by Orhan Pamuk
“Yes,” said Ka ruthlessly. “These are the sorts of thoughts you have when you’re an atheist.”
Fazιl started crying again. Ka either couldn’t remember what they said afterward or he chose not to write it down; the notebooks show no record of the end of the conversation. On the television screen a horde of little American children were clowning for the camera. They were knocking over their chairs, an aquarium was bursting, and then they were all crouching on the ground to the sound of canned laughter. Like everyone else in the teahouse, Fazιl and Ka forgot their troubles and sat laughing at the antics of the American children.
When Zahide entered the teahouse, Ka and Fazιl were watching a truck weave stealthily through a forest. She gave Ka a yellow envelope in which Fazιl showed no interest. Ka opened it up and read the note inside; it was from Ïpek. She and Kadife proposed to meet him in twenty minutes at the New Life Pastry Shop. Fortunately, Zahide had found out from Saffet that he was in the Lucky Brothers Teahouse.
As Zahide was leaving, Fazιl said, “Her grandson is in our class. He’s mad about gambling. If there’s a cockfight or a dogfight going on, he’ll have a bet on it.”
Ka handed him his student identity card. “They want me back at the hotel for dinner,” he said, as he rose to his feet.
“Are you going to see Kadife?” asked Fazιl, hopelessness in his voice. The pity and annoyance he could see on Ka’s face made him blush with shame. As Ka left the teahouse, Fazιl shouted, “I want to kill myself! If you see her, tell her that if she bares her head I’m going to kill myself! But it won’t be because she’s bared her head, I’ll do it just for the pleasure of killing myself in her honor.”
Having more than enough time to get to the New Life Pastry Shop, Ka decided to take the back roads. Walking down Kanal Street, he saw the teahouse where he’d written “Dream Streets” that morning; only when he went inside did he realize that he was not destined to write his next poem in this smoky half-empty teahouse; what he wanted was to go straight across the room and out through the back door. He walked into the snow-covered courtyard, stepped over the low wall he could hardly see, now that it was dark, and went past the same barking dog down three steps into the basement.
A weak lamp illuminated the interior. Mixed with the smell of coal and the stench of old bedding there were now also raki fumes. He could see several silhouettes huddled around the humming stove. When he saw it was the hook-nosed MİT agent drinking raki with the tubercular Georgian woman and her husband, he wasn’t at all surprised. Neither did they seem surprised to see Ka. Ka noticed that the woman was wearing a fashionable red hat. She offered him boiled eggs with pita bread, and her husband poured him a glass of raki. While Ka was still peeling his boiled egg, the MİT agent told him that this furnace room was not merely the warmest place in Kars, it was heaven itself.
The poem Ka wrote during the ensuing silence, without a single difficulty or missing word, was the one he would later call “Heaven.” If he placed it on the Imagination axis of the snowflake, far from the center, way at the top, it was not to suggest that heaven was the future we remember: For Ka, heaven was the place where you kept your memories. Recalling this poem afterward, he would summon one by one a string of recollections: the summer holidays of his childhood, the days he’d skipped out of school, the times he and his sister had gone into their parents’ bed, various drawings he’d done as a child, and the time he went on a date with a girl he’d met at a school party and dared to kiss her.
As Ka walked to the New Life Pastry Shop, his mind was busy with Ïpek. When he arrived, he found the sisters already there. Ïpek looked so beautiful, and Ka felt such happiness at the sight of her, that tears came to his eyes—although it’s possible that his reaction might have had something to do with the raki he’d just drunk on an empty stomach. To sit at a table with two lovely women didn’t just make him happy, it made him proud. He thought of those worn-out Turkish shopkeepers in Frankfurt who smiled and waved at him every morning and evening and imagined what they would think to see him now with these two women. Today he had no audience; no one else was here apart from the old waiter who’d been present when the director of the Institute of Education was assassinated. But even as he sat in the New Life Pastry Shop with Ïpek and Kadife, Ka knew he would always remember this scene; like a photograph taken from outside the shop, it showed him sitting at a table with two beautiful women—never mind that one of them had wrapped her head in a scarf.
The two women were as agitated as Ka was calm. After Ka explained that Fazιl had given him a full report of the meeting at the Hotel Asia, Ïpek came right to the point.
“Blue left the meeting in a fury. And Kadife now regrets what she said there. We sent Zahide to his hiding place but he wasn’t there. We can’t find Blue anywhere.” When she started speaking, it was in the tone of the elder daughter trying to help a sister in trouble, but soon it was clear that she too was distressed.
“If you find him, what then?”
“We want to be sure they haven’t caught him. Above all, we need to know he’s still alive,” said Ïpek. She glanced at Kadife, who looked as if she was about to burst into tears. “Please find him and ask him if he has anything he wants to say to us. Tell him Kadife’s ready to do whatever he asks.”
“You know Kars a lot better than I do.”
“It’s dark and we’re just two women,” said Ïpek. “You’ve learned your way around the city by now. Go see what you can find out at the Man in the Moon Teahouse and the Divine Light Teahouse—that’s where the religious high school boys and the Islamist students go. They’re both swarming with undercover police, and those men are terrible gossips. If something bad’s happened to Blue, they’re sure to be talking about it.”
Kadife had taken out her handkerchief and was blowing her nose. Ka thought she was still on the verge of tears.
“Bring us news of Blue,” Ïpek said. “If we stay here any longer, our father will begin to worry. He’s expecting you for dinner.”
“Don’t forget to check out the teahouses on Bayrampaşa Avenue!” Kadife said, as she rose from her chair.
Her voice was about to crack; it seemed to Ka that both girls were terrified and fast losing hope. Ka was uneasy about leaving them in this state, so he walked them halfway back to the Snow Palace Hotel. Fearful as he was of losing Ïpek, the knowledge of being their accomplice, helping them do something behind their father’s back, bound him to them both. As they walked, he imagined one day when he and Ïpek would be in Frankfurt and Kadife would come to visit, and the three of them would weave in and out of the cafés on Berliner Avenue, stopping from time to time to gaze at a shop window.
But after giving it some thought, he began to doubt he’d be able to accomplish the mission they had set him. He had no trouble finding the Man in the Moon Teahouse, a place so ordinary and uninspiring that Ka soon forgot why he was there; for the longest time he sat alone watching television. There were a few men there who seemed young enough to be students, and although he did try to coax them out with a few remarks about the football match on the screen, none of them responded. Ka’s next move was to take out his cigarettes, so that he’d be ready to offer them to anyone who might approach him; he even went so far as to put his lighter on the table. When he realized that no one, not even the cross-eyed man at the counter, was going to talk to him, he went next door to the Divine Light, where he found a handful of youths watching the same football match in black-and-white. If he hadn’t gone over to the wall to look at the newspaper clippings and the schedule of all Karsspor matches to be played that season, he would not have remembered that this was the teahouse where, only yesterday, he and Necip had discussed God’s existence and the meaning of life. Looking again at the doggerel someone had scribbled on the Karsspor poster, and seeing that another poet had added a few more lines since yesterday, he took out his notebook and began to copy them down:
So it’s settled: our mother’s not coming back from heaven,
>
Never again will we know her embrace,
But no matter how many beatings she suffers at our father’s hand,
She’ll still keep warming our hearts and breathing life into our souls,
Because that was fate, And the shit we’re sinking into smells so bad
it even makes the city of Kars look like heaven.
“Are you writing a poem?” asked the boy at the counter.
“Congratulations,” said Ka. “Tell me, do you know how to read writing upside down?”
“No, big brother, I can’t even read when it’s right side up. I ran away from school, so I never managed to crack the code. But that’s all in the past now.”
“Who wrote the new poem on the wall here?”
“Half the boys who used to come here are poets.”
“Why aren’t they here today?”
“Yesterday the soldiers rounded them all up. Some are locked up now, and the rest are in hiding. Ask those men over there if you want; they’re undercover agents, so they should know.”
The boy pointed toward two young men in the corner in feverish discussion of the football match, but rather than approach them to ask about the missing poets, Ka headed for the door.
He was glad to see that the snow had started falling again. He was sure he’d find no clues to Blue’s whereabouts in the teahouses of Bayrampaşa Avenue. Immersed as he was in the dusky melancholy that had begun descending over the city, he still felt happy. A long procession of images paraded before his eyes as he awaited his next poem—a waking dream of ugly unadorned concrete buildings, parking lots buried in snow, teahouses and barbershops and grocery stores all hidden behind their icy windows, courtyards in which dogs had been barking in unison since the days of the Russians, stores selling spare parts for tractors alongside horse-drawn carriage supplies and cheese. He was seized by the certainty that everything he saw—the banners for the Motherland Party, the little window hidden behind those tightly drawn curtains, the slip of paper someone had taped to the icy window of the Knowledge Pharmacy months earlier to announce that the shot for Japanese influenza had finally arrived, the yellow antisuicide poster—every last one of these little details would stay with him for the rest of his life. There arose from these minor things a vision of extraordinary power: So certain was he that “everything on earth is interconnected and I too am inextricably linked to this deep and beautiful world,” he could only conclude another poem was on its way, and so he stepped into one of the teahouses on Atatürk Avenue. But the poem never arrived.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
A Godless Man in Kars
THE FEAR OF BEING SHOT
No sooner had Ka left the teahouse for the snow-covered pavement than he came face-to-face with Muhtar. Muhtar wore the absentminded look of a man on a mission; when he first saw Ka through the swarm of giant snowflakes he didn’t seem to recognize him, and for a moment Ka was tempted to run away. Then they both rushed forward at once to embrace like long-lost friends.
“Did you pass my message on to Ïpek?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say? Come, let’s sit down in that teahouse over there, and you can tell me.”
In spite of the military coup, the beating at the police station, and the canceled election, Muhtar did not seem at all downcast.
Once they were seated, he said, “So why do you suppose they didn’t arrest me? Because when the snow melts, the roads open, and the soldiers are sent back to their barracks, they’ll set a new date for the elections, that’s why! Make sure you tell Ïpek!”
Ka assured him that he would pass on the message. Then he asked if there was any news of Blue.
“I’m the one who first summoned him to Kars. In the beginning he always stayed with me,” Muhtar told him proudly. “But after the Istanbul press branded him a terrorist, he didn’t want to put the party in a difficult position, so now when he comes to Kars he never gets in touch. I’m always the last to know what he’s up to. What did Ïpek say when you passed on my message?”
Ka told Muhtar that Ïpek had not seemed particularly interested in his proposal that they remarry. Muhtar impressed upon Ka what a sensitive, refined, and understanding woman his ex-wife was; he made the point as though disclosing very precious information. He went on to reiterate his regret for having treated her so badly during a difficult crisis in his life.
“When you get back to Istanbul, you’ll take the poems I gave you and deliver them by hand to Fahir, won’t you?” he asked next.
When Ka had given his word, Muhtar rearranged his face to take on the air of a sad and tenderhearted uncle. Ka’s embarrassment was already giving way to something halfway between pity and revulsion when Muhtar produced a newspaper from his pocket.
“If I were you, I wouldn’t be wandering the streets so casually,” Muhtar said pleasantly.
Ka grabbed the next day’s edition of the Border City Gazette, on which the ink wasn’t yet dry. He scanned the headlines—THEATRICAL REVOLUTIONARIES TAKE CITY BY STORM, HAPPY DAYS RETURN TO KARS, ELECTIONS POSTPONED, CITIZENS APPLAUD THE REVOLUTION—and turned his attention to the front-page article that Muhtar indicated:
A GODLESS MAN IN KARS
QUESTIONS ASKED ABOUT KA,
THE SO-CALLED POET
WHY DID HE CHOOSE TO VISIT OUR
CITY IN SUCH TROUBLED TIMES?
YESTERDAY WE INTRODUCED THE SO-CALLED
POET TO THE PEOPLE OF KARS
TODAY WE REPORT THE SUSPICIONS HE HAS
AROUSED IN OUR READERS
We have been hearing many rumors about the so-called poet who came close to ruining yesterday’s joyous performance by the Sunay Zaim Players when he strode onto the stage halfway through the celebrations of Atatürk and the Republic and robbed the audience of their happiness and their peace of mind by bombarding their ears with a joyless, meaningless poem.
Although the people of Kars once lived side by side in happy harmony, in recent years outside forces have turned brother against brother. Disputes between Islamists, secularists, Kurds, Turks, and Azeris drive us asunder for specious reasons and reawaken old accusations about the Armenian massacre that should have been buried long ago.
It is only natural that the people of Kars wonder whether this suspicious character who fled Turkey many years ago and now lives in Germany has chosen to grace us with his company because he is some sort of spy. Can it be true that his efforts to provoke an incident at our religious high school resulted in his making the following statement to youths who engaged him in a conversation two days ago? “I am an atheist. I don’t believe in God, but that doesn’t mean I’d commit suicide, because after all God—God forbid—doesn’t exist.” Can these be his exact words? And when he said, “An intellectual’s job is to speak against holiness,” was he denying God’s existence and—if so—was he expressing European views on freedom of thought?
Just because Germany is bankrolling you, that doesn’t mean you have the right to trample on our beliefs! Is it because you are ashamed of being a Turk that you hide your true name behind the fake foreign counterfeit name of Ka?
Many readers have telephoned our offices to express their regret about this godless imitation-European’s decision to stir up dissent in our city in these troubled times. They have voiced particular concern about the way in which he has wandered the shantytowns, knocking on the doors of the most wretched dwellings to incite rebellion against our state and indeed, even in our own presence, vainly attempting to stick his tongue out at our country and even at the great Atatürk, Father of our Republic. The youth of Kars know how to deal with blasphemers who deny God and the Prophet Muhammad (SAS)!
“When I passed by their office twenty minutes ago, Serdar’s two sons had only just started printing this edition,” said Muhtar. Far from commiserating with his friend’s fears, he seemed cheerful, as if he had just introduced a pleasant new topic.
Reading the article more carefully a second time, Ka felt very much alone. Long ago, whe
n he’d first dreamed of a glittering literary future, he had foreseen that the modernist innovations he would bring to Turkish poetry (the very concept now seemed excessively nationalist) would provoke harsh criticism and personal attack; still, he’d assumed that notoriety would at least confer a certain aura. Although he’d enjoyed a modest fame in the years since and had never been subject to harsh criticism, it hurt him to be referred to as a “so-called” poet.
After warning him not to wander the streets like a moving target, Muhtar left him alone at the teahouse. Ka was overtaken by the fear that he could be shot at any moment. He left the teahouse and wandered through the snow, lost in thought; the giant snowflakes that sailed down from the heavens so fast were moving with a speed to suggest bewitchment.
Early in his youth, Ka had firmly believed that there could be no higher honor than to die for an intellectual political cause or for what he had written. By his thirties, he’d seen too many of his friends and classmates tortured for the sake of foolish, even malign principles; then there were those who were shot dead in the attempt to rob banks and those who made bombs that wound up exploding in their hands. Seeing the havoc of his lofty ideas put into action, Ka deliberately distanced himself from them. Finally, the fact of having spent years and years of exile in Germany for political beliefs he no longer held had finally severed the connection between politics and self-sacrifice. Whenever he picked up a Turkish paper in Germany and read that this or that columnist had been shot for political reasons, “most probably by political Islamists,” he felt some respect for the victim as a dead man but no particular admiration for him as a murdered writer.
