Snow (13 page)

“Tell me the story.”

“Long, long ago, there was a tireless warrior of unequaled bravery who lived in Iran. Everyone who knew him loved him. They called him Rüstem, and so shall we. One day, while hunting, he lost his way, and then, as he slept encamped that same night, he lost his horse. While he was looking for Raksh, his horse, Rüstem wandered into Turan, which was an enemy land. But because his reputation preceded him, they treated him well. The shah of Turan welcomed him as a guest and arranged a feast in his honor. And after the feast, the shah’s daughter paid Rüstem a visit in his room to proclaim her love for him. She told him that she wished to have his child. She seduced him with her beauty and her fine words, and before long they were making love.

“The following morning, Rüstem returned to his own country, but he left a token—a wristband—for his future child. When the child was born, they called him Suhrab, so let’s call him that too. Years later, his mother told him that his father was none other than the legendary Rüstem. ‘I’m going to Iran,’ the boy said, ‘to depose the wicked Shah Keykavus and install my father as his successor . . . and then I’ll return to Turan and do exactly the same thing to the wicked Shah Efrasiyab, and when I’ve done that, I’ll install myself as his successor. And then my father Rüstem and I will bring just rule to Iran and Turan—in other words, to the entire universe!’

“So said the pure and good-hearted Suhrab, little knowing that his enemies were far more cunning and sly than he. For while Efrasiyab, the shah of Turan, lent his support to the war with Iran, he also placed spies in the army to make sure Suhrab wouldn’t recognize his father.

“After many tricks and ruses, and cruel twists of fate and coincidence, engineered for all he knew by the Sublime Almighty, the day arrived when Suhrab and his father Rüstem came face-to-face on the battlefield, each with his army behind him. Neither could have known the other’s face, but no matter: Both were in armor, and needless to say they did not recognize each other. Rüstem would of course have wanted to remain anonymous inside his armor: otherwise this hero facing him might unleash the full fury of his force against Rüstem in particular. As for Suhrab, his childish heart allowed him only one vision, that of his father on the throne of Iran, so he never stopped even to wonder who his adversary might be.And so it came to pass that these two great and good-hearted warriors who were father and son, standing before their respective watchful armies, jumped forward and drew their swords.” 

Blue paused. Before looking into Ka’s eyes, he added in a childish voice, “Although I’ve read this story hundreds of times, I always shudder when I get to this part, and my heart starts pounding. I don’t know why, but for some reason I identify with Suhrab as he prepares to kill his father. Who would want to kill his father? What soul could bear the pain of that crime, the weight of that sin? Especially my own Suhrab with his innocent heart! The only hope at this point is that Suhrab will kill his foe without discerning his identity.

“As these thoughts pass through my mind, the two warriors begin to fight, and in a struggle that goes on for hours neither is able to defeat the other. Soaked and exhausted, they scabbard their swords. When we come to the evening of the first day, I’m as troubled for the father as I am for Suhrab, and when I continue the story, it’s as if I’m reading it for the first time; I dare to dream that father and son will be unable to kill each other and find some way out of their predicament.

“On the second day, the two armies line up once more, and once again father and son face each other in their armor and engage each other in merciless combat. After a long struggle, luck smiles on Suhrab—but can we even call this luck?—and he throws Rüstem off his horse and pins him to the ground. He takes out his dagger and as he prepares to bring it down on his father’s neck, they say this to him: ‘In Iran it is not the tradition for enemy heroes to take away a head on the first occasion. Don’t kill him; that would be too crude.’ So Suhrab does not kill his father.

“When I read this part I get very confused. I’m full of love for Suhrab. What is the meaning of this fate God has arranged for this father and his son? As for the third day of the fight, a day I have awaited with such trepidation—against all my expectations, it’s over in a moment. Rüstem knocks Suhrab off his horse and, leaping forward, plunges his sword into him and kills him. The speed of the event is horrifying, shocking. When he sees the wristband and realizes that he has killed his son, Rüstem kneels down, takes his son’s bloody corpse onto his lap, and cries.

“At this point in the story I always cry too, not just because I share Rüstem’s grief but because I now understand the meaning of Suhrab’s death. It is Suhrab’s love for his father that kills him. But now I move beyond the childish and good-hearted love Suhrab felt for his beloved father; what I feel most acutely now is the deeper and far more dignified anguish of the father as he struggles to honor both his son and the codes that bind him. My sympathies, which have been throughout with the rebellious and individualistic Suhrab, pass over to Rüstem, the strong responsible father who is his own man.”

Blue paused for a moment. Ka felt very jealous of his ability to tell this story—or, indeed, any story—with such conviction.

“But I didn’t tell you this beautiful story to show you what it means to me or how I relate it to my life; I told it to point out that it’s forgotten,” said Blue. “This thousand-year-old story comes from Firdevsi’s
Shehname
. Once upon a time, millions of people knew it by heart—from Tabriz to Istanbul, from Bosnia to Trabzon—and when they recalled it they found the meaning in their lives. The story spoke to them in just the same way that Oedipus’ murder of his father and Macbeth’s obsession with power and death speak to people throughout the Western world. But now, because we’ve fallen under the spell of the West, we’ve forgotten our own stories. They’ve removed all the old stories from our children’s textbooks. These days, you can’t find a single bookseller who stocks the
Shehname
in all of Istanbul! How do you explain this?” 

Both men fell silent.

“Let me guess what you’re thinking,” said Blue. “Is this story so beautiful that a man could kill for it? That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” said Ka.

“Then think about it,” said Blue, and he left the room.

Are You an Atheist?

a nonbeliever who does not want to kill himself

When Blue left the room, Ka was not sure what to do. At first he thought Blue was coming back to quiz him on his “thoughts.” But it soon dawned on him that he had misread this man. In his posturing, insinuating way, Blue was giving him a message. Or was it a threat?

In either case, it wasn’t danger Ka sensed but rather the fact of not belonging here. The room in which he had seen the mother and the baby was now empty; so, too, was the entryway. As he closed the front door behind him, it was all he could do not to run down the stairs.

When he looked up at the sky, Ka’s first thought was that the snowflakes had stopped moving; as he watched them hover in midair, it seemed as if time itself had stopped. It also seemed that a great deal had changed and a great deal of time had passed while he’d been inside. But Ka’s meeting with Blue had lasted only twenty minutes.

He made his way along the train track, past the snow-covered silo that loomed overhead like a great white cloud, and was soon back inside the station. As he passed through the empty, dirty building, he saw a dog approaching, wagging its curly tail in a friendly way. It was a black dog with a round white patch on its forehead. As he looked across the filthy waiting hall, Ka saw three teenage boys, who were beckoning the dog with sesame rolls. One of them was Necip; he broke away from his friends and ran toward Ka.

“On no account are you to let my classmates know how I knew you’d be coming through here,” he said. “My best friend, Fazıl, has a very important question to ask you. If you can give him a moment of your time, he’ll be very happy.”

“All right,” said Ka, and he walked over to the bench where the other teenagers were sitting.

One poster on the wall behind them urgently reminded travelers how important the railroads were to Atatürk; another sought to strike fear in the heart of any girl contemplating suicide. The boys rose to their feet to shake Ka’s hand, but then shyness overtook them.

“Before Fazıl asks his question, Mesut would like to tell you a story he’s heard,” said Necip.

“No, I can’t tell it myself,” said Mesut, hardly containing his excitement. “Please—could you tell the story for me?” While Necip told the story, Ka watched the black dog frolicking about the dirty half-lit station.

“The story takes place in a religious high school in Istanbul, or that’s what I heard,” Necip began. “A typical slapdash place in a suburb on the edge of the city. The director of this school had an appointment with a city official in one of those new Istanbul skyscrapers we’ve seen on television. He got into this enormous elevator and began to go up. There was another man in the elevator, a tall man younger than he; this man showed the director the book in his hand, and as some of its pages were still uncut he took out a knife with a mother-of-pearl handle while he recited a few lines. When the elevator stopped on the nineteenth floor, the director got out.

“During the days that followed, he began to feel very strange. He became obsessed with death, he couldn’t find the will to do anything, and he couldn’t stop thinking about the man in the elevator. The school director was a devout man, so he went to see some Cerrahi dervishes, hoping to find solace and guidance. He sat there until morning, pouring out all his woes, and after he had done this, the celebrated sheikh made the following diagnosis:

“ ‘It seems you’ve lost your faith in God,’ he said. ‘What’s worse, you don’t even know it, and as if that weren’t bad enough, you’re even proud of not knowing it! You contracted this disease from the man in the elevator. He’s turned you into an atheist.’ The director rose to his feet in tears to deny what the illustrious sheikh had said, but there was still one part of his heart that was pure and honest, and this part assured him that the sheikh was telling the truth.

“Infected by the disease of atheism, the director began to put unrea-sonable pressure on his lovely little pupils; he tried to spend time alone with their mothers; he stole money from another teacher whom he envied. And the worst of it was, he felt proud for having committed these sins. He would assemble the whole school to accuse them of blind faith; he told them their traditions made no sense and asked why they couldn’t be free as he was; he couldn’t utter a sentence without stuffing it with French words; he spent the money he had stolen on the latest European fashions. And wherever he went, he made sure to let people know how much he despised them for being ‘backward.’

“Before long, the school had descended into anarchy. One group of pupils raped a beautiful classmate, another group beat up an elderly Koran teacher, and the whole place was on the brink of revolt. The director would go home in tears, contemplating suicide, but because he lacked the courage to follow through, he kept hoping that someone else would kill him. To make this happen, he—God forbid—cursed His Excellency the Prophet Muhammad in front of one of his most God-fearing pupils. But knowing by now that he had lost his mind, his pupils didn’t lay a finger on him. He took to the streets, to proclaim—God forbid—that God did not exist, that mosques should be turned into discotheques, and that we’d only become as rich as people in the West if we all converted to Christianity. But now that the young Islamists wanted to kill him, he lost his resolve and hid from them.

“Hopeless and unable to find any way to satisfy his death wish, the director returned to the same fateful skyscraper in Istanbul and, stepping into the same elevator car, found himself face-to-face once again with the tall man who had first exposed him to atheism. The man smiled in a way to indicate that he knew the director’s whole story, and then he presented the book as he had the time before—the cure for atheism was to be found in it too. As the director stretched out a trembling hand, the man took out the knife with the mother-of-pearl handle, as if preparing to cut the pages of the book, but with the elevator still moving, he plunged it into the director’s heart.”

When Necip finished the story, Ka realized that he’d heard it before, from Islamist Turks in Germany. In Necip’s version, the mysterious book at the end of the story remained unnamed, but Mesut now named one or two Jewish writers known to be agents of atheism, as well as a number of columnists who had led the media campaign against political Islam—one of these would be assassinated three years later.

“The director is not alone in his anguish—there are many atheists in our midst. They’ve been seduced by the devil and now roam among us, desperate for peace and happiness,” said Mesut. “Do you share this view?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Mesut asked, with some annoyance. “Aren’t you an atheist too?”

“I don’t know,” said Ka.

“Then tell me this: Do you or don’t you believe that God Almighty created the universe and everything in it, even the snow that is swirling down from the sky?”

“The snow reminds me of God,” said Ka.

“Yes, but do you believe that God created snow?” Mesut insisted.

There was a silence. Ka watched the black dog run through the door to the platform to frolic in the snow under the dim halo of neon light.

“You’re not giving me an answer,” said Mesut. “If a person knows and loves God, he never doubts God’s existence. It seems to me that you’re not giving me an answer because you’re too timid to admit that you’re an atheist. But we knew this already. That’s why I wanted to ask you a question on my friend Fazıl’s behalf. Do you suffer the same terrible pangs as the poor atheist in the story? Do you want to kill yourself ?”

“No matter how unhappy I was, I’d still find suicide terrifying,” said Ka.

“But why?” asked Fazıl. “Is it because it’s against the law? But when the state talks about the sanctity of human life, they get it all wrong. Why are you afraid of committing suicide? Explain this.”