Snow (23 page)

* * *

The man from Porlock! During our last years in school, when Ka and I would stay up half the night talking about literature, this was one of our favorite topics. Anyone who knows anything about English poetry will remember the note at the start of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” It explains how the work is a “fragment of a poem, from a vision during a dream”; the poet had fallen asleep after taking medicine for an illness (actually, he’d taken opium for fun) and had seen, in his deepest sleep, sentences from the book he’d been reading just before losing consciousness, except that now each sentence and each object had taken on a life of its own in a magnificent dreamscape to become a poem. Imagine, a magnificent poem that had created
itself,
without the poet’s having exerted any mental energy! Even more amazing, when Coleridge woke up he could remember this splendid poem word for word. He got out his pen and ink and some paper and carefully began to write it down, one line after the other, as if he were taking dictation. He had just written the last line of the poem as we know it when there came a knock at the door. He rose to answer it, and it was a man from the nearby city of Porlock, come to collect a debt. As soon as he’d dealt with this man, he rushed back to his table, only to discover that he’d forgotten the rest of the poem, except for a few scattered words and the general atmosphere.

* * *

As no one arrived from Porlock to break his concentration, Ka still had the poem clear in his mind when he was called onstage. He was taller than everyone else there. He also stood out on account of his German charcoal-gray coat.

There had been a great deal of noise from the audience, but now they fell silent. Some of them—the unruly schoolboys, the unemployed, the Islamist protestors—fell silent because they were no longer quite sure what they should be laughing at or objecting to. The important officials in the front rows, the men who’d been following Ka all day long, the deputy governor, the assistant chief of police, and the teachers all knew he was a poet. The tall thin emcee seemed unnerved by the silence, so he asked Ka a canned question from one of those arts programs on television. “So you’re a poet,” he said. “You write poems. Is it difficult to write poems?” By the end of this awkward interview—and every time I watch the tape, I wish I could forget it—the audience had no idea whether Ka found it hard writing poems, but they did know he had just arrived from Germany.

“How do you find our beautiful Kars?” the host now asked.

After a moment of indecision, Ka said, “Very beautiful, very poor, and very sad.”

At the back of the hall, two students from the religious high school burst out laughing. Someone else cried out, “It’s your own soul that’s poor!” Encouraged by this taunt, six or seven others stood up and started shouting. Some were heckling Ka, and who knows what the others were saying? Long after the events in question, during my own visit to Kars, Turgut Bey told me that when Hande heard Ka say this on television, she began to cry. “In Germany, you were representing Turkish literature,” said the emcee, trying to press on.

“Why doesn’t he tell us why he’s here?” someone shouted.

“I came here because I was desperately unhappy,” said Ka. “I’m much happier here. Listen, please, I’m going to read my poem now.” 

For a few moments there was confusion. Then the shouting stopped, and Ka began to speak. Only years later, when the videotape of that evening passed into my hands, was I able to watch my friend’s moving performance; it was the first time I had ever seen him read a poem to a large audience. He moved forward cautiously, silently, like someone with a great deal on his mind, but there wasn’t a hint of pretension in his bearing. Aside from one or two moments when he paused as if slightly uncertain as to what came next, he recited the poem right through to the end without trouble.

When Necip realized that Ka’s description of “the place where God does not exist” matched his own description of his “landscape” word for word, he rose from his seat, but he did not break Ka’s concentration as he described the falling snow. There was a smattering of applause. Someone in the back stood up and shouted and was soon joined by a few others. It was hard to know whether they were responding to the poem or simply bored.

Unless you count his fleeting appearance a short while later—his falling silhouette, set against a green backdrop—this was the last image of my friend of twenty-seven years.

My Fatherland or My Head Scarf

a play about a girl who burns her head scarf

After Ka had finished reading his poem, the emcee bowed with an exaggerated flourish and, making the most of every word in the title, announced the evening’s main event,
My Fatherland or My Head
Scarf.

From the middle and back rows where the boys from the religious high school were seated came a few shouts of protest, one or two whistles, and a fair amount of booing; a couple of the officials sitting up front clapped approvingly. The rest of the packed hall waited to see what would happen next, their curiosity tempered with a fair amount of awe. The light sketches the troupe had performed earlier in the evening—Funda Eser’s shameless parodies of familiar commercials, her rather gratuitous belly dancing, her impression with Sunay Zaim of an aging woman prime minister and her corrupt husband—had caused remarkably little offense, going down rather well even among the officials in the front.

Most of the audience would also enjoy the next offering, though they soon had enough of the taunts and endless disruptions from the religious high school students. At times you couldn’t hear a thing being said onstage. But this desperately old-fashioned, primitive, twenty-minute play had such a sound dramatic structure that even a deaf-mute would have had no trouble following it.

1. A woman draped in a jet-black scarf is walking down the street; she is talking to herself and thinking. Something is troubling her.

2. The woman takes off her scarf and proclaims her independence. Now she is scarfless and happy.

3. The woman’s family, her fiancé, her relatives, and several bearded Muslim men oppose her independence and demand that she put her scarf back on, whereupon in a fit of righteous rage the woman burns it.

4. The neatly bearded, prayer-bead-clutching religious fanatics, outraged by this show of independence, turn violent.

5. Just as they are dragging the woman off by her hair to kill her, the brave young soldiers of the Republic burst onto the scene and save her.

From the mid-thirties through the early years of the Second World War (when it was known as
My Fatherland or My Scarf
), this short play was performed frequently in lycées and town halls all over Anatolia, and it was very popular with westernizing state officials eager to free women from the scarf and other forms of religious coercion. But after the fifties, when the ardent patriotism of the Kemalist period had given way to something less intense, the piece was forgotten. When I caught up with her years later in a sound studio, Funda Eser, who played the woman that night in Kars, told me of her great pride in re-creating the same role her own mother had played at Kütahya Lycée in 1948, and of her disappointment that the events following her own performance denied her the righteous exultation her mother had enjoyed. Ravaged though she was by drugs, fatigue, and fear, and vapid though her face had become in the manner so common in actors, I nevertheless pressed her to tell me exactly what had happened that evening. Having also interviewed quite a few other witnesses, I can describe it now in some detail.

Most of the locals in the National Theater were shocked and confused by the first scene. When they had heard that the play was entitled
My Fatherland or My Head Scarf,
they assumed it would be a consideration of contemporary politics, but aside from one or two octogenarians who remembered the original from the old days, no one expected to see an actual woman onstage wearing a head scarf. When they did, they took it to be the sort of head scarf that has become the respected symbol of political Islam. And as they watched this mysterious covered woman wandering up and down the stage, it was not immediately clear that she was meant to be sad: Many in the audience saw her as proud, almost arrogant. Even those officials well known for their radical views on religious dress felt respect for this woman. And so when one alert student from the religious high school guessed who was hiding underneath the head scarf, it was to the great annoyance of the front rows that he hooted with laughter.

In the second scene, when the woman made her grand gesture of independence, launching herself into enlightenment as she removed her scarf, the audience was at first terrified. Even the most westernized secularists in the hall were frightened by the sight of their own dreams coming true. Fear of the political Islamists was so great they had long ago accepted that their city must remain as it had always been. I say dreams, but not even in their sleep could they have imagined the state forcing women to remove their head scarves as it had done in the early years of the Republic; they were prepared to live with the practice, “so long as the Islamists don’t use intimidation or force to make westernized women wear scarves as we’ve seen in Iran.”

“But the truth of the matter is this: All those fervent secularist Kemalists in the front rows weren’t really Kemalists after all, they were cowards!” This was what Turgut Bey told Ka after it was all over. It wasn’t just religious extremists who objected to a covered woman baring her head; everyone else in the room was frightened that this spectacle might enrage the unemployed men witnessing it—not to mention the youthful horde milling at the back of the hall. And so when one of the teachers in the front row did rise from his seat to applaud Funda Eser as she shed her scarf with elegance and determination, a handful of youths in the back jeered this poor and forlorn teacher with catcalls. Mind you, according to some witnesses, the teacher was not making a political statement about modern womanhood but rather succumbing to dizzy admiration of Funda’s plump arms and famously beautiful throat.

As to the Republicans in the front rows, they weren’t too happy with the situation either. Having expected a bespectacled village girl, pure-hearted, bright-faced, and studious, to emerge from beneath the scarf, they were utterly discomfited to see it was the lewd belly dancer Funda Eser instead. Was this to say that only whores and fools take off their head scarves? If so, it was precisely what the Islamists had been saying all along. Several seated near him recall the deputy governor shouting, “This is wrong, all wrong!” While a number of others joined the chorus—perhaps to curry favor—Funda Eser persevered. Still, most people in the front rows, however anxious, continued to watch with quiet appreciation as this enlightened Republican secular girl stood up for the freedoms they all hoped to enjoy, and while a few protests did issue from the religious high school boys, no one felt intimidated by them. Certainly not the deputy governor, flanked on all sides by other top officials who saw little to fear in the antics of a few boys from the religious high school who ought to have known better. This retinue included Kasım Bey, the courageous assistant chief of police, who in his day had made life so difficult for the Kurdish PKK; a number of army officers in civilian clothing, accompanied by their wives; the branch manager of the ordinance survey office, joined by his wife, two daughters, four sons in suits and ties, and three nephews; and the city’s cultural director, whose main job was to seize banned tapes of Kurdish music and send them to Ankara.

It could be said that all these officials put their faith in the plainclothes officers planted throughout the hall, the uniformed officers lined up along the walls, and the soldiers they’d heard were waiting backstage. Their only real concern was the fact that the performance was being broadcast live; although it was only going out locally, these grandees could not help feeling as if all of Ankara—indeed, all of Turkey—were watching them. The great and the good in the front rows, like all those behind them, could not quite forget that the scenes playing out before their eyes were simultaneously appearing on television; this alone can explain why the vulgarities and political provocations and nonsense they witnessed seemed to the audience more elegant and magical than they really were. Some were so concerned to know whether the cameras were still running that they were turning their heads every other moment just to check; like the ones in the back continually waving at the camera, and the others periodically shouting “Oh, my God, they can see me on television!” the front row found this prospect so unnerving that they could barely move, even though they were sitting in the most secluded corner of the hall. As to those citizens not in attendance, the city’s first live broadcast did not inspire in most a desire to see the stage on-screen; rather, it made them long to be in the theater, watching the television crew in action.

By now Funda Eser had removed her scarf and tossed it like so much laundry into a copper basin. She then sprinkled it with gasoline—carefully, as if adding detergent—and plunged her hands into the basin as though stirring the wash. By a strange coincidence, they’d put the gasoline into an emptied bottle of Akif liquid detergent, a brand much favored by Kars housewives at the time, and this was why everyone in the auditorium—everyone in Kars, for that matter—took it that the freedom fighter girl had changed her mind: seeing her plunge her hands into the washbasin, they all relaxed.

“That’s the way to do it!” someone shouted from the back. “Scrub out all that dirt!” There was a ripple of laughter, annoying some of the high government officials in front; still, everyone in the hall thought they were watching a woman doing laundry. “So where’s the Omo?” someone shouted.

He was one of the religious high school boys: although their noise was beginning to annoy some people, no one was very angry. Most of the audience, including the officials up front, were just hoping that this dated, provocative piece of Jacobin theater would end without incident. Quite a few of those I interviewed years later, from the most august official to the poorest Kurdish student, told me that most of the Kars residents in the National Theater had come to the performance hoping for one thing: to be transported from their everyday lives for a few hours and maybe even to enjoy themselves.