Snow

by Orhan Pamuk

  “I never expected things to happen so quickly,” he said.

  “Is this your way of admitting you’ve failed at this thing you’ve set out to accomplish, or is it simply that you’re old and tired now and looking for a way to go out in style?” said Kadife.

  Ïpek saw Kadife was drawing on unsuspected reserves of strength.

  “You’re very intelligent, Kadife,” said Sunay.

  “Does this frighten you?” said Kadife, her voice taut and angry.

  “Yes,” said Sunay in a lecherous languor.

  “It’s not my intelligence that frightens you, you fear me because I’m my own person,” said Kadife. “Because here in our city, men don’t fear their women’s intelligence, they fear their independence.”

  “To the contrary,” said Sunay. “I staged this revolution precisely so you women could be as independent as women in Europe. That’s why I’m asking you to remove that scarf.”

  “I am going to bare my head now,” said Kadife, “and then, to prove that I’m motivated neither by your coercion nor by any wish to be a European, I’m going to hang myself.”

  “You do realize, don’t you, Kadife, that when you act like an individual and commit suicide, the Europeans will applaud you? Don’t think you haven’t already turned some heads with your animated performance in the so-called secret meeting at the Hotel Asia. There are even rumors that you organized the suicide girls, just as you did the head-scarf girls.”

  “There was only one suicide who was involved in the head-scarf protest, and that was Teslime.”

  “And now you mean to be the second.”

  “No, because before I kill myself, I’m going to bare my head.”

  “Have you thought this through?”

  “Yes,” said Kadife. “I have.”

  “Then you must have thought about this, too: Suicides go to hell. And since I’m going to hell anyway, you can kill me first with a clear conscience.”

  “No,” said Kadife. “Because I don’t believe I’m going to hell after I kill myself. I’m going to kill you to rid our country of a microbe, an enemy of our nation, our religion, and our women!”

  “You’re a courageous woman, Kadife, and you speak with great frankness. But our religion prohibits suicide.”

  “Yes, it’s certainly true the Nisa verse of the glorious Koran proclaims that we shouldn’t kill ourselves. But this does not prevent God in his greatness from finding it in his heart to pardon the suicide girls and spare them from going to hell after all.”

  “In other words, you’ve found a way to twist the Koran to suit your purposes.”

  “In fact, the contrary is true,” said Kadife. “It happens that a few young women in Kars killed themselves because they were forbidden to cover their heads as they wished. As surely as the world is God’s creation, he can see their suffering. So long as I feel the love of God in my heart, there’s no place for me in Kars, so I’m going to do as they did and end my life.”

  “You’re going to anger all those religious leaders who’ve come to Kars through snow and ice to deliver their sermons hoping the helpless women of Kars might be delivered from their suicidal wishes—you do know that, Kadife, don’t you? And while we’re on the subject, the Koran—”

  “I am not prepared to discuss my religion with atheists or, for that matter, with those who profess belief in God out of fear.”

  “Of course you’re right. Mind you, I don’t bring it up to interfere with your spiritual life; it’s only that I thought the fear of hell might keep you from shooting me with a clear conscience.”

  “You have nothing to worry about. I am going to kill you with a clear conscience.”

  “That’s wonderful,” said Sunay, looking a little offended at the alacrity of the reply. “Now let me tell you the most important thing I’ve learned in my twenty-five years of professional theater: When any dialogue goes on longer than this, our audiences can’t follow it without getting bored. So with your permission we will stop our conversation here and turn our words to deeds.”

  “Fine.”

  Sunay produced the Kirikkale gun he had brandished in the last act and showed it both to Kadife and to the audience. “Now you are going to bare your head. Then I shall place my gun in your hands and you will shoot me. And as this is the first time anything like this has happened on live television, let me take this last opportunity to explain to our audience how they are to understand—”

  “Let’s get on with it,” said Kadife. “I’m sick of hearing men talking about why suicide girls commit suicide.”

  “Right you are,” said Sunay, playing with the gun in his hand. “But there are still one or two things I wish to say. Just so our viewers in Kars won’t be unduly alarmed—after all, some may have actually believed the rumors in the papers—please look at this gun’s magazine clip.” He removed the clip, showing it to Kadife and for effect to the audience as well before putting it back again. “Did you see that it was empty?” he asked, with the assurance of a master illusionist.

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s be absolutely certain about this!” said Sunay. He took the clip out again, and like a magician about to saw a woman in half he showed it to the audience again before snapping it back. “Now, finally, let me say a few words on my own behalf. A moment ago, you promised you would shoot me with a clear conscience. You probably detest me for having staged this coup and opening fire on the audience, just because they weren’t living like Westerners. But I want you to know I did it all for the fatherland.”

  “Fine,” said Kadife. “Now I’m going to bare my head. And please, I want everyone to watch.”

  Her face flashed with pain and then, with a single clean stroke, she lifted her hand and pulled her scarf off.

  There was not a sound in the hall. For a moment Sunay stared stupidly at Kadife, as if she had just done the utterly unexpected. Both then turned to the audience and gaped like acting students who’d forgotten their lines.

  All of Kars gazed in awe at Kadife’s long, beautiful brown hair, which the cameraman finally screwed up his courage to show in tight focus. When he had found the nerve to zoom in on her face, it became clear that Kadife was deeply embarrassed, like a woman whose dress had come undone in a crowded public place. Her every movement bespoke a terrible pain.

  “Hand me the gun, please!” she said impatiently.

  “Here you are,” said Sunay. He was holding it by the barrel, and when she had taken it in hand, he smiled. “This is where you pull the trigger.”

  Everyone in Kars expected the dialogue to continue. And perhaps Sunay did too, because he said, “Your hair is so beautiful, Kadife. Even I would certainly want to guard you jealously, to keep other men from seeing—”

  Kadife pulled the trigger.

  A gunshot sounded in the hall. All of Kars watched in wonder as Sunay shuddered violently—as if he’d really been shot—and then fell to the floor.

  “How stupid all this is!” said Sunay. “They know nothing about modern art, they’ll never be modern!”

  The audience expected Sunay now to launch into a long death monologue; instead, Kadife rushed forward with the gun and fired again and again: four times in smart succession. With each shot, Sunay’s body shuddered and lurched upward; every time it fell back to the floor, it seemed heavier.

  There were still many who thought Sunay was only acting; they were ready for him to sit up at any moment and deliver a long instructive tirade on death; but at the uncommonly realistic sight of his bloodied face, they lost hope. Nuriye Hanιm, whose admiration for theatrical effects surpassed even her reverence for the script itself, rose to her feet; she was just about to applaud Sunay when she too saw his bloody face and sank fearfully back into her seat.

  “I guess I killed him!” said Kadife, turning to the audience.

  “You did well!” shouted a religious high school student from the back of the hall.

  The security forces were so preoccupied by the murder they’d just w
itnessed onstage they failed to identify the student agitator who’d broken the silence. And when Nuriye Hanιm, who’d spent the last two days watching the awesome Sunay on television and who’d determined, before the announcement of free admission, to sit in the front row regardless of the cost so long as she had her chance to see him up close—when Nuriye Hanιm broke down in tears, everyone else in the hall, and everyone else in Kars, was forced to accept the reality of what they had just seen.

  Two soldiers, running toward each other with clownish steps, pulled the curtains shut.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  No One Here Likes Ka These Days

  FOUR YEARS LATER, IN KARS

  As soon as the curtain was closed, Z Demirkol and his friends arrested Kadife “for her own safety”; removing her through the stage door into Little Kâzimbey Avenue, they pushed her into an army jeep and headed straight for the central garrison, where they deposited her in the old fallout shelter where Blue had been kept his last day on earth. A few hours later, all the roads to Kars had reopened; several military units rolled in to suppress the city’s “little coup” and met with no resistance. The governor, the military chief of staff, and a number of other officials were dismissed for dereliction of duty; the small band of conspirators who had staged the coup were arrested, along with a number of soldiers and MİT agents, who protested that they’d done it all for the people and the state. It would be three days before Turgut Bey and Ïpek were able to visit Kadife.

  Turgut Bey had no doubt that Sunay had died onstage, and he was hopeful that nothing would happen to Kadife; all he wanted was to find a way to take his daughter home, but when midnight had come and gone he gave in and walked home through the empty streets, arm in arm with his older daughter. Ïpek went straight to her room; as she unpacked her suitcase, putting everything back in the drawers, her father sat on the edge of the bed and cried.

  Most Kars residents who’d watched the events unfold onstage would discover that Sunay had in fact died after his theatrical death throes only when they read the Border City Gazette the next morning. After the curtain closed, the audience at the National Theater quietly filed out, and the television station never again mentioned the events of the past three days. But as Kars was well accustomed to military rule and to the sight of police and special operations teams chasing “terrorists” through the streets, it wasn’t long anyway before those three days ceased to seem exceptional. And when the general staff office launched a full inquiry the following morning, prompting the office of the prime minister’s inspectorate to spring into action as well, everyone in Kars could see the wisdom of regarding the stage coup more as a strange theatrical event than a political one. Their fascination lingered over questions such as this: If Sunay had just shown the clip to be empty in full view of a live audience, how could Kadife have shot and killed him with the same gun?

  As I have referred several times to the inspecting colonel sent by Ankara after things had returned to normal, my readers will have already deduced my indebtedness to this man and his detailed report on the stage coup; his own analysis of the gun scene confirms it was less a case of sleight of hand than actual magic. Since Kadife refused to speak to her father or her sister or even her lawyer, much less the prosecutor, about what happened that night, the inspecting colonel was obliged to undertake the same sort of detective work I would do four years later; interviewing as many people as he could (although it would be more accurate to say that he took their depositions), he finally satisfied himself there was not a rumor or theory that had escaped his attention.

  There were, of course, many stories suggesting that Kadife did knowingly and willfully kill Sunay Zaim, and without his real permission; to refute these allegations, the inspecting colonel showed it would have been impossible for the young woman to have switched guns or to have replaced the empty clip with a loaded one so quickly. And so, despite the amazement Sunay’s face registered with every shot, the fact remains that searches carried out by the armed forces, the inventory of Kadife’s personal effects at the time of her arrest, and even the video recording of the performance all confirm that she was in possession of only one gun and one clip. Another popular local theory had it that Sunay Zaim was shot by a different gunman firing from a different angle, but that one was put to rest when the ballistics report and autopsy results came back from Ankara to confirm that all the bullets in the actor’s body had come from the Kιrιkkale gun in Kadife’s hand.

  Kadife’s last words (“I guess I killed him!”) turned her into something of an urban legend; the inspecting colonel saw them as proof that this was not a case of premeditated murder. Perhaps out of consideration for the prosecutor who would open the trial, the colonel’s report digressed to give a full discussion of premeditation, wrongdoing with intent, and other related legal and philosophical concepts; still, he wound up alleging that the true mastermind—the one who had helped Kadife memorize her lines and taught her the various maneuvers she would deftly perform—was none other than the deceased himself. In twice showing the audience that the clip was empty, Sunay Zaim had duped Kadife and indeed the entire city of Kars. Here, perhaps, I should quote the colonel himself, who took early retirement not long after the publication of his report. When I met him at his home in Ankara and pointed to the rows of Agatha Christie books on his shelves, he told me that what he liked most about them were their titles. When we moved to the case of the actor’s gun, he said simply, “The clip was full!” A man of the theater would have hardly needed to know magic to trick an audience into taking a full clip for an empty one: Indeed, after three days of merciless violence visited upon them by Sunay and his cohorts in the name of republicanism and westernization (the final death toll, including Sunay, was twenty-nine), the people of Kars were so terrorized they would have been prepared to look at an empty glass and see a full one.

  If we follow this line of reasoning, it becomes clear that Kadife was not Sunay’s only accomplice; Sunay, after all, had gone so far as to advertise his death in advance, and if the people of Kars were so eager to see him kill himself onstage, if they were still prepared to enjoy the drama, telling themselves it was just a play, they too were complicit. Another rumor, that Kadife had killed Sunay to avenge Blue’s death, was refuted on the grounds that anyone handed a loaded gun with the express notification that it was empty could not be accused of using it with intent to kill. There were those among Kadife’s Islamist admirers and her secularist accusers who still maintained that this was precisely what was so crafty about the way Kadife killed Sunay but then refused to kill herself, but the inspecting colonel, whose own patience with the fanciful was limited, held that this was to confuse art with reality.

  The military prosecutor stationed in Kars gave the inspecting colonel’s meticulous report great weight, as did the judges, who ruled that Kadife had not killed for political reasons; instead, they found her guilty of negligent homicide and lack of forethought and sentenced her to three years and one month. She would be released after serving twenty months in jail. Under Articles 313 and 463 of the Turkish Penal Code, Colonel Osman Nuri Çolak was charged with establishing a vigilante group implicated in murders by unknown assailants; for this he received a very long sentence, but six months later the government declared a general amnesty and set him free. Although he had been amply admonished under the conditions of his release that he was not to discuss the coup with anyone, it was not unheard of for him to go to the officer’s club of an evening to see his old army friends, and after enough to drink he’d allow that whatever else had happened he had at least found it in himself to live the dream of every Atatürk-loving soldier; without undue rudeness, he would accuse his friends of bowing to the religious fanatics for want of courage.

  A number of other soldiers and officials involved in the coup tried to portray themselves as well-meaning patriots and helpless links in the chain of command, but the military court was unmoved; they too were convicted of conspiratorial collusion, murder, and use o
f state property without permission and held for a time before the same general amnesty. One of them, a young but high-minded low-ranking officer who turned to Islam after his release, published his story (I Was a Jacobin Too) in the Islamist newspaper Covenant, but the memoirs were censored for insulting the army. By then it was common knowledge that Goalkeeper Vural had started working for the local branch of MİT the moment the revolution began. The court found that the other actors in Sunay’s troupe were but simple artists.

  Funda Eser had gone on a rampage the night her husband died, leveling wild accusations against every person who crossed her path, threatening to denounce them all; when it was established that she had suffered a mental breakdown, she was sent to the psychiatric wing of the military hospital in Ankara, where she spent four months under observation. Years after her discharge, she was to become famous throughout the country as the voice of the witch in a popular children’s television cartoon; she told me she remained grief-stricken over the slanders that had prevented her husband (whose death she now termed “a work-related incident”) from taking on the role of Atatürk; her sole consolation was to see how many of the newest statues of the great man showed him striking poses created by her husband. Because the inspecting colonel’s report had also implicated Ka in the coup, the military court summoned him as a witness; after his failure to appear at two hearings, they charged him with obstruction and issued a warrant for his arrest.