Snow (33 page)

When the general added his new findings to the investigation, he was so concerned about the possible implications that he handed the matter over to MIT and the army inspectorate. The more ground the army gained in its savage conflict with the Kurdish PKK guerillas, the lower became the morale of the weak, despairing, and unemployed Kurdish youths who’d fallen in with them; this situation had led some of these youths to nurture strange and frightful dreams of revenge, as was reported by quite a few of the detectives who spent their days dozing in the city’s coffeehouses. They’d overheard youths discussing bomb and kidnap plots, possible attacks on the statue of Atatürk, a scheme to poison the city’s water supplies, and another to blow up its bridges. This was why the officials had taken the cinnamon sharbat scare so seriously, but owing to the acute sensitivity of the issue, they’d been unable to interrogate or torture the snack bar’s owners. Instead, they assigned a number of detectives attached to the governor’s office to infiltrate not just the Modern Buffet but the kitchen of the old granny, by now over the moon with delight at all the business she was doing.

The detective assigned to the snack bar subjected the granny’s cinnamon drink to yet another examination, and he also inspected the glasses, the heat-resistant holder on the crooked handles of the tin ladles, the change box, a number of rusty holes, and the employees’ hands for any sign of a strange powder. A week later, he too had all the symptoms of poisoning; he was shaking and coughing so much he had to leave work.

The detective who’d been planted in the granny’s kitchen was far more industrious, however. Every night he would sit down and write a full report, listing not just the people who’d passed through the kitchen that day but also every item of food the old lady purchased (carrots, apples, plums, dried mulberries, pomegranate flowers, dog roses, and marshmallows). His reports soon revealed the recipe for this much-praised and appetizing beverage. The detective who was drinking five or six carafes a day suffered no ill effects whatsoever: Indeed, it was, according to him, a bona fide tonic, a genuine mountain sharbat such as appears in the famous Kurdish epic
Mem u Zin.
The experts sent in from Ankara lost faith in this detective because he was a Kurd. They were able to deduce from his reports that the sharbat was poisonous to Turks but not to Kurds; however, because of the official state position that Kurds and Turks are indistinguishable, they kept this conclusion to themselves.

At this point, a group of doctors sent in from Istanbul set up a special clinic at the Social Insurance Hospital. Soon, however, it was overrun by perfectly healthy Kars inhabitants just looking for free treatment, not to mention some so-called invalids complaining of such common afflictions as hair loss, psoriasis, hernias, and stammers; this stampede cast a long shadow over the seriousness of the investigation.

So it fell once again to the Kars intelligence services to unravel the sharbat plot that was slowly incapacitating the city and had already endangered the health of thousands of soldiers; it was for MIT to capture the perpetrators before the city’s spirit was broken. Saffet was just one of several diligent agents assigned to this case. Most had been told simply to follow the people who drank the sharbat the granny boiled with such joy. It was no longer an investigation of the path by which the poison had spread through Kars, but a vain attempt to find a way to distinguish those poisoned by the sharbat from those who were not. To accomplish this task, the detectives were following all the soldier and plainclothes police consumers of the granny’s cinnamon drink—sometimes all the way home.

When Ka heard that this exhausting, painstaking mission had worn out not just the detective’s shoes but also his spirit, he promised to raise the subject with Sunay, who had yet to reach the end of his televised speech.

The detective was so elated by this promise, he threw his grateful arms around Ka, kissed him on both cheeks, and unbolted the door with his own hands.

I, Ka

the six-sided snowflake

With the black dog following close behind, Ka walked back to the hotel, savoring the empty beauty of the snow-covered streets. He dashed off a note to Ipek—
Come at once!
—and asked Cavit, the receptionist, to take it in to her right away. Then he went upstairs and threw himself down on his bed. As he waited he thought of his mother, but soon his thoughts turned instead to Ipek, who had still not arrived. It was not long before he felt racked with such pain as to make him decide he had been a fool to fall in love—or to come to Kars at all. He had been waiting for some time and still there was no sign of her.

Thirty-eight minutes after Ka returned to the hotel, Ipek walked into his room. “I had to go to the coal seller,” she said. “I knew there would be a line once the curfew ended, so I went out through the back courtyard at ten to twelve. After twelve I spent some time wandering around the market. If I’d known you were here, I would have come straight back.” Ipek brought such life into the room, Ka’s mood soared—so wildly he was terrified of doing something to destroy this moment of bliss. He gazed at Ipek’s long shiny hair. Her hands never stopped moving. In no time at all, her left hand traveled from her hair to her nose, to her belt, to the edge of the door, and on to her beautiful long neck, before it was back straightening her hair again, only to be found a moment later fingering her jade necklace. (She must have just put it on. Only now did Ka notice it.)

“I’m terribly in love with you, and I’m in pain,” Ka said.

“Don’t worry. Love that blooms this fast is just as fast to wither.”

 Ka threw his arms around her and tried to kiss her. Ipek kissed him back; she was as calm as he was frenzied. He felt her small hands on his shoulders, and the sweetness of her kiss sent his head spinning. He knew from the easy way she moved her body that she was ready to make love; he was so happy that his eyes, his mind, and his memory opened fully to the moment and to the world.

“I want to make love, too,” said ˙Ipek. For a moment she looked straight ahead; then she lifted her eyes with swift determination and met Ka’s gaze. “But as I’ve already said, it can’t happen under my father’s nose.”

“So when is your father going out?”

“He never goes out,” said Ipek. “I have to go,” she said, and she pulled herself away.

Ka stood in the doorway watching Ipek until she had disappeared down the stairs at the end of the dimly lit corridor. Then he closed the door, sat down on the edge of the bed, whipped his notebook out of his pocket, and, turning to a clean page, began writing the poem he would call “Privations and Difficulties.”

After finishing the poem, Ka continued to sit on the edge of the bed. He realized, for the first time since his arrival in Kars, that apart from chasing Ipek and writing poems there was nothing in this city for him to do. The insight made him feel deprived and liberated in equal measure. He felt sure that if he could convince Ipek to leave Kars with him, he would find lifelong happiness with her. He knew that the moment was fast approaching when he must persuade her but now that he had a plan—he felt grateful for the snow.

He threw on his coat and went outside, unnoticed by anyone except Saffet. Instead of heading toward the city hall, he turned left on National Independence Avenue and walked down the hill. He went into the Knowledge Pharmacy to buy some vitamin C tablets, turned left off Faikbey Avenue, keeping a straight way and pausing now and then to look into restaurant windows, and turned into Kâzım Karabekir Avenue. The campaign banners he’d seen fluttering above the avenue the day before had all been taken down, and all the shops were open. One stationery and cassette vendor was playing loud music. The pavements were crowded with people who’d come out just to mark the end of the curfew; they walked down as far as the market and then back up the hill, pausing now and then to shiver in front of a shop window. Those who usually came to the city on minibuses serving the outlying areas, frequenting the city center to doze in the teahouses and perhaps stop off at the barber’s for a shave, had not come in today, and Ka was pleased to see so many teahouses and barbershops empty. The children in the streets made him forget the fear inside. He watched the children sledding on the bridges, throwing snowballs, playing and fighting and cursing in the vacant lots, the snow-covered squares, the school playgrounds, and the gardens surrounding the government offices. Only a few wore coats; most were wearing school jackets, scarves, and skullcaps. They were happy about the coup because it had given them a school holiday. Whenever the cold got too much for him, Ka went to join Saffet at the nearest teahouse; he’d go straight to the detective’s table, have a glass of tea, and then go outside again.

Now used to Saffet’s following him, he no longer found the man frightening. If they really wanted to find out everything he did, they’d use a man he couldn’t see. A visible detective’s only use was to provide cover for an invisible colleague. That’s why Ka panicked when, at one point in his walk, he lost sight of Saffet, and why he went in search of him. He found Saffet, with a plastic bag in his hand, panting on the corner of Faikbey Avenue—the spot where the tank was the night before.

“The oranges were very cheap, I couldn’t help myself,” said the detective. He thanked Ka for waiting, adding that he had proved himself to be well-intentioned by choosing not to give him the slip. “From now on, why don’t you just tell me where you’re going? That would save us both a lot of effort.”

Ka didn’t know where he was going. But after two more glasses of raki in yet another empty teahouse, he realized he wanted to pay another visit to His Excellency Sheikh Saadettin. There was no chance of seeing Ipek again in the near future, and he dreaded the torment of letting himself think about her, preferring to bare his soul to the sheikh. He’d begin by telling him about the love of God in his heart, and then they could have a civilized conversation about God’s intentions and the meaning of life. But then he remembered that the sheikh’s lodge was bugged: When the police heard what had to say, they’d never stop laughing.

Still, when he passed His Excellency’s modest residence on Baytarhane Street, Ka stopped for a moment to look up at the windows.

Later on his walk, Ka noticed that the doors of the local library were open, so he went inside and walked up the muddy stairs. On the landing was a bulletin board onto which someone had carefully tacked the seven local newspapers. Since, like the
Border City Gazette,
they had all been printed the day before, there was no mention of the revolution but a great deal about the splendid performance at the National Theater and the continuing blizzard.

Although the city’s schools were closed, he saw five or six students in the library reading room; there was also a handful of retired government officials; like the students, they had probably come here to escape the cold in their houses. In a corner, among the dog-eared dictionaries and tattered children’s encyclopedias, he found several old volumes of
The
Encyclopedia of Life,
which had given him so many hours of pleasure as a child. Inside the back cover of every volume was a series of colored trans-parencies, which, as you leafed through them, revealed the organs and inner workings of a car or ship or the anatomy of a man. Ka went straight for the fourth volume, hoping to find the series featuring the baby nestled like a chick inside an egg within its mother’s distended tummy, only to find that the pictures had been torn out; all that remained were frayed edges attached to the back cover.

On page 324 of the same volume, he found an entry that he read with care:

SNOW.
The solid form taken by water when falling, crossing, or rising through the atmosphere. Each crystal snowflake forms its own unique hexagon. Since ancient times, mankind has been awed and mystified by the secrets of snow. In 1555, a priest named Olaus Mag-nus in Uppsala, Sweden, discovered that each snowflake, as indicated in the diagram, has six corners. . . .

How many times Ka may have read this entry during his stay in Kars, to what degree he internalized its illustration of a snow crystal, is impossible for me to say. Years later, when I went to visit his family home in Ni¸santa¸s to spend long hours discussing Ka with his tearful and—as always—troubled and suspicious father, I asked whether I could look at the old man’s library. Memory told me that what I was looking for would be not in Ka’s room with all the other books from his childhood and youth but in a dark corner of the sitting room on the shelves where his father kept his own collection. Here, among the handsome spines of his father’s law books, the collection of novels from the forties—some in Turkish, others in translation—and the row of telephone directories, I found the beautifully bound volumes of
The Encyclopedia of Life.
The first thing I did was turn to the back of the fourth volume to glance at the anatomical illustration of the pregnant woman; then I directed my attention to the book as an object. I was still admiring its perfect condition when there, before my eyes, was page 324. It was almost as if the book had opened of its own accord to that page. By the entry on snow, I found a thirty-two-year-old piece of blotting paper.

* * *

After Ka had finished looking at the encyclopedia, he reached into his pocket and, like a student sitting down to do homework, took out his notebook. He began to write a poem, the tenth to have come to him since his arrival in Kars. In the opening lines, he extolled the singularity of snowflakes, going on to describe his childhood memories of the mother with child he had this time failed to find at the back of the fourth volume of
The Encyclopedia of Life;
in the poem’s final lines, he mapped out a vision of himself and his place in the world, his special fears, his distinctive attributes, his uniqueness. The title he gave this poem was “I, Ka.” 

Ka was still writing down the poem when he noticed someone else sitting at his table. Lifting his eyes from the page, he gasped: It was Necip. He felt no terror at this apparition, and neither was he amazed; instead he felt ashamed—here was someone who didn’t die so easily and yet Ka had been willing to believe he was dead.