Snow (65 page)

Walking through the snowy streets of Kars after nightfall only darkened my mood. Kars Border Television had moved to a new building on Karada˘g Avenue, just across from the gas station. It was a three-story concrete affair heralded on its opening as a sign that Kars was moving up in the world, but two years later, its corridors were as muddy, dark, and dingy as any others in the city.

Fazıl was waiting for me in the second-floor studio; after introducing me to the eight others who worked at the station, he smiled affably and said, “My colleagues want to know if you’d mind saying a word or two for the evening broadcast.” My first thought was that this might help the cause of my research. During my five-minute interview, their youth programs presenter, Hakan Özge, said unexpectedly (though perhaps at Fazıl’s direction), “I hear you’re writing a novel set in Kars!” The question threw me but I managed to mutter noncommittally. There was no mention of Ka.

We then went into the director’s office to examine the shelves lined with videocassettes; the law required that they be dated, so it wasn’t long before we were able to locate the tapes of the first two live broadcasts from the National Theater. We took them into a small airless room and sat in front of the old TV set with our glasses of tea. The first thing I watched was Kadife’s performance in
The Tragedy in Kars.
I must say I was impressed by Sunay Zaim and Funda Eser’s “critical vignettes,” not to mention their parodies of various commercials popular at the time. At the scene in which Kadife bared her head to reveal her beautiful hair before killing Sunay, I paused, rewound, and repeated, trying to see exactly what had happened. Sunay’s death really did look like so much theater. I guessed that only the front row would have had any chance of detecting whether the clip was full or empty.

When I put in the tape of
My Fatherland or My Head Scarf
, I quickly realized that many elements in the play—the impersonations, the confessions of Goalkeeper Vural, Funda Eser’s belly dances—were no more than little sideshows that the troupe inserted into every play they did. The roaring and shouting and sloganeering in the hall, to say nothing of the age of the tape, made it almost impossible to work out what anyone said. But I rewound several times in my attempt to hear Ka recite the poem that had come to him on the spot and would later become “The Place Where God Does Not Exist.” Miraculously, I was able to transcribe most of it. When Fazıl asked me what could have possibly made Necip jump to his feet while Ka was reciting the poem, and what could Necip have been trying to say, I handed him the sheet on which I had jotted down as much of the poem as I’d been able to hear.

When we got to the part where the soldiers fired into the audience, we watched it twice.

“You’ve been all over Kars now,” said Fazıl. “But there’s another place I’d like to show you.” With slight embarrassment, but a certain air of mystery too, he told me that the place he had in mind was the religious high school. The school itself was closed, but since I was probably going to put Necip in my book too, it was important that I see the dormitory where he had spent his last years.

As we were walking through the snow down Ahmet Muhtar the Conqueror Avenue, I happened to see a charcoal-colored dog with a round white spot in the middle of his forehead, and when I realized he must be the dog Ka had written the poem about, I went into a grocery store to buy a boiled egg and some bread: the animal wagged its curly tail happily as I quickly peeled the egg for him.

When Fazıl saw that the dog was following us, he said, “This is the station dog. I didn’t tell you everything back there, maybe because I thought you might not come. The old dormitory is empty now. After the coup, they closed it; they called it a nest of terrorists and reactionary militancy. Since then no one’s lived there, which is why I’ve borrowed this flashlight from the station,” and he shined the light into the anxious eyes of the black dog, still wagging its tail. The dormitory, an old Armenian mansion, had been the Russian consulate, where the consul had lived alone with his dog. The door to its garden was locked. Fazıl took me by the hand and helped me over the low wall. “This is how we used to get out in the evenings,” he said. He pointed to a large high window; slipping through the paneless frame with accustomed ease, he turned around to light my way with the flashlight. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “There’s nothing in here but birds.” Inside it was pitch-dark. Many of the windows were boarded up, and the glazing in others was so caked with ice and dirt that no light came through them, but Fazıl made his way to the stairs without difficulty. He climbed fearlessly but kept turning around like an usher in a cinema to show me the way. Everything stank of dust and mold. We went through doors that had been kicked in on the night of the raid, and past walls riddled with bullet holes; overhead, pigeons flew in a panic from the nests they had built in the elbows of the hot-water pipes and in the corners of the high ceilings.

On the top floor, we walked among empty, rusting bunk beds. “This one was mine, and that was Necip’s,” said Fazıl. “On some nights, to make sure we didn’t wake anyone with our whispering, we’d sleep in the same bed and watch the stars and talk.”

Through a gap in one of the top windows, we could see snowflakes sailing slowly through the halo of the streetlamp. I stood there paying them my full attention, my deepest respects.

“Necip used to watch them from his bed,” said Fazıl. He pointed down to a narrow gap between two buildings: On the left—just beyond the garden—was the blind wall of the Agricultural Bank; to the right another blind wall, the back of a tall apartment building; the two-meter gap between them was too narrow for a street and so is best described as a passageway. A fluorescent tube on the first floor cast a purple light on the muddy ground below. To keep people from mistaking the passageway for a street, a NO ENTRY sign had been posted somewhere in the middle of the wall. At the end of this passage, which Fazıl said had inspired Necip’s vision of the “end of the world,” there was a dark and leafless tree, and just as we were looking at it, it suddenly turned red as if it were on fire.

“The red light in the sign of the Palace of Light Photo Studio has been broken for seven years now,” whispered Fazıl. “It keeps going on and off, and every time we saw it blink from Necip’s bed, the oleander over there looked like it was on fire. Necip would frequently dream of this vision all night long. He called the vision ‘that world,’ and on mornings after sleepless nights, he’d sometimes say, ‘I watched that world all night!’ He had told the poet Ka about it, and your friend put it into his poem. I figured this out while we were watching the tape, and that’s why I brought you here. But your friend dishonored Necip by calling the poem ‘The Place Where God Does Not Exist.’ ”

“It was your friend who described this landscape to Ka as ‘the place where God does not exist,’ ” I said. “I am sure of it.”

“I do not believe that Necip died an atheist,” said Fazıl carefully. “Except, it’s true, he had doubts about himself.”

“Don’t you hear Necip’s voice inside you anymore?” I asked. “Doesn’t all this make you afraid of turning into an atheist so gradually you don’t even notice, like the man in the story?” 

Fazıl was not pleased to learn that I knew of the doubts he’d expressed to Ka four years earlier. “I’m a married man now; I have a child,” he said. “I’m no longer interested in such matters.” It must have occurred to him that he’d been treating me like someone who’d flown in from the West to lure him toward atheism, because he immediately relented. “Let’s talk about that later,” he said, in a gentle voice. “We’re expected at my father-in-law’s for dinner, and it wouldn’t be right to keep them waiting, would it?” 

But before we went downstairs he took me to a grand room that had been the main office of the Russian consulate. Pointing at the table, the chairs, and the broken raki bottles in a corner, he said, “After the roads opened, Z Demirkol and his special operations team stayed here for a few days so they could kill a few more Islamists and Kurdish nationalists.” 

Up until that moment, I’d managed to keep this part of the story out of my mind, but now it came back to me with a vengeance. I had not wanted to think about Ka’s last hours in Kars at all.

The charcoal-colored dog had been waiting for us at the garden gate and followed us back to the hotel.

“You look very upset,” said Fazıl. “What’s wrong?”

“Before we go in to eat, would you come up to my room for a moment? There’s something I’d like to give you.” 

As I took my key from Cavit, I looked through the open door of Turgut Bey’s office and saw the bright room beyond, I saw the food spread on the table, I heard the dinner guests talking and felt Ipek’s presence. In my suitcase I had the photocopies Ka had made of the love letters Necip had written to Kadife four years earlier, and when we got to my room, I gave them to Fazıl. Only much later would it occur to me that I wanted him to be as much haunted by the ghost of his friend as I was by Ka’s.

Fazıl sat on the edge of the bed to read the letters, while I went back to my suitcase to take out one of Ka’s notebooks. Opening it up to the snowflake I had first seen in Frankfurt, I saw something that a part of me must have recognized a long time ago. Ka had located “The Place Where God Does Not Exist” at the very top of the Memory axis. This suggested to me that he had been to the deserted dormitory Z Demirkol and his friends had used as their base at the tail end of the coup, had looked through Necip’s window, and so discovered, just before leaving Kars, the true origins of Necip’s landscape. All the other poems on the Memory axis referred to his childhood or his own memories of Kars. So now I too was sure of the story all of Kars had always believed to be true: After Ka had failed to persuade Kadife to give up the play, and while Ipek was sitting locked up in his room, he’d gone to pay a visit to Z Demirkol, who was waiting in his new headquarters for Ka to tell him where to find Blue.

I am sure I looked just as dazed as Fazıl at that moment. The voices of the dinner guests floated faintly up the stairs; the sighs of the sad city of Kars rose from the street. Each lost in memory, Fazıl and I bowed to the unassailable presence of our more complex, passionate, and authentic originals.

Looking out the window at the falling snow, I told Fazıl that time was passing; we really should be getting downstairs. Fazıl left first, loping off with a hangdog look as if he’d just committed a crime. I lay down on the bed and imagined Ka’s thoughts as he walked from the National Theater to the dormitory; how he must have struggled to look Z Demirkol in the eye; how, unable to furnish the exact street address, he must have ended up getting in the car with those who’d been sent for Blue, to show them the way. What sorrow I felt to imagine my friend pointing out the building in the distance. Or was it something worse? Could it be that the writer clerk was secretly delighted at the fall of the sublime poet? The thought induced such self-loathing I forced myself to think about something else.

When I went downstairs to join Turgut Bey and his other guests, I was undone anew by Ipek’s beauty. Recai Bey, the cultivated book-loving director of the electricity board, did his best to lift my spirits, as did Serdar Bey and Turgut Bey. But let me pass quickly over this long evening, during which everyone treated me with the most beautiful solicitude and I had far too much to drink. Every time I looked at Ipek sitting across the table, I felt something come loose inside me. I watched myself being interviewed on television; to see my nervous hand gestures was excruci-ating. I took out the little tape recorder I’d been carrying around Kars to record my hosts and their guests giving me their views on the city’s history, the fate of journalism here, and the night of the revolution, but I did all this in the dutiful languor of one who no longer believes in his work. As I sipped Zahide’s lentil soup, I began to imagine myself as a character in a provincial novel from the 1940s. I decided that prison had been good for Kadife; she was more mature now, more assured. No one mentioned Ka—not even his death—and this broke my heart. At one point Ipek and Kadife went into the room next door where little Ömercan was sleeping. I wanted to follow them, but by then your author had “drunk a great deal, as artists always will.” I was, in fact, too drunk to stand.

But I still have one very clear memory of that evening. At a very late hour, I told Ipek that I wanted to see Ka’s room, Room 203. Everyone at the table fell silent and turned to look at us.

“Fine,” said Ipek. “Let’s go.”

She took the key from reception, and I followed her upstairs. The room. The window, the curtains, the snow. The smell of sleep, the perfume of soap, the faint whiff of dust. The cold. As Ipek watched, still keen to give me the benefit of the doubt but not entirely trustful, I sat on the edge of the bed where my friend had passed the happiest hours of his life making love to this same woman. What if I died here, what if I declared my love to Ipek, what if I just stayed here to look out the window? They were all waiting for us, yes, they were all waiting for us at the table. I babbled a bit of nonsense that amused Ipek enough to make her smile. I remember her giving me an especially sweet smile when I uttered the mortifying words that I told her I had prepared in advance.

“Nothingmakesyouhappyinloveexceptlove . . . neitherthebooksyou-writenorthecitiesyousee . . . Iamverylonely . . . ifIsaythatIwanttobehere-inthiscityclosetoyoutilltheendofmylifewouldyoubelieveme?”

“Orhan Bey,” said Ipek, “I tried hard to love Muhtar, but it didn’t work out. I loved Blue with all my heart, but it didn’t work out. I believed I would learn to love Ka, but that didn’t work out either. I longed for a child but the child never came. I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone again, I just don’t have the heart for it. All I want to do now is look after my little nephew, Ömercan. But I’d like to thank you anyway, even though I can’t take you seriously.”

For the first time in my presence, she hadn’t said “your friend”; she used Ka’s name, and for this I thanked her effusively. Could we meet again, at noon the next day, at the New Life Pastry Shop, just to talk about Ka a little longer?