by Orhan Pamuk
From what he could hear coming in on the walkie-talkie, Ka gathered that the skirmish in the Watergate district had reached a new stage. When three gunshots sounded, first over the radio frequency and then were heard traveling through the air, muffled by the snowy plain, Ka decided that the sound of gunshots carried better when amplified by a walkie-talkie.
“Don’t be cruel,” Sunay said into the walkie-talkie, “but let them feel the power of the revolution and the state and let them see how determined we are.” He’d raised his left hand and, propping his chin between thumb and forefinger, assumed a pose of deep thought, a gesture so distinctive that Ka now had a memory from the mid-seventies of Sunay posed this way while uttering the exact same words in a history play. He wasn’t as handsome as he’d been in those days; he looked tired, pale, and worn.
Sunay picked up a pair of 1940s army-issue field glasses that were sitting on his table. Then he picked up the thick but ragged felt coat he’d worn throughout his ten-year tour of Anatolia and, putting on his fur hat, took Ka by the hand and led him outside. The cold took Ka by surprise; it made him think how weak and thin are men’s dreams and desires, how insubstantial the intrigues of politics and everyday life compared with the cold winds of Kars. He noticed that Sunay’s left leg was far more damaged than he’d thought. As they set off down the snow-covered pavement, he marveled at the emptiness of the bright white streets, and when it occurred to him that they might be the only ones walking outside in the entire city, he felt a surge of joy. While the beautiful snow-covered city with its empty old mansions could not help but make a man fall in love with life and find the will to love, there was more to Ka’s feeling than that; he was also enjoying this proximity to real power.
“This is the most beautiful part of Kars,” said Sunay. “This is my theatrical company’s third visit to Kars in ten years, and each time this is where I come when the light fades, to sit under the poplars and the oleander trees, to listen to the melancholy cries of the crows and the magpies, while I gaze at the castle, the bridge, and the four-hundred-year-old hamam!”
They were now standing on the bridge over the frozen Kars River. Sunay gazed out over the shanties scattered on the hill rising above the left bank and pointed at one of them. Just below that house, just above the road, Ka saw a tank and, a little farther on, an army truck.
“We can see you,” Sunay said into the walkie-talkie, as he peered through the field glasses. A few moments later, they heard two gunshots—first through the walkie-talkie, then through the air above the valley into which the river flowed. Was this some manner of greeting? Just ahead, at the entrance to the bridge, two bodyguards awaited them. They gazed at the wretched shantytown—a hundred years after Russian cannon destroyed the villas of the Ottoman pashas, the poor had come here to stake their claim—and they looked at the park on the opposite bank that had once been the heart of the bourgeoisie of Kars and at the city rising behind it.
“It was Hegel who first noticed that history and theater are made of the same materials,” said Sunay. “Remember: Just as in the theater, history chooses those who play the leading roles. And just as actors put their courage to the test onstage, so too do the chosen few on the stage of history.”
The entire valley rattled with explosions. Ka deduced from this that the machine gun atop the tank was now in use. The tank’s cannon had also fired shots, but these had missed. The later explosions were caused by hand grenades. A black dog was barking. The shanty door opened and two people came out, their hands in the air. Ka could see tongues of flame licking at the broken windowpanes. All the while, the dog barked happily, darting back and forth, his tail wagging as he went over to join the people crouching on the ground. Ka saw someone running in the distance, and then he heard the soldiers open fire. The man in the distance fell to the ground, and all noise stopped. Much later, someone shouted, but by then Sunay’s attention was elsewhere.
Followed by the bodyguards, they turned their back on the scene outside to reenter the tailor shop. The moment Ka looked again at the exquisite antique wallpaper in the old mansion, he knew he could not contain the new poem now waiting within him, so he retreated to a corner.
This poem, to which he would give the title “Suicide and Power,” contains bold references to his walk with Sunay; he describes the thrill of power, the flavor of the friendship he’s struck up with this man, and his guilt about the girls committing suicide. Later he would decide that in this “sound and considered” poem, the events he had witnessed in Kars had found their most powerful and authentic expression.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
God Is Fair Enough to Know It’s How You Live Your Life
WITH SUNAY AT MILITARY HEADQUARTERS
When Sunay saw that Ka had completed his poem, he rose from his cluttered worktable and limped across the floor to offer his congratulations. “The poem you read at the theater yesterday was very modern too,” he said. “What a shame that audiences in our country are not sophisticated enough to understand modern art. This is why my shows always include belly dancing and the confessions of Vural the goalkeeper. I give the people what they want, and then I give them an unadulterated dose of real-life drama. I would far rather mix high and low art for people than be in Istanbul doing bank-sponsored boulevard comedies. Now tell me as a friend, why didn’t you identify any of the suspicious Islamists they showed you at police headquarters or the veterinary school?”
“Because I didn’t recognize any of them.”
“When they saw how fond you were of that youth who took you to see Blue, the soldiers wanted to arrest you too. They were already suspicious—you’d come all the way from Germany in this time of revolution, and you’d witnessed the assassination of the school director. They wanted to put you through an interrogation—torture you a little—just to see what they could turn up. I’m the one who stopped them. I’m your guarantor.”
“Thank you.”
“The thing no one can understand is why you kissed that boy who took you to Blue.”
“I don’t know why,” said Ka. “He was very honest, and he spoke from the heart. I thought he was going to live for a hundred years.”
“This Necip you’re so sorry about. Would you like to know what kind of boy he really was? Let me read you something.”
He produced a piece of paper with the following information: One day last March, the boy had run away from school; he was associated with a group that had smashed the windows of the Joyous Beer Hall for selling alcohol during Ramadan; he’d been doing odd jobs at the branch headquarters of the Prosperity Party for a while but he’d stopped, either because his extreme views caused alarm or because he’d suffered a breakdown that frightened everyone (there was more than one informer at party headquarters); he was an admirer of Blue and had been making overtures to him during the eighteen months Blue was visiting the city; he had written a story judged to be incomprehensible by the staff of MİT and got it printed by a religious newspaper with a circulation of seventy-five; on a few occasions a retired pharmacist who wrote columns for the same paper kissed him in a rather odd way, so Necip and his friend Fazιl had conspired to murder the man (this was according to their dossier—the original of the letter explaining their act they’d planned to leave at the scene of the murder had been stolen from the archives); on various occasions this Necip been seen walking down Atatürk Avenue, laughing with his friends, and on one of these occasions, in the month of October, he’d made a rude gesture at a unmarked police car that had just driven past them.
“MİT is doing important work here,” said Ka.
“His Excellency Sheikh Saadettin’s house is bugged, so they also know that the first thing you did when you met him was to kiss his hand. They know you confessed in tears to him that you believed in God—what they can’t understand is why. There are quite a few left-wing poets who’ve panicked and changed sides, deciding they might as well find religion before these people come into power.”
Ka felt himsel
f flush. When he saw that Sunay had read it as a sign of weakness, his shame only increased.
“I know the things you saw this morning upset you deeply. The police treat our young very badly; we have in our midst a number of animals who beat up young boys just for the fun of it. But let’s leave that matter to one side for now.”
He offered Ka a cigarette.
“Like you, I spent the years of my youth roaming the streets of Nişantaş and Beyoğlu. I was mad about films from the West and couldn’t see enough of them, I read everything Sartre and Zola had ever written, and I believed that our future lay with Europe. To see that whole world destroyed, to see our sisters forced to wear head scarves, to see poems banned for being antireligious, as has happened already in Iran—this is one spectacle I don’t think you would be prepared to take lying down. Because you’re from my world. There’s no one else in Kars who’s read the poetry of T. S. Eliot.”
“Muhtar, the candidate for the Prosperity Party, has read Eliot,” said Ka. “He has a great interest in poetry.”
“We don’t even have to keep him locked up anymore,” said Sunay with a smile. “He’s signed a statement declaring his withdrawal from the race. He gave it to the first soldier who knocked on his door.”
They heard an explosion. The windowpanes rattled and the frames shook. Turning in the direction of the noise, the two looked through the windows giving onto the Kars River, but all they could see were snow-covered poplars and the icy eaves of the undistinguished abandoned building opposite. Apart from the guard outside their door, there was no one on the street. Even at midmorning, Kars was heavy with gloom.
“A good actor,” said Sunay in a light theatrical tone, “is a man who represents the sediment, the unexplored and unexplained powers that have drifted down through the centuries; he takes the lessons he has gleaned and hides them deep inside him; his self-mastery is awesome; never does he bare his heart; no one may know how powerful he is until he strides onto the stage. All his life, he travels down unfamiliar roads to perform at the most out-of-the-way theaters in the most godforsaken towns, and everywhere he goes he searches for a voice that will grant him genuine freedom. If he is so fortunate as to find that voice, he must embrace it fearlessly and follow the path to the end.”
“In a day or two, when the snow melts and the roads reopen, Ankara is going to come down hard on the people responsible for this carnage,” said Ka. “Not because they can’t bear bloodshed; they’ll be angry because this time they weren’t the perpetrators. The people of Kars will hate you, and they’ll feel the same about this strange production of yours. What will you do then?”
“You saw the doctor. I have a weak and diseased heart, and I’ve come to the end of my allotted time. They can do what they want with me; I don’t care,” said Sunay. “Listen to this: They’re saying that if we caught someone important—say, the man who shot the director of the Institute of Education—hanged him right away, and broadcast the hanging on live TV, we’d have everyone in the city sitting still as a candle.”
“They’re already quiet as candles,” said Ka.
“We’ve heard they’re about to use suicide bombers.”
“If you hang someone, all you’ll do is increase the terror.”
“Are you afraid of the shame you’ll feel when the Europeans see what we’ve done here? Do you know how many men they hanged to establish that modern world you admire so much? Atatürk had no time for birdbrained fantasists; he had people like you swinging from ropes from the very first day.
“Get this into your head too,” said Sunay. “Those religious high school boys you saw in the cells today have your face permanently etched in their memories. They’ll throw bombs at anyone and anything; they don’t care as long as they are heard. And furthermore, since you read a poem during the performance, they’ll assume you were in on the plot. No one who’s even slightly westernized can breathe free in this country unless they have a secular army protecting them, and no one needs this protection more than intellectuals who think they’re better than everyone else and look down on other people. If it weren’t for the army, the fanatics would be turning their rusty knives on the lot of them and their painted women and chopping them all into little pieces. But what do these upstarts do in return? They cling to their little European ways and turn up their affected little noses at the very soldiers who guarantee their freedom. When we go the way of Iran, do you really think anyone is going to remember how a porridge-hearted liberal like you shed a few tears for the boys from the religious high school? When that day comes, they’ll kill you just for being a little westernized, for being frightened and forgetting the Arabic words of a simple prayer, even for wearing a tie or that coat of yours. Where did you buy that beautiful coat by the way? May I wear it for the play?”
“Of course.”
“Just to keep you from getting any holes in your nice coat, I’ll give you a bodyguard. In a little while I’m going to make an announcement on television. The curfew ends at midday, so stay off the streets.”
“I can’t believe there’s an Islamist here in Kars who’s so dangerous I can’t go outside.”
“What’s done is done,” said Sunay. “Above all, they know that the only way they’d ever get to run this country is by terrorizing us. Over time, our fears turn out to have been well founded. If we don’t let the army and the state deal with these dangerous fanatics, we’ll end up back in the Middle Ages, sliding into anarchy, traveling the doomed path already traveled by so many tribal nations in Asia and the Middle East.”
His perfect posture, his commanding voice, his long and frequent gazes at an imaginary point high above the heads of his audience—Ka remembered seeing Sunay striking these same poses onstage twenty years earlier. But it didn’t make him laugh. He felt as if he too were an actor in the same outmoded play.
“What do you want from me?” Ka asked. “Spell it out.”
“If it weren’t for me, you’d have a hard time keeping your head above water in this city. No matter how much you toady to the Islamists, you’d still get holes in your coat. I’m the only friend you have here; I’m the only one in Kars who can protect you—without my friendship you’d soon be trembling in one of those cells beneath police headquarters, waiting to be tortured. As for your friends at the Republican, it’s not you they put their faith in, it’s the army. Know where you stand.”
“I do know.”
“Then confess to me what you hid from the police this morning. Tell me of the guilt you hide deep in your heart.”
“I think I may be starting to believe in God here,” Ka said, with a smile. “It’s something I may be hiding even from myself.”
“You’re deceiving yourself! Even if you did believe in God, it would make no sense to believe alone. You’d have to believe in him the same way the poor do; you’d have to become one of them. It’s only by eating what they eat, living where they live, laughing at the same jokes, and getting angry whenever they do that you can believe in their God. If you’re leading an utterly different life, you can’t be worshiping the same God they are. God is fair enough to know it’s not a question of reason or logic but how you live your life. But that’s not what I was asking you about just now. In half an hour I’m going on television to address the people of Kars. I want to bring them good tidings. I’m going to say that we’ve caught the assassin who shot the director of the Institute of Education. There’s a high probability that the same man shot the mayor. May I say that you identified this person for us this morning? Then you can go on television and tell the whole story.”
“But I didn’t identify anyone.”
With an anger that owed nothing to theatricality, Sunay grabbed Ka’s arm and marched him out of the room and down a wide corridor; he then put him in a bright white room that looked onto the inner courtyard. One look at this room was enough to repel him; it wasn’t the filth but the sordid atmosphere. There were stockings hanging on a line strung between the window latch and a nail on the
wall. Ka saw in the corner an open suitcase containing a hair dryer, a pair of gloves, shirts, and a huge bra that might have fit Funda Eser. Funda Eser herself was sitting in a chair beside the suitcase; the table before her was piled high with paper and cosmetics she’d pushed aside to make room for a bowl—was it stewed fruit, Ka wondered, or soup? She was reading as she ate.
“We’re here in the name of modern art.… We’re as attached to each other as a fingernail is to flesh,” said Sunay, as he squeezed Ka’s arm even harder. Ka wasn’t sure what he was trying to say, and Sunay seemed unsure whether this was life or a play.
“Vural the goalkeeper has gone missing,” said Funda Eser. “He went out this morning and hasn’t come back.”
“He’s passed out somewhere,” said Sunay.
“But where?” said his wife. “Everything’s closed. No one’s allowed out in the street. The soldiers have started a search. I’m afraid he’s been kidnapped.”
“I hope to God he has been kidnapped,” said Sunay. “If they would skin him alive and cut out his tongue, we’d all be better off.”
For all their coarse manners and rough language, there was something so pleasant about their convivial banter, about the depth of their mutual understanding, that Ka could not help feeling a certain respect, even a little envy. The moment he came eye to eye with Funda Eser he instinctively bowed so low that he almost touched the floor.
“Madam, you were a veritable sensation last night,” he said, in an affected voice that did, nevertheless, contain traces of heartfelt admiration.
“Shame on you,” she said, with faint embarrassment. “In our company it’s not the players who make the masterpiece, it’s the audience.”
