by Orhan Pamuk
“Europe’s not my future,” said Blue with a smile. “As long as I live I shall never imitate them or hate myself for being unlike them.”
“It’s not just Islamists who take pride in this country, the Republicans feel the same way,” said Turgut Bey. “If we say all humanity instead of Europe, what do we have?”
“Announcement to All Humanity about the Events in Kars,” said the man in charge of the statement. “That might be too bold.”
There followed a discussion in which they considered replacing Humanity with the West, but the freckled man beside Blue objected to this too. The Kurdish youth with the shrill voice then suggested the more modest An Announcement, and this met with everyone’s approval.
Contrary to all expectations, this draft was in fact very short. And although no one took issue with the opening lines—to the effect that a coup had been “staged” at the very moment when it had become clear that Islamist and Kurdish candidates stood to prevail in the upcoming elections—Turgut Bey objected that people here were known to change their minds on a whim, giving their vote to the party that stood for everything they themselves had opposed only a day before, and that it would be better not to imply with any certitude that this or that politician was sure to have won.
In response, the leftist-militant informer in charge of the working draft said, “Everyone knows this coup happened in advance of the elections in order to prevent certain people from winning.”
“You have to remember that we’re dealing with a theater troupe,” said Turgut Bey. “The only reason they’ve succeeded is that the roads are blocked. Everything will be back to normal in a matter of days.”
“If you’re not against the coup, why are you here?” asked a boy with a beet-red face seated next to Blue.
It was hard to tell whether Turgut Bey had even heard this disrespectful remark. In any case, Kadife rose to her feet at this same moment (she was the only one in the room to stand up when she was speaking, though no one, certainly not she, saw how strange this was). Her eyes burning with anger, she said that her father, having spent many years in prison for his political beliefs, remained categorically opposed to all forms of state-sponsored oppression.
Turgut Bey quickly removed his jacket and sat her down, saying, “I have come to this meeting because I wish to prove to the Europeans that in Turkey, too, we have people who believe in common sense and democracy.”
“If a big German paper gave me two lines of space, this would not be the first thing I’d be aiming to prove,” said the red-faced young man contemptuously; he would have said more, had Blue not laid a warning hand on his arm.
It was enough to make Turgut Bey regret having come. He mastered his disappointment by convincing himself he’d just stopped by on his way somewhere else. Assuming the air of someone preoccupied with matters far away from this room, he rose and took a few steps toward the door; but then, noticing the snow accumulating on Karadağ Avenue, he walked over to the window. Kadife took his arm as if to suggest her father might be unable to walk any farther without assistance. For a long time, father and daughter stood there like mournful children trying to forget their troubles, as a horse-drawn carriage made its way down the street.
One of the three boys from the Kurdish association—the one with the shrill voice—succumbed to curiosity and joined them at the window. The others watched with a mixture of respect and apprehension; as they wondered whether there was about to be a raid, the room grew tense. The various factions were soon so worried that they reached an agreement about the rest of the statement in no time.
The statement declared the military coup to have been the work of a handful of adventurers. It was Blue who suggested this, rejecting a broader definition that might give Westerners the impression that the military had taken over all of Turkey. In the end they agreed to describe it as a “local coup supported by Ankara.” Brief references were made to the Kurds who’d been shot or taken one by one from their homes and killed and to the torture and intimidation suffered by the boys from the religious high school. “A wholesale assault on the people” was amended to read “an assault on the people, the spirit, and religion.” And they changed the last line, calling finally not just on the people of Europe but on the entire world to unite in protest against the Turkish Republic. As he was reading out this line, Turgut Bey caught Blue’s eyes for a moment and saw contentment in them. Again, the old man was sorry he had come.
“Now, if there are no further objections, let’s sign this at once,” said Blue. “Because there could be a raid at any moment.”
By now the statement was a tangle of crossed-out words, arrows, and circled emendations, but this deterred no one from rushing to the middle of the room to jostle for position with one objective: to sign and be off. A few were already heading for the door when Kadife cried, “Stop! My father has something to say!”
This only heightened the panic. Blue ordered the red-faced boy to guard the door. “No one may leave,” he said. “Let Turgut Bey make his objection.”
“I don’t have an objection,” the old man said. “But before I put my name to this statement, there’s something I want from that teenager over there.” He pointed at the red-faced boy, now standing guard at the door. “And not just from him—from everyone in the room. I’m going to ask a question, and I want an answer first from him and then from the rest of you, and if I don’t get it, I won’t be signing this statement.” He turned to Blue to gauge the force of the remark.
“Please, be my guest, ask your question,” said Blue. “If it’s in our power to answer it, we’ll be only too pleased to do so.”
“Just a moment ago you laughed at me. So now I want you to tell me this: If a big German newspaper gave you personally two lines of space, what would you say to the West? I want that boy to go first.”
The red-faced teenager was strong and powerful, with an opinion on everything, but the question caught him unprepared. Clutching the door handle more tightly than ever, he looked to Blue for help.
“Just say whatever you think you’d say, so we can leave,” said Blue, forcing a smile. “If you don’t, the police will be here.”
The red-faced teenager searched the air as if struggling with an exam question he knew how to answer only yesterday.
Hearing nothing, Blue said, “Fine, then let me answer first. I couldn’t care less about your European masters. All I want is to step out of their shadow. But the truth is, we all live under a shadow.”
“Don’t try to help him, let him speak from his own heart,” said Turgut Bey. “You can go last.” He smiled at the red-faced teenager, still squirming. “It’s a difficult decision. It’s a complicated business. It’s not the sort of dilemma you can resolve on your way out the door.”
“He’s looking for excuses!” someone shouted from the back of the room. “He doesn’t want to sign the statement!”
They all retreated, each into his own thoughts. A few moved to the window, to watch another horse-drawn carriage swaying back and forth on its way down the street. Later that same night, in describing the “enchanted silence” that had fallen over the room, Fazιl would tell Ka, “It was as if we were all brothers suddenly, as if we were closer to one another than we’d ever been before.”
An airplane passing far above them in the night sky broke the silence. Everyone heard it. “That’s the second plane today,” Blue whispered.
“I’m leaving!” someone shouted. The speaker, a pale-faced man in his thirties in a pale jacket, had gone unnoticed until this moment. He was one of the three workingmen in the room. A cook in the Social Insurance Hospital, he’d come in with the families of the disappeared and he couldn’t stop looking at his watch. According to later reports, his older brother, a political activist, had been carted off to the police station for questioning, never to return. It was said that the pale-faced cook wanted to secure a death certificate so he could marry his missing brother’s beautiful wife. He’d petitioned the state a year after his
brother’s disappearance, but the police, the secret services, the public prosecutor’s office, and the army garrison all gave him the brush-off; he’d joined the families of the disappeared two months earlier, not out of any desire for revenge but simply because they were the only people willing to listen to him.
“You’ll call me a coward behind my back, but you’re the cowards. And these Europeans of yours, they’re the biggest cowards of all. You can go ahead and quote me.” He kicked the door open and walked out.
Someone now asked just who was this “Hans Hansen Bey.” Kadife panicked, but to her great surprise Blue courteously explained that he was a well-intentioned German journalist who took a deep interest in Turkey’s problems.
“Beware of Germans with good intentions!” cried someone at the back of the room.
“My friends, let’s not hang back like frightened little schoolchildren, waiting for the other kid to speak first,” someone else said.
“I’m at the lycée,” piped up one of the boys from the Kurdish association. “I knew what I would say before I got here.”
His voice couldn’t have been calmer, but his face burned with passion. “I’ve always dreamed of the day when I’d have a chance to share my ideas with the world—and so has everyone else in this room. What I would say is very simple. All I’d want them to print in that Frankfurt paper is this: We’re not stupid, we’re just poor! And we have a right to want to insist on this distinction.”
“Such humble words!”
“Who do you mean, my son, when you say we?” asked a man at the back. “Do you mean the Turks? The Kurds? The Circassians? The people of Kars? To whom exactly are you referring?”
“Mankind’s greatest error,” continued the young Kurd, “the biggest deception of the past thousand years is this: to confuse poverty with stupidity.”
“And what exactly does he mean by stupidity? He should explain his terms.”
“Throughout history, religious leaders and other honorable men of conscience have always warned against this shaming confusion. They remind us that the poor have hearts, minds, humanity, and wisdom just like everyone else. When Hans Hansen sees a poor man he feels sorry for him. He would not necessarily assume that the man’s a fool who’s blown his chances or a drunk who’s lost his will.”
“I can’t speak for Hans Hansen, but that’s what everyone thinks when they see a poor man.”
“Please listen to what I have to say,” said the passionate Kurdish youth. “I won’t speak long. People might feel sorry for a man who’s fallen on hard times, but when an entire nation is poor, the rest of the world assumes that all its people must be brainless, lazy, dirty, clumsy fools. Instead of pity, the people provoke laughter. It’s all a joke: their culture, their customs, their practices. In time the rest of the world may, some of them, begin to feel ashamed for having thought this way, and when they look around and see immigrants from that poor country mopping their floors and doing all the other lowest paying jobs, naturally they worry about what might happen if these workers one day rose up against them. So, to keep things sweet, they start taking an interest in the immigrants’ culture and sometimes even pretend they think of them as equals.”
“It’s about time he told us what nation he’s talking about.”
“Let me add this,” said one of the other Kurdish youths. “Mankind refuses to laugh any longer at those who kill and murder and oppress. This is what I learned from my mother’s brother when he came to Kars from Germany last summer. The world has lost patience with oppressive countries.”
“Are we to assume then that you’re making a threat on behalf of the West?”
“As I was saying,” the first young Kurd continued, “when a Westerner meets someone from a poor country, he feels deep contempt. He assumes that the poor man’s head must be full of all the nonsense that plunged his country into poverty and despair.”
“And if he did, he wouldn’t be far off the mark, would he?”
“If you’re like that conceited poet and think we’re all stupid, stand up and state your case. That godless atheist will end up in hell, but at least he showed some courage. He went on live TV and looked the entire country in the eye and told us to our faces we are stupid.”
“Excuse me, but people on live TV can’t see their audience.”
“The gentleman didn’t say he ‘saw,’ he said he ‘looked.’ ”
“Friends! Please! Let’s not be a debating society,” pleaded the leftist who was taking minutes. “And also, please try to speak more slowly.”
“If he’s not brave enough to say what nation he’s talking about, I refuse to be quiet. Let’s be clear that it’s treason to give a German paper a quote trashing our nation.”
“I’m no traitor. I agree with you,” the passionate Kurdish youth said, rising to his feet. “That’s why I want to tell this German paper that even if I got a chance to go to Germany one day, even if they gave me a visa, I wouldn’t go.”
“They’d never give a European visa to a feeble, unemployed nothing like you.”
“Forget the visa, our own state wouldn’t give him a passport.”
“You’re right, they wouldn’t,” said the passionate but humble youth. “But say they did and I went, and the first Western man I met in the street turned out to be a good person who didn’t even despise me, I’d still mistrust him, just for being a Westerner, I’d still worry that this man was looking down on me. Because in Germany they can spot Turks just by the way they look. There’s no escaping humiliation except by proving at the first opportunity that you think exactly as they do. But this is impossible, and it can break a man’s pride to try.”
“You started badly, my son, but you’ve ended up in the right place,” said an old Azeri journalist. “But I still think we shouldn’t say this to the German press, because it will lay us open to ridicule.” He paused for a moment and then asked cunningly, “So what nation was it you were talking about?”
When the teenager from the Kurdish association sat down without speaking further, the old journalist’s son cried out, “He’s afraid!”
“He’s right to be afraid. He’s not on the government payroll like you.”
Neither the journalist nor his son took offense. Everyone was talking at once, but not in frustration: All the joking and teasing and keeping score had made the atmosphere festive and intimate. Later, on hearing Fazιl’s account of the proceedings, Ka would observe in his notebook that this sort of political meeting could go on for hours, and the beetle-browed, mustachioed, cigarette-smoking men who attended them did so precisely to enjoy the pleasure of the crowd, even without realizing that they were having a good time.
“We will never be Europeans!” cried one of the proud young Islamists. “They may try to roll over us with their tanks and spray us with bullets and kill us all, but they can’t change our souls.”
“You can take possession of my body but never my soul!” said one of the Kurdish youths. He made his contempt clear by reciting the line in the style of a Turkish melodrama.
Everyone laughed. And to show he didn’t mind, the boy who’d been speaking started laughing too.
“Now I’m going to say something,” said one of the youths sitting near Blue. “No matter how hard our friends here try to draw a line between themselves and the lowlifes who ape the ways of the West, I still sense a certain note of apology. It’s as if they’re saying, ‘I’m so sorry I’m not a Westerner.’ ” He turned to the man in the leather jacket who was taking notes. “Please, dear sir, ignore these preliminary remarks!” He spoke like a polite thug. “Here’s what I’d like you to write: I’m proud of the part of me that isn’t European. I’m proud of the things in me that the Europeans find childish, cruel, and primitive. If the Europeans are beautiful, I want to be ugly; if they’re intelligent, I prefer to be stupid; if they’re modern, let me stay pure.”
No one in the room would sign on to that sentiment. The ensuing laughter preserved the new spirit of the gatherin
g, with everything now said giving way to a joke. Then someone went too far—“But you’re stupid already!” At the very same moment the oldest of the leftists and his friend in the black jacket both had coughing fits, so fortunately no one was sure who had uttered these insulting words.
The red-faced teenager guarding the door rattled off a poem. “Europe, O Europe,/Let’s stop and take a look,/When we’re together in our dreams/Let’s not let the devil have his way.” Fazιl had a hard time hearing the rest over all the coughing, taunting, and sniggering, but he could recount in detail the objections to it; jotted down on the same sheet bearing his record of the various two-line statements for Europe were these snippets of reaction that ended up in “All Humanity and the Stars,” the poem Ka was to write shortly afterward.
“Let’s not be afraid of them, there’s nothing there to be afraid of!” One of the old-guard leftist militants now approaching middle age.
The old Azeri journalist who could not stop asking, “To what nation are you referring?” said, “Let’s not sacrifice our Turkishness or forsake our religion.”
A defeatist in the crowd slyly asked, “And whatever happened to the millions of Armenians who once lived all across Anatolia, including Kars?” in the course of a long speech about the Crusades, the Holocaust, the American massacre of the Red Indians, and the Algerian Muslims massacred by the French. But feeling pity for this man, the informer-secretary did not write down his name.
“No one in his right mind would ever want to translate such a long and idiotic poem, and Hans Hansen would never let it be published in his newspaper.” This from one of the three poets in the room. It was their chance to bemoan the luckless isolation of Turkish poets on the international stage.
At the end of his recitation of the poem that everyone denounced as idiotic and primitive, the red-faced youth was drenched in sweat; there was scattered, rather contemptuous applause. Most seemed to agree that it would be unwise to let this poem be published in Germany, as it might give rise to more ridicule. The Kurdish youth whose mother’s brother lived in Germany was the most outspoken on this point.
