by Orhan Pamuk
She turned to her husband. The two began to converse, flitting from one subject to the next as a king and his queen might do, pressed by many important matters of state. Ka listened with a mixture of appreciation and amazement as husband and wife fretted over which costume was right for his impending television appearance (civilian clothes? military uniform? black tie?); they went on to discuss the script for his speech (Funda Eser had written part of it) and the statement taken from the owner of the hotel where they’d stayed during previous visits (nervous about the soldiers continually coming by for another search and anxious to curry favor, he’d formally denounced two young guests who looked suspicious); finally, they pulled out a cigarette pack on which someone had scribbled the afternoon schedule for Border City Television (four or five reruns of the gala at the National Theater, three of Sunay’s speech, folk songs about heroism and the borderlands, a travelog about the beauties of Kars, and a Turkish film called Gulizar). They read it through, and it met with their approval.
“And now,” said Sunay, “what are we to do with this poet of ours, whose intellect belongs to Europe, whose heart belongs to the religious high school militants, and whose head is all mixed up?”
“It’s clear from his face,” said Funda Eser, smiling sweetly. “He’s a good boy. He’s going to help us.”
“But he’s been shedding tears for the Islamists.”
“He’s in love, that’s why,” said Funda Eser. “Our poet has been awash in emotions these last two days.”
“Ah, is our poet in love?” said Sunay Zaim, with exaggerated gestures. “Only the purest poets allow love into their hearts in times of revolution.”
“He’s not pure poet, he’s pure lover,” said Funda Eser.
As husband and wife carried the scene forward with their usual flawless technique, Ka felt both furious and stupefied. Afterward they returned to the atelier and drank tea together at the big table.
“I’m telling you this so you’ll see why helping us is the wisest thing to do,” said Sunay. “Kadife is Blue’s mistress. It’s not politics that draws Blue to Kars, it’s love. They didn’t arrest him because they wanted to know which young Islamists he was working with. Now they’re sorry, because last night, just before the raid on the religious high school dormitory, he vanished like smoke. All the young Islamists in Kars are in his thrall. He’s somewhere in the city, and he will definitely want to see you again. It could be difficult for you to tip us off: I suggest that we plant one or two microphones on you and perhaps a transmitter in your coat—you’d have the same protection then as the late director of the Institute of Education, so you’d have little worry for your safety. After you leave the meeting, we can go in and capture him.” By the look on Ka’s face, Sunay could tell he had not warmed to this proposal. “I’m not going to insist,” he said. “You don’t look it, but your behavior today has shown you to be a cautious person. Of course, you are a man who can look after himself, but I’m still telling you that you need to be very careful around Kadife. We suspect she tells Blue everything she hears, and this must include her father’s conversations every evening with his dinner guests. It’s partly the thrill of betraying her father, but it’s also because she’s bound by love to Blue. How do you explain the strength of this passion?”
“Do you mean for Kadife?” Ka asked.
“No,” said Sunay impatiently. “I mean this passion for Blue. What does this murderer have that makes everyone fall for him? Why is his name legend throughout Anatolia? You’ve spoken to him. Can you solve this mystery for me?”
Funda Eser had picked up a plastic comb and was passing it through her husband’s pale hair with such tender care that Ka, distracted, fell silent.
“I’d like you to hear the speech I’m going to make on television,” said Sunay. “Come with me in the army truck, and we can drop you off at the hotel along the way.”
The curfew was due to end in forty-five minutes. Ka politely declined the offer and asked whether he might have permission to go back to the hotel on foot. It was granted.
It was a relief to walk down the wide empty pavements of Atatürk Avenue—to feel the silence of the snow-packed side streets, to gaze once again at the beautiful snow-covered Russian houses and the oleanders—but he soon realized he was being followed. He crossed over to Halitpaşa Avenue and then turned left on Little Kâzimbey. The detective behind him was huffing and puffing as he hurried through the snow to catch up. Running after him was the same friendly black dog with the white spotted forehead that Ka had seen around the train station the night before. Ka hid in the doorway of one of the workshops in the Yusufpaşa district, hoping to give him the slip, but all at once he found himself face-to-face with his pursuer.
“Are you following me for intelligence purposes or for my protection?”
“God only knows, sir. Whichever sounds better to you is fine by me.”
But the man looked so tired and worn out that Ka doubted he could even protect himself. He looked at least sixty-five years old, his face was lined and wrinkled, his voice was thin, and the light had gone from his eyes; he gazed at Ka timidly, as fearfully as most people gaze at the police. Like all the plainclothes agents in Turkey, he was wearing Sümerbank shoes, and when Ka saw the soles were beginning to come apart, he took pity on him.
“You’re a policeman, aren’t you? If you have your identity card, let’s get them to open up the Green Pastures Café and sit down for a while.”
They did not have to knock on the restaurant door for long before it opened. Ka and the detective, whose name was Saffet, sat drinking raki and sharing cheese pastries with the black dog as they listened to Sunay’s speech. It wasn’t any different from the speeches of the leaders of military coups during Ka’s childhood. In fact, by the time Sunay had explained how Kurdish and Islamist militants in the pay of “our enemies abroad” and degenerate politicians who would stop at nothing to win votes had pushed Kars to the brink of destruction, Ka was a little bored.
While Ka was drinking his second raki, the detective, pointing respectfully at Sunay, directed his attention back to the television. His face had changed somehow. No longer a third-rate detective, he had assumed the air of a long-suffering citizen submitting his petition. “You know this man, and what’s more he respects you,” the detective said plaintively. “I hope you will be able to help me with my humble request. If you would present it to him, you could rescue me from this hellish life. Please, ask him to remove me from this poison investigation and reassign me.”
At Ka’s questioning look, he rose to his feet and went over to bolt the café door. Then he sat back down at the table to tell the tale of the “poison investigation.” The wretched detective had difficulty expressing himself, and the raki had gone straight to Ka’s already addled head, so he had a hard time following the confusing story.
It began at Modern Buffet, a snack bar in the city center not far from the military and intelligence headquarters. Many soldiers went there for sandwiches and cigarettes; lately, however, there were suspicions that the cinnamon sharbat sold there had been laced with poison. The first victim was an infantry officer trainee from Istanbul. Two years earlier, on the morning of a much dreaded, exceptionally arduous maneuver, this officer came down with a fever that made his whole body shiver so wildly he couldn’t even stay on his feet. He was carted off to the infirmary, where they soon established that he had been poisoned, whereupon the officer, thinking he was about to die, blamed the spicy sharbat he had drunk at the snack bar on the corner of Little Kâzimbey and Kâzιm Karabekir avenues—just for the sake, he added angrily, of trying something new.
At first this seemed like a simple case of accidental food poisoning, so it was soon forgotten, but there was reason to think again when, not long afterward, two other officers with similar symptoms turned up at the same infirmary. Like the first, they were shaking so much they could barely talk and couldn’t stand up for long before falling to the ground; both blamed the same hot cinna
mon sharbat that they’d drunk out of simple curiosity. It then emerged that a Kurdish granny was producing this refreshment in her home in the Atatürk district; everyone loved it, so her grandsons had decided to sell it at their snack bar. This information came to light during the secret interrogation conducted at Kars military headquarters immediately following the denunciations. But when secret samples of the old granny’s sharbat were tested at the veterinary school, no trace of poison could be found.
The investigation was closed when the general happened to mention it to his wife; to his alarm and dismay, he discovered that she’d been drinking several cups of the sharbat every day, hoping it might be good for her rheumatism. Quite a few officers’ wives, in fact, and quite a few officers had been knocking back huge quantities of this beverage—all claiming it was for health reasons, though really it was out of simple boredom. Further investigation revealed the officers and their wives were not alone in succumbing to this fad; soldiers on leave were going there as well, as were their visiting families, partly because this snack bar was so central one inevitably passed it about ten times a day but mostly because the sharbat was the only new thing in Kars.
When the general added his new findings to the investigation, he was so concerned about the possible implications that he handed the matter over to MİT and the army inspectorate. The more ground the army gained in its savage conflict with the Kurdish PKK guerillas, the lower became the morale of the weak, despairing, and unemployed Kurdish youths who’d fallen in with them; this situation had led some of these youths to nurture strange and frightful dreams of revenge, as was reported by quite a few of the detectives who spent their days dozing in the city’s coffeehouses. They’d overheard youths discussing bomb and kidnap plots, possible attacks on the statue of Atatürk, a scheme to poison the city’s water supplies, and another to blow up its bridges. This was why the officials had taken the cinnamon sharbat scare so seriously, but owing to the acute sensitivity of the issue, they’d been unable to interrogate or torture the snack bar’s owners. Instead, they assigned a number of detectives attached to the governor’s office to infiltrate not just the Modern Buffet but the kitchen of the old granny, by now over the moon with delight at all the business she was doing.
The detective assigned to the snack bar subjected the granny’s cinnamon drink to yet another examination, and he also inspected the glasses, the heat-resistant holder on the crooked handles of the tin ladles, the change box, a number of rusty holes, and the employees’ hands for any sign of a strange powder. A week later, he too had all the symptoms of poisoning; he was shaking and coughing so much he had to leave work.
The detective who’d been planted in the granny’s kitchen was far more industrious, however. Every night he would sit down and write a full report, listing not just the people who’d passed through the kitchen that day but also every item of food the old lady purchased (carrots, apples, plums, dried mulberries, pomegranate flowers, dog roses, and marshmallows). His reports soon revealed the recipe for this much-praised and appetizing beverage. The detective who was drinking five or six carafes a day suffered no ill effects whatsoever: Indeed, it was, according to him, a bona fide tonic, a genuine mountain sharbat such as appears in the famous Kurdish epic Mem u Zin. The experts sent in from Ankara lost faith in this detective because he was a Kurd. They were able to deduce from his reports that the sharbat was poisonous to Turks but not to Kurds; however, because of the official state position that Kurds and Turks are indistinguishable, they kept this conclusion to themselves.
At this point, a group of doctors sent in from Istanbul set up a special clinic at the Social Insurance Hospital. Soon, however, it was overrun by perfectly healthy Kars inhabitants just looking for free treatment, not to mention some so-called invalids complaining of such common afflictions as hair loss, psoriasis, hernias, and stammers; this stampede cast a long shadow over the seriousness of the investigation.
So it fell once again to the Kars intelligence services to unravel the sharbat plot that was slowly incapacitating the city and had already endangered the health of thousands of soldiers; it was for MİT to capture the perpetrators before the city’s spirit was broken. Saffet was just one of several diligent agents assigned to this case. Most had been told simply to follow the people who drank the sharbat the granny boiled with such joy. It was no longer an investigation of the path by which the poison had spread through Kars, but a vain attempt to find a way to distinguish those poisoned by the sharbat from those who were not. To accomplish this task, the detectives were following all the soldier and plainclothes police consumers of the granny’s cinnamon drink—sometimes all the way home.
When Ka heard that this exhausting, painstaking mission had worn out not just the detective’s shoes but also his spirit, he promised to raise the subject with Sunay, who had yet to reach the end of his televised speech.
The detective was so elated by this promise, he threw his grateful arms around Ka, kissed him on both cheeks, and unbolted the door with his own hands.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I, Ka
THE SIX-SIDED SNOWFLAKE
With the black dog following close behind, Ka walked back to the hotel, savoring the empty beauty of the snow-covered streets. He dashed off a note to Ïpek—Come at once!—and asked Cavit, the receptionist, to take it in to her right away. Then he went upstairs and threw himself down on his bed. As he waited he thought of his mother, but soon his thoughts turned instead to Ïpek, who had still not arrived. It was not long before he felt racked with such pain as to make him decide he had been a fool to fall in love—or to come to Kars at all. He had been waiting for some time and still there was no sign of her.
Thirty-eight minutes after Ka returned to the hotel, Ïpek walked into his room. “I had to go to the coal seller,” she said. “I knew there would be a line once the curfew ended, so I went out through the back courtyard at ten to twelve. After twelve I spent some time wandering around the market. If I’d known you were here, I would have come straight back.”
Ïpek brought such life into the room, Ka’s mood soared—so wildly he was terrified of doing something to destroy this moment of bliss. He gazed at Ïpek’s long shiny hair. Her hands never stopped moving. In no time at all, her left hand traveled from her hair to her nose, to her belt, to the edge of the door, and on to her beautiful long neck, before it was back straightening her hair again, only to be found a moment later fingering her jade necklace. (She must have just put it on. Only now did Ka notice it.) “I’m terribly in love with you, and I’m in pain,” Ka said. “Don’t worry. Love that blooms this fast is just as fast to wither.” Ka threw his arms around her and tried to kiss her. Ïpek kissed him back; she was as calm as he was frenzied. He felt her small hands on his shoulders, and the sweetness of her kiss sent his head spinning. He knew from the easy way she moved her body that she was ready to make love; he was so happy that his eyes, his mind, and his memory opened fully to the moment and to the world.
“I want to make love, too,” said Ïpek. For a moment she looked straight ahead; then she lifted her eyes with swift determination and met Ka’s gaze. “But as I’ve already said, it can’t happen under my father’s nose.”
“So when is your father going out?”
“He never goes out,” said Ïpek. “I have to go,” she said, and she pulled herself away.
Ka stood in the doorway watching Ïpek until she had disappeared down the stairs at the end of the dimly lit corridor. Then he closed the door, sat down on the edge of the bed, whipped his notebook out of his pocket, and, turning to a clean page, began writing the poem he would call “Privations and Difficulties.”
After finishing the poem, Ka continued to sit on the edge of the bed. He realized, for the first time since his arrival in Kars, that apart from chasing Ïpek and writing poems there was nothing in this city for him to do. The insight made him feel deprived and liberated in equal measure. He felt sure that if he could convince Ïpek to leave Kars with him,
he would find lifelong happiness with her. He knew that the moment was fast approaching when he must persuade her but now that he had a plan—he felt grateful for the snow.
He threw on his coat and went outside, unnoticed by anyone except Saffet. Instead of heading toward the city hall, he turned left on National Independence Avenue and walked down the hill. He went into the Knowledge Pharmacy to buy some vitamin C tablets, turned left off Faikbey Avenue, keeping a straight way and pausing now and then to look into restaurant windows, and turned into Kâzιm Karabekir Avenue. The campaign banners he’d seen fluttering above the avenue the day before had all been taken down, and all the shops were open. One stationery and cassette vendor was playing loud music. The pavements were crowded with people who’d come out just to mark the end of the curfew; they walked down as far as the market and then back up the hill, pausing now and then to shiver in front of a shop window. Those who usually came to the city on minibuses serving the outlying areas, frequenting the city center to doze in the teahouses and perhaps stop off at the barber’s for a shave, had not come in today, and Ka was pleased to see so many teahouses and barbershops empty. The children in the streets made him forget the fear inside. He watched the children sledding on the bridges, throwing snowballs, playing and fighting and cursing in the vacant lots, the snow-covered squares, the school playgrounds, and the gardens surrounding the government offices. Only a few wore coats; most were wearing school jackets, scarves, and skullcaps. They were happy about the coup because it had given them a school holiday. Whenever the cold got too much for him, Ka went to join Saffet at the nearest teahouse; he’d go straight to the detective’s table, have a glass of tea, and then go outside again.
Now used to Saffet’s following him, he no longer found the man frightening. If they really wanted to find out everything he did, they’d use a man he couldn’t see. A visible detective’s only use was to provide cover for an invisible colleague. That’s why Ka panicked when, at one point in his walk, he lost sight of Saffet, and why he went in search of him. He found Saffet, with a plastic bag in his hand, panting on the corner of Faikbey Avenue—the spot where the tank was the night before.
