Snow Read online

  At half past eleven, exactly forty-two days before my visit, Ka had returned from Hamburg, where he had taken part in a poetry evening. The journey had taken six hours, but when he got into the station he did not take the south exit straight back to his apartment in Goethestrasse; instead, he took the north exit onto the Kaiserstrasse and spent the next twenty-five minutes wandering among tourists, drunks, solitary men, and the prostitutes who were waiting for customers. He’d been walking around for half an hour when he turned right at the World Sex Center; he was shot crossing Münchnerstrasse. He was probably on his way to the Big Antalya Greengrocer to buy some tangerines to take home. This was the only fruit and vegetable shop in the area still open at this hour, and the shop clerk recalled that Ka had often stopped in to buy oranges. Faced with his claim of total ignorance about Ka’s murder, the police were suspicious enough to take the clerk in for questioning, but they released him the next day, having discovered nothing.

  The police had been unable to find anyone who’d seen Ka’s assailant. The waiter from the Holiday Kebab House had heard gunshots, but with the television and the customers making so much noise he couldn’t even say how many he’d heard. And it was impossible to see through the fogged-up windows of the beer parlor that sat right atop the mosque. A prostitute on the next street down who’d been smoking a cigarette between tricks reported having seen a short dark “Turkish-looking” man in a black coat running in the direction of the Kaiserstrasse around midnight, but she was unable to provide the police with a good description. A German who happened to be standing on the balcony of his apartment when Ka fell to the ground had called the ambulance, but he’d not seen anyone either. The first bullet had gone in through the back of Ka’s head and out his left eye. The other two bullets had shattered major blood vessels around his heart and his liver, piercing both the front and the back of his charcoal-colored coat, which was drenched in blood.

  “He was shot from the back, so it was probably premeditated,” the garrulous old detective in charge had concluded. The murderer may even have followed Ka all the way from Hamburg. The police considered a variety of motives, everything from sexual jealousy to the sort of political vendetta carried out so frequently in the Turkish community. Ka had had no connection to the world below the neighborhoods around the station. When the police showed his photo to people who worked in the immediate vicinity, some remembered seeing him in the sex shops from time to time and others recalled that he had used the small cubicles in the back for viewing porno films. But there were no eyewitnesses, true or false, and there was no pressure from on high to find the killer. Neither was there an outcry in the press, so eventually the police had suspended their inquiries.

  When he interviewed Ka’s acquaintances, the garrulous detective sometimes seemed to have lost sight of the point of the investigation and wound up doing most of the talking. It was from this fatherly Turkophile that Tarkut Ölçün had first heard about the two women who had entered Ka’s life eight years before his visit to Kars. One was German and the other Turkish; I carefully recorded their names in my notebook. In the four years since his return from Kars, Ka had had no relations with any women at all.

  Tarkut and I went back out into the snow; as we returned to Ka’s house, neither of us spoke. This time we were able to see the large and affable, if also discontented, landlord. He let us into the building, which was cool and smelled of soot, and took us up to the penthouse apartment, which, he told us in a querulous voice, he was about to rent out again; any of this filth we didn’t clear out, he was going to throw away, and having said that, he left. Tears came to my eyes the moment I stepped into the small, dark, low-ceilinged rooms in which Ka had spent his last eight years. The distinct smell took me back to our childhood; it was the smell I associated with his school satchel and his room at home and the pullovers his mother had knitted. I thought it must be a Turkish brand of soap I’d never known by name and never thought to ask about.

  During Ka’s early years in Germany he had worked as a porter, a mover, and a house painter, and he’d also given English lessons to Turks; once he was officially declared a political exile and granted asylum benefits, he cut his links with the Turkish Communists who ran the neighborhood centers and who had, until then, made sure he was gainfully employed. His fellow exiles had found Ka too remote and too bourgeois. During his last twelve years, Ka supplemented his income by doing poetry readings in town libraries, cultural foundations, and Turkish associations. Only Turks attended, and the audiences rarely exceeded twenty; even so, if he could do three of them in a month, it was an extra five hundred marks, which, combined with his asylum benefit, would have allowed him to live comfortably. But it was clear now that such months had been few and far between. The chairs in his apartment were broken, the ashtrays chipped, and the electric stove covered with rust. Still affronted by the threat the landlord made when he let us in, I wanted to stuff Ka’s belongings into an old suitcase and a couple of plastic bags and leave. I wanted to take everything: the pillow on the bed that still smelled of his hair, the belt and the tie I remembered him wearing in high school, the Bally shoes that (according to his letters) he had continued using as house slippers once his toes had poked through the leather, the dirty glass in which he kept his toothpaste and brush, his library of some three hundred and fifty books, the TV set, the video machine he’d never mentioned to me, his threadbare jacket and worn-out shirts, and the pajamas he’d brought with him from Turkey sixteen years earlier. But when I looked at the worktable and failed to find the thing I coveted most, the thing I now realized I had flown to Frankfurt to retrieve, I lost my courage.

  In his last letter from Frankfurt, Ka had happily announced that after four years of hard work he had finally completed a new book of poetry. The title was Snow. Most of the poems were based on childhood memories that had come to him in flashes during his visit to Kars, and he had carefully recorded these inspirations in a green notebook. In an earlier letter written almost immediately upon leaving Kars, he had told me he had come to believe that the emerging book had a “deep and mysterious” underlying structure; he had spent his last four years in Frankfurt filling in the blanks in this hidden design. For this grueling purpose, he’d had to withdraw from the world, abstaining from its pleasures like a dervish. In Kars he had felt like a medium, as if someone were whispering the poems into his ear; back in Frankfurt, he could hardly hear them at all.

  Still, he labored to reveal what he had become convinced was the hidden logic of this testament to the visions and inspirations he had experienced in Kars. In his last letter, he said that with the arduous task now complete, he was going to try out the poems at readings in several German cities. Aside from the longhand version he kept in the green notebook he had no other copy, he told me, but he would have a manuscript typed up and duplicated once he was sure everything was in its rightful place. He was planning to send one copy to me and one to his Istanbul publisher. Would I please write a few words for the back cover and send them on to the publisher, our mutual friend Fahir?

  The view from Ka’s desk of the snowcapped rooftops of Frankfurt was now darkening as night fell over the city. The desk itself, covered with a green tablecloth, was surprisingly tidy for a poet’s. On the right were the diaries in which Ka described his visit to Kars and the poems that had come to him there; on the left was a pile of books and magazines he was in the process of reading. Equidistant from the unmarked center line of the table stood a bronze lamp and a telephone.

  I searched the desk drawers for the notebook; I fanned through the books, the diaries, and the collection of newspaper clippings without which no political exile’s room seems complete; with rising panic I went on to search his wardrobes, his bed, the cabinets in his kitchen and his bathroom, his refrigerator, his little laundry basket, and every other corner of the house where a man might think to hide a notebook. Refusing to accept that it might be lost, I then checked all the same places again while Tarkut Ölçün stood smoking
a cigarette and watching the snow fall over Frankfurt. If the notebook wasn’t in the small bag he’d taken with him to Hamburg, it had to be here in his apartment. Ka had always refused to make copies of his poetry until every last word was in place; he thought it was bad luck. But he’d told me himself that the book was finished and ready to go, so where was it?

  Two hours later, still refusing to accept the loss of the green notebook in which Ka had recorded his Kars poems, I had convinced myself that it was here, somewhere, right under my nose, and that it was only on account of having let myself become so upset that I had missed it. When the landlord knocked impatiently again, I scooped up all the notebooks in Ka’s drawers and threw them into a plastic bag, along with every handwritten note I could find. I gathered up the porno tapes piled higgledy-piggledy around the VCR—proof he’d never received visitors here—and threw them into a shopping bag from the Kaufhof. Like a man about to set out on a long journey who takes along some very ordinary memento of the life he’s left behind, I searched the room for a simple keepsake to remember my friend by. But I couldn’t make up my mind; before I knew it I was stuffing a plastic bag with the ashtray and the cigarettes sitting on his desk, the knife he’d used as a letter opener, the clock on his bedside table, the threadbare waistcoat he had worn over his pajamas for twenty-five years, and which still carried Ka’s smell, and the photograph of him and his sister standing on Dolmabahçe wharf. By now I had become the curator of my own passion. Recognizing my last chance, I gathered up almost everything else; and almost everything had value, from his dirty socks to his handkerchiefs (never used), from the kitchen spoons to the empty cigarette packets in the wastebasket. During one of our last meetings in Istanbul, Ka had asked about my plans for a new novel, and I had told him about The Museum of Innocence, an idea I was still keeping from everyone.

  The moment I returned to my hotel room, having parted from my guide, I resumed my analysis of Ka’s belongings. By now I had decided to be clinical and put memories of my friend to rest for the night, before despair could destroy me. The first task I set myself was to review the porn tapes. My room didn’t have a VCR, but from the notes in Ka’s own hand on the cassette sleeves, it was clear that he had a special affection for an American star called Melinda.

  I proceeded next to read the notebooks in which Ka had written about the poems that had come to him in Kars. Why had he never mentioned this love affair, the terrors he had witnessed? I was to find the answer in a file retrieved from one of Ka’s drawers: When I opened this folder, almost forty love letters fell into my lap; all were addressed to Ïpek, none had been sent. Every one began exactly the same way—My darling, I have thought long and hard about whether I should write to tell you this—but then each went on to describe a different experience of his in Kars, each time adding a heart-wrenching new detail to my understanding of his love affair with Ïpek; there were also scattered insights into his everyday life in Frankfurt (the lame dog he’d seen in Von Bethmann Park and the zinc tables in the Jewish Museum, both of which distresses he had written of in letters to me as well). He’d not folded any of these love letters, and this revealed to me a degree of indecision about sending them that would not admit even the commitment of an envelope.

  Just say the word and I’ll come to you, he has written in one letter, though in another he declares he would never return to Kars because I would never allow you to misunderstand me again. One letter refers to a poem, not enclosed, and another invites one to imagine a preceding letter from Ïpek: I’m so sorry you took my letter amiss. That evening, I laid out all Ka’s belongings, on the bed and on every other surface in the room, examining every item with a forensic eye, and so it is with certainty that I can say Ka never received a single letter from Ïpek. Why did he pretend to answer one, even knowing that he would never send her a single letter either?

  Here, perhaps, we have arrived at the heart of our story. How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another’s heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known? Even if the world’s rich and powerful were to put themselves in the shoes of the rest, how much would they really understand the wretched millions suffering around them? So it is when Orhan the novelist peers into the dark corners of his poet friend’s difficult and painful life: How much can he really see?

  All my life I’ve felt as lost and lonely as a wounded animal [Ka wrote]. Perhaps if I hadn’t embraced you with such violence, I wouldn’t have angered you so much, and I might not have undone the work of twelve years, ending up exactly where I started. But here I am, abandoned and wasting away; I carry the scars of my unbearable suffering on every inch of my body. Sometimes I think it’s not just you I’ve lost, but that I’ve lost everything in the world.

  Could the mere act of my reading these words ensure that I understood them?

  Late that night, made pleasantly tipsy by the whiskeys I’d taken from the minibar, I went back to the Kaiserstrasse to investigate Melinda.

  She had enormous olive-colored eyes with a slight cast to them. Her skin was fair, her legs were long, her lips, which an Ottoman court poet might have likened to cherries, were small but full. She was quite well known. The video section of the World Sex Center was open twenty-four hours a day, but it took me only twenty minutes to locate six films bearing her name. I smuggled these videos back to Istanbul, and only after having watched them did I begin to have some sense of what Ka might have been feeling. Whatever sort of man it was she was kneeling before—he could be the coarsest, ugliest fellow in the world—Melinda always responded to his moans of ecstasy in the same way: Her pale face softened with a compassion unique to mothers. No matter how provocative in costume (whether as an impatient businesswoman, a frolicsome stewardess, or a housewife tired of her ineffectual husband), she was always fragile and vulnerable when naked. As I would later come to see on making my own visit to Kars, there was something of Ïpek in her manner, her large eyes, and her curvaceous body.

  I know I risk offending those poor souls who insist on seeing poets as saintly or metaphysical when I suggest that my friend spent the last four years engrossed by this adult entertainment. But as I wandered the World Sex Center hunting for videos of Melinda, it seemed to me that Ka had just one thing in common with these hordes of miserable men, lonely as ghosts. It was the habit of answering his guilt by retreating into the shadows when he would watch these films. In the cinemas around New York’s 42nd Street, Frankfurt’s Kaiserstrasse, and the back streets of Beyoğlu, the lonely, lost men who watch their films with shame and self-loathing, struggling to avoid one another’s eyes at intermissions, these men, in defiance of all national stereotypes and anthropological distinctions, in fact look exactly the same. I left the World Sex Center with my black plastic bag full of Melinda videos and walked back through the giant snowflakes down the empty streets to my hotel.

  I had two more whiskeys at the makeshift bar in the lobby, and while I waited for them to take effect I looked outside at the falling snow. I decided that if I did manage to get tipsy again I’d take a break from Melinda and Ka’s notebooks. But the moment I reached my room, I picked up one of Ka’s notebooks at random, lay down on the bed without pausing to undress, and began to read. On the third—or was it the fourth?—page I found the snowflake reproduced below.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  When Can We Meet Again?

  A SHORT SPELL OF HAPPINESS

  After Ka and Ïpek had made love, they stayed in bed with their arms around each other; for a time, neither moved. The world was shrouded in silence.

  Ka’s happiness was so great that the embrace seemed to last a very long time. This alone explains why he was seized with a sudden impatience and sprang from the bed to go look out the window. Later on, he would come to see their long shared silence as his happiest memory and would ask himself why he should have brought this unequaled bliss to an abrupt end, pulling hims
elf out of Ïpek’s arms. The answer is that he allowed panic to overtake him. It was as if something were about to happen on the other side of the window, in the snowy street, and he needed to be there before it did.

  But there was nothing to see outside the window, apart from the falling snow. The electricity was still off, but there was a candle burning in the icy window of the kitchen downstairs, casting an orange light on the thick snow outside. Much later, it would occur to Ka that he had cut short the happiest moment of his life because he couldn’t bear to be so happy. But in the beginning, as he lay in bed with Ïpek’s arms around him, he didn’t even know how happy he was; he felt at peace with the world, and this sense of peace seemed so natural that he had a hard time remembering why so much of his life up until this point had been sorrow and tumult. The peace he felt was like the silence that presaged a poem, but on those times before a poem came to him he would see the meaning of life stripped bare, a vision that also brought him joy. There was no such moment of enlightenment in this happy memory of Ïpek; it had about it a simple childish purity, like that of a child with the words to explain the meaning of the world on the very tip of his tongue.

  One by one, he recalled the facts about snow he had read in the library that afternoon; he had gone to prepare himself just in case another poem on the subject came to him. But his head was empty of poetry. Although his poems had come to him one by one, he now saw that they all fit together as neatly as the six-pointed snowflake in the encyclopedia. It was at this moment he had the first intimation that his poems were all part of a grand design.