by Orhan Pamuk
On the corner of Halitpaşa and Kâzιm Karabekir avenues, Ka saw a pipe protruding from an icy hole in a windowless wall, imagined it was the barrel of a gun aimed straight at him, and in his mind’s eye saw himself dying on the snow-covered pavement. What would they say about him in the Istanbul papers? Most likely the governor’s office or the local branch of the secret police would want to downplay the political dimension, and if the Istanbul press didn’t pick up on his having been a poet, they might not cover the incident at all. Even if his friends in the poetry world and at the Republican did everything in their power to publicize the political angle (and who would write that article? Fahir? Orhan?), it would only serve to diminish his literary significance. Similarly, if someone succeeded in placing a piece that established him as an important poet, his death would be reported on the arts pages, where no one would read about it. Had there really been a German journalist called Hans Hansen, and had Ka really been his friend, the Frankfurter Rundschau might have run a story about his murder, but it would be the only Western newspaper to do so. Ka took some consolation in imagining that his poems might be translated into German and published in Akzent magazine, but it was still perfectly clear to him that should this article in the Border City Gazette prove to be the death of him, the published translations would mean nothing. Finally, what frightened him most was the thought of dying just at the dawn of his hope of living happily ever after in Frankfurt with Ïpek.
The many writers killed in recent years by Islamist bullets paraded before his eyes: first the old preacher-turned-atheist who had tried to point out “inconsistencies” in the Koran (they’d shot him from behind, in the head); behind him came the righteous columnist whose love of positivism had led him to refer in a number of columns to girls wearing head scarves as “cockroaches” (they strafed him and his chauffeur one morning as he drove to work); then there was the investigative journalist who had tenaciously sought to uncover the links between the Turkish Islamist movement and Iran (when he turned on the ignition, he and his car went sailing into the sky). Even as he recalled these victims with tender sorrow, he knew they’d been naïve. As a rule the Istanbul press, like the Western press, had little interest in these fervent columnists and even less in journalists apt to get shot in the head for similar reasons on a backstreet of some remote Anatolian city. But Ka reserved his bile for a society that so easily forgot its writers and poets: For this reason he thought the smartest thing to do was retreat into a corner and try to find some happiness.
Arriving at the offices of the Border City Gazette on Faikbey Avenue, Ka looked up to see the next day’s edition taped to the back of the recently deiced window. He read the article about himself again, and then he went inside. The elder of Serdar Bey’s two busy sons was securing a pile of freshly printed papers with nylon twine. Ka took off his hat so they could see who he was and brushed off the snow sticking to the shoulders of his coat.
“My father’s not here.” This was the younger son, coming in from the other room with the cloth he’d been using to polish the press. “Would you like some tea?”
“Who wrote the article about me in tomorrow’s edition?”
“Is there an article about you in there?” said the younger son, raising his eyebrows.
“Yes, there is,” said the older son, giving him a warm and happy smile. He had the same thick lips as his brother. “My father wrote the whole edition today.”
“If you distribute this paper tomorrow morning …” said Ka. He paused to think. “It will be bad for me.”
“Why?” asked the older son. He had a soft kind face and pure, innocent eyes.
Ka saw that if he talked to them in a nice friendly voice and kept his questions short, the way you do with children, he could find out quite a bit from them. The brothers soon informed him that only three people had purchased the paper so far: Muhtar Bey, a child who’d been sent from the branch headquarters of the Motherland Party, and the retired literature teacher Nuriye Hanιm, who made a habit of stopping by every evening. Normally they would have dispatched copies to Istanbul and Ankara, but because the roads were closed these papers would have to wait with today’s edition until the snow began to melt. The sons would be distributing the rest of the papers tomorrow morning, and if their father wished it, of course they could print a new edition for tomorrow; their father, they told Ka, had only just left the offices, telling them not to expect him back in time for dinner. Ka told them he wouldn’t stay for tea; he bought a copy of the paper and went out into the murderous Kars night.
The boys’ untroubled innocence had calmed him somewhat. As Ka walked among the slowly falling snowflakes, he began to feel guilty—had he been wrong to take such fright? But in another corner of his mind he knew he would share the fate of the other luckless writers who had died of multiple gunshot wounds after facing similar dilemmas and choosing, either out of pride or courage, to do nothing, or the many others who, assuming that any package from a stranger had to be an ardent fan’s gift of lokum, had died eagerly tearing open what would turn out to be a mail bomb.
There was, for example, the poet Nurettin, who admired all things European but took little interest in politics until the day a radical Islamist newspaper unearthed something he’d written years earlier—an essay on art and religion—and distorted it to charge that he’d “insulted our faith”; afraid of looking frightened, Nurettin dusted off his old ideas and passionately reasserted them; the army-backed secular press warmed to his fine Kemalist words and inflated their importance to make him seem the lifelong hero. Then one morning a device in a plastic bag hanging from the front tire of his car blew him into so many bits that his ostentatious throng of mourners had to march behind an empty coffin.
There was the small-town version too, the materialist doctors and the old leftist journalists of the regional papers who, when faced with similar indictments, responded with fiery antireligious rhetoric, just so no one could say they were cowards. Some perhaps even entertained vain hopes of attracting world attention “like Salman Rushdie,” but the only ones listening were the angry young fanatics in their own neighborhoods, and they had no time for the fancy bomb plots of their colleagues in the cities, or even for guns. As Ka knew only too well from the small lifeless news items he’d seen poring over the back pages of Turkish newspapers in the Frankfurt city library, they preferred to knife the godless in dark alleyways or strangle them with their bare hands.
Ka was still trying to figure out how to save both his skin and his pride if the Border City Gazette gave him a chance to reply—I’m an atheist but I’ve never insulted the Prophet? I’m not a believer but I’d never dream of disrespecting the faith?—when suddenly he heard someone tramping through the snow behind him; a chill went down his spine as he turned around to see it was the bus company manager he’d met yesterday at the same hour at His Excellency Sheikh Saadettin’s lodge. It occurred to him that this man could testify that he wasn’t an atheist; immediately the thought embarrassed him.
He continued dragging his feet down Atatürk Avenue, slowing down to negotiate the icy street corners and pausing from time to time to admire the huge snowflakes, the endless repetition of an ordinary miracle. Afterward, he would often think back to the beautiful scenes he had witnessed while wandering the city’s snow-covered streets (as three children pulled a sled up a narrow street, the windows of the Palace of Light Photo Studio reflected the green light of the one traffic signal in Kars), and he’d wonder why he carried these sad postcard memories with him wherever he went.
He saw an army patrol truck and two soldiers guarding the door to the old tailor shop that Sunay Zaim was using as his base of operations. Ka told the soldiers huddled on the threshold trying to duck the snow that he wanted to contact Sunay, but they treated him like a lowly peasant who’d come in from an outlying village to petition the chief of staff. Ka had been hoping that Sunay might be able to keep the paper from being circulated.
If we are to make sense of the fur
y that was soon to overtake him, it’s important to understand the sting of this rebuff. His first thought was to run off into the snow and seek refuge in the hotel, but before even reaching the corner, he turned left into the Unity Café. Here he took a table between the wall and the stove and wrote the poem he would later call “To Be Shot and Killed.”
As he would explain, in his notes, this poem was an expression of pure fear, so he placed it between the axes of memory and imagination on the six-pronged snowflake and humbly turned his back on the content of its prophecy.
As soon as the poem was finished, Ka left the Unity Café; it was twenty past seven when he reached the Snow Palace Hotel. Stretched out upstairs on his bed, he watched the snowflakes floating through the halos of the streetlamp and the pink letter K pulsating in the window across the way and tried to quell his growing panic by conjuring up happy visions of life with Ïpek in Frankfurt. Ten minutes later, he was overcome by a desire to see her. He went downstairs to find the entire family seated around the dinner table with that evening’s guest, and his heart leaped to see Ïpek’s hair shimmering behind the bowl of soup that Zahide had just set before her. When Ïpek beckoned him to take the place next to her, Ka was proud that everyone at the table knew they were in love, very proud; then, across the table, he saw Serdar Bey, the owner of the Border City Gazette.
As Serdar Bey extended his hand, his smile was so friendly that Ka began to doubt what his own eyes had read in the newspaper folded in his pocket. After serving himself soup, he reached under the table and put his hand on Ïpek’s lap; he brought his head closer to hers, smelling her smell and savoring her presence, and then whispered that he was sorry to have no news of Blue for her. He had hardly finished when he came eye to eye with Kadife, sitting next to Serdar Bey; it amazed and infuriated him to realize that Ïpek had already communicated his news to her.
Although his mind was full of Serdar Bey, he managed to contain his feelings and give his attention to Turgut Bey, who was complaining about the meeting at the Hotel Asia. It had succeeded only in stirring things up, he said; he then added that the police knew all about it. “But I’m not at all sorry to have taken part in this historic occasion,” he added. “I’m glad I got to see with my own eyes how low the level of political understanding has sunk. Young and old alike, they’re hopeless. I went to this meeting to protest the coup, but now I think the army is right to want to keep them out of politics—they’re the dregs of society, the most wretched, muddled, brainless people in the city. I’m glad the army couldn’t stand by and let us abandon our future to these shameless looters. I’ll say this again, Kadife: Before meddling with national politics, consider this carefully. And think also of that painted aging singer you saw turning the wheel of Fortune,” he added mysteriously. “Everyone in Ankara has known for thirty-five years that she was the mistress of Fatin Rustu Zorlu, the old foreign secretary, the one they executed.”
When Ka took out his copy of the Border City Gazette, they’d been sitting at the table for twenty minutes, and even with the television blaring in the background, the room seemed quiet.
“I was going to mention it myself,” said Serdar Bey. “But I couldn’t make up my mind; I thought you might take it the wrong way.”
“Serdar, Serdar, who gave you the order this time?” said Turgut Bey, when he saw the headline. “Ka, you’re not being fair to our guest. Give it to him so he can read it and see what a bad thing he has done.”
“First, let me make clear that I don’t believe a single word I wrote,” said Serdar Bey, as he took the newspaper from Ka. “If you really believed I believe it, you’d break my heart. Please realize that it’s nothing personal, and please, Turgut Bey, help me explain why it is that a journalist in Kars might be forced to write such things under orders.”
“Serdar’s always under orders to sling mud at someone,” Turgut Bey explained. “So let’s hear this article.”
“I don’t believe a single word,” Serdar Bey repeated proudly. “Our readers won’t believe it either. That’s why you have nothing to fear.”
Serdar Bey read out his article in a sarcastic voice, pausing here and there for dramatic effect. “As you see, there’s nothing to fear!” he said, with a smile.
“Are you an atheist?” Turgut Bey asked Ka.
“That’s not the point, Father,” said Ïpek with annoyance. “If this paper gets distributed, they’ll shoot him in the street tomorrow.”
“Nonsense,” said Serdar Bey. “Madam, I assure you, you have nothing to fear. The soldiers have rounded up all the radical Islamists and reactionaries in town.” He turned to Ka. “I can tell just by your eyes that you haven’t taken offense. You know how much I respect your work and how I esteem you as a human being. Please don’t do me the injustice of holding me to European standards that were never designed for us! Let me tell you what happens to fools who wander around Kars pretending to be Europeans—and Turgut Bey knows this as well as I do—three days, that’s all it takes, three days and they’re dead: gone, shot, forgotten.
“The Eastern Anatolian press is in desperate trouble. Our average Kars citizen doesn’t bother to read the paper. Almost all our subscribers are government offices. So of course we’re going to run the sort of news our subscribers want to read. All over the world—even in America—newspapers tailor the news to their readers’ desires. If your readers want nothing but lies from you, who in the world is going to sell papers that tell the truth? If the truth could raise my paper’s circulation, why wouldn’t I write the truth? Anyway, the police don’t let me print the truth either. In Istanbul and Ankara we have a hundred and fifty readers with Kars connections. And to please them we’re always bragging about how rich and successful they’ve become there; we exaggerate everything, because if we don’t they won’t renew their subscriptions. And you know what? They even come to believe the lies we print about them. But that’s another matter.” He let out a laugh.
“And who ordered you to print this article? Go on, tell him,” said Turgut Bey.
“My dear sir! As you know only too well, the first principle of Western journalism is to protect your sources.”
“My girls have grown very fond of our guest here,” said Turgut Bey. “If you distribute this paper tomorrow, they’ll never forgive you. If some crazed fundamentalist shoots him, won’t you feel responsible?”
“Are you that afraid?” Serdar smiled as he turned to Ka. “If you’re that afraid, stay off the streets tomorrow.”
“It would be better that the paper rather than Ka remain unseen,” Turgut Bey said. “Don’t circulate this edition.”
“That would offend my subscribers.”
“All right, then,” said Turgut Bey. He had an inspiration. “Whoever’s ordered a copy, let him have it. As for the others, I suggest you remove the offending article and print a new edition.”
Ïpek and Kadife agreed this was the best solution. “I’m thrilled to see my paper taken so seriously,” said Serdar Bey. “But who’s going to pay for this new print run? That’s the next thing you need to tell me.”
“My father will take you and your sons out for an evening meal at the Green Pastures Café,” said Ïpek.
“I accept if you come too,” said Serdar Bey. “But let’s wait until the roads open and we can be rid of this bunch of actors! Kadife must come too. Kadife Hanιm, I am wondering if you could help me with the new article to replace the one we’re taking out. If you could give me a quote about this coup, this coup de théâtre, I’m sure our readers would be very pleased.”
“No, she can’t. That’s out of the question,” said Turgut Bey. “Don’t you know my daughter at all?”
“Kadife Hanιm, could you tell me if you think the Kars suicide rate is likely to go down in the wake of our theater coup? I’m sure our readers would like your views on this, especially since they know you were opposed to these Muslim girl suicides.”
“I’m not against these suicides anymore.”
“But do
esn’t that make you an atheist?” Serdar Bey asked. Though he may have hoped this would set them off on a fresh discussion, he was sober enough to see that everyone at the table was glaring at him, so he relented.
“All right, then, I promise. I won’t circulate this edition.”
“Are you going to print a new edition?”
“As soon as I leave this table, before I go home.”
“We’d like to thank you, then,” said Ïpek.
A long strange silence followed. Ka found it very soothing. For the first time in years, he felt part of a family; in spite of the trials and responsibilities of what was called family, he saw now that it was grounded in the joys of an unyielding togetherness, a feeling he was sorry to have known so little of in his life. Could he find lasting happiness with Ïpek? It wasn’t happiness he was after—this was very clear to him following his third glass of raki; he would even go so far as to say that he preferred to be unhappy. The important thing was to share the hopelessness, to create a little nest in which two people could live together, keeping the rest of the world at bay. He now thought that he and Ïpek could create such a space, just by making love for months and months on end. To sit at a table with these two girls, knowing that he’d made love to one of them only that afternoon, to feel the softness of their complexions, to know that when he went to bed tonight, he would not be lonely—as sexual bliss beckoned, he allowed himself to believe the paper would not be circulated, and his spirits soared.
His outsize happiness took the edge off the stories and rumors he then heard; they lacked the thud of bad news. It was more like listening to the chilling lines of an ancient epic. One of the children working in the kitchen had told Zahide that a large number of detainees had been taken to the football stadium. With the goalposts now only half visible, half buried in snow, most had been kept outside all day in the hope that they would fall ill or perhaps even die; it was said a few of them had been taken into the locker rooms and pumped full of bullets as an example to the others.