by Orhan Pamuk
“We’ll see about that,” said Z Demirkol. He took out his gun and fired two shots in the air. “Take this man and spread him against the wall,” he said. “If he makes any more trouble we’ll execute him.”
No one believed him, but Demirkol’s two assistants dutifully took Recai Bey and spread him against the wall. Not wishing to damage any windows, they pushed him slightly to their right. Because the snow was very soft in that corner, the manager tripped and fell. The men apologized and helped him back to his feet. They removed his tie and used it to bind his arms behind him. Meanwhile, they announced that this was a cleanup operation and all enemies of the fatherland would be eliminated from the streets of Kars by morning.
When Z Demirkol gave the order, they cocked their rifles and, like a firing squad, lined up in front of Recai Bey. Just then there were gunshots in the distance. (These came from the dormitory garden of the religious high school, where soldiers were firing shots in the air to frighten the students.) They all fell silent and waited. For the first time all day, the snow was abating. The silence was extraordinarily beautiful—bewitching, even. After a few moments, one of the men said that the old man (who wasn’t old at all) was entitled to a last cigarette. They put a cigarette into Recai Bey’s mouth and lit it for him; perhaps having grown a bit restless while the manager was smoking, they started kicking the door of the phone office and ramming it with the butts of their rifles.
“I can’t bear to see you destroy state property,” said the manager from the wall. “Undo my hands and I’ll let you in.”
Once the men were inside, Ka went on his way. He continued to hear the odd gunshot, but he now paid no more attention than he paid to the howling dogs. His whole mind was fixed on the beauty of the silent night. For a time, he tarried before an empty old Armenian house. Then he stopped at an Armenian church to pay his respects; the trees in its gardens were dripping with icicles and looked like ghosts. The yellow streetlamps cast such a deathly glow over the city that it looked like a strange sad dream, and for some reason Ka felt guilty. Still, he was mightily thankful to be present in this silent and forgotten country, now filling him with poems.
A little farther on, he happened on an agitated mother standing at a window and telling her son to come home; the boy was saying he was just going out to see what was going on. Ka passed between them. At the corner of Faikbey Avenue, he saw two men about his age coming rushing out of a shoemaker’s shop; one was rather large, the other slim as a child. Twice a week for the past twelve years, each of these two lovers had been telling his wife that he was going to stop in at the coffeehouse, and they would then meet secretly in this shop that stank of glue; but hearing on the upstairs neighbor’s television set that a curfew had been announced, the couple panicked. Ka turned into Faikbey Avenue; two streets down, opposite a shop he remembered from his morning walk—he had stopped at the trout counter just outside its doors—he saw a tank. Like the street, the tank seemed suffused with a magical silence; it was so still and deathly that he thought it must be empty. But the door opened, and a head popped out to tell him to go home at once. Ka asked the head if it could direct him to the Snow Palace Hotel, but before the soldier could answer Ka noticed across the street the darkened offices of the Border City Gazette and knew he could work out the way to go.
The lights in the hotel lobby were blazing; walking into that warmth was like coming home. A number of guests were in pajamas and puffing on cigarettes, watching the lobby television, and it was clear from their expressions that something extraordinary had happened, but like a child eager to avoid a dreaded subject, Ka refused to notice. After letting his eyes skate swiftly over the scene, he proceeded lightheartedly into Turgut Bey’s apartment. The whole group was still at the table and still watching television. When Turgut Bey saw Ka, he jumped to his feet, scolding him for being so late and telling him how worried they’d all been. He went on to say a few other things, but by now Ka’s gaze had met Ïpek’s.
“You read your poem beautifully,” Ïpek said. “I felt very proud.”
Ka knew at once that he would remember this moment until he died. He felt such joy that, even with the other girls’ tedious questions and Turgut Bey’s exhausted hectoring, he had to fight back tears.
“It looks as if the army is up to something,” said Turgut Bey. To judge from his voice he was in a foul temper, unable to decide whether this was good or bad.
The table was in disarray. Someone had stubbed out a cigarette in an orange peel—most probably it was Ïpek. Ka remembered seeing Aunt Munire, a distant young relative of his father’s, doing the same thing when he was a child, and although she had never once forgotten to say madam when speaking to Ka’s mother, everyone despised her for her bad manners.
“They’ve just announced a curfew,” said Turgut Bey. “Tell us what happened at the theater.”
“I have no interest in politics,” said Ka.
Although everyone and especially Ïpek was aware that this was another voice inside him speaking, Ka still felt sorry.
All he wanted to do now was to sit quietly and look at Ïpek, but he knew it was out of the question; the house, ablaze with revolutionary fever, made him uncomfortable. It wasn’t just the bad memories of the military takeovers during his childhood; it was the fact that everyone was talking at once. Hande had fallen asleep in the corner. Kadife went back to the television screen that Ka refused to watch, and Turgut Bey seemed at once pleased and disturbed that these were interesting times.
For a while Ka sat next to Ïpek and held her hand; he asked her without success to come up to his room. When it became too painful to keep his distance, he went upstairs alone and hung his coat with great care on the hook behind the door. There was a familiar smell of wood in his room. As he lit the small lamp at the head of the bed, a wave of sleep passed over him; he could barely keep his eyes open; he felt himself floating, as if the whole room, the whole hotel, were floating with him. This is why the new poem, which he jotted down in his notebook line by line as it came to him, portrayed the bed, the hotel in which he lay, and the snowy city of Kars as a single divine unity.
The title he gave this poem was “The Night of the Revolution.” It began with his childhood memories of other coups, when the whole family would wake up to sit around the radio, listening to military marches; it went on to describe the holiday meals they’d had together. This was why he would later decide this poem was not about a coup at all and assign it to the branch of the snowflake entitled Memory. One of its important ideas was the poet’s ability to shut off part of his mind even while the world is in turmoil. If this meant that a poet had no more connection to the present than a ghost did, such was the price a poet had to pay for his art! After he finished his poem, Ka lit a cigarette and went to the window.
CHAPTER TWENTY
A Great Day for Our Nation!
WHILE KA SLEPT AND WHEN HE WOKE THE NEXT MORNING
Ka slept for exactly ten hours and twenty minutes without stirring once. In one of his dreams he watched the snow falling. Just before, through the gap in the half-drawn curtains, the snow had begun to fall again onto the white street below, and it looked exceptionally soft where the lamp lit the pink signpost of the Snow Palace Hotel; perhaps it was because this strange and magically soft snow absorbed the sound of the gunfights all over Kars that night that Ka was able to sleep so soundly.
Only two streets away, a tank and two army trucks attacked the religious high school dormitory. There was a skirmish—not in front of the main iron door, where the fine Armenian craftsmanship is visible to this day, but by the wooden door leading to the common rooms and the senior dormitory; hoping to frighten the boys, the soldiers who gathered in the snow-covered garden fired straight up into the night sky. All the hardened political Islamists in the student body had attended the performance at the National Theater, and because they had been arrested on the spot, the only boys in the dormitory were either raw recruits or else had no interest in politics; but t
he scenes on television had made them rather giddy, and so—barricading the door with tables and desks and shouting slogans like “God is great!”—they’d holed up to wait. One or two of the crazy ones, having stolen a few knives and forks from the kitchen, decided to throw the utensils at the soldiers from the bathroom window and began to horse around with the sole gun in their possession; so the standoff ended in gunfire, with one beautiful slip of a boy—nothing but innocence in his face—falling to his death, a bullet in his forehead.
Most of the city was still awake, their eyes glued not to the windows and the streets below but to their television sets. The live broadcast had continued Sunay Zaim announced that this was not a play but a “revolution”; as the soldiers were rounding up the troublemakers and carrying out the dead and wounded, there appeared onstage a man well known to all of Kars. This was Umman Bey, the deputy governor; in a formal and uneasy voice that nevertheless inspired confidence, he expressed perhaps for the first time a certain impatience about this live broadcast and announced a curfew over all of Kars until noon the following day. When he left the stage, no one else appeared, and so for the next twenty minutes the only things the city’s people could see on their screens were the curtains of the National Theater; there was then a break in transmission, after which the same old curtains reappeared on everyone’s screen. Sometime later, the people of Kars would see the curtains were opening again, very slowly, as the whole performance was rebroadcast from the very beginning.
Seated in front of their sets, struggling to work out what was going on, most began to fear the worst. The very tired or half drunk found themselves revisiting earlier times of civic turmoil; others feared a return to death, disappearance, and the rule of night. Those with no interest in politics saw the rebroadcast as an opportunity to make some sense of what had happened that night—just as I would attempt to do many years later—and so they concentrated once more on watching the television.
As the people of Kars were watching Funda Eser’s rendition of the prime minister bowing tearfully to every dark desire of her American clientele, and later, as she concluded her spoof of a famous commercial with a riotous belly dance, a specially trained security team raided the branch headquarters of the People’s Freedom Party in the Halιl Paşa Arcade, arresting the Kurdish janitor (the only person there at that hour), searching the cabinets and the file drawers, and confiscating every bit of paper they could find. The same police unit rounded up the party’s executive committee—they knew from an earlier raid all the identities and addresses—and, charging them with subversion and Kurdish nationalism, took them all into custody.
These were not the only Kurdish nationalists in Kars. The three corpses discovered early that morning in a burned-out Murat taxi not yet covered with snow on the road to Digor were—according to official reports—Kurdish nationalist guerillas. The police claimed that the three young men had been trying to infiltrate the city for months, but, panicked at events of the previous evening, they decided to jump into a taxi and escape into the mountains. When they discovered the road closed they lost hope; in an ensuing quarrel, one of them detonated a bomb, killing all three. The mother of one boy, a cleaner at the hospital, later submitted a petition alleging that unidentified armed agents had rung the doorbell and taken her son away, and the taxi driver’s older brother filed his own charge to the effect that his brother was no nationalist, not even a Kurd. Both petitions, however, were ignored.
By this time, everyone in Kars had become aware of the coup under way—if it wasn’t a coup, one look at the two tanks wandering the city like ponderous dark ghosts was enough to confirm that something very odd was happening—but as they were also watching the performance on their television screens, and as the snow continued to fall apparently without end, their windows like a scene from an old fairy tale, the tanks provoked little fear. Politically active people were the only ones who were at all anxious.
Consider, for example, Sadullah Bey. A journalist held in the highest esteem by the Kurds of Kars and a well-known collector of folklore, he’d seen his share of military takeovers, so the moment he heard of the curfew, he began to prepare for the days in prison he knew lay ahead. After packing his bag with essentials—the blue pajamas he couldn’t sleep without, the medicine for his prostate problem, his sleeping pills, his wool cap and socks, the photograph of his daughter in Istanbul (with his smiling grandson on her lap), and the painstaking notes he had taken for a book on Kurdish dirges—he sat down for a glass of tea with his wife, they watched Funda Eser do her second belly dance, and they waited. When the doorbell rang much later, in the middle of the night, he bade his wife farewell, picked up his suitcase, and headed for the door; seeing no one, he stepped out into the street—where in the sulfur light of the streetlamps he let his mind return to the glorious winters of his childhood, when he would skate across the frozen Kars River, when the silent streets were covered with this same beautiful snow—and as he stood there, someone pumped two bullets into his head and his chest, killing him on the spot.
Months later, when most of the snow had melted, the remains of a number of others similarly murdered that night were discovered, but—like the Kars press in the wake of the coup—I don’t want to upset my readers any more than necessary, so I won’t go into details. As for the rumors that the unknown perpetrators were Z Demirkol and his friends, I can only say that—at least in respect to whatever may have occurred in the early hours of the evening—these allegations are untrue. Although it took longer than expected, they did manage to sever the phone lines and safeguard the Kars Border Television transmission in support of the revolution; by night’s end, all their energy was channeled into what had by then become their main obsession: finding a “deep-voiced folksinger to celebrate the heroes of the borderlands.” After all, this would never measure up as a real revolution until all the radio and television stations in the city were broadcasting celebratory folk songs.
After asking at the barracks, the hospitals, the science high school, and the teahouses, they finally found a folksinger among the firemen on duty at the fire station; he was sure they would either arrest him or riddle him with bullets, but they whisked him down to the television studio.
When Ka woke the next morning, it was the fireman’s sonorous voice he heard coming from the television in the lobby through the walls, the plaster partitions, and the half-drawn curtains. Through those same curtains also came an extraordinarily strong and wonderfully strange shaft of snow light. He’d slept soundly, even awoke relaxed, but he’d not risen from the bed before feeling a pang of guilt so strong it sapped all his strength and certainty. He rallied by pretending he was just an ordinary hotel guest, in another city and another bathroom; after he had washed, shaved, and changed, he picked up his door key by its heavy copper fob and went down to the lobby.
When he saw the folksinger on the screen and the other guests conversing in whispers as they watched, Ka had a measure of the silence that now engulfed the city; his mind returned to the previous evening, and only now did he begin to piece together all the things his mind had put away until this moment. He smiled coolly at the boy behind the reception desk; like a harried traveler vexed with the city’s violent political infighting and determined to leave at the first opportunity, he headed straight for the adjoining dining room and ordered breakfast. In the corner an enormous teapot was steaming above a samovar; on the serving table was a plate of Kars cheese sliced very thin and a bowl of olives that, having long since lost their shine, looked rather deadly.
Ka sat down at a table next to the window. Through the gaps in the tulle curtain he gazed out at the snow-covered scene in all its beauty. The peacefulness in the empty street took Ka back to the curfews of his childhood and his youth. The census days, the days devoted to checking the electoral roll, the days given over to hunting for enemies of the state, the days when the military marched in and everyone would gather around their televisions and radios—he recalled them all, one by one. As th
e other guests sat listening to the martial strains on the radio, as they listened to the news bulletins of martial law, the curfew, and the list of prohibitions, all Ka wanted was to go outside and play in the empty streets. As a child he’d loved those martial-law days like holidays, when his aunts, his uncles, and his neighbors would come together in a common cause. It was perhaps to hide the fact that they felt happier and more secure during military coups that the middle- and upper-middle-class families of Ka’s childhood in Istanbul were in the habit of quietly ridiculing the silly actions that inevitably attended any military takeover—the whitewashing of the city’s cobblestones to make the whole city look like a barracks, or the rough-handed soldiers and policemen who’d seize anyone with long hair or a beard. While the Istanbul rich had a terrible fear of soldiers, they also knew the deprivations under which they lived—the harsh discipline and the low wages—and on this account they despised them.
The street outside looked as if it had been abandoned for centuries, so when Ka looked down to see an army truck turning into it, this sight too took him back to his childhood; like the boy he’d once been, he sat there transfixed.
A man who looked like a cattle dealer entered the room, came over to Ka, threw his arms around him, and kissed him on both cheeks.
“Congratulations! This is a great day for our nation!”
Ka remembered how the grown-ups in his life would congratulate each other after military coups, in much the same way that they congratulated one another during the old religious holidays. He returned the compliment, muttering a few words.
The door to the kitchen swung open and Ka felt all the blood in his body rise to his head: Ïpek was walking into the room. They came eye to eye, and for a moment Ka had no idea what to do. He decided he should stand up, but just then Ïpek smiled at him and turned to the man who had just sat down. She was carrying a tray with a cup and a plate.