by Orhan Pamuk
One month after the suicide idea had, as it were, infected Kars, this girl’s sixteen-year-old cousin committed the first copycat suicide. With the uncle’s coaxing, and having got Ka to promise that he would include the full story in his report, her tearful parents explained that the girl had been driven to suicide after her teacher accused her of not being a virgin. Once the rumor had spread all over Kars, the girl’s fiancé called off the engagement, and the other young suitors—still coming to the house to ask for this beautiful girl’s hand despite the betrothal—stopped coming too. At that point, the girl’s maternal grandmother had started to say, “Oh, well, looks like you’re never going to find a husband.” Then one evening, as the whole family was watching a wedding scene on television and her father, drunk at the time, started crying, the girl stole her grandmother’s sleeping pills and, having swallowed them all, went to sleep (not only the idea of suicide but also the method having proved contagious). When the autopsy revealed that the girl had actually been a virgin, her father blamed not just the teacher for spreading the lie but also his relative’s daughter for coming from Batman to kill herself. And so, out of a wish to dispel the baseless rumors about their child’s chastity and to expose the teacher who had started the malicious lie, the family decided to tell Ka the full story.
Ka thought it strangely depressing that the suicide girls had had to struggle to find a private moment to kill themselves. Even after swallowing their pills, even as they lay quietly dying, they’d had to share their rooms with others. Ka had grown up in Nişantaş reading Western literature, and in his own fantasies of suicide he had always thought it important to have a great deal of time and space; at the very least you needed a room you could stay in for days without any knocking on the door. In his fantasies, suicide was a solemn ceremony with sleeping pills and whiskey, a final act performed alone and of one’s own free will; in fact, every time he had ever imagined doing away with himself, it was the indispensable loneliness of it that scared him off. For that reason, he had to admit, he had never been seriously suicidal.
The only suicide who had delivered him back to that loneliness was the covered girl who had killed herself almost six weeks ago. This suicide was one of the famous “head-scarf girls.” When the authorities had outlawed the wearing of head scarves in educational institutions across the country, many women refused to comply; the noncompliant young women at the Institute of Education in Kars had been barred first from the classrooms and then, following an edict from Ankara, from the entire campus. Among the families Ka met, that of the head-scarf girl was the most well off; the distraught father owned a little grocery store. Offering Ka a Coca-Cola from the store refrigerator, he explained that his daughter had discussed her plans with both family and friends. As for the question of the head scarf, clearly her mother, who wore one, had set the example—with the blessing of the whole family—but the real pressure had come from those of her school friends running the campaign against the banishment of covered women from the Institute. Certainly it was they who taught her to think of the head scarf as a symbol of “political Islam.” And so despite her parents’ express wish that she remove her head scarf, the girl refused, thus ensuring that she herself would be removed, by the police and on many occasions, from the halls of the Institute of Education. When she saw some of her friends giving up and uncovering their heads, and others forgoing their head scarves to wear wigs instead, the girl began to tell her father and her friends that life had no meaning and she no longer wanted to live. But as the state-run Department of Religious Affairs and the Islamists had joined forces by now to condemn suicide as one of the greatest sins, and there were posters and pamphlets all over Kars proclaiming the same truth, no one expected a girl of such piety to take her own life. It seems that the girl, Teslime, had spent her last evening silently watching the television show called Marianna. After making tea and serving it to her parents, she went to her room and readied herself for her prayers, washing her mouth, her feet, and her hands. When she had finished her ablutions, she knelt down on her prayer rug and lost herself for some time in thought, and then in prayer, before tying her head scarf to the lamp hook from which she hanged herself.
CHAPTER THREE
Give Your Vote to God’s Party
POVERTY AND HISTORY
Raised in Istanbul amid the middle-class comforts of Nişantaş—a lawyer for a father, a housewife for a mother, a beloved sister, a devoted maid, rooms full of furniture, a radio, curtains—Ka knew nothing of poverty; it was something beyond the house, in another world. Shrouded in a dangerous and impenetrable darkness, this other world took on a metaphysical charge in Ka’s childhood imagination. And so it may be hard to understand that Ka’s sudden decision to travel to Kars was at least partly motivated by a desire to return to his childhood.
Returning to Istanbul after twelve years in Frankfurt, looking up old friends and revisiting the streets and shops and cinemas they’d shared as children, he found almost nothing he recognized; if they hadn’t been torn down, they’d lost their souls. As for Kars, though he’d been living abroad for some time, Ka was still aware of it as the poorest, most overlooked corner of Turkey. For this reason, he may have been taken by a desire to look farther afield for childhood and purity: If the world he knew in Istanbul was no longer to be found, his journey to Kars can be seen as an attempt to step outside the boundaries of his middle-class childhood, to venture at long last into the other world beyond. In fact, when he found the shop windows in Kars displaying things that he remembered from his childhood, things you never saw in Istanbul anymore—Gislaved gym shoes, Vesuv stoves, and (the first thing any child learned about Kars) those round boxes of the city’s famous processed cheese divided into six wedges, he felt happy enough even to forget the suicide girls: Kars brought him that peace of mind he once knew.
Around noon, after Serdar Bey and he had parted, he met with spokesmen for the People’s Equality Party and for the Azeris, and after these interviews were over he stepped out again into the flurry of snowflakes—how large they were!—to take a solitary stroll through the city. Passing the barking dogs of Atatürk Avenue, he moved with sad determination toward the city’s poorest neighborhoods, through a silence broken only by more barking dogs. As the snow covered the steep mountains no longer visible in the distance, covered the Seljuk castle and the shanties that sprawled among the ruins, it seemed to have swept everything off to another world, a world beyond time; when it occurred to him that he might be the only person to have noticed, his eyes filled with tears. He passed a park in Yusuf Paşa that was full of dismantled swings and broken slides; next to it was an open lot where a group of teenage boys were playing football. The high lampposts of the coal depot gave them just enough light, and Ka stopped for a while to watch them. As he listened to them, shouting and cursing and skidding in the snow, and gazed at the white sky and the pale yellow glow of the streetlights, the desolation and remoteness of the place hit him with such force that he felt God inside him.
It was less a certainty than a faint image at this point, like struggling to remember a particular picture after taking a swift tour through the galleries of a museum. You try to conjure up the painting only to lose it again. It wasn’t the first time Ka had had this sensation.
Ka had grown up in a secular republican family and had had no religious teaching outside school. Although he’d had similar visions on occasion over the past few years, they had caused him no anxiety, nor had they inspired any poetic impulse. At most he would feel happy that the world was such a beautiful thing to behold.
When he returned to his hotel room for a bit of warmth and rest, he spent some time leafing happily through the histories of Kars he had brought with him from Istanbul, confusing what he read with the stories he had been hearing all day and with the tales from childhood that these books brought to mind.
Once upon a time in Kars, there had been a large and prosperous middle class, and although it had been far removed from Ka’s own w
orld it had engaged in all the rituals Ka remembered from childhood; there had been great balls in those mansions, festivities that went on for days. Kars was an important station on the trade route to Georgia, Tabriz, and the Caucasus; being on the border between two empires now defunct, the Ottoman and the Russian, the mountain city also benefited from the protection of the standing armies each power had in turn placed in Kars for that purpose. During the Ottoman period, many different peoples had made Kars their home. There had been a large Armenian community; it no longer existed, but its thousand-year-old churches still stood in all their splendor. Many Persians fleeing first the Moghul and later the Iranian armies had settled in Kars over the years; there were Greeks with roots going back to the Byzantine and Pontus periods; there were also Georgians and Kurds and Circassians from various tribes. Some of the Muslims were driven out when the Russian army took possession of the city’s five-hundred-year-old castle in 1878, and thereafter the pasha’s mansions and hamams and the Ottoman buildings on the slopes below the castle fell into decay. Kars was still prosperous and diverse when the czar’s architects went to work along the southern bank of the Kars River, and soon they had built a thriving new city defined by five perfectly straight parallel avenues and by streets that intersected these avenues at right angles, something never before seen in the East. Czar Alexander came here for the hunting—and to meet secretly with his mistress. To the Russians, Kars was a gateway to the south and to the Mediterranean, and with an eye to controlling the trade routes running through it they invested a great deal in civic projects. These were the things that had so impressed Ka during his stay twenty years earlier. The streets and the large cobblestone pavements, the plane trees and the oleanders that had been planted after the founding of the Turkish Republic—these gave the city a melancholy air unknown in Ottoman cities, whose wooden houses burned down during the years of nationalist struggle and tribal warfare.
After endless wars, rebellions, massacres, and atrocity, the city was occupied by Armenian and Russian armies at different times and even, briefly, by the British. For a short time, when the Russian and Ottoman forces had left the city following the First World War, Kars was an independent state; in October 1920, the Turkish army entered under the command of Kâzιm Karabekir, the general whose statue now stood in Station Square. This new generation of Turks made the most of the grand plan initiated by the czar’s architects forty-three years earlier: The culture that the Russians brought to Kars now fit perfectly with the Republic’s westernizing project. But when it came to renaming the five great Russian avenues, they couldn’t think of enough great men from the city’s history who weren’t soldiers, so they ended up memorializing five great pashas.
These were the city’s westernizing years, as Muzaffer Bey, the exmayor from the People’s Party, related with both pride and anger. He talked about the great balls in the civic centers, and the skating competitions held under the now rusty and ruined wrought-iron bridges Ka had crossed during his morning walk. When a theater company from Ankara came to perform Oedipus Rex, the Kars bourgeoisie received them with great enthusiasm, even though less than twenty years had passed since the war with Greece. The elderly rich in coats with fur collars would go out for rides on sleighs pulled by hearty Hungarian horses adorned with roses and silver tassels. At the National Gardens, balls were held under the acacia trees to support the football team, and the people of Kars would dance the latest dances as pianos, accordions, and clarinets were played in the open air. In summertime, girls could wear short-sleeved dresses and ride bicycles through the city without being bothered. Many lycée students who glided to school on ice skates expressed their patriotic fervor by sporting bow ties. In his youth, Muzaffer Bey had been one of them, and when as a lawyer he eagerly returned to the city to run for office, he took to wearing them again; his party associates warned him that this fashion was a vote-loser, likely to inspire people to dismiss him as the worst sort of poseur, but Muzaffer Bey paid no mind.
Now they were lost, those endless cold winters, and to listen to Muzaffer Bey it was as if this explained the city’s plunge into destitution, depression, and decay. Having described the beauty of those winters—dwelling in particular on the powdered faces of the half-naked actors who had come all the way from Ankara to perform Greek plays—the old mayor went on to tell how in the late forties he himself had invited a youth group to perform a revolutionary play in the civic center. “This work tells of the awakening of a young girl who has spent her life enveloped in a black scarf,” he said. “In the end she pulls it off and burns it.” In the late forties they’d had to search the entire city for a black scarf to use in the play; in the end they had had to phone Erzurum to ask for one to be sent. “Now the streets of Kars are filled with young women in head scarves of every kind,” Muzaffer Bey added. “And because they’ve been barred from their classes for flaunting this symbol of political Islam, they’ve begun committing suicide.”
Ka refrained from asking questions, as he would for the rest of his stay in Kars whenever anyone mentioned the rise of political Islam or the head-scarf question. He also refrained from asking why it was, if indeed not a single head scarf could be had in Kars in the late forties, that a group of fiery youths had felt compelled to stage a revolutionary play urging women not to cover their heads. During his long walks through the city that day, Ka had paid little attention to the head scarves he saw and didn’t attempt to distinguish the political kind from any other; having been back in the country for only a week, he had not yet acquired the secular intellectual’s knack of detecting political motive when seeing a covered woman in the street. But it is also true that, since childhood, he had scarcely been in the habit of noticing covered women. In the westernized upper-middle-class circles of the young Ka’s Istanbul, a covered woman would have been someone who had come in from the suburbs—from the Kartal vineyards, say—to sell grapes. Or she might be the milkman’s wife or someone else from the lower classes.
In time, I was also to hear many stories about former owners of the Snow Palace Hotel, where Ka was staying. One was a West-leaning professor whom the czar had exiled to Kars (a gentler option than Siberia); another was an Armenian in the cattle trade; subsequently the building housed a Greek orphanage. The first owner had equipped the 110-year-old structure with the sort of heating system typical of so many houses built in Kars at that time: a stove set behind the walls to radiate heat to four surrounding rooms. It was not until Kars had become part of the Turkish Republic and the building had its first Turkish owner that it was converted to a hotel, but, being unable to figure out how to operate the Russian heating system, that owner installed a big brass stove beside the door opening onto the courtyard. Only much later was he converted to the merits of central heating.
Ka was lying on his bed with his coat on, lost in daydreams, when there was a knock on the door; he jumped up to answer it. It was Cavit, the desk clerk who spent his days beside the stove watching television; he had come to tell Ka something he had forgotten when Ka came in.
“I forgot to tell you. Serdar Bey, owner of the Border City Gazette, wants to see you immediately.”
Downstairs, Ka was about to walk out of the lobby when he was stopped dead in his tracks; just at that moment, coming through the door behind the reception desk, was Ïpek. He’d forgotten how beautiful she was during their university days, and now, suddenly reminded, he felt slightly nervous in her presence. Yes, exactly—that’s how beautiful she was. First they shook hands in the manner of the westernized Istanbul bourgeoisie, but after a moment’s hesitation they moved their heads forward, embracing without quite letting their bodies touch, and kissed on the cheeks.
“I knew you were coming,” Ïpek said, as she stepped back. Ka was surprised to hear her speaking so openly. “Taner called to tell me.” She looked straight into Ka’s eyes when she said this.
“I came to report on the municipal elections and the suicide girls.”
“How long are you staying
?” asked Ïpek. “I’m busy with my father right now, but there’s a place called the New Life Pastry Shop, right next door to the Hotel Asia. Let’s meet there at half past one. We can catch up then.”
If they’d run into each other in Istanbul—somewhere in Beyoğlu, say—this would have been a normal conversation: it was because it was happening in Kars that Ka felt so strange. He was unsure how much of his agitation had to do with Ïpek’s beauty. After walking through the snow for some time, Ka found himself thinking, I’m so glad I bought this coat!
On the way to the newspaper office, his heart revealed a thing or two that his mind refused to accept: First, in returning to Istanbul from Frankfurt for the first time in twelve years, Ka’s purpose was not simply to attend his mother’s funeral but also to find a Turkish girl to make his wife; second, it was because he secretly hoped that this girl might be Ïpek that he had traveled all the way from Istanbul to Kars.
If a close friend had suggested this second possibility, Ka would never have forgiven him; its truth would cause Ka guilt and shame for the rest of his life. Ka, you see, was one of those moralists who believe that the greatest happiness comes from never doing anything for the sake of personal happiness. On top of that, he did not think it appropriate for an educated, westernized, literary man like himself to go in search of marriage to someone he hardly knew. In spite of this, he felt quite content when he arrived at the Border City Gazette. This was because his first meeting with Ïpek—the thing he had been dreaming of from the moment he stepped on the bus in Istanbul—had gone much better than he could have predicted.
