Snow Read online

  On the top floor, we walked among empty, rusting bunk beds. “This one was mine, and that was Necip’s,” said Fazιl. “On some nights, to make sure we didn’t wake anyone with our whispering, we’d sleep in the same bed and watch the stars and talk.”

  Through a gap in one of the top windows, we could see snowflakes sailing slowly through the halo of the streetlamp. I stood there paying them my full attention, my deepest respects.

  “Necip used to watch them from his bed,” said Fazιl. He pointed down to a narrow gap between two buildings: On the left—just beyond the garden—was the blind wall of the Agricultural Bank; to the right another blind wall, the back of a tall apartment building; the two-meter gap between them was too narrow for a street and so is best described as a passageway. A fluorescent tube on the first floor cast a purple light on the muddy ground below. To keep people from mistaking the passageway for a street, a NO ENTRY sign had been posted somewhere in the middle of the wall. At the end of this passage, which Fazιl said had inspired Necip’s vision of the “end of the world,” there was a dark and leafless tree, and just as we were looking at it, it suddenly turned red as if it were on fire.

  “The red light in the sign of the Palace of Light Photo Studio has been broken for seven years now,” whispered Fazιl. “It keeps going on and off, and every time we saw it blink from Necip’s bed, the oleander over there looked like it was on fire. Necip would frequently dream of this vision all night long. He called the vision ‘that world,’ and on mornings after sleepless nights, he’d sometimes say, ‘I watched that world all night!’ He had told the poet Ka about it, and your friend put it into his poem. I figured this out while we were watching the tape, and that’s why I brought you here. But your friend dishonored Necip by calling the poem ‘The Place Where God Does Not Exist.’ ”

  “It was your friend who described this landscape to Ka as ‘the place where God does not exist,’ ” I said. “I am sure of it.”

  “I do not believe that Necip died an atheist,” said Fazιl carefully. “Except, it’s true, he had doubts about himself.”

  “Don’t you hear Necip’s voice inside you anymore?” I asked. “Doesn’t all this make you afraid of turning into an atheist so gradually you don’t even notice, like the man in the story?”

  Fazιl was not pleased to learn that I knew of the doubts he’d expressed to Ka four years earlier. “I’m a married man now; I have a child,” he said. “I’m no longer interested in such matters.” It must have occurred to him that he’d been treating me like someone who’d flown in from the West to lure him toward atheism, because he immediately relented. “Let’s talk about that later,” he said, in a gentle voice. “We’re expected at my father-in-law’s for dinner, and it wouldn’t be right to keep them waiting, would it?”

  But before we went downstairs he took me to a grand room that had been the main office of the Russian consulate. Pointing at the table, the chairs, and the broken raki bottles in a corner, he said, “After the roads opened, Z Demirkol and his special operations team stayed here for a few days so they could kill a few more Islamists and Kurdish nationalists.”

  Up until that moment, I’d managed to keep this part of the story out of my mind, but now it came back to me with a vengeance. I had not wanted to think about Ka’s last hours in Kars at all.

  The charcoal-colored dog had been waiting for us at the garden gate and followed us back to the hotel.

  “You look very upset,” said Fazιl. “What’s wrong?”

  “Before we go in to eat, would you come up to my room for a moment? There’s something I’d like to give you.”

  As I took my key from Cavit, I looked through the open door of Turgut Bey’s office and saw the bright room beyond, I saw the food spread on the table, I heard the dinner guests talking and felt Ïpek’s presence. In my suitcase I had the photocopies Ka had made of the love letters Necip had written to Kadife four years earlier, and when we got to my room, I gave them to Fazιl. Only much later would it occur to me that I wanted him to be as much haunted by the ghost of his friend as I was by Ka’s.

  Fazιl sat on the edge of the bed to read the letters, while I went back to my suitcase to take out one of Ka’s notebooks. Opening it up to the snowflake I had first seen in Frankfurt, I saw something that a part of me must have recognized a long time ago. Ka had located “The Place Where God Does Not Exist” at the very top of the Memory axis. This suggested to me that he had been to the deserted dormitory Z Demirkol and his friends had used as their base at the tail end of the coup, had looked through Necip’s window, and so discovered, just before leaving Kars, the true origins of Necip’s landscape. All the other poems on the Memory axis referred to his childhood or his own memories of Kars. So now I too was sure of the story all of Kars had always believed to be true: After Ka had failed to persuade Kadife to give up the play, and while Ïpek was sitting locked up in his room, he’d gone to pay a visit to Z Demirkol, who was waiting in his new headquarters for Ka to tell him where to find Blue.

  I am sure I looked just as dazed as Fazιl at that moment. The voices of the dinner guests floated faintly up the stairs; the sighs of the sad city of Kars rose from the street. Each lost in memory, Fazιl and I bowed to the unassailable presence of our more complex, passionate, and authentic originals.

  Looking out the window at the falling snow, I told Fazιl that time was passing; we really should be getting downstairs. Fazιl left first, loping off with a hangdog look as if he’d just committed a crime. I lay down on the bed and imagined Ka’s thoughts as he walked from the National Theater to the dormitory; how he must have struggled to look Z Demirkol in the eye; how, unable to furnish the exact street address, he must have ended up getting in the car with those who’d been sent for Blue, to show them the way. What sorrow I felt to imagine my friend pointing out the building in the distance. Or was it something worse? Could it be that the writer clerk was secretly delighted at the fall of the sublime poet? The thought induced such self-loathing I forced myself to think about something else.

  When I went downstairs to join Turgut Bey and his other guests, I was undone anew by Ïpek’s beauty. Recai Bey, the cultivated book-loving director of the electricity board, did his best to lift my spirits, as did Serdar Bey and Turgut Bey. But let me pass quickly over this long evening, during which everyone treated me with the most beautiful solicitude and I had far too much to drink. Every time I looked at Ïpek sitting across the table, I felt something come loose inside me. I watched myself being interviewed on television; to see my nervous hand gestures was excruciating. I took out the little tape recorder I’d been carrying around Kars to record my hosts and their guests giving me their views on the city’s history, the fate of journalism here, and the night of the revolution, but I did all this in the dutiful languor of one who no longer believes in his work. As I sipped Zahide’s lentil soup, I began to imagine myself as a character in a provincial novel from the 1940s. I decided that prison had been good for Kadife; she was more mature now, more assured. No one mentioned Ka—not even his death—and this broke my heart. At one point Ïpek and Kadife went into the room next door where little Ömercan was sleeping. I wanted to follow them, but by then your author had “drunk a great deal, as artists always will.” I was, in fact, too drunk to stand.

  But I still have one very clear memory of that evening. At a very late hour, I told Ïpek that I wanted to see Ka’s room, Room 203. Everyone at the table fell silent and turned to look at us.

  “Fine,” said Ïpek. “Let’s go.”

  She took the key from reception, and I followed her upstairs. The room. The window, the curtains, the snow. The smell of sleep, the perfume of soap, the faint whiff of dust. The cold. As Ïpek watched, still keen to give me the benefit of the doubt but not entirely trustful, I sat on the edge of the bed where my friend had passed the happiest hours of his life making love to this same woman. What if I died here, what if I declared my love to Ïpek, what if I just stayed here to look out the window?
They were all waiting for us, yes, they were all waiting for us at the table. I babbled a bit of nonsense that amused Ïpek enough to make her smile. I remember her giving me an especially sweet smile when I uttered the mortifying words that I told her I had prepared in advance.

  “Nothingmakesyouhappyinloveexceptlove …

  neitherthebooksyouwritenorthecitiesyousee … Iamverylonely …

  ifIsaythatIwanttobehereinthiscityclosetoyoutillthe

  endofmylifewouldyoubelieveme?”

  “Orhan Bey,” said Ïpek, “I tried hard to love Muhtar, but it didn’t work out. I loved Blue with all my heart, but it didn’t work out. I believed I would learn to love Ka, but that didn’t work out either. I longed for a child but the child never came. I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone again, I just don’t have the heart for it. All I want to do now is look after my little nephew, Ömercan. But I’d like to thank you anyway, even though I can’t take you seriously.”

  For the first time in my presence, she hadn’t said “your friend”; she used Ka’s name, and for this I thanked her effusively. Could we meet again, at noon the next day, at the New Life Pastry Shop, just to talk about Ka a little longer?

  She was sorry to say she’d be busy. But, still determined to be a good host, she promised that she and the rest of the family would come to see me off at the station the following evening.

  I thanked her and then confessed I hadn’t the strength to return to the dinner table (I was also afraid I might start crying), whereupon I threw myself on the bed and passed out.

  The next morning I managed to leave the hotel unnoticed and spent the day walking around the city, first with Muhtar and later on with Serdar Bey and Fazιl. As I’d hoped, my appearance on the evening news had put the people of Kars at ease about talking to me, so I was able to gather up many essential details that clarified the end of my story. Muhtar introduced me to the owner of the Lance, the first political Islamist newspaper in Kars (circulation seventy-five); I also met the retired pharmacist who was the paper’s managing editor, though he arrived for our meeting quite late. The two men went on to tell me that the antidemocratic measures launched against it had sent the Kars Islamic movement into retreat, and even the popular demand for a religious high school was waning. Only after they had finished speaking did I remember how Fazιl and Necip had once plotted to kill this aging pharmacist after he had twice kissed Necip in an odd manner.

  The owner of the Hotel Asia was now writing for the Lance, and when we turned to the discussion of recent events, he remembered how thankful he was that the man who had assassinated the Institute of Education director four years earlier had not been from Kars, a detail I’d somehow managed to forget. The assassin, he said, had turned out to be a teahouse operator from Tokat; it was later proved that he had committed another murder around the same time using the same weapon; when the ballistic reports came back from Ankara, the man from Tokat was charged with the murder, and he confessed that it was Blue who’d invited him to Kars. A brief submitted at trial claimed he had suffered a nervous breakdown, so the judge sent him to the Bakirköy Mental Hospital, and when they released him three years later, he decided to make his home in Istanbul, where he now ran the Merry Tokat Teahouse and wrote columns on the civil rights of head-scarf girls for the newspaper Covenant.

  The cause of the head-scarf girls in Kars had been greatly weakened four years earlier, when Kadife bared her head, and although it now showed signs of resurgence, so many girls involved in the court cases had been expelled, and so many others had transferred to universities in other cities, that the Kars movement had yet to show the dynamism of those in Istanbul; Hande’s family refused to see me.

  The fireman with the strong baritone who’d been yanked into the television station the morning after the revolution to sing Turkish folk songs had gained such a following that he was now the star of his own weekly program on Kars Border Television, Songs of the Turkish Borderlands. They taped it on Tuesday and aired it on Friday evening; the music-loving janitor from Kars General Hospital (a close personal friend and one of His Excellency Sheikh Saadettin’s most devoted followers) accompanied him on a rhythmic saz.

  Serdar Bey also introduced me to “Glasses,” the young boy who’d appeared onstage on the night of the revolution. Forbidden by his father ever to appear onstage again, even for a school play, Glasses was now a grown man, and he still worked as a newspaper distributor. He brought me up-to-date on the Kars socialists who depended on the Istanbul papers for their news. Still stouthearted admirers of the Islamists and the Kurdish nationalists who were prepared to lay down their lives to oppose the state, they occasionally issued indecisive statements that no one bothered to read. These days their activities amounted to little more than sitting around bragging about the heroes they’d been and the sacrifices they’d made as younger men.

  It seemed that almost everyone I met on my walks around Kars was waiting for just such a hero, some great man ready to make the large sacrifices that would deliver them all from poverty, unemployment, confusion, and murder; perhaps because I was a novelist of some repute, the whole city, it seems, had been hoping that I might be that great man they’d been waiting for. Alas, I was to disappoint them with my bad Istanbul habits, my absentmindedness and lack of organization, my self-regard, my obsession with my project, and my haste; what’s more, they let me know it.

  There was Maruf the tailor, who, having told me his life story in the Unity Teahouse, said I should have agreed to come home with him to meet his nephews and drink with them; I should also have planned to stay two more days to attend the Conference of Atatürk Youth on Thursday evening; I should have smoked every cigarette and drunk every glass of tea offered me in a spirit of friendship (I almost did).

  Fazιl’s father had an army friend from Varto who told me that in the past four years most Kurdish militants had either been killed or thrown into prison; no one was joining the guerillas anymore. As for the young Kurds who’d attended the meeting at the Hotel Asia, they’d all abandoned the city, though at the Sunday-evening cockfight I saw Zahide’s grandson the gambler, who greeted me warmly and shared some of his raki, which we sipped surreptitiously out of tea glasses.

  By now it was getting late, so I made my way back to the hotel, plodding slowly through the snow like a traveler without a friend in the world although laden with all its sorrows. I still had plenty of time before my departure, but I was hoping to leave without being seen and went straight up to my room to pack.

  As I was leaving through the kitchen door, I met Saffet the detective. He was retired now, but he still came every night for Zahide’s soup. He recognized me straightaway from my television interview and said he had things he wanted to tell me. At the Unity Teahouse, he told me that while he was officially retired he still worked for the state on a casual basis; there was, after all, no such thing as retirement for a detective in Kars. He’d been dispatched because the city’s intelligence services were keen to know what I was trying to dig up here (was it to do with the “Armenian thing,” the Kurdish rebels, the religious associations, the political parties?). Smiling graciously, he added that if I could tell him my true business, I’d be helping him make a little money.

  Choosing my words carefully, I told him about Ka; I reminded him that he had followed my friend step by step around the city during his visit four years earlier. What did he remember about him? I asked.

  “He was a man who cared about people, and he loved dogs too—a good man,” he said. “But his mind was still in Germany, and he was very introverted. No one here likes Ka these days.”

  For a long time we remained silent. Hoping he might know something, but still apprehensive, I finally asked about Blue, and I discovered that a year ago, just as I was now here asking about Ka, several young Islamists had come from Istanbul to ask about Blue, this enemy of the state. They left without finding his grave, probably because the corpse had been dumped into the sea from an airplane, to keep his burial site from becom
ing a place of pilgrimage.

  When Fazιl came to join us at the table, he said he’d heard similar stories; he’d also heard that those same young Islamists were following the same path Blue had taken on his own pilgrimage. They’d escaped to Germany, where they founded a fast-growing radical Islamist group in Berlin; according to Fazιl’s old classmates from the religious high school, they’d written a statement—published on the first page of a German-based journal called Pilgrimage—in which they’d vowed revenge against those responsible for Blue’s death. It was this group, we guessed, that had killed Ka. Perhaps the only existing manuscript of his book was now in Berlin, in the hands of Blue’s Pilgrims—or so I imagined for a moment as I gazed out at the snow.