Snow Read online

  Every Saturday, Turgut Bey and Ïpek visited Kadife, who served her sentence in Kars. During spring and summer, when the weather was fine, the kindly warden gave them permission to spread a white tablecloth beneath the mulberry tree in the prison’s spacious courtyard, and they would while away the afternoon eating Zahide’s stuffed peppers with olive oil, offering her rice meatballs to the other inmates, cracking and peeling hard-boiled eggs, and listening to Chopin preludes on the Philips cassette player that Turgut Bey had managed to repair. To keep his daughter from seeing her sentence as a cause for shame, Turgut Bey insisted on treating the prison like a boarding school, a place through which all proper folk had to pass sometime; occasionally he would invite friends along, like the journalist Serdar Bey.

  One day Fazιl joined them on a visit, and Kadife said she’d like to see him again; two months after her release, this young man four years her junior became her husband. For the first six months, they lived in a room in the Snow Palace Hotel, where Fazιl now worked as a receptionist, but by the time I visited Kars they had moved to a separate apartment. At six o’clock every morning, Kadife would take their six-month-old, Ömercan, to the Snow Palace Hotel; Zahide and Ïpek would feed the baby and then Turgut Bey would play with his grandson while Kadife busied herself with hotel business; by now Fazιl had decided it was better not to be too dependent on his father-in-law so he was working two other jobs. The first was at the Palace of Light Photo Studio and the other was at Kars Border Television: he told me with a smile that his job title was production assistant but really he was nothing more than a glorified errand boy.

  As I’ve reported, on the day of my arrival the mayor gave a dinner in my honor; I met with Fazιl at noon the next day at their new home on Hulusi Aytekin Avenue. As I was gazing out at the enormous snowflakes bouncing softly against the walls of the castle before sinking into the dark waters of the river, Fazιl innocently asked why I’d come to Kars. Thinking he might say something about the way Ïpek had turned my head at the mayor’s dinner, I panicked and launched into a long, somewhat exaggerated account of my interest in the poems Ka had written while in Kars and my tentative plans to write a book about them.

  “If the poems are missing, how can you write a book about them?” he asked, in a friendly well-meaning voice.

  “That’s as much a mystery to me as it is to you,” I said. “But there must be one poem in the television archives.”

  “We can find it this evening. But you spent the whole morning walking around every street in Kars. So maybe you’re thinking of writing a novel about us too.”

  “All I was doing was visiting the places Ka mentioned in his poems,” I said uneasily.

  “But I can tell from your face that you want to tell the people who read your novels how poor we are and how different we are from them. I don’t want you to put me into a novel like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you don’t even know me, that’s why! Even if you got to know me and described me as I am, your Western readers would be so caught up in pitying me for being poor that they wouldn’t have a chance to see my life. For example, if you said I was writing an Islamist science-fiction novel, they’d just laugh. I don’t want to be described as someone people smile at out of pity and compassion.”

  “Fine.”

  “I know I’ve upset you,” said Fazιl. “Please don’t take offense, I can tell you’re a good person. But your friend was a good person too; maybe he even wanted to love us, but in the end he committed the greatest evil of all.”

  I found it difficult to hear Fazιl imputing evil to Ka’s alleged betrayal of Blue, and I could not help thinking that it was only on account of Blue’s death that Fazιl had been able to marry Kadife. But I held my tongue.

  “How can you be so sure this allegation is true?” I asked finally.

  “Everyone in Kars knows this,” he said. He spoke with warmth, even compassion, and took care not to blame Ka or me.

  In his eyes, I saw Necip. I told him I was happy to look at the science-fiction novel he had wanted to show me, but he explained that he wanted to be with me when I read it. So we sat down at the table where he and Kadife ate their evening meal in front of the television set and read the first fifty pages of the science-fiction novel Necip had first imagined four years earlier, and which Fazιl was now writing in his name.

  “So what do you think, is it good?” Fazιl asked, but only once, and apologetically. “If you’re bored, just leave it.”

  “No, it’s good,” I said, and I read on with curiosity.

  Later, when we were walking down Kâzιm Karabekir Avenue, I told him truthfully how much I liked the novel.

  “Maybe you’re just saying that to cheer me up,” Fazιl said brightly, “but you’ve still done me a big favor. I’d like to reciprocate. So if you decide to write about Ka, it’s fine to mention me. But only if you let me speak directly to your readers.”

  “What do you want to say to them?”

  “I don’t know. If I can think of what to say while you’re still in Kars, I’ll tell you.”

  We parted company, having agreed to meet at Kars Border Television in the early evening. I watched Fazιl race down the street to the Palace of Light Photo Studio. How much of Necip do I see in him? Could he still feel Necip inside him in the way he had described to Ka? How much can a man hear another’s voice inside him?

  That morning, as I walked the streets of Kars, talking to the same people Ka had talked to, sitting in the same teahouses, there had been many moments when I almost felt I was Ka. Early in my wanderings, while I was sitting in the Lucky Brothers Teahouse, where Ka had written “All Humanity and the Stars,” I too dreamed about my place in the universe, just as my beloved friend had done. Back at the Snow Palace Hotel, as I went to pick up my key, Cavit the receptionist told me I was rushing “just like Ka.” As I was walking down a side street, a grocer came outside to ask, “Are you the writer from Istanbul?” He invited me inside to ask whether I could write that all the newspaper reports four years earlier about the death of his daughter Teslime were false; he talked to me in just the way he must have talked to Ka and offered me a Coke, just as he had offered one to him. How much of this was coincidence; how much was just my imagining? At one point, realizing I was on Baytarhane Street, I stopped to look up at the windows of Sheikh Saadettin’s lodge, and then, to understand how Ka felt when he visited the lodge, I went up the steep stairs that Muhtar had described in his poem.

  I’d found Muhtar’s poems in Ka’s Frankfurt papers and took this to mean that he’d never sent them to Fahir. But it must have been five minutes after we were introduced that Muhtar, proclaiming Ka to have been “a true gentleman,” described how Ka had been so taken with Muhtar’s poems that he had volunteered to send them to a conceited Istanbul publisher with a cover letter praising them to the skies. Muhtar was happy with the way his life was going. Although the Prosperity Party had been shut down, he was sure to be the candidate of the new Islamist party the next time there was an election and was confident of a time to come when he would be mayor. Thanks to Muhtar’s warm, ingratiating manner we were able to visit police headquarters (though they didn’t let us see the basement) and the Social Services Hospital where Ka had kissed Necip’s lifeless head. When Muhtar took me to see what was left of the National Theater and the rooms he had converted into an appliance depot, he conceded that he was partly to blame for the destruction of this hundred-year-old building, and then by way of consolation he added, “At least it was an Armenian building and not a Turkish one.” He showed me all the places Ka had remembered whenever he found himself longing to return. My thoughts remained with Ka as we walked through the snow and through the fruit market; as we walked down Kâzιm Karabekir Avenue, Muhtar pointed out the hardware stores one by one. Then he led me into the Halιl Paşa Arcade, where he took his leave, after introducing me to his political rival, the lawyer Muzaffer Bey. The former mayor reminisced at length about the city’s gl
ory days during the early years of the Republic, just as he had done with Ka, and as we proceeded through the gloomy corridors of the arcade a rich dairy owner standing in front of the Association of Animal Enthusiasts cried, “Orhan Bey!” He invited me in and flaunted his remarkable memory by describing how Ka had visited the association around the time of the assassination of the director of the Institute of Education, and how he had gone off in a corner and lost himself in thought.

  It was difficult to listen to his description of the moment Ka had realized he was in love with Ïpek, just as I was about to meet Ïpek at the New Life Pastry Shop. It was, I think, to calm my nerves, to ease my fear of being swamped by love, that I stepped into the Green Pastures Café to down a raki. But the moment I sat down across from Ïpek at the New Life Pastry Shop, I realized that my precaution had left me only more vulnerable. I’d drunk the raki on an empty stomach, so instead of calming me it had set my head swimming. She had enormous eyes, and just the kind of long face I like. As I struggled to make sense of her beauty—although I had been thinking about it incessantly since first seeing her the night before, I had yet to fathom its depths—I inflamed my own confusion and despair by reflecting that I knew every detail of her time with Ka and the love they’d known. It was as if I’d discovered yet another weakness in myself; it was a painful reminder that while Ka had lived his life in the way that came naturally to him, as a true poet, I was a lesser being, a simple-hearted novelist who like a clerk sat down to work at the same time every day. Perhaps this is why I now gave Ïpek such a colorful and sympathetic account of Ka’s daily routines in Frankfurt, how he’d got up every morning at the same hour and walked the same streets to the same library, to sit and work at the same desk.

  “I really had decided to go to Frankfurt with him,” said Ïpek, mentioning several facts to prove it, including the suitcase she’d packed. “But now it’s hard to remember why I found Ka so charming. That said, out of respect for your friendship I would like to help you with your book.”

  “You’ve already helped enormously. Ka wrote brilliantly about his time here, and this was all thanks to you,” I said, hoping to provoke her. “He filled several notebooks with a minute-by-minute account of his three-day visit. The only gap is the last few hours before he left the city.”

  She proceeded to fill that gap with astonishing frankness, concealing nothing, it seemed, though it must have been hard to be so open in public. I could not help but admire her honesty as she offered her own minute-by-minute account of Ka’s last hours in town: what she had seen with her own eyes, and what she had guessed about the rest.

  “You had no solid proof, but you still decided not to go to Frankfurt?” I said, again by way of provocation.

  “Sometimes, you sense something in your heart and simply know it’s true.”

  “You’re the first one to mention hearts,” I said, and as if to make up for this I told her what I had gathered from the letters Ka had written to her from Frankfurt but never sent. I told her Ka had never been able to forget her. He’d been utterly distraught, needing two sleeping pills every night for a year after his return to Germany; he would regularly drink himself into a stupor; walking the streets of Frankfurt, he couldn’t go fifteen minutes without seeing some woman in the distance whom he mistook for her. Until the end of his life Ka had spent hours every day musing on the happy moments they’d spent together—the same film playing in slow motion over and over in his head—he’d been overjoyed every time he managed to go even fifteen minutes without thinking of her; he’d never again had relations with any other woman, and after losing her he saw himself as not a real person at all, but a ghost. When I saw her face succumbing to her compassion even as it cried wordlessly, Please, that’s enough!, when her eyebrows rose up as if taking in a puzzling question, I realized with horror that I wasn’t pleading my friend’s case but my own.

  “Your friend may have loved me a great deal,” she said, “but not enough to come back to Kars to see me.”

  “There was a warrant out for his arrest.”

  “That needn’t have stopped him. He could have appeared in court as ordered, and that would have been the end of the matter. Please don’t take this the wrong way—he was right not to come—but the fact remains that Blue managed to make many secret visits to Kars to see me even though there’d been orders to kill him on sight for years and years.”

  It pierced me to the core to see that when she mentioned Blue, her hazel eyes lit up and her face filled with a melancholy I could tell was entirely genuine.

  “But it wasn’t the courts your friend was most afraid of,” she said, as if to console me. “He knew very well what his real crime was, and this crime is the reason I didn’t come to the station.”

  “You’ve never offered a shred of proof he was actually guilty,” I said.

  “All I have to do is look at your face; you’re carrying his guilt for him.” Satisfied with her clever response, she put her lighter and her cigarettes back into her bag to let me know our interview was over. Clever, indeed: I held up a mirror forcing me to see what she could see, that I was jealous not of Ka but of Blue. Once I had also admitted this to myself, I knew I was defeated. Later on I would decide that I’d overread her—all she’d intended was a simple warning not to let guilt get the better of me. She rose to put on her coat. How tall she was, with everything else!

  I was confused. “We’ll see each other again tonight, won’t we?” I said. There was no call for me to say this.

  “Of course. My father is expecting you,” she said, and moved away with that sweet walk of hers.

  I tried to feel sorry that in her heart she believed Ka was guilty, but I knew I was fooling myself. As I sat there invoking “my dear departed friend,” I had really intended only to speak of him wistfully and then, little by little, to expose his weaknesses, his obsessions, and then his “crime,” finally to blot out his noble memory as I boarded the same ship with her to embark on our first journey together. The dreams I’d entertained during my first night in Kars—of taking Ïpek back with me to Istanbul—now seemed very far away: Faced with the shameful truth, all I wanted now was to prove my friend’s innocence. Can we assume then that, as for dead men, it was Blue who had provoked my jealousy and not Ka?

  Walking through the snowy streets of Kars after nightfall only darkened my mood. Kars Border Television had moved to a new building on Karadağ Avenue, just across from the gas station. It was a three-story concrete affair heralded on its opening as a sign that Kars was moving up in the world, but two years later, its corridors were as muddy, dark, and dingy as any others in the city.

  Fazιl was waiting for me in the second-floor studio; after introducing me to the eight others who worked at the station, he smiled affably and said, “My colleagues want to know if you’d mind saying a word or two for the evening broadcast.” My first thought was that this might help the cause of my research. During my five-minute interview, their youth programs presenter, Hakan Özge, said unexpectedly (though perhaps at Fazιl’s direction), “I hear you’re writing a novel set in Kars!” The question threw me but I managed to mutter noncommittally. There was no mention of Ka.

  We then went into the director’s office to examine the shelves lined with videocassettes; the law required that they be dated, so it wasn’t long before we were able to locate the tapes of the first two live broadcasts from the National Theater. We took them into a small airless room and sat in front of the old TV set with our glasses of tea. The first thing I watched was Kadife’s performance in The Tragedy in Kars. I must say I was impressed by Sunay Zaim and Funda Eser’s “critical vignettes,” not to mention their parodies of various commercials popular at the time. At the scene in which Kadife bared her head to reveal her beautiful hair before killing Sunay, I paused, rewound, and repeated, trying to see exactly what had happened. Sunay’s death really did look like so much theater. I guessed that only the front row would have had any chance of detecting whether the clip was full
or empty.

  When I put in the tape of My Fatherland or My Head Scarf, I quickly realized that many elements in the play—the impersonations, the confessions of Goalkeeper Vural, Funda Eser’s belly dances—were no more than little sideshows that the troupe inserted into every play they did. The roaring and shouting and sloganeering in the hall, to say nothing of the age of the tape, made it almost impossible to work out what anyone said. But I rewound several times in my attempt to hear Ka recite the poem that had come to him on the spot and would later become “The Place Where God Does Not Exist.” Miraculously, I was able to transcribe most of it. When Fazιl asked me what could have possibly made Necip jump to his feet while Ka was reciting the poem, and what could Necip have been trying to say, I handed him the sheet on which I had jotted down as much of the poem as I’d been able to hear.

  When we got to the part where the soldiers fired into the audience, we watched it twice.

  “You’ve been all over Kars now,” said Fazιl. “But there’s another place I’d like to show you.” With slight embarrassment, but a certain air of mystery too, he told me that the place he had in mind was the religious high school. The school itself was closed, but since I was probably going to put Necip in my book too, it was important that I see the dormitory where he had spent his last years.

  As we were walking through the snow down Ahmet Muhtar the Conqueror Avenue, I happened to see a charcoal-colored dog with a round white spot in the middle of his forehead, and when I realized he must be the dog Ka had written the poem about, I went into a grocery store to buy a boiled egg and some bread: the animal wagged its curly tail happily as I quickly peeled the egg for him.

  When Fazιl saw that the dog was following us, he said, “This is the station dog. I didn’t tell you everything back there, maybe because I thought you might not come. The old dormitory is empty now. After the coup, they closed it; they called it a nest of terrorists and reactionary militancy. Since then no one’s lived there, which is why I’ve borrowed this flashlight from the station,” and he shined the light into the anxious eyes of the black dog, still wagging its tail. The dormitory, an old Armenian mansion, had been the Russian consulate, where the consul had lived alone with his dog. The door to its garden was locked. Fazιl took me by the hand and helped me over the low wall. “This is how we used to get out in the evenings,” he said. He pointed to a large high window; slipping through the paneless frame with accustomed ease, he turned around to light my way with the flashlight. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “There’s nothing in here but birds.” Inside it was pitch-dark. Many of the windows were boarded up, and the glazing in others was so caked with ice and dirt that no light came through them, but Fazιl made his way to the stairs without difficulty. He climbed fearlessly but kept turning around like an usher in a cinema to show me the way. Everything stank of dust and mold. We went through doors that had been kicked in on the night of the raid, and past walls riddled with bullet holes; overhead, pigeons flew in a panic from the nests they had built in the elbows of the hot-water pipes and in the corners of the high ceilings.