Snow Read online

  “What are you doing over there?” Ïpek asked.

  “I’m looking at the snow, dear.”

  It seemed to him that Ïpek somehow knew he could see more than just beauty in the geometry of the snowflakes, but at the same time he knew this could not be so. Part of him knew she was not altogether happy to see his attention drawn elsewhere. Up to now he had been the pursuer, and his evident desire had made him feel uncomfortably vulnerable, so Ka was pleased to see the tables turned: From this he deduced that making love had gained him a slight advantage.

  “What are you thinking?” asked Ïpek.

  “I’m thinking about my mother,” said Ka, at first not knowing why he said this, for though she had just died, his mother was actually far from his thoughts. Later, returning to this moment, he would explain it by saying, “My mother was on my mind throughout my visit to Kars.”

  “So what are you remembering about your mother?”

  “I am remembering how we were standing at the window one winter night, looking out at the snow, and she ran her hands through my hair.”

  “Were you happy when you were a child?”

  “People don’t know when they’re happy, at least not at the moment. I decided years later that I’d been happy as a child, but the truth is, I wasn’t. On the other hand, I was not unhappy in the way I was during the years that followed. I just wasn’t interested in happiness at first.”

  “When did you start becoming interested?”

  Ka longed to say never but he didn’t, partly because it wasn’t true and partly because it seemed too aggressive. He was still tempted, if only because it might impress Ïpek, but there were weightier things on his mind now than the desire to make an impression.

  “A moment arrived when I was so unhappy I could barely move, and that’s when I began to think about happiness,” Ka told her. Was this the right thing for him to say? The silence made him uneasy. If he told her how unhappy he’d been in Frankfurt, how in the world would he convince her to go back there with him? As a wild and nervous wind scattered the snowflakes outside, the panic that had driven Ka from the bed now returned with a vengeance, and more fiercely than ever his stomach ached with love and the agony of waiting. The happiness he’d felt only moments earlier now gave way to the awful certainty that he was going to lose it. In the place of happiness, doubts mounted. He wanted to ask Ïpek, Are you coming with me to Frankfurt? but he was already afraid of not getting the answer he wanted.

  He returned to bed, pressed himself up against Ïpek’s back, and embraced her with all his strength. “There’s a store in the market,” he said. “It was playing a very old song called ‘Roberta,’ by Peppino di Capri. Where do you think they found it?”

  “There are still a few old families hanging on in Kars,” said Ïpek. “Eventually the parents die and the children sell off their belongings and leave, and so all sorts of things turn up in the market that seem very out of place in the poor city we see today. There used to be a junk dealer who’d come from Istanbul every spring, buy everything cheap, and cart it off. But now even he’s stopped coming.”

  For a moment Ka thought he had recaptured his earlier unequaled bliss, but it just wasn’t the same as before. Once again, he succumbed to the fear that it might be lost to him forever; everything before his eyes increased his panic; he was never going to convince Ïpek to return to Frankfurt with him, that much was clear.

  “So, darling, I think it’s time for me to get up.”

  Even when she used the word darling, even when she kissed him sweetly, Ka still could find no peace. “When can we meet again?”

  “I’m worried about my father. The police might have followed him.”

  “I’m worried about that, too,” said Ka. “But first I’d like to know when we can meet again.”

  “I’m not coming to your room if my father’s in the hotel.”

  “Oh, everything’s changed now,” Ka said. But as he watched the silent ease with which Ïpek dressed in the dark, he was hit by the fear that nothing had changed at all. “Why don’t I move to another hotel? Then we could see each other right away,” he said.

  There was a devastating silence. Now a new wave of panic overtook him, and a helpless jealousy ran through him. He allowed himself to wonder whether Ïpek might have another lover. Part of him was still sane enough to remember that this sort of jealousy was commonplace in the early stages of an untested love affair, but a stronger voice inside him told him to wrap his arms around her with all the strength he could muster and devote every ounce of his energy to overcoming the obstacles still standing between them. He knew it was a matter of urgency, but he also knew that if he acted too hastily it might make things awkward for him. Uncertain, he stayed silent.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  We’re Not Stupid, We’re Just Poor

  THE SECRET MEETING AT THE HOTEL ASIA

  When Zahide rushed out to the horse-drawn carriage that was to take Turgut Bey and Kadife to the secret meeting at the Hotel Asia, the light was failing and so Ka, watching from the window, could not quite make out what the faithful servant had in her hands. In fact, it was an old pair of woolen gloves.

  Uncertain as to what he should wear to the meeting, Turgut Bey had taken the two jackets he had from his teaching days—one black, one gray—and spread them out on the bed with the felt hat he saved for national holidays and inspection visits and the checked tie he had not worn for years except to amuse Zahide’s grandson. He would have spent a good deal more time poring over the other elements of his wardrobe and the contents of his drawers, but, seeing him acting like a dreamy girl wondering what her father would let her wear to the ball, Kadife stepped in to make the final selection. After buttoning his shirt for him, she helped him on with his jacket and his coat; then came the pair of white dog-leather gloves that she struggled to pull onto his small hands.

  At this moment Turgut Bey remembered his old woolen gloves. Stubbornly insisting that these were the ones he had to wear, he sent Ïpek and Kadife rushing around the house frantically to search every wardrobe and every chest from top to bottom; upon finally finding them, they saw how many holes the moths had made, and they threw the gloves aside. But once he was ensconced in the carriage, Turgut Bey insisted yet again that he wasn’t leaving the house without them; years ago, he explained, when his left-wing activities had landed him in prison, his dear departed wife had brought him these gloves, knitted especially for him. Kadife, who knew her father better than he knew himself, saw the matter for what it was: If the old man was insisting on these gloves as a talisman, he must be very scared indeed.

  After the gloves had arrived and the carriage set off into the snow, Kadife asked her father to tell her more about his prison days; she listened to his stories (how he’d cried whenever he received letters from his wife, how he’d taught himself French, how he’d worn these very gloves to bed on winter nights) as intently as if she were hearing them for the first time, occasionally interrupting to say, “What a brave man you are, Father!” And then he did what he always did when he heard his daughters utter these words (which over the last few years, he’d hardly heard at all): Fighting back tears, Turgut Bey enfolded Kadife in his arms and, shuddering, kissed her cheeks.

  When the horse-drawn carriage reached the Hotel Asia, they saw that the lights were still burning in the street outside.

  As he stepped out of the carriage, Turgut Bey said, “Look at all these new shops. Let’s see what they have in the windows.” Kadife knew he was dragging his feet out of fear, so she was careful not to hurry him. Turgut Bey proposed they stop for a cup of linden tea—if a detective was following them, he said, they might as well give him a run for his money—so they made their way into a teahouse, where they sat silently watching a race on television. Just as they were leaving, Turgut Bey spotted his old barber, so they turned around and went back inside, so as not to be seen going to the meeting.

  “Do you think we’re too late now? Do you think we’ll off
end them if we don’t go at all?” The fat barber at a nearby table seemed to be eavesdropping, so Turgut Bey spoke to Kadife in whispers. He took her arm, but instead of heading straight for the back courtyard, he now went into a stationery store, where he picked out a navy-blue pen. When they finally reached the back courtyard of Ersin Electric and Plumbing Supplies and turned toward the dark door that was the back entrance to the Hotel Asia, Kadife saw the blood drain from her father’s face.

  Not a thing was stirring at the back entrance to the hotel. They stuck close together; no one was following them. They took a few steps inside, but in the darkness Kadife had to grope her way to the stairs that led to the lobby. “Don’t let go of my arm,” said Turgut Bey.

  The lobby was in semidarkness, its high windows hidden behind heavy drapes. There was a weak, dirty lamp on the reception desk, which barely illuminated the face of the unshaven, unkempt clerk standing behind it. In the darkness beyond the desk they could make out a few other shadowy figures wandering about the lobby and gliding up and down the stairs. These were either plainclothes police or black marketeers who dealt in livestock or lumber or undocumented workers smuggled across the border. Eighty years earlier, this hotel had been popular with Russian businessmen; after the revolution, most of its custom came from Istanbul Turks and aristocratic English double agents heading into Armenia to spy on the Soviet Union; now it was full of women who’d come over from Georgia and the Ukraine to work as prostitutes and petty smugglers. By and large it was men from the villages around Kars who rented rooms for these women; they’d live there together during the day, almost as married couples, and after the men had gone back to their villages on the last minibus of the day, the women would come downstairs to drink coffee and cognac in the dark recesses of the bar.

  As Turgut Bey and Kadife made their way among the wooden chairs once draped with red tapestry, they found themselves face-to-face with one of these tatty blondes; Turgut Bey turned to Kadife and whispered, “The Grand Hotel, where Ismet Pasha stayed when he was negotiating the Treaty of Lausanne, was just as cosmopolitan as this,” and with that he took the navy-blue pen out of his pocket. “I’m going to do just what Ismet Pasha did in Lausanne: I’m going to sign the statement with a brand-new pen.” For the longest time, he wouldn’t move; it wasn’t clear to Kadife if he was stalling or listening for noise on the stairs. And when they finally arrived at Room 307, Turgut Bey said, “Let’s just sign this thing and leave.”

  It was so crowded inside that Kadife at first thought they’d come to the wrong room. Seeing Blue sitting glumly near the window with two other Islamist militants, she took her father across the room and sat him beside them. A naked lightbulb hung from the ceiling; on the table was a lamp in the shape of a fish, but the room was still inadequately lit. The fish was made of Bakelite; propped on its tail fins, it held the lightbulb in its mouth, and a state-owned microphone was hidden in one of its eyes.

  Fazιl was in the room too; the moment he saw Kadife, he jumped to his feet, and when the others rose to pay their respects to Turgut Bey, he remained standing. He looked stunned, as if someone had cast a spell on him. A few in the room thought he was about to speak, but Kadife didn’t even notice him. Her eyes were on Blue and Turgut Bey, whose eyes were on each other, and the atmosphere was tense.

  Blue had decided the West would take the statement more seriously if the Kurdish nationalist who signed it was also an atheist. But the thin pale teenager who’d reluctantly agreed to sign had a difference of opinion with his Kurdish nationalist associates as to the wording. Now the three of them were waiting sullenly for their turn to speak. Since the associations of angry, hopeless, jobless youths known to admire the Kurdish guerillas from the mountains tended to convene in the houses of individual members, and since association directors were often being arrested, beaten, and tortured following frequent raids on meetings, it was hard to find these youngsters after the coup. But the three young Kurds had an even more pressing problem: The mountain warriors might find their very presence in this room suspect. They might decide that these young men had it too easy in these warm city rooms and accuse them of accommodation with the Turkish Republic. In fact, the charge that the associations were not sending their fair share of guerilla recruits up to the mountains had demoralized the handful of members who had not yet been arrested.

  Also at the meeting were two old-wave socialists, both in their thirties. The possibility of a joint statement to the German press had been conveyed to them by the Kurdish youths, who’d gone to the socialists to brag a little and also to ask for advice. Socialist militancy had once cast a long shadow over Kars, but now it was spent; these days no socialist would dare set an ambush, kill a policeman, or start a mail-bomb campaign without first seeking the support of the Kurdish guerillas, and the result was an epidemic of premature decrepitude and widespread depression in their once-formidable ranks. Now here were these old militants who’d come uninvited to the meeting, having heard there were still a lot of Marxists in Europe. At the far end of the room, just beside the oldest socialist, who looked bored, sat a relaxed, clean-faced comrade, who was in high spirits, knowing he would relay the details of the meeting to the local MİT branch. His intentions weren’t malign; he did this to help the associations head off police harassment. He would inform the state of any activities he didn’t like—most of which seemed unnecessary in retrospect anyway—but in his heart of hearts, he was proud that there were rebels out there fighting for the cause, so proud, in fact, that he would brag about the shootings, the kidnappings, the beatings, the bombings, and the assassinations to anyone who would listen.

  At first no one spoke, so sure were they that the room was bugged and that there were several informers present. Or if they spoke, it was with a nod in the direction of the window to note that it was still snowing, or to admonish someone for stubbing out cigarettes on the floor. The silence lasted until a Kurdish granny unnoticed until that moment stood up and told the story of her grandson’s disappearance (they had come in the middle of the night and taken him away). Even only half listening to this disappearance story, Turgut Bey felt uneasy. He was as appalled to hear of the abduction and murder of Kurdish teenagers as he was angry to hear them described as innocents. Holding her father’s hand, Kadife tried to make sense of the disgust and contempt in Blue’s face. Blue felt he had walked into a trap, but fearing what people would say if he left, he remained, against his better judgment. And then: (1) the Islamist youth who was sitting next to Fazιl, and whose connection to the murder of the director of the Institute of Education would be proved months later, began to argue that the director had been assassinated by a government agent; (2) the revolutionaries in the room made a long announcement about a hunger strike begun by their friends in prison; and (3) the three youths from the Kurdish association read out an even longer statement, in which they threatened to withdraw their signatures from the joint declaration unless the Frankfurter Rundschau published it, thus restoring Kurdish culture and literature to its proper place in world history.

  When the granny, who had come to submit a petition on behalf of the missing teenager, asked where this German journalist was, Kadife rose to explain: Ka was indeed in Kars, she said, in a reassuring voice, but had stayed away from the meeting lest his presence cast any doubt on the impartiality of the statement. The others being unaccustomed to seeing a woman address a political meeting with such confidence, she quickly gained their respect. On hearing that Kadife would do everything in her power to get her story published in the German papers, the granny threw her arms around Kadife and began to cry, and then gave her a piece of paper on which someone had written her grandson’s name.

  The well-meaning leftist-militant informer chose this moment to present the first draft, which he had written in longhand in a notebook; as he read it, he did his best to look inscrutable.

  Almost everyone warmed to the title at once: “Announcement to the People of Europe about the Events in Kars.” Remembering h
ow he felt at that moment, Fazιl would later smile and tell Ka, “This was the first time it ever occurred to me that our small city might one day have a role to play on the world stage.” (Ka would later use these very words in his poem “All Humanity and the Stars.”)

  Only Blue adamantly opposed the title. “We’re not speaking to Europe,” he said, “we’re speaking to all humanity. Our friends should not be surprised to learn we have been unable to publish our statement—not just in Kars and Istanbul but also in Frankfurt. The people of Europe are not our friends, they’re our enemies. And it’s not because we’re their enemies, it’s because they instinctively despise us.”

  The leftist in charge of the first draft interrupted to clarify that it wasn’t all humanity that despised them, just the European bourgeoisie. The poor and unemployed were their brothers, he reminded them, but no one other than his fellow socialist was persuaded.

  “No one in Europe is as poor as we are,” said one of the three Kurdish youths.

  “My son, have you ever been to Europe?” asked Turgut Bey. “I haven’t had the opportunity yet, but my mother’s brother is a worker in Germany.”

  This provoked some laughter. Turgut Bey straightened his chair. “Although the word means much to me, I have never been to Europe either,” he said. “This is not a laughing matter. Please, would all those in the room who have been to Europe raise their hands.”

  Apart from Blue, who had spent many years in Germany, no one raised his hand.

  “But we all know what Europe has come to mean,” Turgut Bey continued. “Europe is our future, and the future of our humanity. So if this gentleman”—here he pointed at Blue—“thinks we should say all humanity instead of Europe, we might as well change our statement accordingly.”