Snow (46 page)

A GODLESS MAN IN KARS

QUESTIONS ASKED ABOUT KA,

THE SO-CALLED POET

WHY DID HE CHOOSE TO VISIT OUR

CITY IN SUCH TROUBLED TIMES?

YESTERDAY WE INTRODUCED THE SO-CALLED

POET TO THE PEOPLE OF KARS

TODAY WE REPORT THE SUSPICIONS HE HAS

AROUSED IN OUR READERS

We have been hearing many rumors about the so-called poet who came close to ruining yesterday’s joyous performance by the Sunay Zaim Players when he strode onto the stage halfway through the celebrations of Atatürk and the Republic and robbed the audience of their happiness and their peace of mind by bombarding their ears with a joyless, meaningless poem.

Although the people of Kars once lived side by side in happy harmony, in recent years outside forces have turned brother against brother. Disputes between Islamists, secularists, Kurds, Turks, and Azeris drive us asunder for specious reasons and reawaken old accusations about the Armenian massacre that should have been buried long ago.

It is only natural that the people of Kars wonder whether this suspicious character who fled Turkey many years ago and now lives in Germany has chosen to grace us with his company because he is some sort of spy. Can it be true that his efforts to provoke an incident at our religious high school resulted in his making the following statement to youths who engaged him in a conversation two days ago? “I am an atheist. I don’t believe in God, but that doesn’t mean I’d commit suicide, because after all God—
God forbid
—doesn’t exist.” Can these be his exact words? And when he said, “An intellectual’s job is to speak against holiness,” was he denying God’s existence and—if so—was he expressing European views on freedom of thought?

Just because Germany is bankrolling you, that doesn’t mean you have the right to trample on our beliefs! Is it because you are ashamed of being a Turk that you hide your true name behind the fake foreign counterfeit name of Ka?

Many readers have telephoned our offices to express their regret about this godless imitation-European’s decision to stir up dissent in our city in these troubled times. They have voiced particular concern about the way in which he has wandered the shantytowns, knocking on the doors of the most wretched dwellings to incite rebellion against our state and indeed, even in our own presence, vainly attempting to stick his tongue out at our country and even at the great Atatürk, Father of our Republic. The youth of Kars know how to deal with blasphemers who deny God and the Prophet Muhammad (SAS)!

“When I passed by their office twenty minutes ago, Serdar’s two sons had only just started printing this edition,” said Muhtar. Far from com-miserating with his friend’s fears, he seemed cheerful, as if he had just introduced a pleasant new topic.

Reading the article more carefully a second time, Ka felt very much alone. Long ago, when he’d first dreamed of a glittering literary future, he had foreseen that the modernist innovations he would bring to Turkish poetry (the very concept now seemed excessively nationalist) would provoke harsh criticism and personal attack; still, he’d assumed that notoriety would at least confer a certain aura. Although he’d enjoyed a modest fame in the years since and had never been subject to harsh criticism, it hurt him to be referred to as a “so-called” poet.

After warning him not to wander the streets like a moving target, Muhtar left him alone at the teahouse. Ka was overtaken by the fear that he could be shot at any moment. He left the teahouse and wandered through the snow, lost in thought; the giant snowflakes that sailed down from the heavens so fast were moving with a speed to suggest bewitch-ment.

Early in his youth, Ka had firmly believed that there could be no higher honor than to die for an intellectual political cause or for what he had written. By his thirties, he’d seen too many of his friends and classmates tortured for the sake of foolish, even malign principles; then there were those who were shot dead in the attempt to rob banks and those who made bombs that wound up exploding in their hands. Seeing the havoc of his lofty ideas put into action, Ka deliberately distanced himself from them. Finally, the fact of having spent years and years of exile in Germany for political beliefs he no longer held had finally severed the connection between politics and self-sacrifice. Whenever he picked up a Turkish paper in Germany and read that this or that columnist had been shot for political reasons, “most probably by political Islamists,” he felt some respect for the victim as a dead man but no particular admiration for him as a murdered writer.

On the corner of Halitpa¸sa and Kâzım Karabekir avenues, Ka saw a pipe protruding from an icy hole in a windowless wall, imagined it was the barrel of a gun aimed straight at him, and in his mind’s eye saw himself dying on the snow-covered pavement. What would they say about him in the Istanbul papers? Most likely the governor’s office or the local branch of the secret police would want to downplay the political dimen-sion, and if the Istanbul press didn’t pick up on his having been a poet, they might not cover the incident at all. Even if his friends in the poetry world and at the
Republican
did everything in their power to publicize the political angle (and who would write that article? Fahir? Orhan?), it would only serve to diminish his literary significance. Similarly, if someone succeeded in placing a piece that established him as an important poet, his death would be reported on the arts pages, where no one would read about it. Had there really been a German journalist called Hans Hansen, and had Ka really been his friend, the
Frankfurter Rundschau
might have run a story about his murder, but it would be the only Western newspaper to do so. Ka took some consolation in imagining that his poems might be translated into German and published in
Akzent
magazine, but it was still perfectly clear to him that should this article in the
Border City Gazette
prove to be the death of him, the published translations would mean nothing. Finally, what frightened him most was the thought of dying just at the dawn of his hope of living happily ever after in Frankfurt with Ipek.

The many writers killed in recent years by Islamist bullets paraded before his eyes: first the old preacher-turned-atheist who had tried to point out “inconsistencies” in the Koran (they’d shot him from behind, in the head); behind him came the righteous columnist whose love of positivism had led him to refer in a number of columns to girls wearing head scarves as “cockroaches” (they strafed him and his chauffeur one morning as he drove to work); then there was the investigative journalist who had tenaciously sought to uncover the links between the Turkish Islamist movement and Iran (when he turned on the ignition, he and his car went sailing into the sky). Even as he recalled these victims with tender sorrow, he knew they’d been naïve. As a rule the Istanbul press, like the Western press, had little interest in these fervent columnists and even less in journalists apt to get shot in the head for similar reasons on a backstreet of some remote Anatolian city. But Ka reserved his bile for a society that so easily forgot its writers and poets: For this reason he thought the smartest thing to do was retreat into a corner and try to find some happiness.

Arriving at the offices of the
Border City Gazette
on Faikbey Avenue, Ka looked up to see the next day’s edition taped to the back of the recently deiced window. He read the article about himself again, and then he went inside. The elder of Serdar Bey’s two busy sons was securing a pile of freshly printed papers with nylon twine. Ka took off his hat so they could see who he was and brushed off the snow sticking to the shoulders of his coat.

“My father’s not here.” This was the younger son, coming in from the other room with the cloth he’d been using to polish the press. “Would you like some tea?”

“Who wrote the article about me in tomorrow’s edition?”

“Is there an article about you in there?” said the younger son, raising his eyebrows.

“Yes, there is,” said the older son, giving him a warm and happy smile. He had the same thick lips as his brother. “My father wrote the whole edition today.”

“If you distribute this paper tomorrow morning . . .” said Ka. He paused to think. “It will be bad for me.” 

“Why?” asked the older son. He had a soft kind face and pure, innocent eyes.

Ka saw that if he talked to them in a nice friendly voice and kept his questions short, the way you do with children, he could find out quite a bit from them. The brothers soon informed him that only three people had purchased the paper so far: Muhtar Bey, a child who’d been sent from the branch headquarters of the Motherland Party, and the retired literature teacher Nuriye Hanım, who made a habit of stopping by every evening. Normally they would have dispatched copies to Istanbul and Ankara, but because the roads were closed these papers would have to wait with today’s edition until the snow began to melt. The sons would be distributing the rest of the papers tomorrow morning, and if their father wished it, of course they could print a new edition for tomorrow; their father, they told Ka, had only just left the offices, telling them not to expect him back in time for dinner. Ka told them he wouldn’t stay for tea; he bought a copy of the paper and went out into the murderous Kars night.

The boys’ untroubled innocence had calmed him somewhat. As Ka walked among the slowly falling snowflakes, he began to feel guilty—had he been wrong to take such fright? But in another corner of his mind he knew he would share the fate of the other luckless writers who had died of multiple gunshot wounds after facing similar dilemmas and choosing, either out of pride or courage, to do nothing, or the many others who, assuming that any package from a stranger had to be an ardent fan’s gift of
lokum
, had died eagerly tearing open what would turn out to be a mail bomb.

There was, for example, the poet Nurettin, who admired all things European but took little interest in politics until the day a radical Islamist newspaper unearthed something he’d written years earlier—an essay on art and religion—and distorted it to charge that he’d “insulted our faith”; afraid of looking frightened, Nurettin dusted off his old ideas and passionately reasserted them; the army-backed secular press warmed to his fine Kemalist words and inflated their importance to make him seem the lifelong hero. Then one morning a device in a plastic bag hanging from the front tire of his car blew him into so many bits that his ostentatious throng of mourners had to march behind an empty coffin.

There was the small-town version too, the materialist doctors and the old leftist journalists of the regional papers who, when faced with similar indictments, responded with fiery antireligious rhetoric, just so no one could say they were cowards. Some perhaps even entertained vain hopes of attracting world attention “like Salman Rushdie,” but the only ones listening were the angry young fanatics in their own neighborhoods, and they had no time for the fancy bomb plots of their colleagues in the cities, or even for guns. As Ka knew only too well from the small lifeless news items he’d seen poring over the back pages of Turkish newspapers in the Frankfurt city library, they preferred to knife the godless in dark alley-ways or strangle them with their bare hands.

Ka was still trying to figure out how to save both his skin and his pride if the
Border City Gazette
gave him a chance to reply—I’m an atheist but I’ve never insulted the Prophet? I’m not a believer but I’d never dream of disrespecting the faith?—when suddenly he heard someone tramping through the snow behind him; a chill went down his spine as he turned around to see it was the bus company manager he’d met yesterday at the same hour at His Excellency Sheikh Saadettin’s lodge. It occurred to him that this man could testify that he wasn’t an atheist; immediately the thought embarrassed him.

He continued dragging his feet down Atatürk Avenue, slowing down to negotiate the icy street corners and pausing from time to time to admire the huge snowflakes, the endless repetition of an ordinary miracle. Afterward, he would often think back to the beautiful scenes he had witnessed while wandering the city’s snow-covered streets (as three children pulled a sled up a narrow street, the windows of the Palace of Light Photo Studio reflected the green light of the one traffic signal in Kars), and he’d wonder why he carried these sad postcard memories with him wherever he went.

He saw an army patrol truck and two soldiers guarding the door to the old tailor shop that Sunay Zaim was using as his base of operations. Ka told the soldiers huddled on the threshold trying to duck the snow that he wanted to contact Sunay, but they treated him like a lowly peasant who’d come in from an outlying village to petition the chief of staff. Ka had been hoping that Sunay might be able to keep the paper from being circulated.

If we are to make sense of the fury that was soon to overtake him, it’s important to understand the sting of this rebuff. His first thought was to run off into the snow and seek refuge in the hotel, but before even reaching the corner, he turned left into the Unity Café. Here he took a table between the wall and the stove and wrote the poem he would later call “To Be Shot and Killed.”

As he would explain, in his notes, this poem was an expression of pure fear, so he placed it between the axes of memory and imagination on the six-pronged snowflake and humbly turned his back on the content of its prophecy.

As soon as the poem was finished, Ka left the Unity Café; it was twenty past seven when he reached the Snow Palace Hotel. Stretched out upstairs on his bed, he watched the snowflakes floating through the halos of the streetlamp and the pink letter
K
pulsating in the window across the way and tried to quell his growing panic by conjuring up happy visions of life with Ipek in Frankfurt. Ten minutes later, he was overcome by a desire to see her. He went downstairs to find the entire family seated around the dinner table with that evening’s guest, and his heart leaped to see Ipek’s hair shimmering behind the bowl of soup that Zahide had just set before her. When Ipek beckoned him to take the place next to her, Ka was proud that everyone at the table knew they were in love, very proud; then, across the table, he saw Serdar Bey, the owner of the
Border City
Gazette.