Snow

by Orhan Pamuk

  Once again, Ka found himself overcome with the fear that he would find so shaming afterward. He also dreaded the things he knew they would say about him if he left. “So what shall I do, Your Excellency?” he asked. He was just about to kiss the sheikh’s hand again when he changed his mind. He could tell that everyone around him knew how confused he was, and how drunk, and looked down on him for this. “I want to believe in the God you believe in and be like you, but because there’s a Westerner inside me, my mind is confused.”

  “If your intentions are this sincere, this is a good beginning,” said the sheikh. “The first thing you need to learn is humility.”

  “How can I do that?” Ka asked. Once again, he could feel the mocking devil inside him.

  “After the evening meal, anyone who wants to talk comes to join me in this corner, on the divan where you’re sitting right now,” said the sheikh. “Everyone here is a brother.”

  It now dawned on Ka that the great crowd of men sitting on the chairs and the cushions around him were in fact queuing up to sit on the corner of this divan. He guessed that what the sheikh wanted most from him now was his respect for this imagined queue, so the best course was to make his way to the end of it and wait patiently like a European; with this in mind, he rose to his feet. He kissed the sheikh’s hand one more time and went to sit on a cushion in the far corner.

  Sitting next to him was a short, kindly man with gold-capped molars who worked at one of the teahouses on İnönü Avenue. The man was so small, and Ka so addled, that Ka found himself wondering whether the man had come to see the sheikh about a remedy for dwarfism. When he was a child in Nişantaş, there had been a very elegant dwarf who would go to the Gypsies in the square every evening to buy a bouquet of violets and a single carnation. The little man told Ka he had seen him passing in front of his teahouse earlier that day; he was sorry Ka hadn’t come in, and he would be very happy if Ka dropped by tomorrow. At this point the cross-eyed bus company manager with the elderly friend chimed in; in a whisper, he told Ka of having gone through a very bad spell on account of a girl—he had given himself to drink and become rebellious to the point of losing all sight of God—but in the end he had been able to put everything behind him. Before Ka could ask, Did you marry the girl? the bus company manager added, “We came to see that this girl was not right for us.”

  The sheikh then said a few words against suicide. The men nearby listened in silence, some nodding at the wisdom of his words, while the three in the corner continued their whispering.

  “There have been a few more suicides,” the short man said, “but the state has decided not to tell us, for the same reason as when it decides not to tell us that the temperature is dropping—they don’t want to upset us. But here’s the real reason for this epidemic: It’s because they’re selling these girls to elderly clerks, men they don’t love.”

  The bus company manager objected. “When my wife first met me,” he said, “she didn’t love me either.” He went on to declare that the epidemic had many causes: for example, unemployment, high prices, immorality, and lack of faith. Because he agreed with everything both men said, Ka began to feel rather two-faced. When the elderly companion began to nod off, the cross-eyed manager woke him up.

  There was a long silence. A feeling of peace rose up inside Ka. They were so far from the center of the world, one couldn’t even imagine going there, and as he fell under the spell of the snowflakes that seemed to hang in the sky outside, he began to wonder if he had entered a world without gravity.

  When everyone had ceased to pay any attention to him, another poem came to Ka. He had his notebook with him, and, as with his first poem, he gave himself fully to the voice now rising up inside him, but this time he wrote down all thirty-six lines of the poem in one fell swoop. Because his mind was still foggy with drink, he was not sure the poem was any good. But when a new rush of inspiration overtook him, he rose to his feet and, begging the sheikh’s pardon, rushed out of the room; when he sat himself down on the stairs to read what he had written, he could see that this poem, like the first, was flawless.

  The poem draws upon the events Ka had just lived and witnessed. Four lines allude to a conversation with a sheikh about the existence of God; there are also references to Ka’s shameful look following his mention of the uneducated man’s God, some proposals concerning solitude, the world’s secret symmetry and the creation of life; there is a man with gold teeth and one who is cross-eyed and a gentle dwarf holding a carnation, all standing with him, telling their life stories.

  Shocked at the beauty of his own words, Ka could not help but ask himself, What does it all mean? It seemed to be a poem someone else had written—this, he thought, was why he was able to see its beauty. But also, finding it beautiful was a shock considering its contents, considering his own life. How to understand the beauty in this poem?

  The light timer in the stairwell clicked off and he was plunged into darkness. When he had found the button and turned the light back on, he took one last look at the notebook and the title came to him: “Hidden Symmetry.” Later he would point to the speed with which this happened as proof that this and all the poems that followed it were—like the world itself—not of his own creation. With this in mind, he would move it to the position of the first poem on the Reason axis.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  If God Does Not Exist, How Do You Explain All the Suffering of the Poor?

  THE SAD STORY OF NECIP AND HICRAN

  On leaving His Excellency’s lodge, Ka headed back to the hotel, and as he trudged through the snow his mind turned to Ïpek. It wouldn’t be long, he realized, before he’d see her again. On his way down Halitpaşa Avenue, he passed first a group of People’s Party campaigners and then a crowd of students on their way out of a university-entrance-exam course. The students were talking about what they were going to watch on television that night and about how easy it was to fool their chemistry teacher; they were needling each other just as mercilessly as Ka and I used to do when we were their age.

  Ka saw a mother and father leading their tearful child by the hand from an apartment building where they’d just visited the dentist upstairs. It was clear from their clothes that this couple were barely making ends meet, but they had decided to take their beloved child not to the state dispensary but rather to a private dentist, whose treatment they hoped would be less painful. Through the open door of a shop that sold women’s stockings, bolts of cotton cloth, colored pencils, batteries, and cassettes, he heard once again the strains of Peppino di Capri’s “Roberta” and remembered hearing it on the radio when he was a child and his uncle had taken him out for a drive on the Bosphorus.

  As his heart began to soar, it occurred to Ka that there might be a new poem coming to him, so he stepped into the first teahouse he could find and, sitting down at the first empty table, took out his pencil and his notebook.

  After gazing through moist eyes at the empty page for some time, he revised his forecast: Actually, there was no poem coming to him, but this didn’t dampen his spirits in the slightest. The teahouse was packed with unemployed men and students, and all around him the walls were plastered not just with scenes of Switzerland but also with theatrical posters, newspaper cartoons, assorted clippings, an announcement of the terms and conditions of the civil service exam, and a schedule of the soccer matches to be played by Karsspor that year. The results of past matches—most of them losses—were penciled in by various hands; next to the 6–1 loss to Erzurumspor, someone had written the lines that Ka would incorporate into “All Humanity and the Stars,” the poem he would write tomorrow while sitting in the Lucky Brothers Teahouse:

  Even if your mother came down from heaven to take you into her arms,

  Even if your wicked father let her go without a beating for just one night,

  You’d still be penniless, your shit would still freeze, your soul would still wither, there is no hope!

  If you’re unlucky enough to live in Kars, you might
as well flush yourself down the toilet.

  Smiling happily as he copied these lines into his notebook, he was soon joined by Necip, who was sitting at a table in the back; it was clear from his expression that he was stunned to see Ka in this place and also very pleased.

  “I’m so happy you’re here,” said Necip. “Are you writing a poem? I would like to apologize for my friends, especially the one who called you an atheist. It’s the first time in their lives they’ve come face-to-face with a nonbeliever. But it seems to me that you couldn’t really be an atheist, because you’re such a good person.” He went on to say a few other things that he’d felt unable to say earlier: He and his friends had sneaked out of school to attend the show at the theater that evening, but they were going to sit way in the back, because of course they didn’t want the school directors to spot them on live TV. Necip was elated to have escaped from school and to be meeting his friends at the National Theater. They all knew that Ka was going to read a poem there. Everyone in Kars wrote poems, but Ka was the first person Necip had ever met to have his poems published. Could he offer Ka a glass of tea?

  Ka explained that he was short of time.

  “In that case, I’ll just ask you one question, one last question,” said Necip. “I’m not like my friends, I’m not trying to show you disrespect. I’m just very curious.”

  “Yes.”

  Necip lit a cigarette with shaky hands. “If God does not exist, that means heaven does not exist either. And that means the world’s poor, those millions who live in poverty and oppression, will never go to heaven. And if that is so, then how do you explain all the suffering of the poor? What are we here for, and why do we put up with so much unhappiness, if it’s all for nothing?”

  “God exists. So does heaven.”

  “No, you’re just saying that to console me, because you feel sorry for us. As soon as you’re back in Germany, you’ll start thinking God doesn’t exist, just like you did before.”

  “For the first time in years, I’m very happy,” said Ka. “Why shouldn’t I believe the same things as you?”

  “Because you belong to the intelligentsia,” said Necip. “People in the intelligentsia never believe in God. They believe in what Europeans do, and they think they’re better than ordinary people.”

  “I may belong to the intelligentsia in Turkey,” said Ka. “But in Germany I’m a worthless nobody. I was falling apart there.”

  Necip’s beautiful eyes turned inward, and Ka could see that the teenager was considering his case, trying to put himself in Ka’s shoes. “Then why did you get angry at your country and flee to Germany?” he asked. Seeing Ka’s face fall, he said, “Never mind! Anyway, if I were rich, I’d be so ashamed of my situation that I’d believe in God even more.”

  “One day, God willing, we’ll all be rich,” said Ka.

  “Nothing is as simple as you say—that’s what I think. I’m not that simple either, and I don’t want to be rich. What I want is to be a writer. I’m writing a science-fiction novel. It might get published—in one of the Kars papers, the one called the Lance—but I don’t want to be published in a paper that sells seventy-five copies; I want to be published in an Istanbul paper that sells thousands. I have a synopsis of the novel with me. If I read it to you, could you tell me whether you think an Istanbul paper might publish it?”

  Ka looked at his watch.

  “It’s very short!” said Necip.

  The electricity went out and all of Kars was plunged into darkness. The only light in the teahouse was coming from the stove. Necip ran over to the counter and grabbed a candle; he lit it and dripped a few drops of wax onto a plate, a seal by which to affix the burning candle to the plate, which he set on the table. Retrieving a few sheets of crumpled paper from his pocket, he began to read in a hesitant voice, stopping from time to time to gulp with excitement.

  “In the year 3579, there was a red planet we haven’t even discovered yet. Its name was Gazzali and its people were rich, and their lives were much easier than our lives are today, but contrary to what materialists would have predicted, their rich and easy lives did not bring the inhabitants of this planet any spiritual satisfaction. To the contrary, everyone was deeply anxious about being and nothingness, man and the universe, God and his people.

  “And so it came to pass that a number of Gazzalians traveled to the most remote corner of their planet to set up the Islamic Lycée for the Study of Science and Oration. It took only the cleverest and most hardworking students.

  “Two close friends attended this lycée. Inspired by books written 1600 years earlier, books that illuminated this East—West problem so beautifully they could have been written yesterday, they called each other Necip and Fazιl. Together they read The Great East, their revered master’s finest book, over and over, and in the evenings they would meet secretly in Fazιl’s bed, the higher bunk, where under the covers they would lie side by side watching the blue snowflakes fall onto the glass roof above them and disappear just like planets. Here they would whisper into each other’s ears about the meaning of life and the things they hoped to do when they were older.

  “The evil-hearted tried in vain to tarnish this pure friendship with snide and jealous jokes. But then one day the two came under a cloud. It so happened that they had simultaneously fallen in love with the same girl, a virgin named Hicran. Even when they discovered that Hicran’s father was an atheist, they couldn’t cure themselves of their hopeless longing; on the contrary, their love grew all the more intense.

  “In this way they came to realize that there was no longer enough room on Gazzali for both of them; they knew in their hearts that one of them would have to die. But they made the following promise. After spending some time in the next world, no matter how many light-years away it was, the one who died would come back to this world to visit his surviving friend and answer his most urgent questions—about life after death.

  “As for the question of who would kill whom and how it would be done, they just couldn’t make up their minds—mainly because they both knew that true happiness could only come for the one who sacrificed his own life for the other. So, for example, if one of them—let’s say it was Fazιl—said, ‘Let’s both stick our naked hands into the sockets at the same time and electrocute ourselves together,’ Necip would see it at once for what it was: a clever trick Fazιl had invented to sacrifice himself for his friend (clearly, Fazιl would have arranged for Necip’s socket to be harmless). After many months of hemming and hawing, months that caused both boys great pain, the question was decided in a matter of seconds: Necip returned from his evening lessons one night to discover his dear friend lying dead in his bed, riddled with bullets.

  “The following year, Necip married Hicran, and on their wedding night he told her what had passed between him and his friend and how one day Fazιl would return from the spirit world. Hicran told him she had really loved Fazιl; after his death she had cried for days, cried so much that blood had run from her eyes, and she had married Necip only because he was Fazιl’s friend and bore him some resemblance. They decided not to consummate their marriage and agreed that the ban on love should continue until Fazιl returned from the other world.

  “But as the years passed, they began to long for each other. First their longing was spiritual, and then it became physical. One night, during an interplanetary inspection, while shining their beams on a city on Earth that went by the name of Kars, they were no longer able to control themselves; they fell upon each other like crazy people and made passionate love. You might think this meant they had forgotten Fazιl, whose memory had for so long plagued them like a toothache. But they had not forgotten him, and the shame in their hearts scared them as it grew with every day.

  “A night arrived when they awoke suddenly, having both decided at the same time that this strange cocktail of fear and other emotions was going to destroy them. At the same moment, the television across the room turned on by itself, and there, shining brightly, the ghos
tly form of Fazιl took shape. The deadly shots to the forehead were still fresh, and his lower lip and other wounds were still dripping with blood.

  “ ‘I am racked with pain,’ said Fazιl. ‘There is not a single corner of the other world I have not seen.’ [I will write about these travels in full detail using Gazzali’s Victories of Mecca and Ibn Arabi as my inspirations, said Necip.] ‘I have earned the highest compliments of God’s angels, and I have traveled to what is thought to be the summit of the highest plain of heaven; I have seen the terrible punishments meted out in hell to tie-wearing atheists and arrogant colonialist positivists who make fun of the common people and their faith—but everywhere happiness eluded me, because my mind was here with you.’

  “Husband and wife were overwhelmed with fearful admiration as they listened to the sad ghost.

  “ ‘The thing that made me so unhappy all those years was not the thought that I might one day see you two sitting so happily together, as I am seeing you tonight. On the contrary, I longed for Necip’s happiness more than I longed for my own. Because of the profound feeling between us, we had been unable to find any way to kill either ourselves or each other. Because each valued the other’s life more than his own, it was as if we were both wearing protective armor that made us immortal. How happy that made me feel! But my death proved to me that I had been wrong to believe in this feeling.’

  “ ‘No!’ Necip cried. ‘Not once did I give my own life more value than I gave to yours!’

  “ ‘If this had been true, I never would have died,’ said Fazιl’s ghost, ‘and you would never have married the beautiful Hicran. I died because you harbored a secret wish—a wish so secret you even hid it from yourself—to see me dead.’