Snow (43 page)

The red-faced teenager was strong and powerful, with an opinion on everything, but the question caught him unprepared. Clutching the door handle more tightly than ever, he looked to Blue for help.

“Just say whatever you think you’d say, so we can leave,” said Blue, forcing a smile. “If you don’t, the police will be here.”

The red-faced teenager searched the air as if struggling with an exam question he knew how to answer only yesterday.

Hearing nothing, Blue said, “Fine, then let me answer first. I couldn’t care less about your European masters. All I want is to step out of their shadow. But the truth is, we all live under a shadow.”

“Don’t try to help him, let him speak from his own heart,” said Turgut Bey. “You can go last.” He smiled at the red-faced teenager, still squirming. “It’s a difficult decision. It’s a complicated business. It’s not the sort of dilemma you can resolve on your way out the door.”

“He’s looking for excuses!” someone shouted from the back of the room. “He doesn’t want to sign the statement!” 

They all retreated, each into his own thoughts. A few moved to the window, to watch another horse-drawn carriage swaying back and forth on its way down the street. Later that same night, in describing the “enchanted silence” that had fallen over the room, Fazıl would tell Ka,

“It was as if we were all brothers suddenly, as if we were closer to one another than we’d ever been before.”

An airplane passing far above them in the night sky broke the silence. Everyone heard it. “That’s the second plane today,” Blue whispered.

“I’m leaving!” someone shouted. The speaker, a pale-faced man in his thirties in a pale jacket, had gone unnoticed until this moment. He was one of the three workingmen in the room. A cook in the Social Insurance Hospital, he’d come in with the families of the disappeared and he couldn’t stop looking at his watch. According to later reports, his older brother, a political activist, had been carted off to the police station for questioning, never to return. It was said that the pale-faced cook wanted to secure a death certificate so he could marry his missing brother’s beautiful wife. He’d petitioned the state a year after his brother’s disappearance, but the police, the secret services, the public prosecutor’s office, and the army garrison all gave him the brush-off; he’d joined the families of the disappeared two months earlier, not out of any desire for revenge but simply because they were the only people willing to listen to him.

“You’ll call me a coward behind my back, but you’re the cowards. And these Europeans of yours, they’re the biggest cowards of all. You can go ahead and quote me.” He kicked the door open and walked out.

Someone now asked just who was this “Hans Hansen Bey.” Kadife panicked, but to her great surprise Blue courteously explained that he was a well-intentioned German journalist who took a deep interest in Turkey’s problems.

“Beware of Germans with good intentions!” cried someone at the back of the room.

“My friends, let’s not hang back like frightened little schoolchildren, waiting for the other kid to speak first,” someone else said.

“I’m at the lycée,” piped up one of the boys from the Kurdish association. “I knew what I would say before I got here.” 

His voice couldn’t have been calmer, but his face burned with passion. “I’ve always dreamed of the day when I’d have a chance to share my ideas with the world—and so has everyone else in this room. What I would say is very simple. All I’d want them to print in that Frankfurt paper is this: We’re not stupid, we’re just poor! And we have a right to want to insist on this distinction.”

“Such humble words!”

“Who do you mean, my son, when you say
we
?” asked a man at the back. “Do you mean the Turks? The Kurds? The Circassians? The people of Kars? To whom exactly are you referring?”

“Mankind’s greatest error,” continued the young Kurd, “the biggest deception of the past thousand years is this: to confuse poverty with stupidity.”

“And what exactly does he mean by stupidity? He should explain his terms.”

“Throughout history, religious leaders and other honorable men of conscience have always warned against this shaming confusion. They remind us that the poor have hearts, minds, humanity, and wisdom just like everyone else. When Hans Hansen sees a poor man he feels sorry for him. He would not necessarily assume that the man’s a fool who’s blown his chances or a drunk who’s lost his will.”

“I can’t speak for Hans Hansen, but that’s what everyone thinks when they see a poor man.”

“Please listen to what I have to say,” said the passionate Kurdish youth. “I won’t speak long. People might feel sorry for a man who’s fallen on hard times, but when an entire nation is poor, the rest of the world assumes that all its people must be brainless, lazy, dirty, clumsy fools. Instead of pity, the people provoke laughter. It’s all a joke: their culture, their customs, their practices. In time the rest of the world may, some of them, begin to feel ashamed for having thought this way, and when they look around and see immigrants from that poor country mopping their floors and doing all the other lowest paying jobs, naturally they worry about what might happen if these workers one day rose up against them. So, to keep things sweet, they start taking an interest in the immigrants’ culture and sometimes even pretend they think of them as equals.”

“It’s about time he told us what nation he’s talking about.”

“Let me add this,” said one of the other Kurdish youths. “Mankind refuses to laugh any longer at those who kill and murder and oppress. This is what I learned from my mother’s brother when he came to Kars from Germany last summer. The world has lost patience with oppressive countries.”

“Are we to assume then that you’re making a threat on behalf of the West?”

“As I was saying,” the first young Kurd continued, “when a Westerner meets someone from a poor country, he feels deep contempt. He assumes that the poor man’s head must be full of all the nonsense that plunged his country into poverty and despair.”

“And if he did, he wouldn’t be far off the mark, would he?”

“If you’re like that conceited poet and think we’re all stupid, stand up and state your case. That godless atheist will end up in hell, but at least he showed some courage. He went on live TV and looked the entire country in the eye and told us to our faces we are stupid.”

“Excuse me, but people on live TV can’t see their audience.”

“The gentleman didn’t say he ‘saw,’ he said he ‘looked.’ ”

“Friends! Please! Let’s not be a debating society,” pleaded the leftist who was taking minutes. “And also, please try to speak more slowly.”

“If he’s not brave enough to say what nation he’s talking about, I refuse to be quiet. Let’s be clear that it’s treason to give a German paper a quote trashing our nation.”

“I’m no traitor. I agree with you,” the passionate Kurdish youth said, rising to his feet. “That’s why I want to tell this German paper that even if I got a chance to go to Germany one day, even if they gave me a visa, I wouldn’t go.”

“They’d never give a European visa to a feeble, unemployed nothing like you.”

“Forget the visa, our own state wouldn’t give him a passport.”

“You’re right, they wouldn’t,” said the passionate but humble youth. “But say they did and I went, and the first Western man I met in the street turned out to be a good person who didn’t even despise me, I’d still mis-trust him, just for being a Westerner, I’d still worry that this man was looking down on me. Because in Germany they can spot Turks just by the way they look. There’s no escaping humiliation except by proving at the first opportunity that you think exactly as they do. But this is impossible, and it can break a man’s pride to try.”

“You started badly, my son, but you’ve ended up in the right place,” said an old Azeri journalist. “But I still think we shouldn’t say this to the German press, because it will lay us open to ridicule.” He paused for a moment and then asked cunningly, “So what nation was it you were talking about?”

When the teenager from the Kurdish association sat down without speaking further, the old journalist’s son cried out, “He’s afraid!”

“He’s right to be afraid. He’s not on the government payroll like you.” 

Neither the journalist nor his son took offense. Everyone was talking at once, but not in frustration: All the joking and teasing and keeping score had made the atmosphere festive and intimate. Later, on hearing Fazıl’s account of the proceedings, Ka would observe in his notebook that this sort of political meeting could go on for hours, and the beetle-browed, mustachioed, cigarette-smoking men who attended them did so precisely to enjoy the pleasure of the crowd, even without realizing that they were having a good time.

“We will never be Europeans!” cried one of the proud young Islamists. “They may try to roll over us with their tanks and spray us with bullets and kill us all, but they can’t change our souls.”

“You can take possession of my body but never my soul!” said one of the Kurdish youths. He made his contempt clear by reciting the line in the style of a Turkish melodrama.

Everyone laughed. And to show he didn’t mind, the boy who’d been speaking started laughing too.

“Now I’m going to say something,” said one of the youths sitting near Blue. “No matter how hard our friends here try to draw a line between themselves and the lowlifes who ape the ways of the West, I still sense a certain note of apology. It’s as if they’re saying, ‘I’m so sorry I’m not a Westerner.’ ” He turned to the man in the leather jacket who was taking notes. “Please, dear sir, ignore these preliminary remarks!” He spoke like a polite thug. “Here’s what I’d like you to write: I’m proud of the part of me that isn’t European. I’m proud of the things in me that the Europeans find childish, cruel, and primitive. If the Europeans are beautiful, I want to be ugly; if they’re intelligent, I prefer to be stupid; if they’re modern, let me stay pure.”

No one in the room would sign on to that sentiment. The ensuing laughter preserved the new spirit of the gathering, with everything now said giving way to a joke. Then someone went too far—“But you’re stupid already!” At the very same moment the oldest of the leftists and his friend in the black jacket both had coughing fits, so fortunately no one was sure who had uttered these insulting words.

The red-faced teenager guarding the door rattled off a poem. “Europe, O Europe,/Let’s stop and take a look,/When we’re together in our dreams/Let’s not let the devil have his way.” Fazıl had a hard time hearing the rest over all the coughing, taunting, and sniggering, but he could recount in detail the objections to it; jotted down on the same sheet bearing his record of the various two-line statements for Europe were these snippets of reaction that ended up in “All Humanity and the Stars,” the poem Ka was to write shortly afterward.

1. “Let’s not be afraid of them, there’s nothing there to be afraid of !” One of the old-guard leftist militants now approaching middle age.

2. The old Azeri journalist who could not stop asking, “To what nation are you referring?” said, “Let’s not sacrifice our Turkishness or forsake our religion.”

3. A defeatist in the crowd slyly asked, “And whatever happened to the millions of Armenians who once lived all across Anatolia, including Kars?” in the course of a long speech about the Crusades, the Holocaust, the American massacre of the Red Indians, and the Algerian Muslims massacred by the French. But feeling pity for this man, the informer-secretary did not write down his name.

4. “No one in his right mind would ever want to translate such a long and idiotic poem, and Hans Hansen would never let it be published in his newspaper.” This from one of the three poets in the room. It was their chance to bemoan the luckless isolation of Turkish poets on the international stage.

At the end of his recitation of the poem that everyone denounced as idiotic and primitive, the red-faced youth was drenched in sweat; there was scattered, rather contemptuous applause. Most seemed to agree that it would be unwise to let this poem be published in Germany, as it might give rise to more ridicule. The Kurdish youth whose mother’s brother lived in Germany was the most outspoken on this point.

“When they write poems or sing songs in the West, they speak for all humanity. They’re human beings—but we’re just Muslims. When
we
write something, it’s just called ethnic poetry.”

“My message is this: Write this down,” said the man in the black jacket. “If the Europeans are right and our only future and only hope is to be more like them, it’s foolish to waste time talking about what makes us who we are.”

“Ah, of all the things said so far, here is the one that will most effectively convince the Europeans that we’re idiots.”

“Please, once and for all, state clearly which nation it is that’s going to look idiotic.”

“And here we are acting as if we’re so much smarter and worthier than Westerners, but gentlemen, I put it to you that if Germany opened a consulate in Kars today and started handing out free visas, the city would be empty within a week.”

“That’s a lie. After all, our friend over there just told us he wouldn’t go even if they offered him the chance. I wouldn’t leave either. I’d do the honorable thing and stay here.”

“And many others would stay too, gentlemen, make no mistake. All those who wouldn’t go raise your hands so we can see you.” A few gravely raised their hands. A handful of youths saw them but remained undecided. “And why is it that those who would go are seen as dishonorable?” asked the man in the black jacket.

“This is hard to explain to people who don’t already understand,” said one mysterious fellow.

Fazıl noticed that Kadife had turned away, looking mournfully out the window, and his heart began to thump wildly. Please God, he thought, help me preserve my purity, protect my mind from confusion. It occurred to him that Kadife might like these words. It occurred to him to make this his quote for the German newspaper, but with so many people speaking, there was no chance for him to be heard.

The only one whose voice rose above all this noise was the shrill Kurdish youth. He proposed to tell the German newspaper about a dream he’d had. Pausing from time to time with a shiver, he explained how in this dream he’d been sitting all alone in the National Theater watching a film. It was a Western film, and everyone in it was speaking a foreign language, but this didn’t make him uncomfortable; he somehow understood everything they said. And then, in the blink of an eye, he entered the film itself; it turned out that his seat was not in the National Theater but in the sitting room of a Christian family. There, before his eyes, was a table laden with food; he longed to fill his stomach, but for fear of doing something wrong he kept his distance. His heart began to race: there, before him, was a beautiful blond woman, and the moment he saw her he remembered that he’d been in love with her for years. The woman was warmer and more gentle than he could ever imagine. She complimented him on his clothes and his manners, kissed his cheeks, and ran her fingers through his hair. He felt so very happy. Before he knew it, she sat him on her lap and pointed out the food on the table. Only then did he realize that he was still a child, said the Kurdish youth, with tears welling in his eyes. It was because he was still a child that she found him so charming.