Snow

by Orhan Pamuk

You couldn’t walk two feet in this city without passing a teahouse full of unemployed men; although most establishments were closed this morning, one teahouse on Kanal Street was managing to do business without attracting the attention of the army jeep standing by the curb. Inside, a young apprentice was awaiting the end of the curfew, and three other young men were sitting at another table. They all stirred to see a man in an army cap and a plainclothes officer coming through the door.

  Without missing a beat, the hook-nosed man drew a gun from his coat and, with a professionalism Ka could not help but admire, lined the young men up with their faces to the huge Swiss landscape hanging on the wall; just as effectively, he searched them and checked their identity cards. Ka was sure he was just going through the motions, so he sat down at the table next to the cold stove and with no difficulty set down the poem in his head.

  He would later give this poem the title “Dream Streets”; although it opens on the snowy streets of Kars, the thirty-six-line poem also contains numerous references to the streets of old Istanbul, the Armenian ghost town of Ani, and the wondrous, fearsome, empty cities Ka had seen in his dreams.

  When Ka finished his poem, he looked up at the black-and-white television to see that the morning folksinger had gone; in his place they were rebroadcasting the first moments of the drama at the National Theater. Vural the goalkeeper had just begun to recount his past loves and lost goals; by Ka’s calculations it would be twenty minutes before he could watch himself reading his poem. This was the poem that had been erased from his mind before he’d had a chance to write it down: he was determined to record it.

  Four more people entered the teahouse through the back door; the hook-nosed MİT agent drew his gun and lined them up against the wall also. The teahouse owner, a Kurd, tried to explain to the agent, whom he addressed as “my commander,” that these men had not in fact broken the curfew, having really come in from the courtyard via the garden, but the agent decided to check their stories anyway. After all, one of them didn’t have his identity card on him, and he was quaking with fear. The agent announced that he would take the man home by the same route he had come and called in his chauffeur to watch the youths still lined up against the wall.

  Ka, putting his poetry notebook back into his pocket, followed the two men through the back door into the icy snow-covered courtyard; they went over a low wall, down three icy steps, and were lunged at by a barking dog on a chain before entering a ramshackle concrete building similar to most other buildings in Kars. In the basement was a foul smell: mud and dirty bedclothes. The man at the front slipped past a humming furnace into an area furnished with boxes and vegetable crates; there in a shabby bed slept an exceptionally beautiful fair-skinned woman; Ka could not keep from turning to look. Now the man without the identity card produced a passport for the MİT agent; the furnace was making such a clatter that Ka couldn’t hear their words, but as he peered through the semidarkness he could see that the man had now produced a second passport.

  It turned out they were a Georgian couple who had come to Turkey hoping to find work and make some money. The unemployed youths whose identity cards the MİT agent had checked back at the teahouse had been full of complaints about these Georgians. The woman was tubercular but still working as a prostitute; her customers were the dairy owners and leather merchants who came down to the city to do business. As for the husband, like so many other Georgians he was willing to work for half pay in the markets and so was taking work away from Turkish citizens whose job opportunities were already scarce. This couple was so poor and so stingy they wouldn’t even pay for a hotel; instead, they paid the janitor from the water department five dollars a month to let them live in this furnace room. They were said to be saving up to buy a house when they returned to their own country, after which they planned never to work again for the rest of their lives. The boxes were filled with leather goods they had bought cheaply with an eye to selling them back in Tiflis. They had already been deported twice but both times found their way back to the furnace room. Having taken over, it was now up to the army to do what the corrupt municipal police had failed to accomplish: tackle these parasites and clean the city up.

  Back at the teahouse, the owner was only too happy to be serving guests and listening to this table of feeble unemployed youths, who, with a little prompting from the MİT agent, began to speak, if somewhat haltingly, about what they hoped for from the military coup. Mixed in with their complaints about rotten politicians was quite a bit of hearsay good enough to count as denunciation: the unlicensed slaughter of animals, the scams run in the warehouses where state-owned commodities were stored, the crooked contractors who were smuggling Armenian illegals in on meat trucks and housing them in barracks, working the men all day long, only to pay them nothing. These unemployed youths gave no hint of understanding that the military had stepped in to take a position against Kurdish nationalism and keep “religious fanatics” from winning the municipal elections. Instead, they seemed to think that last night’s events marked the beginning of a new age, in which immorality and unemployment would no longer be tolerated; it was as if they thought the army had stepped in expressly to find them jobs.

  In the army truck once again, Ka observed the hook-nosed MİT agent taking out the Georgian woman’s passport; sensing the agent’s purpose was to look at her photograph, Ka felt strangely embarrassed.

  The moment they stepped into the veterinary school, Ka could see how relatively benign things had been at police headquarters. As he walked down the corridors of this ice-cold building, he realized that he was in a place where no one gave a moment’s thought to other people’s pain. This was where they’d brought the Kurdish nationalists they’d rounded up, along with left-wing terrorists who proudly took responsibility for bombings, not to mention all those listed in the MİT files as supporters of these people. The police, the soldiers, and the public prosecutors all took a very dim view of any participant at events these groups had organized; the same went for anyone who aided or abetted the Kurdish guerillas who came down from the mountains to infiltrate the city. For people like these there was no mercy, and the interrogation methods were far harsher than those used against those suspected of links to political Islam.

  A tall, powerfully built policeman took him by the arm and walked him down the corridor lovingly, as if Ka were an old man unsteady on his feet; together they visited three classrooms where terrible things were going on. I will follow Ka’s lead here; just as he chose not to record them in his notebook, I will try not to dwell on them either.

  After looking for three or four seconds at the suspects in the first classroom, Ka’s first thought was of the shortness of mankind’s journey from birth to death. One look at these freshly interrogated suspects was enough to conjure up fond wishful dreams of distant civilizations and countries he’d never visited. And so it was Ka knew with absolute certainty that he and all the others in the room were fast approaching the end of their allotted time; their candles would soon burn themselves out. In his notebook, Ka would call this place the yellow room.

  In the second classroom he had a shorter vision. He remembered these men from a teahouse he’d passed the day before during his strolls around the city; their eyes were now blank with guilt. They had drifted off into some faraway dreamworld, or so it now seemed to Ka.

  They moved on to the third classroom, where in the mournful darkness that overtook his soul Ka felt the presence of an omniscient power whose refusal to disclose all he knew made a torment of life on earth. Ka’s eyes were open, but he could not see what was in front of him; all he could see was the color inside his head. Because the color was something close to red, he would call this the red room. Here the thoughts he’d had in the first two rooms—that life was short, that mankind was awash in feelings of guilt—came back to haunt him, but even with this fearsome landscape before him, he managed to stay calm.

  As they left the veterinary faculty, Ka was aware that his companions were losing faith
in him and beginning to wonder about his motives when he failed, yet again, to make an identification. But he was so relieved not to have seen Necip that when the MİT agent suggested that they examine the corpses, Ka agreed at once.

  In the morgue, located in the basement of the Social Insurance Hospital, they showed him their most suspicious corpse first. This was the slogan-chanting Islamist militant who’d taken three bullets of the soldiers’ second volley, but Ka had never seen him before. He approached this corpse with caution, and it seemed to him the dead youth was giving him a sad and respectful greeting. The corpse laid out on the second slab of marble seemed to be shivering from the cold: This was the body of the little grandfather. They showed it to Ka because they hadn’t yet established that this man had come from Trabzon to see a grandson who was doing his military service in Kars, and because his small frame suggested he might be the assassin they were seeking. As he approached the third corpse, Ka was already thinking happy thoughts about seeing Ïpek again. This corpse had a shattered eye. For a moment it seemed this was a feature of all the corpses in this room. Then as he drew closer to the dead boy’s white face, something inside him shattered too.

  It was Necip, his lips still pushed forward as if to ask one more question. Ka felt the cold and the silence of the hospital. That same childish face, the same little pimples he’d seen earlier, the same aquiline nose, the same grimy school jacket. For a moment Ka thought he was going to cry, and this made him panic. The panic distracted him long enough for him to restrain the tears. There, in the middle of the forehead on which he’d pressed the palm of his hand only yesterday, was a bullet hole. But the most deathly thing about Necip was not the bullet hole, not his pale, bluish complexion, but the frozen stiffness with which he lay on the slab. A wave of gratitude swept over Ka; he was so glad to be alive. This distanced him from Necip. He leaned forward, separated the hands he’d been clasping behind his back, placed them on Necip’s shoulders, and kissed him on both cheeks. The cheeks were cold but had not yet hardened. His remaining green eye was still half open, and it was looking right at Ka. Ka straightened himself up and told the agent that this was a friend who had stopped him in the road the day before to describe his efforts as a science-fiction writer and had later taken Ka to see Blue. He kissed him, he explained, because this teenager had had a pure heart.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  A Man Fit to Play Atatürk

  SUNAY ZAIM’S MILITARY AND THEATRICAL CAREERS

  After Ka had identified Necip’s corpse at the Social Services Hospital morgue, an official hastily drew up a report, signed it, and passed it on to be certified. Then Ka and the MİT agent got back into their army truck and set off down the road. A pack of timid dogs walked alongside them; the only other signs of life were election banners and antisuicide posters. As they continued on their way, Ka’s mind registered the restless children and anxious fathers twitching their closed curtains to catch a glimpse of the passing truck, but he looked right past them. All he could think about, all he could see, was Necip’s face and Necip’s stiff body. He imagined Ïpek consoling him when he got back to the hotel, but after the truck had gone through the empty city center, it continued straight down Atatürk Avenue to stop just beyond a ninety-year-old Russian building two streets away from the National Theater.

  This was one of the beautiful run-down single-story mansions that Ka had been so happy to see on his first night in Kars. After the city had passed over to the Turks and joined the Republic, the mansion passed into the hands of one Maruf Bey, a well-known merchant who sold wood and leather to the Soviet Union. For forty-three years, he and his family had lived magnificently here, conveyed in horse-drawn sleighs and carriages, with their every need met by cooks and servants. After the Second World War, at the start of the Cold War, the government rounded up the well-known merchants who did business with the Soviet Union, charged them with spying, and carted them off to prison, from which it was clear they would never return.

  And so, for the next twenty years, Maruf Bey’s mansion sat empty, first because of having no owner and then because of a dispute over its ownership. In the mid-seventies a club-wielding Marxist splinter group had seized the building as its headquarters, where they planned a number of political assassinations (including that of Muzaffer Bey, the lawyer and former mayor, who had survived the attempt but was wounded); after the 1980 coup the building was empty for a time, and then the enterprising appliance dealer who owned the small shop next door converted half the old mansion into a warehouse, while a visionary tailor—who had returned to his hometown three years earlier with an impossible dream, having made his money in Istanbul and Arabia—turned the other half into a sweatshop.

  When Ka walked into the former tailor shops, he saw button machines and big old-fashioned sewing machines and giant pairs of scissors still hanging from nails on the wall; in the soft orange glow of the old rose-patterned wallpaper they resembled strange instruments of torture.

  Sunay Zaim was still dressed in the ragged coat, pullover, and army boots he’d been wearing two days earlier, when Ka had first seen him; he was pacing up and down the room with an unfiltered cigarette wedged between his fingers. When he saw Ka, his face lit up as if on seeing a dear old friend, and he hurried across the room to embrace him and kiss him on both cheeks. Ka almost expected him to say, “Congratulations on the military takeover!” as the cattle dealer at the hotel had done; something in his excessive friendliness put Ka on his guard. He would describe his dealings with Sunay in a favorable light: They were just two men from Istanbul who, having been thrown together in a remote and impoverished city, had found a way to work together under difficult conditions. But he was only too well aware of Sunay’s part in helping to create those difficult conditions.

  “Not a day passes when the eagle of dark depression doesn’t take flight in my soul,” said Sunay, infusing his words with a mysterious pride. “But I cannot catch myself. So hold yourself in. All’s well that ends well.”

  In the white light pouring through the great windows, Ka surveyed the spacious room. The large stove and the friezes in the corners of the high ceilings bore witness to a glorious past; now the place was crawling with men carrying walkie-talkies, and there were two huge guards clocking Ka’s every movement. On the table by the door leading into the corridor was a map, a gun, a typewriter, and a pile of dossiers; Ka deduced that this was the center of operations for the revolution, and that Sunay was the most powerful man present.

  “There were times in the eighties, and these were the worst of times,” said Sunay as he paced back and forth, “when we would arrive in some wretched, godforsaken town in the middle of nowhere—still not knowing if we would find a place to stage our plays or even a hotel room to rest our weary heads—and I would go out in search of an old friend, only to discover that he had long since left that small town, and it was at such times that depression—grief—would overtake me. To keep it at bay, I would rush about the streets of the city, knocking on the doors of the local doctors and lawyers and teachers in search of someone, somewhere, who might be interested in hearing the news we had brought from the frontiers of modern art and contemporary culture. When I found no one living at the only address I had to hand, when the police informed us that they would not, after all, give us permission to put on a performance, or when—and this was always my last hope—I took my humble request to the mayor, only to learn that he too was unwilling to accommodate us, I began to fear that darkness might engulf me. At moments like this the eagle in my chest would come to life; it would spread its wings and—just before it smothered me—it would take flight.

  “It didn’t matter where we performed—we could be in the most wretched teahouse the world has ever seen; we could be in a train station, thanks to some stationmaster who had his eye on one of our actresses; we could be in a fire station or an empty classroom in the local primary school or a humble shack or a restaurant; we could be playing in the window of a barbershop, on the stair
s of a shopping arcade, in a barn, or on the pavement—but no matter where we were, I would refuse to succumb to depression.”

  The door to the corridor opened and Funda Eser came in to join them; Sunay switched from I to we. Ka saw nothing contrived in the shift to plural, this couple was so close. Funda Eser moved her great bulk across the room with considerable grace; after giving Ka a quick handshake she whispered something into her husband’s ear and, looking very preoccupied, left the room.

  “Yes, those were our worst years,” said Sunay. “Social unrest and the combined stupidities of Istanbul and Ankara had taken their toll, and our fall from favor was well documented in the press. I had seized the great opportunity that comes only to those graced with genius—yes, I had—and on the very day that I was going to use my art to intervene in the flow of history, suddenly the rug was pulled out from under me and I found myself dragged through the worst imaginable mud. Although it failed to destroy me, my old friend depression now returned to haunt my soul. But no matter how long I languished in the mire, no matter how much filth, wretchedness, poverty, and ignorance I saw around me, I never lost my belief in my guiding principles, never doubted that I had reached the summit.… Why are you so frightened?”

  A doctor in a white coat and carrying a bag appeared at the door. With a hurried air that seemed only half genuine, he pulled out a blood-pressure cuff and wrapped it around Sunay’s arm, and as he did so Sunay gazed at the white light pouring through the windows, his air so tragic Ka thought he might still be thinking about his fall from favor in the early eighties. For his part, Ka remembered Sunay more for his roles in the seventies; it was these roles that had made him famous.

  The seventies was the golden age of leftist political theater, and if Sunay stood out in this still rather small theatrical society, it was not only for being a hardworking and accomplished actor who could rise to the challenge of a demanding role—no, what audiences most admired were his leadership qualities. Young Turkish audiences warmed to his interpretations of powerful leaders like Napoleon, Lenin, and Robespierre, and Jacobin revolutionaries like Enver Pasha, as well as local folk heroes with whom they could identify. When he raised his commanding voice to rail against oppression; when, after a stage beating at the hands of wicked oppressors, he raised his proud head to cry, “The day will come when we will call them to account!”; when, on the worst day of all (the day he knew, when everyone knew, that his arrest was imminent), he gritted his teeth and, wishing his friends luck, told them that no matter what suffering lay ahead, he remained certain they would and could bring happiness to the people through the exercise of merciless violence—it was at that moment the lycée students and progressive university students in the audience would always respond with tearful and thunderous applause. Especially impressive was his decisiveness in the final acts of these plays, when power had passed into his hands and the time had come to mete out punishments to the wicked oppressors—here, many critics saw the influence of his military training. He’d studied at Kuleli Military Academy. He’d been expelled in his final year for slipping over to Istanbul in a row-boat to perform in various Beyoğlu theaters and also for staging a secret performance of a play called Before the Ice Melts.