Snow Read online

  Acclaim for Orhan Pamuk’s

  Snow

  “Powerful.… Astonishingly timely.… A deft melding of political intrigue and philosophy, romance and noir.… [Snow] is forever confounding our expectations.”

  —Vogue

  “A novel of profound relevance to the present moment. [The] debate between the forces of secularism and those of religious fanaticism … is conducted with subtle, painful insight into the human weakness that can underlie both impulses.”

  —The Times (London)

  “A work of art.… Alternating between the snowstorm’s hush and philosophical conversations reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s great novels, Snow proves a … timely and gripping read.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “Marvelous … as quiet and transformative as a blizzard and as coldly beautiful.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “In Snow, Pamuk uses his powers to show us the critical dilemmas of modern Turkey. How European a country is it? How can it respond to fundamentalist Islam? And how can an artist deal with these issues? … The author’s high artistry and fierce politics take our minds further into the age’s crisis than any commentator could. Orhan Pamuk is the sort of writer for whom the Nobel Prize was invented.”

  —The Daily Telegraph (London)

  “Part political thriller, part farce, Snow is [Pamuk’s] most dazzling fiction yet. One of the top books of the year.”

  —The Village Voice

  “It comes as no surprise that political prescience should be yet another of the many gifts of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. With Snow, Pamuk gives convincing proof that the solitary artist is a better bellwether than any televised think-tanker.… The work is a melancholy farce full of rabbit-out-of-a-hat plot twists that, despite the locale, looks uncannily like the magic lantern show of misfire, denial and pratfall that appears daily in our newspapers.”

  —Independent on Sunday

  “Pure magic.… Snow is excellent.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “ ‘How much can we ever know about 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?’ Such questions haunt the poet Ka … [in] this novel [that is] as much about love as it is about politics.”

  —The Observer (London)

  “Snow has already been a bestseller in Turkey—given Pamuk’s stature as a novelist and the novel’s content it could hardly fail to be. But what makes it a brilliant novel is its artistry. Pamuk keeps so many balls in the air that you cannot separate the inquiry into the nature of religious belief from the examination of modern Turkey, the investigation of East-West relations, and the nature of art itself.… All this rolled into a gripping political thriller.”

  —The Spectator

  “Brilliant.… Pamuk writes with such grace and deep respect for his conflicted characters that this rich novel passes like a dream, encompassing every aspect of love and belief.”

  —People

  Orhan Pamuk

  Snow

  Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name Is Red won the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in Istanbul.

  ALSO BY ORHAN PAMUK

  My Name Is Red

  The White Castle

  The New Life

  The Black Book

  Istanbul

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, AUGUST 2005

  Translation copyright © 2004 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Turkey as Kar by İletişim, Istanbul, in 2002. Copyright 2002 İletişim Yayincilik A. Ş. This translation originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2004.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Pamuk, Orhan [date]

  [Kar, English]

  Snow / Orhan Pamuk ; translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Freely, Maureen, [date] II. Title

  PL248.P34K36513 2004

  894′.3533—dc22

  2003065935

  eISBN: 978-0-307-38647-2

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1_r1

  To Rüya

  Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things.

  The honest thief, the tender murderer,

  The superstitious atheist.

  —Robert Browning, “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”

  Politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though one impossible to ignore. We are about to speak of very ugly matters.

  —Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma

  Richard Howard’s translation

  Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. Because the European enlightenment is more important than people.

  —Dostoevsky, notebooks for The Brothers Karamazov

  The Westerner in me was discomposed.

  —Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. The Journey to Kars

  2. The Outlying Districts

  3. Poverty and History

  4. Ka Meets Ïpek in the New Life Pastry Shop

  5. The First and Last Conversation Between the Murderer and His Victim

  6. Love, Religion, and Poetry: Muhtar’s Sad Story

  7. At Party Headquarters, Police Headquarters, and Once Again in the Streets

  8. Blue and Rüstem

  9. A Nonbeliever Who Does Not Want to Kill Himself

  10. Snow and Happiness

  11. Ka with Sheikh Efendi

  12. The Sad Story of Necip and Hicran

  13. A Walk Through the Snow with Kadife

  14. The Dinner Conversation Turns to Love, Head Scarves, and Suicide

  15. At the National Theater

  16. Necip Describes His Landscape and Ka Recites His Poem

  17. A Play About a Girl Who Burns Her Head Scarf

  18. A Revolution Onstage

  19. The Night of the Revolution

  20. While Ka Slept and When He Woke the Next Morning

  21. Ka in the Cold Rooms of Terror

  22. Sunay Zaim’s Military and Theatrical Careers

  23. With Sunay at Military Headquarters

  24. The Six-sided Snowflake

  25. Ka with Kadife in the Hotel Room

  26. Blue’s Statement to the West

  27. Ka Urges Turgut Bey to Sign the Statement

  28. Ka with Ïpek in the Hotel Room

  29. In Frankfurt

  30. A Short Spell of Happiness

  31. The Secret Meeting at the Hotel Asia

  32. On Love, Insignificance, and Blue’s Disappearance

  33. The Fear of Being Shot

  34. The Mediator

  35. Ka with Blue in His Cell

  36. Bargaining in Which Life Vies with Theater, and Art with Politics

  37. Preparations for the Play to End All Plays

  38. An Enforced Visit

  39. Ka and Ïpek Meet at the Hotel

  40. The First Half of the Chapter

  41. The Missing Green Notebook

  42. From Ïpek’s P
oint of View

  43. The Final Act

  44. Four Years Later, in Kars

  The Order in Which Ka Wrote His Poems

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Silence of Snow

  THE JOURNEY TO KARS

  The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow.

  He’d boarded the bus from Erzurum to Kars with only seconds to spare. He’d just come into the station on a bus from Istanbul—a snowy, stormy, two-day journey—and was rushing up and down the dirty wet corridors with his bag in tow, looking for his connection, when someone told him the bus for Kars was leaving immediately.

  He’d managed to find it, an ancient Magirus, but the conductor had just shut the luggage compartment and, being “in a hurry,” refused to open it again. That’s why our traveler had taken his bag on board with him; the big dark-red Bally valise was now wedged between his legs. He was sitting next to the window and wearing a thick charcoal coat he’d bought at a Frankfurt Kaufhof five years earlier. We should note straightaway that this soft, downy beauty of a coat would cause him shame and disquiet during the days he was to spend in Kars, while also furnishing a sense of security.

  As soon as the bus set off, our traveler glued his eyes to the window next to him; perhaps hoping to see something new, he peered into the wretched little shops and bakeries and broken-down coffeehouses that lined the streets of Erzurum’s outlying suburbs, and as he did it began to snow. It was heavier and thicker than the snow he’d seen between Istanbul and Erzurum. If he hadn’t been so tired, if he’d paid a bit more attention to the snowflakes swirling out of the sky like feathers, he might have realized that he was traveling straight into a blizzard; he might have seen at the start that he was setting out on a journey that would change his life forever and chosen to turn back.

  But the thought didn’t even cross his mind. As evening fell, he lost himself in the light still lingering in the sky above; in the snowflakes whirling ever more wildly in the wind he saw nothing of the impending blizzard but rather a promise, a sign pointing the way back to the happiness and purity he had known, once, as a child. Our traveler had spent his years of happiness and childhood in Istanbul; he’d returned a week ago, for the first time in twelve years, to attend his mother’s funeral, and having stayed there four days he decided to take this trip to Kars. Years later, he would still recall the extraordinary beauty of the snow that night; the happiness it brought him was far greater than any he’d known in Istanbul. He was a poet and, as he himself had written—in an early poem still largely unknown to Turkish readers—it snows only once in our dreams.

  As he watched the snow fall outside his window, as slowly and silently as the snow in a dream, the traveler fell into a long-desired, long-awaited reverie; cleansed by memories of innocence and childhood, he succumbed to optimism and dared to believe himself at home in this world. Soon afterward, he felt something else that he had not known for quite a long time and fell asleep in his seat.

  Let us take advantage of this lull to whisper a few biographical details. Although he had spent the last twelve years in political exile in Germany, our traveler had never been very much involved in politics. His real passion, his only thought, was for poetry. He was forty-two years old and single, never married. Although it might be hard to tell as he curled up in his seat, he was tall for a Turk, with brown hair and a pale complexion that had become even paler during this journey. He was shy and enjoyed being alone. Had he known what would happen soon after he fell asleep—with the swaying of the bus his head would come to lean first on his neighbor’s shoulder and then on the man’s chest—he would have been very much ashamed. For the traveler we see leaning on his neighbor is an honest and well-meaning man and full of melancholy, like those Chekhov characters so laden with virtues that they never know success in life. We’ll have a lot to say about melancholy later on. But as he is not likely to remain asleep for very long in that awkward position, suffice it for now to say that the traveler’s name is Kerim Alakuşoğlu, that he doesn’t like this name but prefers to be called Ka (from his initials), and that I’ll be doing the same in this book. Even as a schoolboy, our hero stubbornly insisted on writing Ka on his homework and exam papers; he signed Ka on university registration forms; and he took every opportunity to defend his right to continue to do so, even if it meant conflict with teachers and government officials. His mother, his family, and his friends all called him Ka, and, having also published some poetry collections under this name, he enjoyed a small enigmatic fame as Ka, both in Turkey and in Turkish circles in Germany.

  That’s all we have time for at present. As the bus driver wished his passengers a safe journey as we departed Erzurum station, let me just add these words: “May your road be open, dear Ka.” But I don’t wish to deceive you. I’m an old friend of Ka’s, and I begin this story knowing everything that will happen to him during his time in Kars.

  After leaving Horasan, the bus turned north, heading directly for Kars. As it climbed the winding road, the driver had to slam on the brakes to avoid a horse and carriage that had sprung up out of nowhere on one of the hairpin bends, and Ka woke up. Fear had already fostered a strong fellow feeling among the passengers; before long, Ka too felt at one with them. Even though he was sitting just behind the bus driver, Ka was soon behaving like the passengers behind him: Whenever the bus slowed to negotiate a bend in the road or avoid going over the edge of a cliff, he stood up to get a better view; when the zealous passenger who’d committed himself to helping the driver by wiping the condensation from the windshield missed a corner, Ka would point it out with his forefinger (which contribution went unnoticed); and when the blizzard got so bad that the wipers could no longer keep the snow from piling up on the windshield, Ka joined the driver in trying to guess where the road was.

  Once caked with snow, the road signs were impossible to read. When the snowstorm began to rage in earnest, the driver turned off his brights and dimmed the lights inside the bus, hoping to conjure up the road out of the semidarkness. The passengers fell into a fearful silence with their eyes on the scene outside: the snow-covered streets of destitute villages, the dimly lit, ramshackle one-story houses, the roads to farther villages that were already closed, and the ravines barely visible beyond the streetlamps. If they spoke, it was in whispers.

  So it was in the gentlest of whispers that Ka’s neighbor, the man onto whose shoulder Ka had fallen asleep earlier, asked him why he was traveling to Kars. It was easy to see that Ka was not a local.

  “I’m a journalist,” Ka whispered in reply. This was a lie. “I’m interested in the municipal elections—and also the young women who’ve been committing suicide.” This was true.

  “When the mayor of Kars was murdered, every newspaper in Istanbul ran the story,” Ka’s neighbor replied. “And it’s the same for the women who’ve been committing suicide.” It was hard for Ka to know whether it was pride or shame he heard in the man’s voice. Three days later, standing in the snow on Halitpaşa Avenue with tears streaming from his eyes, Ka was to see this slim handsome villager again.

  During the desultory conversation that continued on and off for the rest of the bus journey, Ka found out that the man had just taken his mother to Erzurum because the hospital in Kars wasn’t good enough, that he was a livestock dealer who served the villages in the Kars vicinity, that he’d been through hard times but hadn’t become a rebel, and that—for mysterious reasons he did not disclose to Ka—he was sorry not for himself but for his country and was happy to see that a well-read, educated gentleman like Ka had taken the trouble to travel all the way from Istanbul to find out more about his city’s problems. There was something so noble in the plainness of his speech and the pride of his bearing that Ka felt respect for him.

  His very presence was calming. Not once during twelve years in Germany had Ka known such inner peace; it had been a long time si
nce he had had the fleeting pleasure of empathizing with someone weaker than himself. He remembered trying to see the world through the eyes of a man who could feel love and compassion. As he did the same now, he no longer felt so fearful of the relentless blizzard. He knew they were not destined to roll off a cliff. The bus would be late, but it would reach its destination.

  When, at ten o’clock at night, three hours behind schedule, the bus began its crawl through the snow-covered streets of Kars, Ka couldn’t recognize the city at all. He couldn’t even see the railroad station, where he’d arrived twenty years earlier by steam engine, nor could he see any sign of the hotel to which his driver had taken him that day (following a full tour of the city): the Hotel Republic, “a telephone in every room.” It was as if everything had been erased, lost beneath the snow. He saw a hint of the old days in the horse-drawn carriages here and there, waiting in garages, but the city itself looked much poorer and sadder than he remembered. Through the frozen windows of the bus, Ka saw the same concrete apartments that had sprung up all over Turkey during the past ten years, and the same Plexiglas panels; he also saw banners emblazoned with campaign slogans strung above every street.

  He stepped off the bus. As his foot sank into the soft blanket of snow, a sharp blast of cold air shot up past the cuffs of his trousers. He’d booked a room at the Snow Palace Hotel. When he went to ask the conductor where it was, he thought two of the faces among the travelers waiting for their luggage looked familiar, but with the snow falling so thick and fast he couldn’t work out who they were.

  He saw them again in the Green Pastures Café, where he went after setting into his hotel: a tired and careworn but still handsome and eyecatching man with a fat but animated woman who seemed to be his lifelong companion. Ka had seen them perform in Istanbul in the seventies, when they were leading lights of the revolutionary theater world. The man’s name was Sunay Zaim. As he watched the couple, he let his mind wander and was eventually able to work out that the woman reminded him of a classmate from primary school. There were a number of other men at their table, and they all had the deathly pallor that speaks of a life on the stage; what, he wondered, was a small theater company doing in this forgotten city on a snowy night in February? Before leaving the restaurant, which twenty years ago had been full of government officials in coats and ties, Ka thought he saw one of the heroes of the seventies’ militant left sitting at another table. But it was as if a blanket of snow had settled over his memories of this man, just as it had settled over the restaurant and the failing, gasping city itself.