Snow

by Orhan Pamuk

  Hoping he might be able to identify the tiny man who had shot the director of the Institute of Education, they took Ka into a side room to peruse an archive of about a hundred black-and-white photographs. Here was every political Islamist from Kars and the surrounding areas who had ever been detained even once by the police. Most of them were young Kurds, from the villages or else unemployed, but there were also mug shots of street vendors, students attending religious high schools or universities, teachers, and Sunni Turks. As Ka looked at photograph after photograph of doleful youths staring miserably into the police camera, he thought he recognized two teenagers from his walk around the city earlier in the day, but he saw no one who resembled the tiny and, it seemed to him, older man who’d committed the murder.

  Ka returned to find Muhtar hunched on the same stool, but his nose was bleeding and one eye was shot with red. Muhtar made one or two shameful gestures and then hid his face behind a handkerchief. In the silence Ka imagined that Muhtar had found redemption in this beating; it might have released him from the guilt and spiritual agony he felt at the misery and stupidity of his country. Two days later, just before receiving the unhappiest news of his life—and having by then fallen into the same state as Muhtar—Ka would have reason to recall his foolish fantasy.

  Moments later, they returned Ka to the side room to give his statement. Sitting across from a young policeman using the same old Remington typewriter he remembered his lawyer father using on nights when he brought work home, Ka described the slaying of the director of the Institute of Education, and as he spoke it occurred to him that they had shown him Muhtar in order to frighten him.

  He was released soon afterward, but Muhtar’s face remained before his eyes for some time. In the old days, the provincial police weren’t quite so ready to beat up religious conservatives. But Muhtar was not from one of the center-right parties; he was a proponent of radical Islam. Once again Ka wondered if this stance had something to do with Muhtar’s personality. He walked through the snow for a long, long time. At the end of Army Avenue, he sat down on a wall and smoked a cigarette, while he watched a group of children slipping and sliding on a side street in the lamplight. The poverty and the violence he had seen that day had tired him, but he was propped up by the hope that with Ïpek’s love he would be able to begin a new life.

  Later on, walking through the snow again, he found himself on the pavement across the street from the New Life Pastry Shop. The window was broken and the navy-blue light atop the police patrol car parked out front was flashing; it cast an almost spiritual glow over the shop employees and the pack of children gathered around the car, and it imbued the falling snow with a divine patience. When Ka joined the crowd, the police were still interrogating the old waiter.

  Someone tapped timidly on Ka’s shoulder. “You’re Ka the poet, aren’t you?” It was a teenage boy with large green eyes and a good-natured childish face. “My name is Necip. I know you’ve come to Kars to report on the elections and the suicide girls for the Republican, and you’ve already met with quite a few groups. But there’s one more important person in Kars whom you should see.”

  “Who?”

  “Could we move a little to the side?”

  Ka liked the teenager’s air of mystery. They moved in front of the Modern Buffet, “world-famous for its sharbats and saleps.”

  “My instructions are such that I cannot give you the name of the person you need to meet unless you first agree to meet him.”

  “How can I agree to see someone without first knowing who he is?”

  “You’re right,” said Necip. “But this person is in hiding. I can’t tell you who he’s hiding from or why unless you agree to see him.”

  “All right, I agree to see him,” said Ka. Striking a pose that came straight out of an adventure comic, he added, “I hope this isn’t a trap.”

  “If you can’t put your trust in people, you’ll never get anywhere in life,” said Necip, also striking a pose straight out of an adventure comic.

  “I trust you,” said Ka. “Who is this person I need to see?”

  “After you find out his name, you’ll meet him. But you must also keep his hiding place a secret. Now think about it one more time. Shall I tell you who he is?”

  “Yes,” said Ka. “You have to trust me too.”

  “This person’s name is Blue,” said Necip in a voice full of awe. He looked disappointed when Ka offered no reaction. “Did you never hear about him when you were in Germany? In Turkey he’s famous.”

  “I know,” said Ka, in a soothing voice. “I’m ready to meet him.”

  “But I don’t know where he is,” said Necip. “What’s more, I myself have never seen him even once in my whole life.”

  For a moment they smiled doubtfully at each other.

  “Someone else is going to take you to see Blue. My job is to help you make contact with that person.”

  They walked together down Little Kâzιmbey Avenue, amid the posters and small campaign banners. There was something about Necip’s wiry body and his nervous, childish manner that reminded Ka of himself at that age, so he warmed to the boy. For a moment he found himself trying to imagine what the world looked like through those green eyes.

  “What did you hear about Blue in Germany?” asked Necip.

  “I read in the Turkish papers that he was a militant political Islamist,” said Ka. “I read other nasty things about him, too.”

  Necip quickly interrupted him. “Political Islamist is only a name that Westerners and seculars give us Muslims who are ready to fight for our religion,” he said. “You’re a secularist, but please don’t let yourself fall for the lies about Blue in the secular press. He hasn’t killed anyone, not even in Bosnia, where he went to defend his Muslim brothers, or in Grozny, where a Russian bomb left him crippled.”

  They came to a corner, where he made Ka stop.

  “You see that store across the street, the Communication Bookstore? It belongs to the Followers, but all Islamists in Kars use it as a gathering place. The police know this and so does everyone else; some of the sales-clerks spy for them. I’m a pupil at the religious high school. It’s against the rules for me to go in there. If I do I’ll be disciplined, but I have to let the people inside know you’re here. In three minutes you’ll see a tall bearded young man wearing a red skullcap come out the door. Follow him. When you’ve gone two streets, if there aren’t any plainclothes police around, he’ll approach you and take you to the place you need to go. Do you understand? May God be your helper.”

  With that, Necip vanished into a cloud of snowflakes. Ka’s heart went out to him.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Suicide Is a Terrible Sin

  BLUE AND RÜSTEM

  Ka stood across the street from the Communication Bookstore. The snow was falling faster, and by now he was tired of waiting and of dusting snow off his head, his coat, his shoes. He was about to go back to the hotel when he looked across the street and in the dim light of the streetlamp saw a tall bearded youth walking along the pavement opposite. When he realized that the snow had turned the boy’s skullcap from red to white, Ka’s heart began to race and he set off after him.

  After walking all the way down Kâzιm Karabekir Avenue—which the mayoral candidate of the Motherland Party, following the new fashion set by Istanbul, had promised to turn into a pedestrian precinct—they turned into Faikbey Avenue and then took the second right into Station Square. The statue of General Kâzιm Karabekir that Ka remembered seeing earlier in the middle of the square was now buried and looked like a giant ice-cream cone. In the darkness Ka could still see that the bearded youth had entered the train station; he hurried after him. Finding no one in the waiting hall, he imagined that his guide must have gone out to the platform, so Ka went also; at the end of the platform he was just able to see someone moving into the darkness beyond, so Ka followed onto the tracks. Just as Ka was considering that were he to be shot dead here, his body would probably lie undiscover
ed till spring, he came face-to-face with the bearded young man.

  “No one’s following us,” he said, “though you can still change your mind. But if you decide to continue you must keep your mouth shut from here on. You can never tell anyone how you got here. The penalty for treachery is death.”

  This threat didn’t scare Ka, if only because, pronounced in a high-pitched voice, it sounded almost funny. They continued along the tracks, passing the silo and then turning into Stew Street, right next to the military barracks, where the bearded youth pointed to an apartment building and told him which bell to ring.

  “Don’t be insolent to the Master,” he said. “Don’t interrupt him, and when you’re through don’t hang around, just get up and leave.”

  This was how Ka discovered that among his admirers Blue was also known as the Master. But it was just about the only thing Ka knew about Blue—aside from his being a political Islamist of some notoriety. He remembered reading in the Turkish newspapers he saw from time to time in Germany that Blue had been implicated in a murder years ago. Still, many political Islamists killed, and none of them was famous. What had made Blue notorious was the claim that he was responsible for the murder of an effeminate exhibitionist and TV personality named Güner Bener, on whose quiz show, broadcast on a minor channel, contestants vied for cash prizes. Bener wore gaudy suits and had a penchant for indecent remarks, favoring jokes about “the uneducated.” One day, during a live broadcast, this freckled master of sarcasm was making fun of one of his poorer and clumsier contestants when by some slip of the tongue he uttered an inappropriate remark about the Prophet Muhammad.

  Most likely it was noticed only by a few devout men dozing in front of their TV sets, who probably forgot the quip as soon as they had heard it, but Blue sent a letter to all the Istanbul papers threatening to kill the host unless he made a formal apology on the next show and promised never to make such a joke again. The Istanbul press gets threats like this all the time and might well have paid no attention to this one. But the television station had such a commitment to its provocative secularist line, and to showing just how rabid these political Islamists could be, that the managers invited Blue to appear on the show. He took this opportunity to make even fiercer threats, and he was such a hit as the “wild-eyed scimitar-wielding Islamist” that he was invited to repeat the performance on other channels.

  Around this time, the public prosecutor issued a warrant for Blue’s arrest on the charge of making a public death threat, so Blue marked his first burst of celebrity by going into hiding. Meanwhile Güner Bener, who had also captured much attention by now for his role, appeared on his daily live TV show to defy his would-be assassins, proclaiming with unexpected vehemence that he was “not afraid of Atatürk-hating antirepublican perverts”; the next day, in his luxury hotel room in Izmir where he stayed for the show, they found him strangled with the same loud tie festooned with beach balls he’d been wearing during the broadcast.

  Blue had an alibi—he’d been attending a conference in Manisa in support of the head-scarf girls—but he stayed in hiding to avoid the press, which had by now made sure the whole country knew about the incident and Blue’s part in it. Some of the Islamist press were as critical as the secularists; they accused Blue of “bloodying the hands” of political Islam, of allowing himself to become the plaything of the secularist press, of enjoying his media fame in a manner unbefitting a Muslim, of being in the pay of the CIA. This may explain why Blue went underground and stayed there for a good long time. It was while he was in hiding that stories spread in Islamist circles of his having gone to Bosnia to fight the Serbs and his having been heroically wounded fighting the Russians in Grozny, but there were those who claimed that these rumors were false.

  (Those who would know Blue’s own version of these matters might consult his short autobiography entitled “My Execution,” which can be found on the fifth page of this book’s thirty-fifth chapter, “Ka with Blue in His Cell” subtitled “I’M NOT AN AGENT FOR ANYONE,” though I am not sure everything Blue tells us there is entirely correct.)

  True, many lies were told about Blue. The fact is that some of them fed his legend, and certainly it could be said that Blue was nourished by his own mysterious reputation. It was also suggested that, by his later silence, Blue had tacitly agreed with all the barbs he attracted in some Islamist circles for his earlier proclamations; many would even suggest that a Muslim appearing so much in the secularist, Zionist, bourgeois media had only got what he deserved. In fact, as our story will show, Blue did indeed enjoy talking to the media.

  As for his reasons for being in Kars, as is so often the case with rumors in small places, the stories spread fast but just didn’t add up. Some said he had come to shore up the local operations of a Kurdish Islamist organization, the government having crushed the Diyarbakir-based national operations center; Blue, it was said, had been dispatched to Kars to “secure the organization’s secrets.” Others discounted this story, as the organization in question had no members in Kars, apart from one or two raving lunatics. Some said Blue had come to repair relations between the Marxist-revolutionary Kurds and the Islamist Kurds—there was increasing conflict between them in the cities of the East—and according to this story he had come to urge that they all try to act like peaceful well-behaved militants. The tension between the Marxist-revolutionary Kurds and the Islamist Kurds had begun in violent arguments, exchanges of insults, beatings, and street fights, and in many cities matters escalated to knifings and attacks with meat cleavers; in recent months partisans had been shooting and killing one another, taking captives and interrogating them under torture (with both sides using familiar methods like pouring melted plastic onto a prisoner’s skin or squeezing his testicles), and there were also reports of strangulations. It was said that a secret group of mediators had formed who believed this war was “playing right into the hands of the state” and so wanted to end it, and that this group had dispatched Blue to reconnoiter in the towns of the affected area, but according to his enemies Blue’s black past and relative youth disqualified him from such an important mission. There were other rumors, spread by the young Islamists, that he had come to Kars to “straighten out” Hakan Özge, Kars Border Television’s effeminate young shiny-suit-wearing host and disc jockey, who had been making mischievous jokes and sly insinuations about our glorious Islam and now constantly referred to God and prayer time on his program. Others still imagined that Blue was a go-between for an international Islamist terrorist ring. It was said that even the Kars intelligence and security units had heard about this Saudi-backed network with plans to terrorize thousands of women—pouring into Turkey from the old Soviet Union to work as prostitutes—by killing some of them. Blue had done nothing to deny these rumors, just as he had done nothing to deny the rumors about the suicide girls, the head-scarf girls, or the rumor that he had come to observe the municipal election. His failure to respond to what was said about him, coupled with his refusal to come out of hiding, gave him an air of mystery that appealed to the students at the religious high school and the young in general. He wasn’t just hiding from the police; he stayed off the streets as a way of maintaining his legend, and toward this end it suited him to keep people guessing as to whether or not he was in their city.

  Ka rang the doorbell that the youth with the skullcap had indicated and immediately decided that the short man who welcomed him inside the apartment was the one who had shot the director of the Institute of Education at the New Life Pastry Shop an hour and a half earlier. Ka’s heart began to beat faster.

  “I hope you won’t take offense,” this man said, raising his arms in the air as a prompt for his guest to do likewise. “Over the past two years they’ve made three attempts to assassinate the Boss, so I’m going to have to frisk you.”

  Ka held out his arms to be searched—it took him back to his university days. As the man’s little hands passed carefully over his shirt, Ka was afraid he would notice how fast his heart w
as beating. But once the search was over, Ka felt calmer and his heartbeat returned to normal. No, in fact this was not the director’s assassin. This pleasant middle-aged man, who rather resembled Edward G. Robinson, seemed neither decisive nor strong enough to shoot anyone.

  Ka heard the sobs of a baby and the sweet sounds of a mother tenderly trying to comfort it.

  “Shall I take off my shoes?” he asked, and removed them without waiting for an answer.

  “We’re guests here,” said a second voice. “We don’t want to be a burden to our hosts.”

  Ka suddenly realized there was someone else in the little entry hall. Although he knew at once that it was Blue, a part of him was doubtful; perhaps he had been expecting the meeting to be far more carefully staged. He followed Blue into a sparsely furnished room, where a black-and-white television set was playing. Here a tiny infant with his fist in his mouth was staring with happy and deeply serious eyes at his mother, who was changing him and whispering to him sweetly in Kurdish. His eyes fixed first on Blue and then on Ka as they entered the room. As in all the old Russian houses, there was no hallway. The two men continued into a second room.

  Ka’s mind was on Blue. He saw a bed made so perfectly that it would have passed military inspection, and a pair of striped pajamas neatly folded beside the pillow; sitting on the bed was an ashtray inscribed ERSIN ELECTRIC and on the wall a calendar showing scenes of Venice; there was a large window, its shutters open, looking out over the melancholy lights of the snow-covered city. Blue closed the window and turned to face Ka.