Snow Read online

  At that point another policeman joined us at the table to tell me that all the gossip about him was untrue. “I don’t have gray eyes!” he said. He had no idea what it meant to have gray eyes. He’d loved the late Teslime with all his heart, and if she hadn’t committed suicide they would certainly have married. It was then I remembered from Ka’s notebooks how, four years ago, Saffet had confiscated Fazιl’s student identity card at the public library. It occurred to me that both Saffet and Fazιl had long forgotten the transaction.

  When Fazιl and I returned to the snowy streets, the two policemen came out with us—whether in a spirit of friendship or professional curiosity, I couldn’t tell—and as we walked, they spoke unbidden about their lives, the emptiness of life in general, the pain of love and growing old. Neither had a hat, and when the snowflakes landed on each man’s thinning white hair, they didn’t melt. When I asked whether the city was now even poorer and emptier than four years earlier, Fazιl said everyone had been watching a lot more television in recent years, and that, rather than spend their days sitting in a teahouse, the unemployed now preferred to sit at home watching free films beamed from all over the world by satellite. Everyone in the city had scrimped and saved up to buy these white dishes about the size of stewpot lids now hitched to the edge of every window; this, he said, was the only new development in the city.

  We stopped off at the New Life Pastry Shop, where we each bought one of the delicious nut-filled crescent rolls that had cost the director of the Institute of Education his life: It would be our evening meal. When the police had ascertained that we were heading for the station, they said their farewells, and as Fazιl and I walked on past shuttered shops, empty teahouses, abandoned Armenian mansions, and brightly glistening shop windows, I looked up from time to time at the snow-laden branches of the chestnut and poplar trees above streets unevenly illuminated by the odd neon light. We took the side streets since the police weren’t following us. The snow, which had given signs of abating, now began to fall more thickly. It may have been the emptiness of the streets, or it may have been my pain at the prospect of leaving Kars, but I began to feel guilty, as if I were somehow abandoning Fazιl to solitary life in this empty city. I could see that the icicles hanging from the bare branches of two oleander trees had intertwined to form a tulle curtain; in a nest of ice I saw a sparrow fluttering; it took off into swirls of giant snowflakes and flew away over our heads. The blanket of fresh white snow had buried the empty streets in a silence so deep that, apart from our footsteps, all we could hear was our own breathing. The longer we walked, the more labored and thunderous our breathing became, the shops and houses remaining silent as a dream.

  I stopped for a moment in the middle of a street to watch a single snowflake fall through the night to its ultimate resting place. At that same moment, Fazιl pointed above the entrance of the Divine Light Teahouse: There, high up on the wall, was a faintly lettered poster, now four years old:

  HUMAN BEINGS ARE GOD’S MASTERPIECES

  AND

  SUICIDE IS BLASPHEMY

  “This teahouse is popular with the police, so no one dared touch that poster,” said Fazιl.

  “Do you feel as if you’re God’s masterpiece?” I asked.

  “No. Only Necip was God’s masterpiece. Ever since God took his life, I’ve let go my anxieties about atheism and my desire to love God more. May God forgive me.”

  The snowflakes falling so slowly now seemed suspended in the sky, and we did not speak again until we’d reached the train station. The beautiful stone station house, the early republican structure I’d mentioned in The Black Book, was gone now; they’d replaced it with the typical concrete monstrosity. We found Muhtar and the charcoal-colored dog waiting for us.

  Ten minutes before the train’s scheduled departure, Serdar Bey arrived with some back issues of the Border City Gazette that mentioned Ka. Giving them to me, he asked me if I could take care not to say anything bad about Kars or its troubles, the city or its people, when I wrote my book. When he saw Serdar Bey bringing out a present, a nervous, almost guilty-looking Muhtar handed me a plastic shopping bag; inside was a bottle of cologne, a little wheel of the famous Kars cheese, and a signed copy of his first poetry collection, printed in Erzurum at his own expense.

  I bought my ticket and a sandwich for the little dog my friend had mentioned in his poem. The dog wagged his curly tail happily as he approached me, and I was still feeding him the sandwich when I saw Turgut Bey and Kadife rushing into the station. They’d only just heard from Zahide that I’d gone. We exchanged a few pleasantries about the ticket agent, the journey, the snow. Turgut Bey reached shamefacedly into his pocket and pulled out a new edition of First Love, the Turgenev novel he’d translated from the French while he was in prison. Ömercan was sitting on Kadife’s lap, and I stroked his head. His mother’s head was wrapped in one of her elegant Istanbul scarves, and the snow it had collected was falling from the edges. Afraid to look too long into his wife’s beautiful eyes, I turned back to Fazιl and asked him whether he knew now what he might want to say to my readers if ever I was to write a book set in Kars.

  “Nothing.” His voice was determined.

  When he saw my face fall, he relented. “I did think of something, but you may not like it,” he said. “If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I’d like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away.”

  “But no one believes in that way what he reads in a novel,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, they do,” he cried. “If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you would put in what I’ve just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds.”

  I promised I would put what he’d said into my novel.

  When Kadife saw me eyeing the station entrance, she came toward me. “I hear you have a beautiful little daughter called Rüya,” she said. “My sister isn’t coming, but she asked me to send warm wishes to you and your daughter. And I brought you this memento of my short theatrical career.” She gave me a photograph of herself with Sunay Zaim on the stage of the National Theater.

  The stationmaster blew the whistle. I think I was the only one boarding the train. One by one, I embraced them. At the last moment, Fazιl passed me a plastic bag; inside were the copies he’d made of the videos and a ballpoint pen that had once belonged to Necip.

  By now the train was moving, and it took some effort to jump into the car with my hands so full of presents. They were all standing on the platform waving, and I leaned out the window to wave back. It was only at the last moment that I saw the charcoal-colored dog, its pink tongue hanging from its mouth. It ran happily alongside me, right to the end of the platform. They all disappeared into the thick-falling snow.

  I sat down and as I looked out the window through the snow at the orange lights of the outermost houses of the outlying neighborhoods, the shabby rooms full of people watching television, and the last snow-covered rooftops, the thin and elegantly quivering ribbons of smoke rising from the broken chimneys at last seemed a smudge through my tears.

  April 1999–December 2001

  THE ORDER IN WHICH

  KA WROTE HIS POEMS

  1. Snow

  2. Hidden Symmetry

  3. Stars and Their Friends

  4. The Chocolate Box

  5. The Place Where God Does Not Exist

  6. The Night of the Revolution

  7. Dream Streets

  8. Suicide and Power

  9. Privations and Difficulties

  10. I, Ka

  11. I Am Going to Be Happy

  12. All Humanity and the Stars

  13. Heaven

  14. To Be Shot and Killed

  15. Chess

  16. Love

  17. Dog

>   18. Jealousy

  19. The Place Where the World Ends