by Orhan Pamuk
“What’s the play?”
Ka told her everything he knew about Thomas Kyd and The Spanish Tragedy, explaining as well that Sunay had changed the play to make it more relevant. “In the same way that during their long years of touring Anatolia they’ve made Corneille, Shakespeare, and Brecht more relevant by adding belly dances and bawdy songs.”
“I suppose I’m the one who gets the blood feud started by being raped on live television.”
“No. You’re a proper Spanish lady with a covered head, but then you tire of the blood feud and in a burst of anger you pull off your scarf to become the rebel heroine.”
“To play the rebel heroine in Turkey you don’t pull off your scarf, you put it on.”
“This is just a play, Kadife. And because it’s just a play, it shouldn’t be a problem to take off your scarf.”
“I see now what they want from me. But even if it’s a play, even it’s a play within a play, I’m still not baring my head.”
“Look, Kadife, the snow’s going to melt in two days, the roads will open, and the people sitting in jail will pass into the hands of men who know no pity. If that happens, you won’t see Blue again in this life. Have you really thought this through?”
“I’m afraid that if I do think about it, I’ll agree to it.”
“You could wear a wig underneath your scarf. Then no one would see your real hair.”
“If I’d wanted to wear a wig, I would have done it a long time ago, like a lot of other women I know, and I’d be back at the university.”
“This is not a question of sitting outside the university and trying to save your honor. You’ll be doing this to save Blue.”
“Well, let’s see if Blue will want me to save him by pulling off my scarf.”
“Of course he will,” said Ka. “You won’t hurt his honor by baring your head. After all, no one even knows you two are involved.”
Ka could tell at once from the fury in her eyes that he had found her weak spot, but then she gave him a strange smile that filled him with fear. Mixed in with this fear was jealousy. He was afraid that Kadife was about to tell him something damning about Ïpek.
“We don’t have much time, Kadife,” he said. He could hear that strange note of dread in his voice. “I know you’re bright enough and sensitive enough to get through all this with grace. I’m saying this to you as someone who’s spent years as a political exile. Listen to me: Life’s not about principles, it’s about happiness.”
“But if you don’t have any principles, and if you don’t have faith, you can’t be happy at all,” said Kadife.
“That’s true. But in a brutal country like ours where human life is cheap, it’s stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs, high ideals—only people living in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.”
“Actually, it’s the other way round. In a poor country, the only consolation people can have is the one that comes from their beliefs.”
Ka wanted to say, But the things they believe aren’t true! but he managed to hold his tongue. Instead he said, “But you’re not one of the poor, Kadife. You’re from Istanbul.”
“That’s why I do what I believe in. I don’t fake things. If I decide to bare my head, I won’t go halfway, I’ll really do it.”
“All right, then, what would you say to this? Let’s say they give up on the idea of a live audience. What if they just televise it, and that’s the only performance that the people of Kars ever see. So when they get to the part where you have your moment of fury, all they show is your hand pulling off the scarf. Then they can cut to another woman who looks like you, and we’ll simply show her hair swinging free, but from the back.”
“That’s even more dishonest than wearing a wig,” said Kadife. “And in the end, when the coup is over, everyone will think I really did bare my head.”
“What’s more important, honoring the law of God or worrying what people might say about you? The important thing is, if we do it like this, you won’t really have bared your head. But if you are so worried what people will think, it’s still not a problem, because once all this nonsense is over, we can make sure everyone knows about the last-minute switch. When it gets around that you were prepared to do all this to save Blue, those boys at the religious high school will be even more in awe of you than they are now.”
“Has it ever occurred to you,” said Kadife, her tone suddenly very different, “that when you’re trying with all your might to talk someone into something, you say things you don’t believe at all?”
“That can happen. But it’s not that way now.”
“But if it were, and you managed to convince this person in the end, wouldn’t you feel some remorse for having fooled her? I mean, for having left her out on a limb?”
“This is not about leaving you out on a limb, Kadife. It’s about using your head and seeing that this is the only option. Sunay’s people are ruthless. If they decide to hang Blue, they won’t hesitate—you’re not prepared to let them do that, are you?”
“Let’s just say I bared my head in front of everyone. That would be admitting defeat. And what proof is there that they’d release Blue? Why should I believe any promise that comes from the Turkish state?”
“You’re right. I’m going to have to discuss this with them.”
“With whom are you going to speak and when?”
“First I’ll meet with Blue and then I’m going back to speak to Sunay.”
They were both silent. By now it was clear that Kadife was more or less prepared to go along with the plan. But Ka still needed to be sure, so he made a show of looking at his watch.
“Who has Blue, MİT or the army?”
“I don’t know. It probably doesn’t make much difference.”
“If it’s the army, he may not have been tortured,” said Kadife. She paused. “I want you to give these to him.” She gave Ka an old-fashioned jeweled lighter coated with mother-of-pearl and a pack of red Marlboros. “The lighter belongs to my father. Blue will enjoy lighting his cigarettes with it.”
Ka took the cigarettes but not the lighter. “If I give him the lighter, Blue will know I came here to talk to you first.”
“Why shouldn’t he?”
“Because then he’ll know what we’ve been talking about and he’ll want to know what your decision was. I wasn’t planning to tell him I’d seen you first, or that you were ready to bare your head, so to speak, in order to save him.”
“Is that because you know he’d never agree to it?”
“No. He’s an intelligent, rational man, and he’d certainly agree to your doing something like baring your head if it would save him from the gallows; you know this as well as I do. The thing he would never accept is my having asked you first instead of going straight to him.”
“But this is not just a matter of politics; it’s also personal, something between him and me. Blue would understand this.”
“That may be, Kadife, but you know as well as I do that he wants the first word. He’s a Turkish man, and a political Islamist. I can’t go to him and say, ‘Listen, Kadife’s decided to bare her head to set you free.’ He must believe it’s his decision. I’m going to ask him what he thinks of the various options—whether you should wear a wig or if it’s better to do that montage with another woman’s hair. He must convince himself that this will save your honor and solve the problem. Believe me, he’ll never venture into such murky areas where your uncompromising ideas of honor can’t be reconciled with his more practical understanding. If you are to bare your head, he certainly won’t prefer to see you do it openly without playing some tricks.”
“You’re jealous of Blue; you hate him,” said Kadife. “You don’t even want to see him as a human being. You’re like all republican secularists, you see someone who isn’t westernized and you dismiss him as a primitive underclass reprobate. You tell yourself a good beating is bound to make a man of him. Do you enjoy seeing me bow to the army to save Blue’s skin?
It’s immoral to take pleasure from something like this, but you’re not even trying to hide it.” Her eyes glittered with hatred. “Anyway, if it has to be Blue’s decision, and if you are an enlightened Turkish man, why didn’t you go straight to him after you left Sunay? I’ll tell you why: You wanted to watch me deciding to bow my own head. This was to make you feel superior to Blue—a man who terrifies you.”
“You’re right about one thing, he does terrify me. But everything else you said is unfair, Kadife. Say I’d gone to Blue first and then come to you with his decision that you have to bare your head. You would have taken it as an order, and you’d have refused.”
“You’re not a mediator, you’re cooperating with the tyrants.”
“My only ambition is to get out of this city in one piece. You shouldn’t take this coup any more seriously than I do. You’ve already done more than enough to prove to the people of Kars what a brave, clever, righteous woman you are. After we get out of this, your sister and I are going to Frankfurt. We hope to find happiness there. I would advise you to do the same—to do whatever you must to find happiness. If you and Blue can manage to get out of here, you could live happily ever after as political exiles in any number of European cities, and I’ve no doubt your father would want to join you. But before any of this can happen, you’ve got to put your trust in me.”
All this talk of happiness had sent a large tear rolling down Kadife’s cheek. Smiling in an odd way that Ka found alarming, she quickly wiped it away with the palm of her hand. “Are you sure my sister is ready to leave Kars?”
“I’m positive,” said Ka, though his voice didn’t sound sure.
“I’m not going to insist that you give Blue the lighter or tell him that you came to see me first,” said Kadife. She was speaking now like a haughty but forbearing princess. “But before I bare my head in front of anyone I must be absolutely sure they’ll set him free. I need more than the guarantee of Sunay or one of his henchmen. We all know what the word of the Turkish state is worth.”
“You’re a very intelligent woman, Kadife. No one in Kars deserves happiness as much as you do,” Ka said. He was tempted to add, Except for Necip! But no sooner had he thought this than he forgot it. “If you give me the lighter right now, I can take that to Blue, too. But please, try to trust me.”
Kadife bent forward to pass him the lighter, and they embraced with a warmth that neither expected. For a fleeting moment, Ka enjoyed the thrill of touching Kadife’s body, which was much lighter and narrower than her sister’s, but he stopped himself from kissing her. A moment later, when there was a loud bang on the door, he could not help but think it was a good decision.
It was Ïpek, come to tell Ka that an army truck was waiting for him. She stood there and gazed softly, searchingly, into their eyes, as if trying to understand what Ka and Kadife had decided. Ka left the room without kissing her. When he reached the end of the corridor, he turned around in guilty triumph to see the two sisters locked in a silent embrace.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
I’m Not an Agent for Anyone
KA WITH BLUE IN HIS CELL
The image of Kadife and Ïpek embracing in the corridor lingered in Ka’s mind. Sitting beside the driver in the army truck, at the Atatürk and Halitpaşa Avenue intersection, waiting for the only set of traffic lights in the city to change, he was high enough off the road to see into the unpainted second-floor window of an old Armenian house. Someone had opened it to let in some fresh air, and as a light wind swayed the shutters and ruffled the curtains, Ka looked inside and could tell at once that he was witnessing a secret political meeting—in fact, so penetrating was his awareness of what was going on inside, he was like a doctor looking at an X-ray. And so, though a pale and frightened woman soon dashed forward to draw the curtains, he was able to guess with extraordinary accuracy what had transpired in that bright room: Two of Kars’s most seasoned Kurdish militants were talking to an apprentice teaman whose older brother had been killed in the raid the night before; the apprentice was now hunched in a cloud of sweat by the stove, wrapping the body in Gazo-brand bandages, while the militants assured him how easy it would be to enter the police headquarters on Faikbey Avenue and set off a bomb.
Ka had not, however, guessed his own destination. Instead of taking him to police headquarters or turning into the grand old square dating from the early years of the Republic where MİT had its headquarters, the army truck went straight through the Faikbey Avenue intersection and continued along Atatürk Avenue, before it turned finally into the military compound in the center of the city. In the 1960s there’d been a plan to convert this space into a park, but after the military coup in the early seventies, they built a wall around it, and before long it had become a garrison comprising barracks, new command headquarters, training grounds, and bored children riding bicycles among the stunted poplar trees. According to Free Nation, the pro-army newspaper, it was thanks to the new occupants that the house in which Pushkin had stayed during his visit to Kars, as well as the Cossack horsemen’s stables built by the czar forty years after the poet’s visit, had been saved from demolition.
The cell in which they were holding Blue was right next door to these stables. The army truck dropped Ka outside a pleasant old stone building that stood under an oleander tree; its branches, he noticed, were bowing under the weight of the snow. Inside were two gracious men whom Ka correctly took to be MİT operatives; they picked up a roll of Gazo bandages and a tape recorder, awfully primitive-looking considering it was the 1990s, and after they had used the former to secure the latter to his chest, they showed him how to operate the ON/OFF button. When they spoke about the prisoner downstairs, it was as if they were sorry he’d been caught and wanted to help him. At the same time, they made it clear that they expected Ka to get the prisoner’s confession, in particular concerning the murders he had committed or had ordered others to commit: It didn’t occur to Ka that they might not know his real reason for being here.
In the days of the czar, when the Russian cavalry used this little stone building as its headquarters, you would go down a cold stone staircase to reach a large windowless room in which soldiers were punished for lacking discipline. After the founding of the Turkish Republic, the cell had served as a depot for a time, and then, during the nuclear panics of the Cold War, it was turned into a model fallout shelter; it was still far cleaner and more comfortable than Ka had expected.
The room was well heated by the Arçelik furnace (donated several years earlier by Muhtar, the area’s main distributor, in an effort to ingratiate himself), but Blue, who was in bed reading a book, had still found it necessary to cover himself with a clean army blanket. He rose the moment he saw Ka and stepped into his shoes, from which the laces had been removed; assuming an official air but still managing a smile, he shook Ka’s hand and, with the decisiveness of one ready to talk business, he pointed to a Formica table pushed up against the wall. When they had claimed their seats at opposite ends of the table, Ka looked across to see an ashtray filled with cigarette butts, so he took the pack of Marlboros out of his pocket and passed them to Blue, commenting as he did so on the comforts of the surroundings. Blue told him that he’d not been tortured; then he struck a match and lit Ka’s cigarette before lighting his own.
“So tell me, sir, for whom are you spying today?”
“I’ve given up spying,” said Ka. “These days I’m a mediator.”
“That’s even worse. Spies traffic in snippets of information that aren’t much use to anyone, and mostly they do it for the money. Mediators, on the other hand—well, they’re just smart alecks who think they can stick their noses into your private business on the pretense of being ‘impartial.’ What’s your game here? What are you trying to get out of all this?”
“To get out of this dreadful city in one piece.”
“As things stand today, only one person in this city is in any position to protect an atheist flown in from the West to spy on us, and that’s Suna
y.”
So Blue had seen the front page of the Border City Gazette. How Ka hated that smile forming underneath Blue’s mustache! How could this militant Islamist who’d spent half his life railing against the merciless Turkish state, and who was now sitting in a prison cell implicated in two separate murder inquiries, be so calm and cheerful? Now more than ever, Ka could see why Kadife was so madly in love with him. Blue never looked more handsome than today.
“What are you here to mediate?”
“I’ve come to try to arrange your release,” said Ka, and in a very calm voice he relayed Sunay’s proposal. He didn’t mention the possibility of Kadife’s wearing a wig, nor did he discuss the various tricks they might resort to in the event of the live transmission; he reserved these just in case he needed a bargaining chip later. While he was explaining the gravity of the present circumstances and the pressure certain merciless parties were putting on Sunay to hang Blue at the first opportunity, he felt a certain joy, but as this joy was soon followed by a certain guilt, he went on to denounce Sunay as the crackpot to end all crackpots and to assure Blue that as soon as the snow melted everything would go back to normal. Later on, he would ask himself whether he’d said this to please the MİT operatives upstairs.
“What all this means is that my only chance for freedom is to take part in another crack at Sunay’s pot, so to speak,” said Blue.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Well, tell him this: I reject his proposal. And I thank you for taking the trouble to come all this way.”