Snow (61 page)

She went up to her room and stood there for a minute in the dark. She stopped by Ka’s room to pick up his cherry-colored valise, and then she went out into the street. She walked in the cold over to the official standing by the army truck and told him she had decided not to leave the city.

“We can still make the train,” said the official, trying to be helpful.

“I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going, but thank you. Please give this bag to Ka Bey.”

She went back inside, and as she sat down next to her father they heard the army truck revving its engine.

“I sent them off,” Ipek told her father. “I’m not going.”

Turgut Bey put his arms around her. For a while, they watched the play on television, but without taking in a single thing. The first act was just coming to an end when Ipek said, “Let’s go see Kadife! I’ve got something to tell her.”

The Main Reason Women Commit

Suicide Is to Save Their Pride

the final act

It was very late in the day when Sunay decided to change the title of the drama originally inspired by Thomas Kyd’s
The Spanish Tragedy
but which in its final form showed many other influences; in fact, it was only during the last half hour of the relentless promotional campaign that the television announcers began referring to
The Tragedy in Kars.
The revi-sion came too late for those already in the theater. Many had been brought in by military bus; others had seen the play advertised and came to show their faith in a strong army; a fair number didn’t care how cata-strophic the result, as long as they had the chance to see it with their own eyes (there were already rumors that the “live broadcast” was really a tape shipped in from America); there were the city officials as well, whose presence had been ordered (this time they’d decided not to bring their families). Hardly any of these people were aware of the new title, but even those who were could little fathom the content and, like the rest of the city, had a hard time following the action.

Four years after its first and last performance, I found a videotape of
The Tragedy in Kars
in the Kars Border Television archives. The first half is almost impossible to summarize. I could make out a blood feud in some “backward, impoverished, and benighted” town, but when its inhabitants started killing one another, I had no notion of what it was that they’d been unable to share, nor could the murderers or their victims offer a clue as to the reason for so much bloodshed. Only Sunay raged against the backwardness of blood feuds and of people who allowed themselves to be drawn into them; he debated the matter with his wife and a younger woman who seemed to understand him better (this was Kadife). Though he was a rich and enlightened member of the ruling elite, Sunay’s character enjoyed dancing and joking with the poorest villagers and, indeed, engaged them in erudite discussions of the meaning of life, as well as regaling them with scenes from Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, and Brecht, if only to furnish the promised “play within the play.” He also offered an assortment of short soliloquies on such matters as city traffic, table manners, the special traits Turks and Muslims will never give up, the glories of the French Revolution, the virtues of cooking, condoms, and raki, and the way fancy prostitutes belly dance. These discussions, no more than his subsequent exposés of adulterated brands of shampoo and cosmetics, shed little light on the bloody scenes they interrupted, and as one outburst followed another, it grew harder to imagine that they conformed to any logic at all.

But the wild series of improvisations was somehow still worth watching, if only for the passion of Sunay’s performance. Whenever the action began to drag, whenever he sensed the people of Kars losing interest, Sunay could always find something to bring them back under his spell; he would fly into a fury and, borrowing a fine theatrical pose from one of the most illustrious roles of his career, he would rail against those who had brought the people low; with tragic abandon he would then pace the stage recounting youthful memories and quoting Montaigne on friendship as he mused on the quintessential loneliness of Atatürk. His face was wet with perspiration. During my visit to Kars, I was able to meet with Nuriye Hanım, the teacher who loved literature and history and had been so enthralled by Sunay’s performance on the night of the revolution; she told me that everyone in the front row for the second performance could smell the raki fumes. Still, she insisted Sunay wasn’t drunk; she preferred
enthusiastic.
But others in her row more than confirmed this so-called enthusiasm. It was a disparate group: Many were middle-aged officials who’d risked their lives to get as close to this great man as decorum allowed. Some were widows, others perhaps best described as young admirers of Atatürk—and they had already seen these images hundreds of times. There were also a few hungry for adventure, so to speak, or at least interested in power. But they all spoke of the light shining in Sunay’s eyes, radiating in all directions; it was dangerous, they said, to stare into those eyes for more than a few seconds. 

I would one day have corroborating testimony from one of the religious high school boys who’d been piled into a military transport and frog-marched to the National Theater. His name was Mesut (he’d been the one opposed to burying atheists and believers in the same cemetery). He confirmed how Sunay held them all spellbound. We can only assume he had no ax to grind because, after four years with a small Islamist group based in Erzurum, he had lost faith in armed struggle and returned to Kars to work in a teahouse. He told me it was very difficult for the other religious high school boys to speak openly about their attraction to Sunay. Perhaps it had to do with Sunay’s absolute power, the thing to which they also aspired. It may be that they were relieved by the many restrictions he’d imposed on their movements, which made it impossible to take stupid risks like inciting a riot. “Whenever the army steps in, most people are secretly thankful,” he told me, and then confessed that his classmates had been most impressed by Sunay’s courage. There he was, the most powerful man in the city, unafraid to stride onto the stage and bare his soul to the teeming multitudes.

Watching the Kars Border Television archive videotape of the evening’s performance, I was struck by the silence in the hall; it was as if the audience had left behind the struggles that defined them—the tussle of fathers and sons, the skirmishes between the guilty and the powerful—to sink into a collective terror; and I was not immune to the power of that shimmering fiction that any citizen of an oppressive and aggressively nationalistic country will understand only too well: the magical unity conjured by the word
we.
In Sunay’s eyes, it was as if there were not a single outsider in the hall: all were inextricably bound by the same hopeless story.

But Kadife threatened to break this trance, and this may explain why the people of Kars couldn’t quite bring themselves to accept her presence onstage. The cameraman taping the live broadcast seems to have been aware of this ambivalence: In the happy scenes, he zoomed in on Sunay, not showing Kadife at all, so the only time the broadcast audience got a glimpse of her was when she was serving the great and the good, just like one of those maids in a boulevard comedy. Still, everyone had heard the announcements that had been running on TV since lunchtime, and they were now very curious to see whether she would bare her head. There’d been the usual spate of conflicting rumors—some holding that Kadife was merely following army orders to remove her scarf, while others had it that she was planning not to go onstage after all—but after half a day of saturation publicity, even those only vaguely acquainted with the head-scarf affair now knew all about Kadife. This is why there was such broad disappointment at her low visibility in the early scenes—and her long red dress was hardly any consolation for the scarf, whose fate remained unclear.

Twenty minutes into the play, an exchange between Kadife and Sunay gave the audience the first hint of what was to come. They were alone onstage, and Sunay asked if she had made up her mind, adding that he “could not condone killing oneself just out of anger.” 

Kadife gave the following reply: “In a city where men are killing each other like animals just to make it a happier place, who has the right to stop me from killing myself ?” Then, seeing Funda Eser striding toward her, she made a quick exit—leaving it unclear whether this was part of the play or a hastily improvised escape.

When I’d spoken to everyone who would speak to me, I tried to reconstruct from their testimony a minute-by-minute time line synchro-nizing the performance with the action offstage; and this is how I was able to establish that Blue’s last glimpse of Kadife came when she delivered this line. For according to neighbors who witnessed the raid, and also various police officers still working in Kars at the time of my visit, Blue and Hande had been watching television when the bell rang. According to the official report, Blue took one look at the soldiers and the police officers assembled outside and rushed to get his weapon; he did not hesitate to open fire, though several neighbors and the young Islamists who would turn him into a legend almost overnight remember that after getting off a few rounds he’d cried, “Don’t shoot!” Perhaps he was hoping to save Hande, but in vain; Z Demirkol’s special operations team had already taken up positions around the perimeter, and in less than a minute not just Blue and Hande but every wall of their safe house was riddled with bullets. It was a fierce noise, but hardly anyone but a handful of curious neighborhood children paid much attention. It was not only that the people of Kars were accustomed to such nocturnal raids; they simply wouldn’t be distracted from the live broadcast from the National Theater. All the sidewalks in town were empty, all the shutters closed, and apart from the odd teahouse with a television no one was open for business.

Sunay was well aware that all eyes in the city were on him, and this made him feel not just secure but extraordinarily powerful. Knowing her very presence onstage was subject to Sunay’s sufferance, Kadife courted his approval more than she might have done otherwise; she had to make the most of the opportunities Sunay had given her if she was to have any hope of accomplishing her own ends. (Unlike Ipek, she would refuse to give me her own version of events, so I cannot know what else she was thinking.) Over the next forty minutes, as the audience began to grasp that Kadife was faced with two important decisions—one about baring her head, the other about committing suicide—their admiration for her grew and grew. And as her stature increased, the play evolved into a drama more serious than that implied by Sunay and Funda’s half didactic, half vaudevillian fury. Although they could not completely forget Kadife the head-scarf girl, many still grieving for her years later told me that her new persona had won the hearts of the people of Kars. By the middle of the play, the audience was falling into a deep silence whenever Kadife walked onstage; whenever she spoke, those watching in houses full of noisy children would frantically ask one another, “What did she say? What did she say?”

It was with the National Theater caught in just such a moment of silence that one could hear the whistle of the first train to leave Kars in four days. Ka was riding in the compartment in which the army had forcibly planted him. When my dear friend had seen the army transport return not with Ipek but only his valise, he desperately implored his guards to let him see her or at least talk to her; when they refused, he persuaded them to send the army transport back to the hotel; when the transport returned empty a second time, he begged the officers to hold the train for five more minutes. When the whistle blew, there was still no sign of Ipek, and even as the train began to move, Ka’s wet eyes were still scanning the crowds on the platform; training them on the station entrance, the door that looked out at the statue of Kâzım Karabekir, he continued trying to conjure up a tall woman walking straight toward him, bag in hand.

As the train gathered speed, it blew its whistle once again. Ipek and Turgut Bey were on their way from the Snow Palace Hotel to the National Theater when they heard it.

“The train’s on its way,” said Turgut Bey.

“Yes,” said Ipek, “and any minute now the roads will be reopened. The governor and the military chief of staff will be back in the city soon.” They talked for a while about how this ridiculous coup would now draw to a close and everything would soon return to normal, but Ipek would later allow that she had no particular interest in these subjects; she wanted to speak lest her father deduce from her silence that she was thinking about Ka. Was her mind really on Ka, though? How much was she thinking about Blue’s death? Even four years later, she herself wasn’t sure, and finding my questions and my suspicions irksome, she tried to deflect them. But she did say that far stronger than any regret at missing her chance for happiness was her anger at Ka. After that night, she knew, there was no hope of ever loving him again. When she heard Ka’s train pull out of the station, the only thing she felt was heartbreak, and perhaps that came with a bit of surprise. In any case, all she wanted was to share her grief with Kadife.

“It’s so desolate, you’d think everyone’s fled the city,” Turgut Bey said.

“It’s a ghost city,” said Ipek, just to say something.

A convoy of three army transports turned the corner to pass in front of them. Turgut Bey took this as proof that the roads had reopened. They watched the trucks roll off into the night until only their lights were visible. According to my later inquiries, but at the time unbeknownst to them, the middle jeep was carrying the bodies of Blue and Hande.

A moment earlier, the lights of the last jeep had shone on the offices of the
Border City Gazette
just long enough for Turgut to see that tomorrow’s edition was hanging in the window. He stopped to read the headlines: DEATH ONSTAGE; ILLUSTRIOUS ACTOR SUNAY ZAIM SHOT AND KILLED DURING YESTERDAY’S PERFORMANCE.

They read it twice and then walked as fast as they could to the National Theater. The same police cars were standing outside the entrance, and down the road, far, far away, the same tank nestled in the shadows.