by Orhan Pamuk
“When they write poems or sing songs in the West, they speak for all humanity. They’re human beings—but we’re just Muslims. When we write something, it’s just called ethnic poetry.”
“My message is this: Write this down,” said the man in the black jacket. “If the Europeans are right and our only future and only hope is to be more like them, it’s foolish to waste time talking about what makes us who we are.”
“Ah, of all the things said so far, here is the one that will most effectively convince the Europeans that we’re idiots.”
“Please, once and for all, state clearly which nation it is that’s going to look idiotic.”
“And here we are acting as if we’re so much smarter and worthier than Westerners, but gentlemen, I put it to you that if Germany opened a consulate in Kars today and started handing out free visas, the city would be empty within a week.”
“That’s a lie. After all, our friend over there just told us he wouldn’t go even if they offered him the chance. I wouldn’t leave either. I’d do the honorable thing and stay here.”
“And many others would stay too, gentlemen, make no mistake. All those who wouldn’t go raise your hands so we can see you.”
A few gravely raised their hands. A handful of youths saw them but remained undecided. “And why is it that those who would go are seen as dishonorable?” asked the man in the black jacket.
“This is hard to explain to people who don’t already understand,” said one mysterious fellow.
Fazιl noticed that Kadife had turned away, looking mournfully out the window, and his heart began to thump wildly. Please God, he thought, help me preserve my purity, protect my mind from confusion. It occurred to him that Kadife might like these words. It occurred to him to make this his quote for the German newspaper, but with so many people speaking, there was no chance for him to be heard.
The only one whose voice rose above all this noise was the shrill Kurdish youth. He proposed to tell the German newspaper about a dream he’d had. Pausing from time to time with a shiver, he explained how in this dream he’d been sitting all alone in the National Theater watching a film. It was a Western film, and everyone in it was speaking a foreign language, but this didn’t make him uncomfortable; he somehow understood everything they said. And then, in the blink of an eye, he entered the film itself; it turned out that his seat was not in the National Theater but in the sitting room of a Christian family. There, before his eyes, was a table laden with food; he longed to fill his stomach, but for fear of doing something wrong he kept his distance. His heart began to race: there, before him, was a beautiful blond woman, and the moment he saw her he remembered that he’d been in love with her for years. The woman was warmer and more gentle than he could ever imagine. She complimented him on his clothes and his manners, kissed his cheeks, and ran her fingers through his hair. He felt so very happy. Before he knew it, she sat him on her lap and pointed out the food on the table. Only then did he realize that he was still a child, said the Kurdish youth, with tears welling in his eyes. It was because he was still a child that she found him so charming.
The old journalist broke the silence. “No one could dream a dream like that,” he said. “This Kurdish boy made it all up just to mock us to the Germans.”
To prove the authenticity of this dream, the teenager from the Kurdish association offered a detail he’d omitted from his earlier account: Every time he’d woken up since the dream, he’d remembered this same blond woman. He’d first seen her five years ago; she was stepping out of a bus, one of a group of tourists who’d come to see the Armenian churches. She was wearing a blue dress with straps that she also wore in his dreams.
This produced more laughter. “We’ve all seen European women like that,” said someone, “and we’ve all been tempted by the devil.” It was an opportunity for a few mischievous anecdotes, off-color jokes, and angry diatribes against Western women. A tall, thin, and rather handsome youth who had stayed in the background until that moment launched into a story about a Westerner and a Muslim who met at a train station. Sadly, the train didn’t arrive. At the end of the same platform they saw a beautiful Frenchwoman waiting for the same train.…
Anyone who’d ever attended a boys’ school or done his military service recognized this for a story about to draw a parallel between sexual prowess and national culture. It contained no rude words; its coarseness was hidden under a veil of insinuations. But in no time at all there fell over the room a mood that would later cause Fazιl to exclaim: “My heart was heavy with shame!”
Turgut Bey rose to his feet. “All right, my boy, that’s enough,” he said. “Bring me this statement so I can sign it.”
He fished out his new pen, and it was done. The noise and the cigarette smoke had worn him out, and Kadife had to help him stand.
“Now listen to me for a minute,” she said. “You seem to feel no shame, but my face is red from what I’ve just heard. I cover my head with this scarf so you won’t see my hair, and maybe you think this causes me undue hardship, but—”
“You don’t do it for us!” someone said in a respectful whisper. “You do it for God, to proclaim your spirituality!”
“I have a few things to say to the German paper too. Please write them down.” She was enough of an actress to know that her audience half hated and half admired her. “A young woman of Kars—no, don’t write that; say a Muslim girl who lives in Kars—has covered her head for personal religious reasons but also wears the scarf as an emblem of her faith. One day this girl is overcome by a sudden revulsion and pulls the scarf off her head. (The Westerners would greet this as good news. If we did that, Hans Hansen would certainly want to print our views.) When she pulled off her scarf, this girl said, ‘Please God, forgive me, because I have to be alone. This world is so loathsome, and I am so powerless and so full of woe that your—’ ”
“Kadife,” whispered Fazιl. “Please, I beg you, don’t bare your head. We’re all here right now, all of us, including me and Necip. It would kill us, kill us all.”
Everyone in the room seemed confused by these words. “Stop talking nonsense,” someone said, and then someone else, “But of course she shouldn’t bare her head.” But most looked at her expectantly, half hoping she was about to do something shocking and newsworthy and half wondering who had staged this melodrama and who was playing games with whom.
“The two lines I want to give the German paper are as follows,” said Fazιl. The buzzing in the room grew louder. “I speak not only for myself but for my friend Necip, who was so cruelly martyred on the night of the revolution: Kadife, we love you very much. If you bare your head, I’ll kill myself, so please. Please don’t.”
According to some reports, Fazιl didn’t say we love you but I love you, though it’s possible these witnesses adjusted their memories to explain what Fazιl would do later on.
“No one in this city may talk about suicide!” bellowed Blue, and he stormed out of the hotel room without even pausing to look at Kadife; this brought the meeting to an immediate close and, although they were not particularly quiet about it, they’d cleared the room in a matter of seconds.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I Have Two Souls Inside My Body
ON LOVE, INSIGNIFICANCE, AND BLUE’S DISAPPEARANCE
At a quarter to five, Ka stepped out of the Snow Palace Hotel. Turgut Bey and Kadife had not yet returned from the meeting at the Hotel Asia, and Ka still had fifteen minutes before he was due to meet Fazιl, but he was too happy to sit still. He turned left off Atatürk Avenue and walked as far as the Kars River, slowing down from time to time to gaze into the windows of grocery stores and photographers’ and teahouses crowded with men watching television. When he reached the Iron Bridge, he smoked two Marlboros in quick succession; with his head full of visions of living happily ever after with Ïpek in Frankfurt, he didn’t feel the cold at all. Across the river was the park where rich families of Kars used to go to watch the ice skaters; it was now omino
usly dark.
Fazιl was late to the Iron Bridge rendezvous, and when he emerged from the darkness Ka for a moment mistook him for Necip. Together they went into the Lucky Brothers Teahouse, where Fazιl reported everything he could remember about the meeting at the Hotel Asia. When he got to the part where he declared his feeling that the history of his small city had become as one with the history of the world, Ka silenced him as one might hush another in midsentence upon catching the thread of something important being said on the radio; he then proceeded to write the poem entitled “All Humanity and the Stars.”
In the notes he made afterward, Ka described its subject as the sadness of a city forgotten by the outside world and banished from history; the first lines followed a sequence recalling the opening scenes of the Hollywood films he had so loved as a child. As the titles rolled past, there was a faraway image of the earth turning slowly; as the camera came in closer and closer, the sphere grew and grew, until suddenly all you could see was one country, and of course—just as in the imaginary films Ka had been watching in his head since childhood—this country was Turkey; now the blue waters of the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus and the Black Sea were visible; as the camera moved in farther you could see Istanbul, and the Nişantaş of Ka’s childhood, with the traffic policeman on Teşvikiye Avenue, the Street of Niğar the Poetess, and trees and rooftops (how lovely they looked from above!); then came a slow pan across the laundry hanging on the line, the billboard advertising Tamek canned goods, the rusty gutters and the pitch-covered sidewalls, before the pause at Ka’s bedroom window. Then a long tracking shot through the window of rooms packed with books, dusty furniture, and carpets, to Ka at a desk facing the other window; panning over his shoulder, the camera revealed a piece of paper on the desk and, following the fountain pen, came finally to rest on the last letters of the message he was writing, thus inviting us to read:
ADDRESS ON THE DAY OF MY ENTRANCE INTO THE HISTORY OF POETRY: POET KA, 16/8 NIGR THE POETESS STREET, NIŞANTAŞ, ISTANBUL, TURKEY
As discerning readers will already have guessed, this address, which I think must also appear in the poem itself, is located on the Reason axis but positioned to suggest the power of the imagination.
Fazιl’s main preoccupation was clear by the end of his story; he was now very uneasy about having threatened to kill himself if Kadife bared her head. “It’s not just because committing suicide is tantamount to losing your faith, it’s also because I didn’t mean it. Why did I say something I didn’t mean?” Fazιl claimed that right after his vow, he had said, “God forgive me, I’ll never say that again!” But then, coming eye to eye with Kadife at the door, he had trembled like a leaf.
“Do you think Kadife thought I was in love with her?” he asked Ka.
“Are you in love with Kadife?”
“You know the truth already; I was in love with Teslime, may she rest in peace. My friend Necip, may he also rest in peace, was the one who was in love with Kadife. I feel so ashamed of myself for falling in love with the same girl not a day after his death. And I know there can be only one explanation. This scares me too. Tell me why you’re so sure that Necip is dead!”
“I looked at the place where the bullet entered his forehead before I laid my hands on his shoulders and kissed him.”
“It’s possible that Necip’s soul is now living inside my body,” said Fazιl. “Listen. I stayed away from the gala last night; I didn’t even watch it on television. I went to bed early and passed out immediately. Only later did I hear about the terrible things that had happened to Necip while I was asleep. Then the soldiers raided our dormitory, and I had no doubt they were true. By the time I saw you at the library, I knew Necip was dead, because his soul had been in my body since early morning. The soldiers who came to empty the dormitory passed me by, so I spent the night on Sunday Street, at the home of one of my father’s friends from army days—he’s from Varto. As I lay in his guest bed, my head suddenly started spinning and a deep rich feeling came over me. My friend was at my side again; he was inside me. It’s just as they say in the old books: The soul leaves the body six hours after death. According to Suyuti, at that instant the soul is a playful, mercurial thing, and it has to sit in Berzah till the Day of Judgment. But Necip’s soul decided to enter my body instead. I’m sure of this. I’m also very much afraid, because this is never mentioned in the Koran. But there’s no other way I can explain how I fell in love with Kadife so quickly. So the idea of committing suicide over her wasn’t mine either. Do you think it could be true that Necip’s soul has taken refuge in my body?”
“If that’s what you believe,” said Ka carefully.
“You’re the only one I’m telling. Necip told you secrets he never told anyone else. I beg you, tell me the truth: Necip never once told me that the doubt of atheism had taken root in him, but he could have mentioned it to you. Did Necip ever tell you that he—God forbid—doubted God’s existence?”
“It wasn’t the sort of doubt you imagine; what he told me was different. Like imagining your parents might die one day and taking pleasure from that sadness, it was about thoughts that came to him unbidden about what might happen if his beloved God did not exist.”
“Now the same thing’s happening to me,” said Fazιl. “I’ve no further doubt that Necip’s soul has planted these thoughts in me.”
“These uncertainties don’t equal atheism.”
“But I’m already siding with the suicide girls,” said Fazιl sadly. “Just a few minutes ago, I said I was ready to commit suicide myself. I don’t want to believe that my dear departed friend was an atheist. But now I hear the voice of an atheist inside me, and this makes me very scared. I don’t know if it’s the same for you, but you’ve been to Europe; you’ve met all the intellectuals and all those alcohol and sleeping-pill addicts who live there. So please, tell me again, what does it feel like to be an atheist?”
“Well, they certainly don’t fantasize endlessly about suicide.”
“I don’t fantasize endlessly, but sometimes I do think about it.”
“Why?”
“Because of Kadife. I can’t get her out of my mind! I close my eyes and there she is, shimmering before me. When I’m studying, watching television, waiting for evening to fall, everything reminds me of Kadife, even if it has nothing to do with her, which causes me great pain. This started happening before Necip died. To tell you the truth, it was not really Teslime; it was always Kadife I loved. But because my friend loved her I hid my feelings. It was actually Necip who provoked it, by talking endlessly about Kadife. When the soldiers raided our dormitory I knew there was a chance they had already killed him and, yes, this thought made me glad. It wasn’t because I saw a chance to make my feelings plain; it was because I thought it served him right for provoking this love in me. Necip is dead now, and I am free, but that only means I love Kadife more than ever. I’ve been thinking of her ever since I woke up this morning; she’s consuming my thoughts; it’s got so I can’t think about anything else and—dear God—I just don’t know what to do!”
Fazιl buried his face in his hands and began to sob. Ka lit a Marlboro as a wave of selfish indifference passed through him. But he still reached out to comfort the boy and, for the longest time, stroked his head.
Saffet, the detective assigned to follow him, had been sitting at the other end of the teahouse, watching them with one eye and the television set with the other; now he got up and walked over to the table.
“Tell this boy to stop crying. I didn’t take his identity card to headquarters; I still have it with me.” When this failed to stem Fazιl’s tears, he put his hand in his pocket and produced the identity card; Ka reached out and took it. “Why is he crying?” asked Saffet, half out of professional curiosity and half out of compassion.
“He’s in love,” said Ka. The detective immediately relaxed. Ka watched him leave the teahouse and vanish into the night.
Later, Fazιl asked what he had to do to get Kadife’s attentio
n, mentioning that all of Kars knew Ka was in love with Kadife’s sister. Fazιl’s passion seemed so plainly hopeless and impossible that Ka wondered whether his own love for Ïpek might not be similarly doomed. As Fazιl’s sobs faded away, Ka dolefully repeated the advice Ïpek had given him: “Just be yourself.”
“That’s not going to be possible as long as I have two souls inside my body,” said Fazιl. “Especially with Necip’s atheist soul slowly taking over. For years and years, I’ve thought my friends and fellow classmates were wrong to get mixed up in politics, and now suddenly I want to join the Islamists and do something to protest this military coup. But even there my motivation, I think, is to make Kadife notice me. It scares me to have nothing but Kadife inside my head. It’s not just because I don’t know her. It’s because this proves I’m a typical atheist. I don’t care about anything except love and happiness.”
When Fazιl broke down into sobs again, Ka thought of telling him that he shouldn’t be discussing his infatuation with Kadife in public; he would be in serious trouble if Blue found out about it. If everyone knew about his own relationship with Ïpek, Ka reasoned, it followed that everyone also knew about Kadife’s relationship with Blue. In this case, Fazιl’s professed ardor would be a direct challenge to the Kars Islamist hierarchy.
“We’re poor and insignificant,” said Fazιl, with a strange fury in his voice. “Our wretched lives have no place in human history. One day all of us living now in Kars will be dead and gone. No one will remember us; no one will care what happened to us. We’ll spend the rest of our days arguing about what sort of scarf women should wrap around their heads, and no one will care in the slightest because we’re eaten up by our own petty, idiotic quarrels. When I see so many people around me leading such stupid lives and then vanishing without a trace, an anger runs through me because I know then that nothing really matters more in life than love. And when I think that, my feelings for Kadife become all the more unbearable—it hurts to know that my only consolation would be to spend the rest of my life with my arms around her.”
