to leave Kars. The simplicity of life, the gentle companionship, the intimacy, the fragility of life, its continuity, and the sense of being in a place where time moves so slowly: These are the things that bind me to Kars.

  This morning, the same börek seller as before, with the same tray balanced on his head. When I am thinking all this, the friends sharing my table at the Unity Teahouse talk of unemployment, of being stranded in teahouses with nothing to do. “Have you written that down?” they ask. “Write it down. The president of the Republic supports us citizens. The president is a good man. The others keep thieving and building up their fortunes. Write that down. Deputies take a salary of two billion, and then they rob us of the right to earn a hundred million. Write that down, and write down my name too. Write, write.”

  The men sitting in the Unity Teahouse, despite their poverty, are not the worst off in Kars. For instance the man with whom I was speaking just now is a gentleman who once had a job, and others owned businesses that have since failed, or they were hospital directors, managers who’ve now retired, men who owned trucks; but now they are left with nothing to do, like the bankrupt tailor we interviewed on our last visit (he had a little garment factory with twelve machines). They were all once rich and successful. This is what distinguishes the Unity Teahouse from the teahouses of the most desperate among the city’s unemployed—those who live out their unlettered lives in the city’s shantytowns. What we see here is a continuation of the old Unity Club.

  “Not a single person is happy here. And everything is forbidden,” someone says. Everyone complains in Kars; no one is happy; they all seem on the verge of bursting from unhappiness. If there is a silence, a dullness, a strange sense of calm, it is because the streets are full of people who have made peace with misery and helplessness; the state has banned all other possibilities, and done so with some violence. Happiness is another matter. But this is what I felt when I was writing the novel. What I feel rising up inside me is not guilt at not sharing in these people’s fate but a feeling of helplessness. I am pessimistic: There seem to be no prospects for significant change here in the near future. But let me write my novel as I believe it to be, and from the heart. The best thing I can do for the people of Kars is to write from the heart, to write a good novel.

  PICTURES AND TEXTS

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  Şirinn’s Surprise

  I am a novelist. However much I have learned from theory, having at times even been beguiled by it, I have quite often felt the need to steer clear of it. I now hope to entertain you with a few stories and, through them, to suggest a few ideas of my own.

  If there is a garden in your dreams—a garden you have never seen in life, perhaps because it is on the other side of a high wall—the best way to imagine that unseen garden is to tell stories that evoke your hopes and fears.

  A good theory, even one that has affected us deeply and convinced us, will remain someone else’s theory and not our own. But a good story that has affected us deeply, and convinced us, becomes our own. Old stories, very old stories, are like this. No one can remember who told them first. We erase all memory of the way in which they were first expressed. With each new telling, we hear the story as if for the first time. I shall now tell you two such stories.

  The first is one I tried to retell in my fashion in The Black Book. I would like to apologize to those of you who have already read it—though stories like this take on new meanings with each telling: Gazzali told the following story in Ihya-ul Ulum; Enveri compressed it into four verses; Nizami used it in the Iskendername, Ibni Arabi told it, and so too did Rumi in Mesnevi.

  One day a ruler—a sultan, a khan, a shah—announced a painting competition, whereupon the Chinese artists and the artists from countries to the west began to challenge one another: We paint better than you do; No, we do…. After pondering the matter, the sultan—let’s say he’s a sultan—decided to put both sides to the test. He offered them two facing walls in two adjoining rooms, for this would allow him to compare their work. Between the two facing walls was a curtain; once this was closed and the artist camps could no longer see each other, they both went to work. The western artists took out their colors and their brushes and began to draw and paint. The Chinese, meanwhile, decided that they first needed to scrub away the dust and the rust, so they set about cleaning and shining the wall to which they had been assigned. The work continued for months. In one room there was now a wall filled with brilliantly colored paintings. In the other was a wall that had been so well polished that it had turned into a mirror. When the time was up, the curtain between the two rooms was opened. The sultan looked first at the work of the western artists. It was a beautiful painting, and the sultan was very impressed. When he looked at the wall on which the Chinese artists had been working, he saw the reflection of the wondrous paintings on the wall opposite. The sultan gave the prize to the Chinese artists, who had turned their wall into a mirror.

  The second story is as old as the first. It too has many variations. It appears in the Thousand and One Nights, in the parrots’ tales of Tutiname, and in Nizami’s Hüsrev and şirin, itself taken into various other books. I shall try to summarize the Nizami version.

  şirin is an Armenian princess and a great beauty. Hüsrev is a prince, the son of the Persian shah. Şapur wants to make his master Hüsrev fall in love with şirin, and şirin with Hüsrev. With this in mind he travels to şirin’s country. One day, when şirin has gone to the forest with her courtiers to eat and drink, he hides among the trees. There and then, he draws a picture of his fine handsome master, hangs it on a tree, and makes himself scarce. As şirin frolics in the forest with her courtiers, she sees the picture of Hüsrev hanging from the branch and falls in love with this person in the picture. şirin does not believe in her love; she wants to forget the picture and her response to it. Then, during another excursion to another forest, the same thing happens. şirin is again affected by the picture; she is in love but helpless. During a third excursion, when şirin again sees Hüsrev’s picture hanging from a branch, she knows she is helplessly in love with him. She accepts her love and begins to search for the person whose likeness, whose image, s
he has seen.

  In the same way, Şapur makes his master fall in love with şirin, but in this case he does not use pictures but words. After falling equally in love, one through pictures and the other through words, these two young people begin to search each other out. Each sets out for the other’s country. Their paths cross on the banks of a spring, but they fail to recognize each other. şirin, tired from her travels, undresses and steps into the water. The moment he sets eyes on her, Hüsrev is besotted. Is this the beauty he has come to know through words and stories? At a moment when he is not watching her, şirin also sees Hüsrev. She too is deeply affected. But Hüsrev is not wearing the red robes that might have helped her recognize him. She is sure of her feelings but surprised and confused enough to entertain these thoughts: It was a picture hanging from the tree, but the man before me is alive. What I saw hanging from the branch was a likeness, but this is a real man.

  In Nizami’s version, the story of Hüsrev and şirin carries on with the utmost elegance. What I can identify with most easily here is şirin’s surprise, the way she wavers between image and reality. I see her innocence—her susceptibility to a painting, the way she lets an image give rise to desire—as something we can still understand today. And perhaps I can see it, too, in Nizami’s affection for the tradition that makes things happen in threes. But the uncertainty şirin feels when she first sets eyes on the handsome Hüsrev is also our uncertainty: Which is the “true” Hüsrev? Like şirin, we ask ourselves, Is it in reality that the truth lies, or in the image? Which one affects us more deeply, handsome Hüsrev’s picture or the man himself?