by Orhan Pamuk
What was the difference between love and the agony of waiting? Like love, the agony of waiting began in the muscles somewhere around the upper belly but soon spread out to the chest, the thighs, and the forehead, to invade the entire body with numbing force. As he listened to sounds from other parts of the hotel, he tried to guess what Ïpek was doing. He saw a woman passing in the street, and even though she didn’t look a bit like Ïpek, he thought it must be she. How beautiful the snow looked as it fell from the sky! When he was a child, they’d been sent down to the school cafeteria for their injections; as he stood there waiting, hugging his arms as cooking fumes tinged with iodine swirled around his head, his stomach had ached like this and he wanted to die. He wanted to be home, in his own room. Now he wanted to be in his own miserable room in Frankfurt. What a huge mistake he’d made by coming here! Even the poems had stopped coming. It hurt so much he couldn’t even look at the snow falling onto the empty street. And yet it felt good to be standing at this warm window; this was still better than dying, and if Ïpek didn’t come soon, he would die anyway.
The lights went off.
This was a sign, he thought, sent specially to him. Perhaps Ïpek hadn’t come because she knew there was about to be a power outage. He looked down at the dark street for a sign of life, something that might explain Ïpek’s absence. He caught sight of a truck—was it an army truck? No, just his mind playing tricks on him. So were the footsteps he thought he heard on the stairs. No one was coming. He left the window and lay on the bed on his back. The pain that had begun in his belly had now spread to his soul; he was alone in the world with no one to blame but himself. His life had come to nothing; he was going to die here, die of misery and loneliness. This time he wouldn’t even find the strength to scurry like a rat back into that hole in Frankfurt.
The thing that grieved and distressed him the most was not his terrible unhappiness; it was knowing that, had he acted a bit more intelligently, his entire life might have been much happier. The worst thing was knowing that no one even noticed his fear, his misery, his loneliness. If Ïpek had any idea she’d have come right up without delay! If his mother had seen him in this state … she was the only one in the world who would have felt for him; she would have run her fingers through his hair and consoled him.
The ice on the windows gave an orange glow to the light from the streetlamps and the surrounding houses. Let the snow keep falling, he thought; let it fall for days and months on end; let it cover the city of Kars so completely that no one will ever find it again. He wanted to fall asleep on this bed and not wake up until it was a sunny morning and he a child again, with his mother.
There was a knock at the door. By now, Ka told himself, it could only be someone from the kitchen. But he flew to the door, and the moment he opened it he could feel Ïpek’s presence.
“Where have you been?”
“Am I late?”
But it was as if Ka hadn’t even heard her. He was already embracing her with all his strength; he’d put his head against her neck and buried his face in her hair, and there he stayed without moving a muscle. He felt such joy that the agony of waiting now seemed absurd. But the agony had worn him out all the same; that, he thought, was why he could not relish her presence fully. That is why he demanded that Ïpek explain her delay: Even knowing he had no right to do so, he kept complaining. But Ïpek insisted that she had come up as soon as her father had left—yes, it was true that she had stopped off in the kitchen to give Zahide one or two instructions about dinner, but that couldn’t have taken more than a minute. So Ka showed himself to be the more ardent and fragile of the two; even at the very beginning of their relationship, he had let Ïpek have the upper hand. And even if his fear of seeming weak had moved him to conceal the agony she’d put him through, he would still have to grapple with feelings of insecurity. Besides, didn’t love mean sharing everything? What was it if not the desire to share your every thought? He related this chain of thought to Ïpek as breathlessly as if revealing a terrible secret.
“Now put all that out of your head,” said Ïpek. “I came here to make love to you.”
They kissed, and with a softness that brought Ka comfort, they fell onto the bed. For Ka, who had not made love in four years, it felt like a miracle. So even as he succumbed to the pleasures of the flesh, his conscious mind was reminding him what a beautiful moment this was. Just as with his first sexual experiences, it was not the act as much as the thought of making love that occupied him. For a while, it protected Ka from overexcitement. Details from the pornographic films to which he’d become addicted in Frankfurt rushed through his head, creating a poetic aura that seemed beyond logic. But he wasn’t imagining these pornographic scenes to arouse himself; he was celebrating the fact that he could at last enact such fantasies as had played incessantly in his mind. So it was not Ïpek herself who was arousing Ka but a pornographic image; and the miracle was less her presence than the fact that he could imagine his fantasy here in bed with her. It was only when he began to pull off her clothes with an almost savage clumsiness that he began to look at the real Ïpek. Her breasts were enormous; the skin on her neck and her shoulders was wonderfully soft, its scent strange and foreign. He watched the snowlight playing on her; now and again something sparkled in her eyes that frightened him. Her eyes were very sure of themselves: Ka worried that Ïpek was not as fragile as he wanted her to be. This is why he pulled her hair to cause her pain, why he took such pleasure from her pain that he yanked her hair again, why he subjected her to a few other acts also inspired by the pornographic film still playing in his head, and why he treated her so roughly—to the accompaniment of an internal musical sound track as deep as it was primitive. When he saw that she enjoyed his being rough, his triumph gave way to brotherly affection. He wrapped his arms around her; no longer wishing to save just himself from the miseries of Kars, he wanted to save Ïpek too. But when he decided her reaction was commensurate with his ardor, he pulled himself away. In a corner of his mind he was able to control and coordinate these sexual acrobatics with surprising finesse. But when his mind was somewhere far off he could seize the woman with a passion verging on violence; at such a moment he wanted to hurt her.
According to the notes Ka made about his lovemaking—notes I feel I must share with my readers—his passion was finally reciprocated, and they fell upon each other with such intensity as to leave the rest of the world behind. The same notes also reveal that Ïpek let out a mournful cry when it was over. Ka’s native paranoia came rushing back as he wondered whether this was the reason they’d given him a room in the most remote corner of the hotel; the pleasure they’d taken in causing each other pain now gave way to the old loneliness. It seemed to him that this remote room on this remote corridor had split away from the hotel and floated off to the most remote corner of this empty city. And the quiet of this empty city was as if the world had come to an end, and it was snowing.
For a long time they lay side by side in bed, gazing silently at the snow. From time to time, Ka turned his head to watch the snow falling in Ïpek’s eyes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
It’s Not Just You I’ve Lost
IN FRANKFURT
Four years after Ka’s visit to Kars and forty-two days after his death, I went to see the small Frankfurt apartment in which he had spent the last eight years of his life. It was a snowy, rainy, windy February day. When I arrived in Frankfurt on the morning flight from Istanbul, the city looked even drearier than it had in the postcards Ka had been sending me for sixteen years. Except for the dark cars rushing past in the streets, the trams that appeared out of nowhere like ghosts only to vanish a moment later, and the umbrella-wielding housewives hurrying along the pavements, the streets were empty. It was the middle of the day, but looking into the dark, dense mist I could still see the deathly yellow glow of streetlamps.
Still, it cheered me to see—in the streets surrounding the central train station, along the pavements lined with restaurant
s and travel agencies and ice-cream parlors and sex shops—signs of the deathless energy that sustains all big cities. After I had checked into my hotel and phoned the young Turkish-German literature enthusiast who had (at my request) arranged for me to give a talk at the city hall, I went to the Italian café at the station to meet with Tarkut Ölçün. In Istanbul, Ka’s sister had given me his number. This tired well-meaning man in his sixties was Ka’s closest acquaintance during his years in Frankfurt. He had given a statement to the police during the inquiry following Ka’s death; he was the one who had contacted Ka’s family in Istanbul and helped arrange for the body to be flown back to Turkey. At the time I was still hoping to find the typescript of the poetry collection on which Ka said he had been laboring ever since returning from Kars four years earlier and had only just completed, so I asked his father and sister what had happened to his belongings. They’d not been strong enough to make the trip to Germany, so they asked me to gather up Ka’s things and clear out his apartment.
Tarkut Ölçün had come to Germany in the first wave of immigration in the early sixties. For years he’d worked as a teacher and a social worker, serving a number of Turkish associations and charities. When he brought out pictures of his German-born son and daughter, he told me proudly that he’d sent them both through university; although Tarkut was a figure of some standing in Frankfurt’s Turkish community, in his face I still saw the loneliness and defeat so commonly seen in first-generation immigrants and political exiles.
The first thing Tarkut Ölçün gave me was the small bag Ka had been carrying when he was shot. The police had made Tarkut sign for it before they handed it over. I opened it at once and frantically rummaged through it. Inside I found the pajamas Ka had bought in Nişantaş eighteen years earlier, a green pullover, shaving articles, a toothbrush, a pair of socks, a change of underwear, and a number of literary magazines I had sent him from Istanbul. There was no sign of his green poetry notebook.
Later, as we sat drinking our coffee and gazing into the crowded station where two aging Turks were laughing and talking as they mopped the floor, Tarkut said, “Orhan Bey, your friend Ka Bey was a solitary man. No one in Frankfurt apart from me knew much about what he was doing.” But he still promised to tell me everything he knew.
We walked around to the back of the station, wending our way past the old army barracks and the hundred-year-old factory buildings to the building near Goethestrasse where Ka had spent his last eight years. The apartment overlooked a small square with a playground, but the landlord was not there to open the front door or let us into Ka’s apartment. The paint on the old door was flaking, and as we stood waiting in the wet snow I recognized many of the things Ka had described to me in his letters and his infrequent phone calls (given as he was to paranoia, Ka suspected someone was listening in on all his calls to Turkey, so he didn’t like using the phone). I looked at the small neglected park and the grocery store on the other side, and as my eyes wandered beyond them to the dark windows of the shops that sold alcohol and newspapers, I felt I was looking at my own memories. The swings and seesaws in the playground, like the benches where Ka had spent summer evenings drinking beer with the Italian and Yugoslavian workmen who were his neighbors, were now covered with a light blanket of snow.
We went back to the station square, following the route to the city library Ka had taken every morning during his last years. He had enjoyed walking through the crowds of people rushing to work. So we followed his footsteps into the station and down through an underground arcade, coming aboveground again to follow the tram route past the sex shops, souvenir stores, patisseries, and pharmacies of Kaiserstrasse as far as Hauptwache Square. Tarkut Ölçün saw many Turks and Kurds he knew in the döner shops, kebab restaurants, and fruit and vegetable shops we passed along the way, and as he waved to them he told me how when these same people had seen Ka walking to the city library every morning at exactly the same time, they’d cry out, “Good morning, Professor!” When we arrived in Hauptwache Square, he pointed out the big store on the opposite side of the square—the Kaufhof. I told him it was here that Ka had bought the overcoat he wore in Kars, but I declined his offer to take me inside.
Ka’s final destination, the Frankfurt city library, was a modern and anonymous building. Inside were the types you always find in such libraries: housewives, old people with time to kill, unemployed men, one or two Turks and Arabs, students giggling over their homework assignments, and all other manner of stalwarts from the ranks of the obese, the lame, the insane, and the mentally handicapped. One drooling young man raised his head from his picture book to stick out his tongue at me. My guide was not particularly interested in books so I left him in the coffee shop downstairs and went to the shelves of English poetry. Here I searched the checkout slips on the inside back covers for my friend’s name; whenever I opened a copy of Auden, Browning, or Coleridge to find his signature, I shed tears for him and for the years he’d wasted away in this library.
I cut short my search, which had plunged me into melancholy, and walked back with my friendly guide along the same avenues without saying a word. We turned left somewhere in the middle of the Kaiserstrasse, just before a place that was called the World Sex Center or something equally absurd, and from here we walked down one street to Münchnerstrasse, where I saw more Turkish-owned produce stores and restaurants, as well as an empty hairdresser’s. By now I had guessed what I was about to be shown, so my heart was pounding, and as my eyes moved from the fresh leeks and oranges displayed outside the fruit and vegetable shops to the one-legged man begging nearby, and on to the headlights flashing across the stifling windows of the Hotel Eden, I looked into the charcoal twilight and there, shining in bright pink solitary splendor, I found the neon letter K.
“This is where it happened, I’m afraid,” said Tarkut Ölçün. “They found Ka’s body right here.”
I stared helplessly at the wet pavement. Two boys came flying out of a fruit and vegetable shop pushing and shoving each other; as they ran off, one of them stepped on the patch of wet pavement where Ka had lain dying with three bullets in his body. The red lights of a truck parked just ahead were reflected in the asphalt. Ka had spent several minutes writhing on this very pavement and then died before the ambulance arrived.
For a moment I lifted my head to find the patch of sky he saw as he was dying: between the old dark buildings, the streetlamps, and the power lines, there was a sliver of sky. Ka had been shot around midnight. Tarkut Ölçün told me there would still have been a smattering of prostitutes walking up and down the street. The actual red-light district was one street up, along the Kaiserstrasse, but on busy nights and weekends, or during one of the trade fairs, the ladies would spread out along this street too. “They didn’t find anything,” he said, when he saw me looking left and right as if in search of a clue. “And the German police aren’t like our Turkish police. They do their job well.”
When I started canvassing the occupants of the shops in the immediate vicinity anyway, this good-natured man decided to help. The girls at the hairdresser’s recognized him; after exchanging a few niceties, he asked whether they’d seen anything, but of course they were not in the shop at the time of the murder and had in fact heard nothing about the incident. “The only thing Turkish families teach their daughters here is how to be hairdressers,” he told me, when we were outside again. “There are hundreds of Turkish hairdressers in Frankfurt.”
The Kurds in the fruit and vegetable shop, by contrast, were only too well aware of the murder and the police inquiry that had followed. This could explain their evident displeasure at meeting us.
With the same dirty cloth he had when we entered, the waiter in the Holiday Kebab House had been wiping off the Formica tabletops at twelve on the night in question when he’d heard the gunshots; he waited a short time before going outside to become the last person Ka would see.
After leaving the kebab restaurant, we walked swiftly into the first passageway we came to and
ended up in the back courtyard of a dark building. I followed Tarkut Bey down two flights of stairs, through a door, and into a forbidding space the size of a hangar, which had once served as a warehouse. This underworld area was as wide as the street above. It now served as a mosque—between fifty and sixty worshipers were saying their evening prayers on the carpeted area in the middle—and was lined with shops as dark and dirty as the ones you’d find in any underground arcade in Istanbul. I saw a glitterless jewelry store and a fruit and vegetable shop almost small enough to qualify as a dwarf; the butcher’s next door was crowded, but the man in the grocery store sat idly watching the TV set in the coffeehouse as he sat surrounded by coils of garlic sausage. In that corner stood cases of Turkish fruit juice, Turkish macaroni, Turkish canned goods, and religious literature, and I noticed that the café was even more popular than the mosque. The air was thick with cigarette smoke. The men at the tables looked tired—most had their eyes glued to the Turkish film on television, but now and then someone shuffled over to the makeshift fountain; after filling it with water from a plastic bucket, he would perform his ablutions before joining the worshipers outside.
“On Fridays and holidays, you can see two thousand people here,” Tarkut Bey told me. “The overflow goes all the way up the stairs to the back courtyard.” I went over to the stall that sold books and magazines and—for no particular reason—bought a copy of Communication.
Afterward we repaired to the old Munich-style beer parlor directly overhead. “That mosque belongs to the Süleymans,” Tarkut Ölçün said, pointing at the ground below us. “They’re theocrats, but they won’t have anything to do with terrorism; they’re not like the National Advocates or the Cemalettin Tigers. They don’t want to take up arms against the Turkish state, either.” Perhaps troubled by the suspicion he could read in my face and the attention with which I was poring over Communication, as if looking for clues, he now told me everything he knew about Ka’s murder and what he had later discovered from the police and the press.
