by Orhan Pamuk
“The oranges were very cheap, I couldn’t help myself,” said the detective. He thanked Ka for waiting, adding that he had proved himself to be well-intentioned by choosing not to give him the slip. “From now on, why don’t you just tell me where you’re going? That would save us both a lot of effort.”
Ka didn’t know where he was going. But after two more glasses of raki in yet another empty teahouse, he realized he wanted to pay another visit to His Excellency Sheikh Saadettin. There was no chance of seeing Ïpek again in the near future, and he dreaded the torment of letting himself think about her, preferring to bare his soul to the sheikh. He’d begin by telling him about the love of God in his heart, and then they could have a civilized conversation about God’s intentions and the meaning of life. But then he remembered that the sheikh’s lodge was bugged: When the police heard what had to say, they’d never stop laughing.
Still, when he passed His Excellency’s modest residence on Baytarhane Street, Ka stopped for a moment to look up at the windows.
Later on his walk, Ka noticed that the doors of the local library were open, so he went inside and walked up the muddy stairs. On the landing was a bulletin board onto which someone had carefully tacked the seven local newspapers. Since, like the Border City Gazette, they had all been printed the day before, there was no mention of the revolution but a great deal about the splendid performance at the National Theater and the continuing blizzard.
Although the city’s schools were closed, he saw five or six students in the library reading room; there was also a handful of retired government officials; like the students, they had probably come here to escape the cold in their houses. In a corner, among the dog-eared dictionaries and tattered children’s encyclopedias, he found several old volumes of The Encyclopedia of Life, which had given him so many hours of pleasure as a child. Inside the back cover of every volume was a series of colored transparencies, which, as you leafed through them, revealed the organs and inner workings of a car or ship or the anatomy of a man. Ka went straight for the fourth volume, hoping to find the series featuring the baby nestled like a chick inside an egg within its mother’s distended tummy, only to find that the pictures had been torn out; all that remained were frayed edges attached to the back cover.
On page 324 of the same volume, he found an entry that he read with care:
SNOW. The solid form taken by water when falling, crossing, or rising through the atmosphere. Each crystal snowflake forms its own unique hexagon. Since ancient times, mankind has been awed and mystified by the secrets of snow. In 1555, a priest named Olaus Magnus in Uppsala, Sweden, discovered that each snowflake, as indicated in the diagram, has six corners.…
How many times Ka may have read this entry during his stay in Kars, to what degree he internalized its illustration of a snow crystal, is impossible for me to say. Years later, when I went to visit his family home in Nişantaş to spend long hours discussing Ka with his tearful and—as always—troubled and suspicious father, I asked whether I could look at the old man’s library. Memory told me that what I was looking for would be not in Ka’s room with all the other books from his childhood and youth but in a dark corner of the sitting room on the shelves where his father kept his own collection. Here, among the handsome spines of his father’s law books, the collection of novels from the forties—some in Turkish, others in translation—and the row of telephone directories, I found the beautifully bound volumes of The Encyclopedia of Life. The first thing I did was turn to the back of the fourth volume to glance at the anatomical illustration of the pregnant woman; then I directed my attention to the book as an object. I was still admiring its perfect condition when there, before my eyes, was page 324. It was almost as if the book had opened of its own accord to that page. By the entry on snow, I found a thirty-two-year-old piece of blotting paper.
After Ka had finished looking at the encyclopedia, he reached into his pocket and, like a student sitting down to do homework, took out his notebook. He began to write a poem, the tenth to have come to him since his arrival in Kars. In the opening lines, he extolled the singularity of snowflakes, going on to describe his childhood memories of the mother with child he had this time failed to find at the back of the fourth volume of The Encyclopedia of Life; in the poem’s final lines, he mapped out a vision of himself and his place in the world, his special fears, his distinctive attributes, his uniqueness. The title he gave this poem was “I, Ka.”
Ka was still writing down the poem when he noticed someone else sitting at his table. Lifting his eyes from the page, he gasped: It was Necip. He felt no terror at this apparition, and neither was he amazed; instead he felt ashamed—here was someone who didn’t die so easily and yet Ka had been willing to believe he was dead.
“Necip,” he said. He wanted to throw his arms around the boy and kiss him.
“I’m Fazιl,” said the youth. “I saw you in the street and followed you.” He glanced over at the library table where Saffet was sitting. “Tell me quickly—is it true that Necip’s dead?”
“It’s true. I saw him with my own eyes.”
“Then why did you call me Necip? You’re still not sure, are you?”
“No, I’m not.”
For a moment Fazιl’s face crumpled, but then he pulled himself together.
“He wants me to take revenge. This is why I am convinced he’s dead. But when school opens all I want to do is study; I don’t want to take revenge. I don’t want to get involved in politics.”
“Revenge is a terrible thing.”
“Even so, I would do it if I thought I had to,” said Fazιl. “I’ve been told you discussed this with him. Did you give those letters to Hicran—I mean Kadife?”
“I did.” Fazιl’s gaze made him uncomfortable. Should I correct that? he asked himself. Say I was intending to instead? But it was already too late. For some reason, his lie made him feel more secure. The pain on Fazιl’s face was hard to bear.
Fazιl covered his face with his hands and cried a little. But he was so angry the tears wouldn’t come. “If Necip is dead, who is the person I should be taking revenge on?” When Ka said nothing, Fazιl looked him straight in the eye. “You know who it is,” he said sternly.
“I was told that sometimes the two of you thought the same thing at the same time,” said Ka. “If you can still do that, you know who it is.”
“But what he thinks, the thing he wants me to think, causes me terrible pain,” said Fazιl. For the first time, Ka saw in his eyes the same light he’d seen in Necip’s. It was like sitting across from a ghost.
“So what is it that he’s forcing you to think?”
“Revenge,” said Fazιl. He cried a little more.
Ka could tell right away that Fazιl’s own thoughts were of something other than revenge. And Fazιl said so himself when he saw Saffet the detective rise from his table to join them.
“Please, may I see your identity card?” said Saffet the detective, giving him a fierce look.
“They have my school identity card at the circulation desk.”
Ka watched the fear that swept over Fazιl as he realized he was talking to a plainclothes policeman. They all walked over to the circulation desk. The detective snatched the identity card from the hand of the terrified woman on duty, and when he saw that Fazιl was a student at the religious high school, he shot Ka a look that said I might have known and, like an old man confiscating a child’s toy, he put the identity card into his pocket.
“If you want this religious high school ID of yours back, you’ll have to come to police headquarters and ask for it.”
“With all due respect,” said Ka, “this boy has gone to great lengths to stay out of trouble, and he’s only just heard that his best friend is dead. Couldn’t you give him his card back now?”
Having tried so hard to ingratiate himself earlier in the day so that Ka might put in a good word for him, Saffet now refused to budge.
Hoping he might persuade Saffet to entrust the
card to him later on, when no one was watching, Ka arranged to meet Fazιl at five o’clock at the Iron Bridge. Fazιl left the library at once. By now all the other people in the reading room were on tenterhooks, thinking that they too were going to have their identity cards checked. But Saffet was not paying attention; he went straight to his table, where he returned to a 1960s volume of Life magazine to read about the sad Princess Sureyya, who had been spurned by her husband the shah after failing to give him a child, and to look at the last picture taken of Adnan Menderes, the former prime minister, before he was hanged.
Calculating now that he would not be able to get Saffet to give him Fazιl’s identity card, Ka too left the library. When he returned to the enchanted white street to see swarms of joyous children throwing snowballs, he forgot all his fears. He felt like running. In Government Square he saw a gloomy line of shivering men clutching burlap sacks and packets wrapped in newspaper, tied up with string. These cautious citizens of Kars had decided to take the coup seriously and were turning over all the weapons in their houses to the state. The authorities didn’t trust them and had refused to let them inside the provincial headquarters, but they were still lined up like cold little lambs at the main entrance. When it was first announced that all weapons were to be turned in, most Kars residents had gone straight out into the snow in the dead of night to hide their guns in the frozen ground where no one would think to look for them.
While he was walking down Faikbey Avenue, Ka ran into Kadife and felt his face go red. He’d just been thinking of Ïpek, and because he associated one sister with the other he now thought Kadife extraordinarily beautiful. He had to exercise great self-control to keep himself from embracing her.
“I must have a very quick word with you,” said Kadife. “But there’s a man following you, so I can’t say anything while he’s looking. Could you go back to the hotel and come to Room Two-seventeen at two o’clock? It’s the last room at the end of your corridor.”
“Are you sure we can speak openly there?”
“If you don’t tell anyone we’ve spoken”—Kadife opened her eyes wide—“and I mean not even Ïpek, no one will ever know.” She gave him a stern and businesslike handshake. “Now look behind you as casually as you can and tell me if I have one or maybe even two detectives following me.”
Ka nodded, smiling slightly. He was surprised at his own cold-bloodedness. Although the thought of meeting Kadife secretly in a room confused him, he had no trouble putting it out of his mind.
He knew at once that he didn’t want to see Ïpek again before his meeting with Kadife, not even by chance, so he decided to continue his walk to kill time. No one seemed to be complaining about the coup; instead, the mood was much as he remembered from the coups of his childhood: There was a sense of new beginnings and of a change from the vexing routines of everyday life. The women had gathered up their handbags and their children and gone out to pick through the fruit in the stalls and at the greengrocer’s in search of a bargain; the men with their thick mustaches stood on street corners, smoking filterless cigarettes and gossiping as they watched the crowds go by; the beggar he’d seen feigning blindness twice the day before was no longer in his station under the eaves of an empty building between the garages and the market. The vendors who had been selling oranges and apples out of pickup trucks parked right in the middle of the street were gone. The traffic, normally light, was lighter still, but it was hard to say whether this was owing to the coup or to the snow. There were more plainclothes policemen out on the streets (one had been made a goalkeeper by the boys playing soccer at the bottom of Halitpaşa Avenue). The two hotels next to the garages that served as brothels (the Hotel Pan and the Hotel Freedom) were, like the cockfight ring and the unlicensed butchers, not to be permitted to pursue their black arts “indefinitely.” As for the explosions they’d heard coming from the shanty areas, especially at night, the people of Kars were accustomed to this, so their calm was generally undisturbed. Ka found the general lack of interest liberating. This is why he went into the snack bar on the corner of Little Kâzimbey Avenue and Kâzιm Karabekir Avenue, and ordered himself a cinnamon sharbat, and he drank it with relish.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
This Is the Only Time We’ll Ever Be Free in Kars
KA WITH KADIFE IN THE HOTEL ROOM
When he stepped into Room 217 sixteen minutes later, Ka was so worried someone might have seen him that he tried to joke with Kadife about the cinnamon sharbat, its sour taste still in his mouth.
“For a while there were rumors of angry Kurds poisoning that sharbat to kill military personnel,” said Kadife. “It’s even said that secret investigators were sent in to solve the mystery.”
“Do you believe these rumors?” Ka asked.
“When educated, westernized outsiders come to Kars and hear these conspiracy theories,” said Kadife, “they immediately try to disprove them by going to the snack bar and ordering a salep, and then the fools end up poisoning themselves because the rumors are true. Some Kurds are so unhappy they know no God.”
“Then why, after all this time, hasn’t the state stepped in?”
“Like all westernized intellectuals, you put your trust in the state without even realizing it. MİT knows everything that goes on in Kars, and they know about the sharbat, too, but they don’t stop it.”
“So does MİT know we’re here together in this room?”
“Don’t worry, right now they don’t,” said Kadife with a smile. “One day they’ll find out, but until that day comes we’re free here. This is the only time we’ll ever be free in Kars. Appreciate it, and take off your coat.”
“This coat protects me from evil,” said Ka. Seeing fear in Kadife’s face, he added, “And it’s cold in here.”
The room in which they were meeting was half of an old storage room. One narrow window looked onto the inner courtyard, and there was room only for the single bed on which they were now sitting, Ka perched uncertainly at one end of it, Kadife at the other. The room had that stifling dusty smell that you find only in unaired hotel rooms. Kadife leaned over to fiddle with the dial on the radiator, but when it refused to budge she gave up. When she saw Ka had jumped nervously to his feet, she tried to conjure up a smile.
For a moment it seemed to Ka that Kadife was taking great pleasure from this assignation. After so many years of solitude, he too was pleased to be alone in a room with a beautiful girl, but he sensed she had no time for such soft thoughts; the light shining in her eyes spoke of something darker and more destructive.
“Don’t worry, right now the only agent they have following you is that poor man with the bag of oranges. You can take this to mean that the state isn’t afraid of you, it just wants to frighten you a little. Who was following me?”
“I forgot to look,” said Ka, with embarrassment.
“What?” Kadife shot him a poisonous look. “You’re in love, aren’t you. You’re madly in love.” But she quickly pulled herself together. “I’m sorry, it’s just that we’re all so scared,” she said, and once again the expression on her face changed abruptly. “You must make my sister happy. She’s a very good person.”
“Do you think she’ll love me back?” Ka asked, in a near whisper.
“Of course she will—she must; you’re a very charming man,” said Kadife. When she saw how much she’d shocked him, she added, “What’s more, you’re a Gemini like Ïpek.” She then explained that while Gemini men are best suited to Virgo women, the double personality of Geminis, which makes them both light and shallow, can either delight a Gemini woman or disgust her. “But you both deserve to be happy,” she added consolingly.
“When you’ve discussed me with your sister, has the question of her coming back with me to Germany ever come up?”
“She thinks you’re very handsome,” said Kadife, “but she doesn’t trust you. Trust takes time. Impatient men like you don’t fall in love with a woman, they take possession of her.”
“Is this wha
t she said to you?” said Ka, raising his eyebrows. “Time is a scarce commodity in this city.”
Kadife glanced at her watch. “First let me thank you for coming here. I’ve summoned you to discuss something very important. Blue has a message he wants to give you.”
“If we meet again, they’ll follow me and arrest him on the spot,” said Ka. “Then they’ll torture us all. They’ve been in his house. The police hear everything he says.”
“Blue knew they were listening,” said Kadife. “He sent you this message before the coup, and he also sent a message for you to pass on to the West. He sent it to make a philosophical point. Stop sticking your nose into this suicide business—that’s what he wanted you to tell them. But now everything’s changed; there’s something more important. He wants to cancel that message and give you a new one.”
The more Kadife insisted, the more uncertain Ka became. “It’s not possible to go from one point to another in this city without anyone seeing you,” he said finally.
“There’s a horse-drawn carriage. Twice a day it stops just outside the kitchen door to drop off gas canisters, coal, and bottled water. It then goes on to make deliveries all over the city, and it’s draped in canvas to protect its goods from snow and rain. The driver can be trusted.”
“Am I to hide under the canvas like a thief?”
“I’ve done it plenty of times myself,” said Kadife. “It’s lots of fun to go right across the city without anyone knowing. If you agree to this meeting, I promise I’ll do everything in my power to help you with Ïpek. I want you to marry her.”