Snow (16 page)

“Do you really want guidance from me?” asked the sheikh. “We’re those people you just mentioned: bearded provincial reactionaries. Even if we shaved off our beards, there is no cure for provincialism.”

“I’m provincial too, and I want to become even more provincial. I want to be forgotten in the most unknown corner of the world under a blanket of snow,” said Ka.

He kissed the sheikh’s hand again. When he saw how easily he could do this, he felt pleased with himself. But one part of his mind still oper-ated differently, in a Western manner, so he also despised himself.

“I hope you will forgive me, but before I came here I had something to drink,” he said again. “I felt guilty about having refused all my life to believe in the same God as the uneducated—the aunties with their heads wrapped in scarves, the uncles with the prayer beads in their hands. There’s a lot of pride involved in my refusal to believe in God. But now I want to believe in that God who is making this beautiful snow fall from the sky. There’s a God who pays careful attention to the world’s hidden symmetry, a God who will make us all more civilized and refined.”

“Of course there is, my son,” said the sheikh.

“But that God is not among you. He’s outside, in the empty night, in the darkness, in the snow that falls inside the hearts of outcasts.”

“If you want to find God by yourself, go ahead—walk out into the darkness, revel in the snow, use it to fill yourself with God’s love. We have no desire to turn you from this path. But don’t forget that arrogant men who think too much of themselves always end up alone. God doesn’t have any time for pride. Pride was what got Satan expelled from heaven.” 

Once again, Ka found himself overcome with the fear that he would find so shaming afterward. He also dreaded the things he knew they would say about him if he left. “So what shall I do, Your Excellency?” he asked. He was just about to kiss the sheikh’s hand again when he changed his mind. He could tell that everyone around him knew how confused he was, and how drunk, and looked down on him for this. “I want to believe in the God you believe in and be like you, but because there’s a Westerner inside me, my mind is confused.”

“If your intentions are this sincere, this is a good beginning,” said the sheikh. “The first thing you need to learn is humility.”

“How can I do that?” Ka asked. Once again, he could feel the mocking devil inside him.

“After the evening meal, anyone who wants to talk comes to join me in this corner, on the divan where you’re sitting right now,” said the sheikh. “Everyone here is a brother.”

It now dawned on Ka that the great crowd of men sitting on the chairs and the cushions around him were in fact queuing up to sit on the corner of this divan. He guessed that what the sheikh wanted most from him now was his respect for this imagined queue, so the best course was to make his way to the end of it and wait patiently like a European; with this in mind, he rose to his feet. He kissed the sheikh’s hand one more time and went to sit on a cushion in the far corner.

Sitting next to him was a short, kindly man with gold-capped molars who worked at one of the teahouses on Inönü Avenue. The man was so small, and Ka so addled, that Ka found himself wondering whether the man had come to see the sheikh about a remedy for dwarfism. When he was a child in Ni¸santa¸s, there had been a very elegant dwarf who would go to the Gypsies in the square every evening to buy a bouquet of violets and a single carnation. The little man told Ka he had seen him passing in front of his teahouse earlier that day; he was sorry Ka hadn’t come in, and he would be very happy if Ka dropped by tomorrow. At this point the cross-eyed bus company manager with the elderly friend chimed in; in a whisper, he told Ka of having gone through a very bad spell on account of a girl—he had given himself to drink and become rebellious to the point of losing all sight of God—but in the end he had been able to put everything behind him. Before Ka could ask, Did you marry the girl? the bus company manager added, “We came to see that this girl was not right for us.”

The sheikh then said a few words against suicide. The men nearby listened in silence, some nodding at the wisdom of his words, while the three in the corner continued their whispering.

“There have been a few more suicides,” the short man said, “but the state has decided not to tell us, for the same reason as when it decides not to tell us that the temperature is dropping—they don’t want to upset us. But here’s the real reason for this epidemic: It’s because they’re selling these girls to elderly clerks, men they don’t love.” 

The bus company manager objected. “When my wife first met me,” he said, “she didn’t love me either.” He went on to declare that the epidemic had many causes: for example, unemployment, high prices, immorality, and lack of faith. Because he agreed with everything both men said, Ka began to feel rather two-faced. When the elderly companion began to nod off, the cross-eyed manager woke him up.

There was a long silence. A feeling of peace rose up inside Ka. They were so far from the center of the world, one couldn’t even imagine going there, and as he fell under the spell of the snowflakes that seemed to hang in the sky outside, he began to wonder if he had entered a world without gravity.

When everyone had ceased to pay any attention to him, another poem came to Ka. He had his notebook with him, and, as with his first poem, he gave himself fully to the voice now rising up inside him, but this time he wrote down all thirty-six lines of the poem in one fell swoop. Because his mind was still foggy with drink, he was not sure the poem was any good. But when a new rush of inspiration overtook him, he rose to his feet and, begging the sheikh’s pardon, rushed out of the room; when he sat himself down on the stairs to read what he had written, he could see that this poem, like the first, was flawless.

The poem draws upon the events Ka had just lived and witnessed. Four lines allude to a conversation with a sheikh about the existence of God; there are also references to Ka’s shameful look following his mention of the uneducated man’s God, some proposals concerning solitude, the world’s secret symmetry and the creation of life; there is a man with gold teeth and one who is cross-eyed and a gentle dwarf holding a carnation, all standing with him, telling their life stories.

Shocked at the beauty of his own words, Ka could not help but ask himself, What does it all mean? It seemed to be a poem someone else had written—this, he thought, was why he was able to see its beauty. But also, finding it beautiful was a shock considering its contents, considering his own life. How to understand the beauty in this poem?

The light timer in the stairwell clicked off and he was plunged into darkness. When he had found the button and turned the light back on, he took one last look at the notebook and the title came to him: “Hidden Symmetry.” Later he would point to the speed with which this happened as proof that this and all the poems that followed it were—like the world itself—not of his own creation. With this in mind, he would move it to the position of the first poem on the Reason axis.

If God Does Not Exist, How Do You

Explain All the Suffering of the Poor?

the sad story of necip and hicran

On leaving His Excellency’s lodge, Ka headed back to the hotel, and as he trudged through the snow his mind turned to Ipek. It wouldn’t be long, he realized, before he’d see her again. On his way down Halitpasa Avenue, he passed first a group of People’s Party cam-paigners and then a crowd of students on their way out of a university-entrance-exam course. The students were talking about what they were going to watch on television that night and about how easy it was to fool their chemistry teacher; they were needling each other just as mercilessly as Ka and I used to do when we were their age.

Ka saw a mother and father leading their tearful child by the hand from an apartment building where they’d just visited the dentist upstairs. It was clear from their clothes that this couple were barely making ends meet, but they had decided to take their beloved child not to the state dis-pensary but rather to a private dentist, whose treatment they hoped would be less painful. Through the open door of a shop that sold women’s stockings, bolts of cotton cloth, colored pencils, batteries, and cassettes, he heard once again the strains of Peppino di Capri’s “Roberta” and remembered hearing it on the radio when he was a child and his uncle had taken him out for a drive on the Bosphorus.

As his heart began to soar, it occurred to Ka that there might be a new poem coming to him, so he stepped into the first teahouse he could find and, sitting down at the first empty table, took out his pencil and his notebook.

After gazing through moist eyes at the empty page for some time, he revised his forecast: Actually, there was no poem coming to him, but this didn’t dampen his spirits in the slightest. The teahouse was packed with unemployed men and students, and all around him the walls were plastered not just with scenes of Switzerland but also with theatrical posters, newspaper cartoons, assorted clippings, an announcement of the terms and conditions of the civil service exam, and a schedule of the soccer matches to be played by Karsspor that year. The results of past matches—most of them losses—were penciled in by various hands; next to the 6–1 loss to Erzurumspor, someone had written the lines that Ka would incor-porate into “All Humanity and the Stars,” the poem he would write tomorrow while sitting in the Lucky Brothers Teahouse: 

Even if your mother came down from heaven to take you into her arms,
Even if your wicked father let her go without a beating for just one night,
You’d still be penniless, your shit would still freeze, your soul would
still wither, there is no hope!

If you’re unlucky enough to live in Kars, you might as well flush yourself
down the toilet.

Smiling happily as he copied these lines into his notebook, he was soon joined by Necip, who was sitting at a table in the back; it was clear from his expression that he was stunned to see Ka in this place and also very pleased.

“I’m so happy you’re here,” said Necip. “Are you writing a poem? I would like to apologize for my friends, especially the one who called you an atheist. It’s the first time in their lives they’ve come face-to-face with a nonbeliever. But it seems to me that you couldn’t really be an atheist, because you’re such a good person.” He went on to say a few other things that he’d felt unable to say earlier: He and his friends had sneaked out of school to attend the show at the theater that evening, but they were going to sit way in the back, because of course they didn’t want the school directors to spot them on live TV. Necip was elated to have escaped from school and to be meeting his friends at the National Theater. They all knew that Ka was going to read a poem there. Everyone in Kars wrote poems, but Ka was the first person Necip had ever met to have his poems published. Could he offer Ka a glass of tea?

Ka explained that he was short of time.

“In that case, I’ll just ask you one question, one last question,” said Necip. “I’m not like my friends, I’m not trying to show you disrespect.

I’m just very curious.”

“Yes.”

Necip lit a cigarette with shaky hands. “If God does not exist, that means heaven does not exist either. And that means the world’s poor, those millions who live in poverty and oppression, will never go to heaven. And if that is so, then how do you explain all the suffering of the poor? What are we here for, and why do we put up with so much unhappiness, if it’s all for nothing?”

“God exists. So does heaven.”

“No, you’re just saying that to console me, because you feel sorry for us. As soon as you’re back in Germany, you’ll start thinking God doesn’t exist, just like you did before.”

“For the first time in years, I’m very happy,” said Ka. “Why shouldn’t I believe the same things as you?”

“Because you belong to the intelligentsia,” said Necip. “People in the intelligentsia never believe in God. They believe in what Europeans do, and they think they’re better than ordinary people.”

“I may belong to the intelligentsia in Turkey,” said Ka. “But in Germany I’m a worthless nobody. I was falling apart there.” 

Necip’s beautiful eyes turned inward, and Ka could see that the teenager was considering his case, trying to put himself in Ka’s shoes. “Then why did you get angry at your country and flee to Germany?” he asked. Seeing Ka’s face fall, he said, “Never mind! Anyway, if I were rich, I’d be so ashamed of my situation that I’d believe in God even more.”

“One day, God willing, we’ll all be rich,” said Ka.

“Nothing is as simple as you say—that’s what I think. I’m not that simple either, and I don’t want to be rich. What I want is to be a writer. I’m writing a science-fiction novel. It might get published—in one of the Kars papers, the one called the
Lance
—but I don’t want to be published in a paper that sells seventy-five copies; I want to be published in an Istanbul paper that sells thousands. I have a synopsis of the novel with me. If I read it to you, could you tell me whether you think an Istanbul paper might publish it?”

Ka looked at his watch.

“It’s very short!” said Necip.

The electricity went out and all of Kars was plunged into darkness. The only light in the teahouse was coming from the stove. Necip ran over to the counter and grabbed a candle; he lit it and dripped a few drops of wax onto a plate, a seal by which to affix the burning candle to the plate, which he set on the table. Retrieving a few sheets of crumpled paper from his pocket, he began to read in a hesitant voice, stopping from time to time to gulp with excitement.

“In the year 3579, there was a red planet we haven’t even discovered yet. Its name was Gazzali and its people were rich, and their lives were much easier than our lives are today, but contrary to what materialists would have predicted, their rich and easy lives did not bring the inhabitants of this planet any spiritual satisfaction. To the contrary, everyone was deeply anxious about being and nothingness, man and the universe, God and his people.