by Orhan Pamuk
“After Teslime committed suicide, Hande’s parents pressured her to take off her head scarf and she did, but she’s not comfortable with the decision. My father says it all reminds him of his old days as a Communist. There are two kinds of Communists: the arrogant ones, who enter the fray hoping to make men out of the people and bring progress to the nation; and the innocent ones, who get involved because they believe in equality and justice. The arrogant ones are obsessed with power; they presume to think for everyone; only bad can come of them. But the innocents? The only harm they do is to themselves. But that’s all they ever wanted in the first place. They feel so guilty about the suffering of the poor, and are so keen to share it, that they make their lives miserable on purpose.
“My father was a teacher, but then they took his job away. During one torture session they pulled out one of his fingernails; following another session they threw him into prison. Still, he did what he could. For years he and my mother ran a stationery store; they did photocopying; they even translated a few novels from French into Turkish. At times they would go door-to-door selling encyclopedias on the installment plan. When the poverty was just too much to bear, he’d put his arms around us and cry. He was always so afraid something bad would happen to us. And so when the police came to see us after the director of the Institute of Education was shot, he got very frightened—even though he grumbled at them too. I’ve heard that you went to see Blue. Please don’t tell my father.”
“I won’t tell him,” Ka said. He stopped to brush the snow off his coat. “Aren’t we going this way—straight to the hotel?”
“You can go this way too. The snow doesn’t end, and neither will the list of things we have to discuss. Besides, I’d like to show you Butcher Street.… What did Blue want from you?”
“Nothing.”
“Did he say anything about us—my father or my sister?” Ka saw an anxious expression on Kadife’s face. “I can’t remember,” he said.
“Everyone’s afraid of him. We are too.… These are the most famous butcher shops in the city.”
“How does your father spend his days?” Ka asked. “Does he ever leave the house—the hotel?”
“He’s the one who manages the hotel. He gives the orders to the housekeeper, the cleaner, the laundrywoman, and the busboys. My sister and I help out. But my father almost never goes out. What’s your sign?”
“Gemini,” said Ka. “Geminis are supposed to tell lots of lies, but I’m not so sure.”
“Are you saying that you’re not sure whether Geminis tell lies, or you’re not sure whether you do?”
“If you believe in astrology, you must be able to figure out why today is such a special day for me.”
“Yes, my sister told me; today you wrote a poem.”
“Does your sister tell you everything?”
“We have two diversions here. We talk about everything that happens to us, and we watch television. We even talk while watching television. And while we’re talking, we watch television too. My sister is very beautiful, don’t you think?”
“Yes, she’s very beautiful,” said Ka, with reverence. “But you’re also beautiful,” he added politely. “And now are you going to tell her that too?”
“No, I’m not going to tell her. Let’s have one secret we can share. It’s the best way to begin a friendship.” And she brushed off the snow that had piled up on her long purple raincoat.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
How Do You Write Poems?
THE DINNER CONVERSATION TURNS TO LOVE, HEAD SCARVES, AND SUICIDE
They saw a crowd milling in front of the National Theater; in just a few minutes, the show would begin. The relentless snowfall seemed to have deterred no one, or perhaps the snow itself had made people decide that, with so much going wrong, they might as well seize this one chance for an enjoyable evening out. Many of those gathered on the pavement in front of the 110-year-old building came from the ranks of the unemployed; there were youths who had left their homes and dormitories in shirt and tie, and youngsters who had sneaked out of the house. Many had brought their children. For the first time since arriving in Kars, Ka saw an open black umbrella. Kadife knew Ka was on the program and scheduled to recite a poem, but when Ka said he had no intention of taking part and had no time for it anyway, she made no attempt to persuade him.
He could feel another poem coming. He stopped talking and rushed back to the hotel as fast as he could. He excused himself, saying that he needed to nip back to his room to collect himself; no sooner had he opened the door than he threw off his coat, sat down at the small table, and began scribbling furiously. The poem’s main themes were friendship and secrecy. Snowflakes and stars were also featured, as were a number of motifs that suggested special happy days.
A number of Kadife’s remarks went straight into the poem without alteration; as one line followed another, Ka surveyed the page with the pleasure and excitement of a painter watching a picture appear on his easel. He could see now that his conversation with Kadife had a hidden logic; in this poem, entitled “Stars and Their Friends,” he elaborated on the theory that every person has a star, every star has a friend, and for every person carrying a star there is someone else who reflects it, and everyone carries this reflection like a secret confidante in the heart. Although he could hear the poem’s music in his head and exalted in its perfection, he had to skip a word that eluded him here and there; there were a few lines missing too. He would later say that this was because of his preoccupation with Ïpek, his not having had his dinner yet, and his being happier than ever before.
As soon as he finished the poem, he rushed down to the lobby and into the owners’ private quarters. Sitting at a bountifully set table in the middle of a spacious room with high ceilings, flanked on either side by his daughters, Kadife and Ïpek, was Turgut Bey. There was a third girl as well, sitting to one side; she wore a stylish purple head scarf, and Ka knew at once she must be Kadife’s friend Hande. Across from her was Serdar Bey, the newspaperman; he seemed at home in this group. As Ka surveyed all the dishes on the table—what a strange and beautiful disorder—and watched the Kurdish maid, Zahide, gracefully darting in and out of the back kitchen, he imagined that Turgut Bey and his daughters were accustomed to spending long evenings at this table.
“I’ve been thinking about you all day, and all day I’ve been worrying about you,” said Turgut Bey. “Why are you so late?” He rose to his feet and leaned over to wrap his arms around Ka in such a way that Ka thought the man was about to cry. “Terrible things can happen at any time,” he said, with a tragic air.
He sat down in the place Turgut Bey indicated, right across from him, at the other end of the table; the maid served Ka a bowl of lentil soup, which he devoured hungrily. The two other men returned to their raki, their eyes drifting toward the television right behind him; when Ka saw that everyone else had done the same, he did something he’d been dreaming of for a long time: He stared at Ïpek’s beautiful face.
Because he would later describe his boundless ecstasy quite vividly in his notes, I know exactly how he felt at that moment—like a happy child, he couldn’t keep his arms or legs still. He could not have been more jittery and impatient if he and Ïpek were rushing to catch the train that would take them back to Frankfurt. He looked at Turgut Bey’s worktable—piled high with books, newspapers, receipts, hotel record books—and as he gazed at the circle cast by the lamp below its shade, he conjured up the vision of another circle of light, one on his own worktable, in the little office he would share with Ïpek when they returned to live happily ever after in Frankfurt.
Just then he saw that Kadife’s eyes were on him. Meeting her gaze, Ka thought he saw a flash of jealousy cross her face, which was not as beautiful as her sister’s, but she managed to conceal it with a conspiratorial smile.
His dinner companions remained mesmerized by the television set; even in the thick of conversation, they kept glancing at it out of the corners of their eyes. The live telec
ast from the National Theater had begun; the tall thin emcee swaying this way and that on the stage was one of the actors Ka had seen while getting off the bus the previous evening. They had not been watching him long when Turgut Bey picked up the remote control and changed the channel. For a long time they sat staring at a fuzzy picture flecked with white dots; they had no idea what they were watching, but it seemed to be in black-and-white.
“Father,” said Ïpek, “what are you watching?”
“It’s snow,” said her father. “If nothing else, it is an accurate description of our weather here. This counts as real news. Anyway, you know that if I watch one channel for too long, I feel robbed of my dignity.”
“Then, Father, why don’t you just turn the television off? Something else is going on here that’s robbing us all of our dignity.”
“Well, tell our guest what’s happened,” said her father, looking rather shamefaced. “It makes me uneasy that he doesn’t know.”
“That’s how I feel too,” said Hande. There was anger in her beautiful black eyes. For a moment everyone fell silent.
“Why don’t you tell the story, Hande?” said Kadife. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“No, that’s not true. There’s a great deal to be ashamed of, and that’s why I want to talk about it,” Hande said. Her large eyes flashed with a strange joy. She smiled as if recalling a happy memory and said, “It’s forty days exactly since our friend Teslime’s suicide. Of all the girls in our group, Teslime was the one most dedicated to the struggle for her religion and the word of God. For her, the head scarf did not just stand for God’s love, it also proclaimed her faith and preserved her honor. None of us could have ever imagined she would kill herself. Despite pressure both at school and at home to take off her scarf—her father and her teachers were relentless—Teslime held her ground. She was about to be expelled from school in her third year of study, just on the verge on graduating. Then one day her father had some visitors from police headquarters; they told him that if he didn’t send his daughter to school scarfless, they would close down his grocery store and run him out of Kars.
“The father threatened to throw Teslime out of the house, and when this tactic failed he entered into negotiations to marry her off to a forty-five-year-old policeman who had lost his wife. Things had gone so far that the policeman was coming to the store with flowers. So revolted was Teslime by this gray-eyed widower, she told us, she was thinking of taking off her head scarf if it would save her from this marriage, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do it.
“Some of us agreed that she should uncover her head to avoid marrying the gray-eyed widower, and some of us said, ‘Why don’t you threaten your father with suicide?’ I was the one who urged this most strongly. I really didn’t want Teslime to give up her head scarf. I don’t know how many times I said, ‘Teslime, it’s far better to kill yourself than to uncover your head.’ But I was just saying it for the sake of conversation. We believed what the papers said—that the suicide girls had killed themselves because they had no faith, because they were slaves to materialism, because they had been unlucky in love; all I was trying to do was give Teslime’s father a fright. Teslime was a devout girl, so I assumed she would never seriously consider suicide. But when we heard she had hanged herself, I was the first to believe it. And what’s more, I knew that, had I been in her shoes, I would have done the same thing.”
Hande began to cry. Ïpek went to her side, gave her a kiss, and began to caress her; Kadife joined them. With the girls wrapped in each other’s arms, Turgut Bey was waving the remote control and soon also trying to comfort Hande. Before long they were all telling jokes to keep her from crying. As though trying to distract a weeping child, Turgut Bey pointed out the giraffes on the screen; then, like a child not yet certain she’s ready to relent, Hande gazed at the screen with tearful eyes. For a long while, the girls forgot their own lives as they watched two giraffes in slow motion, in a faraway land, perhaps in the middle of Africa, in a field shaded by a heavy growth of trees.
“After Teslime’s suicide, Hande decided to take off her head scarf and go back to school; she didn’t want to cause her parents any more distress,” Kadife explained. “They’d made so many sacrifices, gone without so much, to give her the right sort of upbringing; the things most parents do for an only son, they did for her. Her parents have always assumed that Hande would be able to support them one day, because Hande is very clever.”
She was speaking in a soft voice, almost whispering, but still loud enough for Hande to hear her, and like everyone else in the room, Hande was listening, even with her tear-filled eyes still fixed to the television screen.
“At first the rest of us tried to talk her out of removing her scarf, but when we realized that her going uncovered was better than her committing suicide, we supported her decision. When a girl has accepted the head scarf as the word of God and the symbol of faith, it’s very difficult for her to take it off. Hande spent days locked up inside her house trying to concentrate.”
Like everyone else in the room, Ka was cowering with embarrassment by now, but when his arm brushed against Ïpek’s arm a wave of happiness spread through him. As Turgut Bey jumped from channel to channel, Ka tried to find more happiness by brushing his arm against Ïpek’s arm. When Ïpek did the same, he forgot all about the sad story he’d just heard.
Once again, the television was tuned to the National Theater. The tall thin man was saying how proud he was to be taking part in Kars’s first live telecast and announced the program for the evening, promising miraculous renditions of the world’s greatest legends; secret confessions of a national goalkeeper; shocking revelations that would bring shame to our political history; unforgettable scenes from Shakespeare and Victor Hugo; amorous disasters; the greatest, most glittering stars of Turkish film and theater; as well as jokes, songs, and earth-shaking surprises. Ka heard himself described as “our greatest poet, who has returned to our country in silence after many years.” Reaching under the table, Ïpek took Ka’s hand.
“I understand that you don’t want to take part in the performance,” said Turgut Bey.
“I’m very happy where I am, sir, very happy indeed,” said Ka, pressing his arm against Ïpek’s even harder.
“I really wouldn’t want to do anything to disrupt your happiness,” said Hande, setting everyone in the room on edge, “but I came here tonight to meet you. I haven’t read any of your books, but it’s enough for me that you’re a poet and have been to places like Germany. Do you mind if I ask whether you’ve written any poems lately?”
“Quite a few poems have come to me since I arrived in Kars,” said Ka.
“I wanted to meet you because I thought you could tell me how I might go about concentrating. Do you mind if I ask a question? How do you write poems? Isn’t it by concentrating?”
Whenever he gave readings for Turks in Germany, this was the most common question from women in the audience, but every time they asked, Ka recoiled as if he’d been asked something personal. “I have no idea how poems get written,” he said now. “A good poem always seems to come from outside, from far away.” He saw Hande’s eyes filling with suspicion, and added, “Why don’t you explain to me what you mean when you use the word concentrate?”
“I try all day, but I can’t conjure up the vision I want to see, the vision of myself without a head scarf. Instead, I keep seeing all the things I want to forget.”
“For example?”
“When they first noticed how many of us were wearing head scarves, they sent a woman from Ankara to try to talk us out of it. This ‘agent of persuasion’ sat in the same room for hours on end, talking to each of us alone. She asked things like, ‘Did your parents beat you? How many children are there in your family? How much does your father earn in a month? What sort of clothes did you wear before you adopted religious dress? Do you love Atatürk? What sort of pictures do you have hanging on the walls at home? How many times a week do you
go to the movies? In your view, are men and women equals? Is God greater than the state, or is the state greater than God? How many children do you want to have? Have you ever suffered from abuse in the home?’ She asked us hundreds of questions like this, and she wrote down all our answers, filling out a long form for each of us.
“She was a very stylish woman—painted nails, dyed hair, no head scarf, of course—and she wore the sort of clothes you see in magazines, but at the same time she was—how should I put this?—plain. Even though some of her questions made us cry, we liked her. We even hoped that the muddy streets of Kars weren’t causing her too much trouble. Afterward I began to see her in my dreams. At first I didn’t read too much into it, but now, whenever I try to imagine myself walking through crowds with my hair flying all around me, I see myself as the ‘agent of persuasion.’ In my mind’s eye I’m as stylish as she is, wearing stiletto heels and dresses even shorter than hers, and men are looking at me with interest. I find this pleasing—and at the same time very shaming.”
“Hande, you don’t have to describe your shame unless you want to,” said Kadife.
“No, I’m going to talk about it. Even though I feel shame in my dreams, that doesn’t mean I’m ashamed of my dreams. Even if I did take off my head scarf, I don’t think I’d become the kind of woman who flirts with men or who can’t think of anything but sex. After all, when I do take off my head scarf, I won’t be doing it of my own free will. Still, I know people can be overcome by sexual feelings even when they do something like this without conviction, without even wanting it. There’s one thing all men and women have in common. We all sin in our dreams with people who wouldn’t remotely interest us in our waking lives. Isn’t that true?”
“That’s enough, Hande,” said Kadife.
“But isn’t it?”
“No, it isn’t,” said Kadife. She turned to Ka. “Two years before all this happened, Hande was engaged to a very handsome Kurdish teenager. But the poor boy got mixed up in politics and they killed him—”
