Snow

by Orhan Pamuk

  Now Ïpek was setting the cup and the plate on the man’s table, like a waitress.

  Ka’s spirits sank. He hated himself for failing to greet Ïpek as he should have done, but there was something going on here, and he knew at once that he wouldn’t be able to hide from it. Everything he’d done the day before was all wrong. He hated himself for abruptly proposing to a woman he hardly knew; he hated himself for kissing her (as fine as that had been), and for losing control, and for holding her hand at the supper table; and most of all, he hated himself for behaving like a common Turkish man and getting drunk and without the slightest shame letting everyone know that he was sexually attracted to her. He had no idea what to say; his only hope was that Ïpek would keep playing the waitress forever and ever.

  The man who looked like a cattle dealer shouted, “Tea!” in a coarse voice. Ïpek turned smoothly toward the samovar, the empty tray in her hand. After she had given the man his tea, she approached Ka’s table; Ka felt the pulse of his heartbeat even in his nose.

  “So what happened?” Ïpek asked, with a smile. “Did you sleep well?”

  This reference to the night before, to yesterday’s happiness, made Ka uneasy. “It looks like this snow isn’t going to stop,” he said haltingly.

  They observed each other in silence. Ka knew he had nothing to say; anything he might come up with right now would be false. So, staring into her big, hazel, slightly cast eyes, he told her wordlessly that he had no choice but to remain silent. Ïpek sensed now that Ka’s frame of mind was very different than the day before; he had, in fact, become a very different person. Ka could tell Ïpek sensed a darkness inside him and accepted it. This, he thought, would bind him to her for life.

  “This snow is going to last for some time,” she said carefully.

  “There’s no bread,” said Ka.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.” She went straight over to the table next to the samovar, put down the tray, and began slicing bread.

  Ka had asked for bread because he couldn’t bear the tension. Now, as he gazed at her back, he assumed a pensive pose. “Actually, I could have sliced that bread myself.”

  Ïpek was wearing a white pullover, a long brown skirt, and a thick belt of a type Ka remembered as being fashionable in the seventies; he hadn’t seen such a belt since. Her waist was slim, her hips were perfect. She was just the right height for him. He even liked her ankles, and he knew that if he ended up returning to Germany without her, he would dwell for the rest of his life on painful memories of how happy he’d been here, holding hands, exchanging half-playful, half-serious kisses, and telling jokes.

  Ka saw Ïpek’s bread-slicing arm fall still, and before she turned around, he looked away. “Shall I put cheese and olives on your plate?” she asked. Her tone was formal, Ka realized, because she wanted to remind him there were people watching them.

  “Yes, please,” Ka answered, and as he spoke he looked around the room. When their eyes met again, her expression was enough to tell him that she knew he’d been staring at her the whole time her back was turned. Ka was unnerved by Ïpek’s familiarity with the subtleties of male–female relations, that diplomacy at which he had always felt himself clumsy. And he was already worried that she might be his only chance for happiness.

  “The bread came in on an army truck just a few minutes ago,” Ïpek said, giving Ka a smile that broke his heart. “I’m looking after the kitchen; Zahide Hanιm couldn’t make it here this morning because of the curfew.… I was worried when I saw the soldiers.”

  Because the soldiers could have been coming for Kadife or Hande. Or even her father.

  “They’ve sent hospital janitors to wipe up the blood in the National Theater,” Ïpek whispered. She sat down at the table. “They’ve raided the university hostels, the religious high school, and the party headquarters.” In the course of these raids, there’d been more deaths, she said. Hundreds had been arrested, although some were already released that morning. She told him all this in the particular hushed tone people save for political emergencies. It took Ka back twenty years; he remembered how he and his friends would sit in the university canteen exchanging tales of torture and brutality in whispers that were angry and woeful but also strangely proud. At times like these he had felt most guilty; all he’d wanted was to forget about Turkey and everything in it and go home and read books.

  Now, to help Ïpek close the subject, he felt the impulse to say something like “This is terrible, absolutely terrible!” but though the words were in his mouth, he refrained from comment, knowing he would sound pretentious no matter how hard he tried; instead, he sat there, sheepishly eating his bread and cheese.

  While he ate, Ïpek continued whispering—they’d loaded the dead boys from the religious high school onto army trucks and sent them out to the Kurdish villages for their relatives to identify them, but the trucks had got stuck in the snow; the authorities had granted a daylong amnesty for everyone to surrender all weapons; Koran instruction had been suspended and so had all political activity—and as she told him all this he looked at her arms, he looked into her eyes, he admired the fine color of her long neck, and he admired the way her brown hair brushed against her nape. Did he love her? He tried to imagine them together in Frankfurt, walking down the Kaiserstrasse, going home after an evening at the cinema. But dark thoughts were taking over his soul. All he could see was that this woman had cut the bread into thick slices just as they did in the poorest houses, and, even worse, that she had arranged these thick slices in a pyramid, in the manner of fishermen’s soup kitchens.

  “Please, talk to me about something else now,” Ka said carefully.

  Ïpek had been telling him about a man two houses down who’d been arrested on his way through the back gardens after someone denounced him, but now she gave him a knowing look and stopped. Ka saw fear in her eyes.

  “I was very happy yesterday, you know. For the first time in years I was writing poems,” he explained. “But I can’t bear to hear these stories now.”

  “The poem you wrote yesterday was very beautiful,” said Ïpek. “Can I ask you to do something for me, before this despair overtakes me?”

  “Tell me what I can do.”

  “I’m going up to my room now,” said Ka. “Come up in a little while and hold my head between your hands? Just for a while—no more than that.”

  Before he had even finished speaking, he could tell from Ïpek’s frightened eyes that she wasn’t going to oblige, so he got up to leave. She was a provincial, a stranger to him, and he had asked her for something no stranger could understand. He could have spared himself this woman’s uncomprehending look; he ought to have known better than to make this asinine request. As he ran up the stairs, he was full of self-reproach for having made himself believe he loved her. Throwing himself on the bed, he mused about what a fool he’d been to leave Istanbul for Kars in the first place, and then he concluded it had been a mistake even to leave Germany and return to Turkey. He thought of his mother, who had so wanted him to have a normal life and tried so hard to keep him away from poetry and literature; if she could have known his happiness depended on a woman from Kars who helped out in the kitchen and cut bread in thick slices, what would she have said? What would his father have said to learn that Ka had knelt before a village sheikh and talked with tears in his eyes about his faith in God? Outside, the snow had started falling again; the snowflakes he could see from his window were large and dreary.

  There was a knock and he rushed to the door, suddenly full of hope. It was Ïpek, but wearing a very different expression: An army truck had just arrived with two men, one of them a soldier, and they’d asked for Ka. She’d told them he was here and that she would let him know they were waiting for him.

  “All right,” said Ka.

  “If you want, I can give you that two-minute massage you wanted,” Ïpek said.

  Ka pulled her inside, closed the door, kissed her once, and sat her down at the head of the bed. He lay down, putting h
is head on her lap. They stayed like this for a time, saying nothing as they gazed out the window at the crows walking over the snow on the roof of the 110-year-old building that now housed the police headquarters.

  “That’s fine, I’ve had enough now, thank you,” said Ka. Carefully lifting his charcoal-gray coat off the hook on the door, he left the room. As he went down the stairs, he smelled the coat to remind himself of Frankfurt; for a few minutes he could see the city in full color and wished he were there. The day he bought the coat at the Kaufhof, he’d been helped by a fellow whom he saw again two days later when he came to collect the coat, which had to be shortened. His name was Hans Hansen. It may have been because his name sounded so German and because he had blond hair that Ka also remembered thinking about him when he woke up in the middle of the night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  But I Don’t Recognize Any of Them

  KA IN THE COLD ROOMS OF TERROR

  The men sent to pick up Ka came in one of those old army trucks—rarely seen these days, even in Turkey. A young hook-nosed, fair-skinned, plainclothes policeman met him in the lobby and sat him down in the middle of the front seat, taking the space by the door for himself as if to block Ka’s possible escape. But his manner was polite enough; he addressed Ka as sir and this, Ka decided, meant he was not a policeman after all but an MİT agent, perhaps under instructions not to harm him.

  They moved slowly through the city’s empty white streets. The dashboard of the army truck was covered with indicator dials, but none of them was working; because the cab was high off the ground Ka could see into the handful of houses whose curtains were open. Television sets were on everywhere, and for the most part the city of Kars had drawn its curtains and turned in on itself. It was as if they were driving through another city altogether; as the windshield wipers went about their monotonous work, it seemed to Ka that the dreamlike streets, the old Baltic-style houses, and the beautiful snow-covered oleander trees had cast a spell bewitching even the driver and his hook-nosed companion.

  They stopped in front of police headquarters. By now they were very cold, so they lost no time getting inside. It was much more crowded and frenetic than it had been the day before, and even though he’d been expecting this, Ka still felt uneasy. The animated disorder was typical of so many Turkish offices. It made Ka think of courthouse corridors, gates to football stadiums, bus stations. But there was also a whiff of iodine and hospitals, terror and death. Somewhere very close to where he was standing, someone was being tortured; the very thought made him feel guilty. Fear gripped his soul.

  As he climbed the same stairs he had climbed with Muhtar the day before, instinct told him to follow the example of the men in charge, so he did his best to adopt an air of authority. Passing open doors, he heard the rapid tap-tap-tap of old typewriters. Everywhere men were barking into police radios or calling for the tea boy. On benches outside closed doors he saw lines of young men awaiting interrogation; they were handcuffed to one another, and it was obvious they had been badly roughed up; their faces were covered with bruises. Ka tried not to look them in the eye.

  They took him into a room rather like the room he’d sat in with Muhtar, and here they informed him that despite his statement to the effect that he had not seen the face of the man who murdered the director of the Institute of Education and so was unable to identify the assailant from the photographs they’d shown him the day before, they now hoped he would be able to recognize the culprit among the religious high school boys in the cells downstairs. From this Ka deduced that MİT had taken charge of the police following the “revolution” and that relations between the two groups were tense.

  A round-faced intelligence agent asked Ka where he’d been around four o’clock the previous afternoon.

  For a moment Ka’s face turned gray. “They told me it would also be a good idea to pay a visit to His Excellency Sheikh Saadettin—” he began, but his interrogator cut him short.

  “No, before that!” he said.

  When Ka remained silent, the round-faced agent reminded him of his meeting with Blue. He did it in such a way as to suggest that he already knew all about it and even regretted having to cause Ka such embarrassment. Ka struggled to see this as a sign of good intentions. An ordinary police officer would have accused him of trying to conceal the meeting and then would have relished humiliating him, bragging that the police know everything.

  In an almost apologetic voice, this agent explained that Blue was a dangerous terrorist as well as a formidable conspirator; he was a certified enemy of the Republic and in the pay of Iran. It was certain that he had murdered a television emcee, so a warrant had been issued for his arrest. He’d been sighted all over Turkey. He was organizing the fundamentalists. “Who arranged your meeting?”

  “A boy from the religious high school—I don’t know his name,” said Ka.

  “Please see if you can identify him now,” said the agent. “Look at them very carefully. You’re going to be using the observation windows in the doors to their cells. Don’t be afraid; they won’t recognize you.”

  They took Ka down a wide staircase to the basement. A hundred-odd years ago, when this fine long building housed an Armenian hospital, the basement was used for wood storage and as a dormitory for the janitors. Much later, during the 1940s, when the building was turned into a state lycée, they had knocked down the interior walls and turned the space into a cafeteria. Quite a few Kars youths who would go on to become Marxists and sworn enemies of the West during the 1960s had swallowed their first fish oil tablets in this place; they’d washed them down with powdered yogurt milk sent by UNICEF, a vile-smelling drink that turned their stomachs. Now this spacious basement amounted to a corridor and four cells.

  With a careful confidence bespeaking practiced routine, a policeman placed an army cap on Ka’s head. The hook-nosed MİT agent who’d picked him up at the hotel gave him a knowing look and said, “These people are terrified of army caps.”

  When they reached the two cells on the right, the policeman shoved open the little observation windows and bellowed, “Attention! Officer!” Ka peered in through the window, no bigger than his hand.

  The cell itself was about the size of a large bed; Ka could see five people inside. Perhaps there were more; it was hard to tell because they were sitting on top of one another. They were all propped up against the filthy wall on the far side, and although they’d done no military service they knew now to stand, however awkwardly, at attention, their eyes shut. (It seemed to Ka that a few had their eyes half open and were looking at him.) It was less than a day since the “revolution” had begun, but already their heads were shaven and their faces and eyes swollen from beatings. There was more light in the cells than in the hallway, but to Ka’s eyes all the boys looked alike. His head began to spin as pain and fear and shame engulfed him. He was glad not to see Necip among them.

  After Ka had failed to identify any of the boys in the second and third cells, the hook-nosed MİT agent said, “There’s nothing to be afraid of. After all, when the roads open again you’re going to pick up and leave.”

  “But I don’t recognize any of them,” Ka said, with faint stubbornness.

  After that he did recognize a few; he had a very clear memory of one boy he’d seen heckling Funda Eser and another who’d been chanting slogans. If he denounced these boys now, it would be proof of his willingness to work with the police, and so, if he later saw Necip, it would be easier to pretend he hadn’t. (It wasn’t as if these boys were charged with anything serious.)

  But he didn’t denounce anyone. One youth whose face and eyes were streaked with blood looked up at Ka and pleaded, “Sir, please don’t tell our mothers.”

  It looked as if these boys had been beaten in the heat of the coup’s early hours: the police had not used any instruments, just their boots and fists. Ka looked into the fourth cell and once again failed to see anyone resembling the man who had assassinated the director of the Institute of Educa
tion. Once he was sure that Necip was not sitting among these terrified boys, he began to relax.

  By the time they went upstairs, it was clear how eager the round-faced agent and his superiors were to find the director’s assassin so they could parade him as the first achievement of the “revolution”; Ka suspected that they planned to hang the culprit then and there. Now a retired major entered the room. Despite the curfew he had somehow managed to find his way to police headquarters to ask that his grandson be released from detention. The major begged them not to torture the boy, who had no grievances against the state and had been sent to that religious high school only because his impoverished mother had fallen for those lies they told about how all the students were given free woolen coats and suits; in fact, the family were staunch supporters of Atatürk—

  The round-faced man cut off the retired major in midsentence. “My dear sir, no one here gets treated badly,” he said. He took Ka to one side. There was, he said, a chance that the murderer and Blue’s men (Ka had the feeling that the culprit was thought to be one of them) might be with those they’d detained from the veterinary school.

  So Ka ended up back in the army truck with the hook-nosed agent who’d first picked him up at the hotel. En route, as he admired the beauty of the empty streets and smoked a cigarette, he was thankful to have made it out of police headquarters. A small part of him was secretly relieved that the military had taken charge and the country wasn’t bending to the will of the Islamists. But with most of his heart he vowed to himself that he would refuse to cooperate with both the police and the army. Just then a new poem came rushing into his mind; it was so powerful, so strangely exhilarating, that Ka now found himself turning to the hook-nosed intelligence agent and asking, “Might it be possible to stop off at a teahouse along the way?”