by Orhan Pamuk
In the harsh light of many years spent criticizing poets of obscure verse, in thrall to the myths of modernism, there are but one or two excuses for Ka’s extensive self-commentary. A careful reading reveals that Ka did not believe himself to be the true author of any of the poems that came to him in Kars. Rather, he believed himself to be but the medium, the amanuensis, in a manner well exampled by predecessors of his modernist bêtes noires. But as he wrote in several places, having produced the poems, he was now determined to throw off his passivity, and it was by coming to understand them—by revealing their hidden symmetry—that he hoped to achieve this purpose. But there was a more practical urgency as well: Without understanding what his Kars poems meant, he could have no hope of filling in the blanks, of completing the half-finished lines—or of recovering his lost poem, “The Place Where God Does Not Exist”—and thus no hope of completing the book. For after Ka returned to Frankfurt, no poem ever came to him again.
It’s clear from his notes and letters that by the end of his fourth year back in Frankfurt, Ka had managed to divine the hidden logic of his poems and bring the book to its final form. This is why, when I returned to my Frankfurt hotel room with the papers and notebooks and other belongings rescued from his apartment, I sat there until dawn, drinking raki and sifting through the remains: I kept telling myself that his poems had to be among his things. I stayed up all night, poring over his notebooks and inspecting his old pajamas, his Melinda tapes, his ties, his books, his lighters (I realized that one of these was the lighter that Kadife had asked him to pass on to Blue), until finally I drifted off to sleep on a sea of nightmares and yearnings, dreams and visions. (Ka came to me in one frightening dream to say, “You are old.”)
It was noon when I awoke to spend the rest of the day roaming the wet and snowy streets of Frankfurt, and although I no longer had Tarkut Ölçün at my side, I did my best to gather as much information on Ka as I could. The two women with whom he had had relations during the eight years before his visit to Kars were happy to speak to me; I told them I was writing my friend’s biography. His first lover, Nalan, didn’t even know he was a poet, so it was hardly surprising that she knew nothing of his new collection. She was married now and with her husband ran two döner shops and a travel agency. After telling me baldly that Ka had been a contentious, peevish man, always quick to take offense, she cried a little. (The thing that grieved her most was having sacrificed her youth to her ideals.)
His second lover, Hildegard, was still single, and I guessed at once that she would know nothing of the contents of his last poems, or indeed of his having completed a collection entitled Snow. I may have overstated Ka’s fame as a poet in Turkey, and certainly she played upon my sheepishness at having been caught out; in a rather flirtatious manner she told me that after her involvement with Ka she had stopped taking her summer holidays in Turkey. Ka, she said, was a dutiful, clever, lonesome child whose life was dominated by a restless hunger for mothering—he knew he’d never find it, but also that if he did he’d run the other way—so while he was an easy man to love, he was an impossible one to live with. Ka had never spoken to her about me. (I’ve no idea why I asked her that question or, indeed, why I mention it here again.) After an interview that lasted an hour and a quarter, Hildegard showed me something I had failed to notice: The top segment of the index finger on her beautiful slender-wristed right hand was missing. She added with a smile that once, in a moment of anger, Ka had mocked her for this defect.
Ka had finished writing out his book in longhand and, as usual, refrained from having it typed or copied; instead, just as he had done with his previous books, with manuscript in hand he went on a reading tour, visiting Kassel, Braunschweig, Hannover, Osnabrück, Bremen, and Hamburg. At the invitation of the various city councils, and with the assistance of Tarkut Ölçün, I embarked on my own lightning tour of literary evenings in those same cities. Like Ka, ever the great admirer of Germany’s efficient and immaculate trains, I traveled from city to city enjoying the very Protestant comforts Ka had described in one of his poems; as he must have done, I sat by the window peacefully watching the reflections of the grassy plains, the villages with the sweet little churches nestled in the mountain foothills, and the little stations full of children with their bright raincoats and backpacks; the two Turks sent by the association to greet me would listen impassively, with cigarettes hanging from their mouths, as I explained my wish to do exactly as Ka had done on his own tour seven weeks earlier; and so in every city I checked into a cheap little hotel like Ka’s and went off with my hosts to a Turkish restaurant where over spinach börek and döner we discussed politics and agreed what a shame it was that Turks had so little interest in culture; after the meal I would wander through the cold empty city and pretend I was Ka walking the same streets to escape the painful memories of Ïpek. In the evening, before a gathering of fifteen or twenty people interested in politics, literature, and things Turkish, I would read halfheartedly a page or two of my most recent novel, and then, switching to the subject of poetry, I would announce that I was a close friend of the great poet Ka, who had recently been shot dead on a street in Frankfurt; did anyone remember anything about his last poems, “which he read here only a short time ago?”
Most of those on hand at these literary evenings had skipped Ka’s poetry reading, and it was clear that those who had attended had done so for political reasons or simply by chance, judging by the little they could tell me about his poems as compared with the copious notice they had taken of the charcoal-colored coat he had never taken off, his pale complexion, his unkempt hair, and his nervous mannerisms. But even those uninterested in Ka’s life and poetry were quick to take interest in his death. I heard quite a few conspiracy theories: He’d been assassinated by Islamists, the Turkish secret service, Armenians, German skinheads, Kurds, and Turkish nationalists. But it also turned out that at every event there had been a few sensitive souls who had paid Ka careful attention. Those keenly interested in literature confirmed that he had indeed just finished a new collection, that he had read several poems from it—“Dream Streets,” “Dog,” “Chocolate Box,” and “Love”—but they were unable to recall anything useful about the individual pieces, apart from their being very difficult. At several events, Ka had mentioned that he’d written the poems in Kars, sometimes implying he meant them as elegies, particularly for those longing for the towns and villages they’d left behind. At the end of one event, a dark-haired woman in her thirties came forward and, after explaining that she was widowed with a child, she told me of having approached Ka in a similar manner after his reading and that they had discussed a poem called “The Place Where God Does Not Exist”; she believed he had read only four lines of this long poem because he didn’t want to offend anyone. No matter how hard I tried to draw her out, this careful poetry lover couldn’t remember any of the poem’s words, only that it described “a terrifying landscape.” But having sat in the front row during Ka’s Hamburg appearance, she could at least confirm he’d been reading from a green notebook.
That evening I took the same train that Ka had taken from Hamburg to Frankfurt. When I left the station, I took the same route also—walking down the Kaiserstrasse and stopping now and then to wander through a sex shop. (Although it had been only a week since my arrival in Germany, there was already a new Melinda video.) When I arrived at the place where my friend had been shot, I stopped, and this time I acknowledged what I had already accepted unconsciously: that when Ka fell to the ground, his assassin must have made off with the green notebook. Now I could hold but one consoling hope following this futile weeklong hunt across Germany and all the evening hours poring over Ka’s notes: Perhaps I might retrieve one poem from the video archives of a television station in Kars.
Back in Istanbul, I found myself tuning in to the state channel’s end-of-day news broadcasts, to hear the Kars weather reports and to judge in what sort of climate I might be received. Like Ka, I arrived in Kars in the early eveni
ng, after a bus journey lasting a day and a half; bag in hand, I timidly negotiated a room for myself at the Snow Palace Hotel (where there was no sign of the father or his two mysterious daughters). I then went out to explore the city, taking those same snow-covered pavements Ka told of having walked four years before, and while I wouldn’t say the compass of my walk equaled his, I did go far enough to discover that the establishment he had known as the Green Pastures Café was now a wretched beer hall. In any event, I shouldn’t want my readers to imagine that I was trying to become his posthumous shadow. As Ka had so often suggested to me, I simply did not understand poetry well enough, nor the great sadness from which it issues, and so there had been a wall between us, a wall that now divided me not just from the melancholy city described in his notes but from the impoverished place I was now seeing with my own eyes. There was, of course, one person who nevertheless observed a resemblance between us; it is that person who now binds us together. But let’s not talk about that yet.
Whenever I remember the astonishment of first seeing Ïpek that evening at the dinner the mayor held in my honor, I only wish I could ascribe my addlement to too much raki, that I could say the drink made me lose myself and emboldened me to believe I had a chance, and that there was no other basis for the jealousy I began to feel for my dead friend. Later, at the Snow Palace Hotel, as I stood at my window watching a far less poetic snowfall—a wet snow that melted on contact with the city’s muddy pavements—than the one Ka had described, I could not stop wondering how, having read my friend’s notebooks so closely for so long, I had failed to grasp the extent of Ïpek’s beauty. Without quite knowing why, I took out a notebook—just like Ka, you might say, and, indeed, this was an expression I found myself using more and more—and I wrote down those thoughts that could be called the germ of the book you are reading. I remember trying to describe Ka’s story, and his love for Ïpek, as he might have described it himself. In a smoky corner of my mind I was reminded of a truth drawn from bitter experience: Immersing oneself in the problems of a book is a good way to keep from thinking of love.
Contrary to popular opinion, a man can shut love out if he wants to. But to do so, he must free himself not only from the woman who has bewitched him but also from the third person in the story, the ghost who has put temptation in his way. I, however, already had an appointment with Ïpek the following afternoon at the New Life Pastry Shop, and the express purpose was to discuss Ka.
Or perhaps it was my desire to talk about Ka that allowed me to open up to her. We were the only customers in the shop; on that same black-and-white television in the corner, two lovers were to be seen embracing near the Bosphorus Bridge. Ïpek confessed at the outset that she could talk about Ka only with the greatest difficulty. She could describe her pain and disillusionment only to someone who would listen patiently, so it was a comfort to her to know I was a close friend who cared enough about Ka’s poetry to have come all the way to Kars. And if she could convince me that she had not treated him unfairly, she could find release at least for a time from her sorrow. But she also warned that it would cause her great pain if I failed to accept or understand her story. She wore the same long brown skirt in which she’d served Ka breakfast on the “morning of the revolution,” and there, around her waist, was the same wide outdated belt (both virtually recognizable to one who’d read Ka’s notes). There were flashes of anger in her eyes, but her expression was sorrowful; it reminded me of Melinda.
She talked for a long time; I hung on her every word.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
I’m Going to Pack My Suitcase
FROM ÏPEK’S POINT OF VIEW
When, on his way to the National Theater with his two army bodyguards in tow, Ka stopped and turned for one last glimpse of her, Ïpek was still hopeful, still convinced she’d learn to love him dearly. The knowledge that she could learn to love a man had always meant more to her than loving him effortlessly, more even than falling in love, and that was why now she felt herself to be on the threshold of a new life, a happiness bound to endure for a very long time.
So she was not particularly disturbed to find herself locked in a room by a jealous lover during the first twenty minutes following Ka’s departure. Conveniently, her mind was on her suitcase: if she could concentrate now on those things she wanted to keep with her throughout her life, she would, she thought, have an easier time parting from her father and her sister, and if she could finish planning what to take during this unavoidable captivity, they’d have a better chance of leaving Kars in one piece at the earliest opportunity.
After a half hour had passed with no sign of Ka, Ïpek lit a cigarette. By now she was wondering whether she hadn’t been a fool to think everything was going according to plan; her confinement to this room only fed her agitation, and she grew as angry at herself as at Ka. Seeing Cavit the receptionist dashing across the courtyard, she was tempted to open the window and shout to him, but before she could resolve to do so, the teenager had scampered out of range. She was still unsure, but she still expected Ka to return at any minute.
Forty-five minutes after Ka’s departure, Ïpek managed to force open the icy window; she called to a youth who was passing in the street below—a bewildered religious high school student who had somehow managed not to be carted off to the National Theater—and asked the boy to go into the hotel to tell reception that she was locked in Room 203. The youth seemed very suspicious, but he did go inside. Moments later, the phone in the room rang.
“What on earth are you doing in Ka’s room?” said Turgut Bey. “If you were locked in, why didn’t you just pick up the phone?”
A minute later, her father had opened the door with a skeleton key. Ïpek told Turgut Bey that she’d wanted to accompany Ka to the National Theater, but Ka had locked her in the room to keep her from danger, and with the phone lines down throughout the city, she’d assumed the hotel phones weren’t working either.
“But the phones are working again, not just here but everywhere in the city,” said Turgut Bey.
“Ka’s been gone a long time, I’m beginning to worry,” said Ïpek. “Let’s go to the theater and find out what’s happened.”
Despite his panic, Turgut Bey dawdled in getting ready. First he couldn’t find his gloves, then he said he was sure Sunay would take offense if he didn’t put on a tie. He insisted on walking very slowly, partly because he didn’t have the strength but also because he had much advice to give Ïpek and wanted her to listen carefully.
“Whatever you do, don’t cross swords with Sunay,” said Ïpek. “Don’t forget that he’s a Jacobin hero who’s just been endowed with special powers.”
Seeing the curious onlookers milling about at the entrance to the National Theater, and the religious high school boys who’d been herded in on buses, and the hawkers and soldiers and policemen who’d been longing endlessly for this sort of crowd, Turgut Bey remembered his own excitement as a youth over attending political meetings. He clutched Ïpek’s arm tighter as he looked around, hopeful yet afraid, looking for the conversation that might make him feel a part of this event, for the initiative to which he might lend his support. When he saw that most of the crowd were strangers, he shoved aside one of the youths standing in the entrance, but then he immediately felt ashamed.
The hall wasn’t yet full, but already there was a family atmosphere in the large theater; it reminded Ïpek of those dreams in which you see everyone you’ve ever met assembled before you in a crowd. But there was no sign of Ka or Kadife, and this worried her. A sergeant moved them into the aisle.
“I’m the father of the leading lady, Kadife Yιldιz,” complained Turgut Bey. “I must see her at once.”
Turgut Bey sounded every bit like a father who’d come at the last minute to bar his daughter from playing the lead in some objectionable school play, and the panic-stricken sergeant acted rather like a teacher putting aside his job to help that father—whose concern he knew in his heart to be justified. After they’d waited a
short time in a room lined with pictures of Atatürk and Sunay, Kadife appeared alone at the door. Seeing her, Ïpek knew at once that whatever they said, her sister would still be taking to the stage that evening.
Ïpek asked about Ka, and Kadife said that they’d spoken briefly but that Ka had headed back to the hotel. Ïpek wondered why they had not run into him on the way over, but soon she dropped the subject: Turgut Bey, now in tears, was imploring his daughter not to go onstage.
“At this late hour, after all they’ve done to advertise this play, it would be more dangerous not to go onstage, Father dear,” said Kadife.
“When you bare your head, Kadife, do you have any idea how much you’ll enrage the religious high school boys, not to mention everyone else?”
“Frankly, Father, after all these years isn’t it ironic that you’re now telling me to cover my head?”
“There’s nothing funny about it, little Kadife,” said Turgut Bey. “Tell them you’re feeling ill.”
“I’m not ill.”
Turgut Bey cried a little. Ïpek felt that her father staged his tears, as he always did when he saw the opportunity to focus on the sentimental aspect of a problem. There was about the old man’s anguish something so ready and superficial as to make Ïpek always suspect that in his heart of hearts he was in fact grieving for the opposite of what he tearfully professed. In the past she and her sister had thought this trait of their father’s endearing, but now, faced with a subject they urgently needed to address, they found his behavior embarrassingly trivial.
“What time was it when Ka left?” Ïpek whispered.
“He should have been back in the hotel quite some time ago,” said Kadife, with equal alarm.
They could see the fear in each other’s eyes.
When I met with her in the New Life Pastry Shop four years later, Ïpek told me that at that moment they were worried not about Ka but about Blue, and as they communicated this to each other silently with their eyes, they were paying little mind to their father. By now I could not help seeing Ïpek’s frankness as a token of feeling close to me, and imagined I would be unable to see the end of this story from any other point of view than hers.
