Snow (66 page)

She was sorry to say she’d be busy. But, still determined to be a good host, she promised that she and the rest of the family would come to see me off at the station the following evening.

I thanked her and then confessed I hadn’t the strength to return to the dinner table (I was also afraid I might start crying), whereupon I threw myself on the bed and passed out.

* * *

The next morning I managed to leave the hotel unnoticed and spent the day walking around the city, first with Muhtar and later on with Serdar Bey and Fazıl. As I’d hoped, my appearance on the evening news had put the people of Kars at ease about talking to me, so I was able to gather up many essential details that clarified the end of my story. Muhtar introduced me to the owner of the
Lance
, the first political Islamist newspaper in Kars (circulation seventy-five); I also met the retired pharmacist who was the paper’s managing editor, though he arrived for our meeting quite late. The two men went on to tell me that the antidemocratic measures launched against it had sent the Kars Islamic movement into retreat, and even the popular demand for a religious high school was waning. Only after they had finished speaking did I remember how Fazıl and Necip had once plotted to kill this aging pharmacist after he had twice kissed Necip in an odd manner.

The owner of the Hotel Asia was now writing for the
Lance
, and when we turned to the discussion of recent events, he remembered how thankful he was that the man who had assassinated the Institute of Education director four years earlier had not been from Kars, a detail I’d somehow managed to forget. The assassin, he said, had turned out to be a teahouse operator from Tokat; it was later proved that he had committed another murder around the same time using the same weapon; when the ballistic reports came back from Ankara, the man from Tokat was charged with the murder, and he confessed that it was Blue who’d invited him to Kars. A brief submitted at trial claimed he had suffered a nervous breakdown, so the judge sent him to the Bakirköy Mental Hospital, and when they released him three years later, he decided to make his home in Istanbul, where he now ran the Merry Tokat Teahouse and wrote columns on the civil rights of head-scarf girls for the newspaper
Covenant.

The cause of the head-scarf girls in Kars had been greatly weakened four years earlier, when Kadife bared her head, and although it now showed signs of resurgence, so many girls involved in the court cases had been expelled, and so many others had transferred to universities in other cities, that the Kars movement had yet to show the dynamism of those in Istanbul; Hande’s family refused to see me.

The fireman with the strong baritone who’d been yanked into the television station the morning after the revolution to sing Turkish folk songs had gained such a following that he was now the star of his own weekly program on Kars Border Television,
Songs of the Turkish Borderlands.
They taped it on Tuesday and aired it on Friday evening; the music-loving janitor from Kars General Hospital (a close personal friend and one of His Excellency Sheikh Saadettin’s most devoted followers) accompanied him on a rhythmic
saz.

Serdar Bey also introduced me to “Glasses,” the young boy who’d appeared onstage on the night of the revolution. Forbidden by his father ever to appear onstage again, even for a school play, Glasses was now a grown man, and he still worked as a newspaper distributor. He brought me up-to-date on the Kars socialists who depended on the Istanbul papers for their news. Still stouthearted admirers of the Islamists and the Kurdish nationalists who were prepared to lay down their lives to oppose the state, they occasionally issued indecisive statements that no one bothered to read. These days their activities amounted to little more than sitting around bragging about the heroes they’d been and the sacrifices they’d made as younger men.

It seemed that almost everyone I met on my walks around Kars was waiting for just such a hero, some great man ready to make the large sacrifices that would deliver them all from poverty, unemployment, confusion, and murder; perhaps because I was a novelist of some repute, the whole city, it seems, had been hoping that I might be that great man they’d been waiting for. Alas, I was to disappoint them with my bad Istanbul habits, my absentmindedness and lack of organization, my self-regard, my obsession with my project, and my haste; what’s more, they let me know it.

There was Maruf the tailor, who, having told me his life story in the Unity Teahouse, said I should have agreed to come home with him to meet his nephews and drink with them; I should also have planned to stay two more days to attend the Conference of Atatürk Youth on Thursday evening; I should have smoked every cigarette and drunk every glass of tea offered me in a spirit of friendship (I almost did).

Fazıl’s father had an army friend from Varto who told me that in the past four years most Kurdish militants had either been killed or thrown into prison; no one was joining the guerillas anymore. As for the young Kurds who’d attended the meeting at the Hotel Asia, they’d all abandoned the city, though at the Sunday-evening cockfight I saw Zahide’s grandson the gambler, who greeted me warmly and shared some of his raki, which we sipped surreptitiously out of tea glasses.

By now it was getting late, so I made my way back to the hotel, plod-ding slowly through the snow like a traveler without a friend in the world although laden with all its sorrows. I still had plenty of time before my departure, but I was hoping to leave without being seen and went straight up to my room to pack.

As I was leaving through the kitchen door, I met Saffet the detective. He was retired now, but he still came every night for Zahide’s soup. He recognized me straightaway from my television interview and said he had things he wanted to tell me. At the Unity Teahouse, he told me that while he was officially retired he still worked for the state on a casual basis; there was, after all, no such thing as retirement for a detective in Kars. He’d been dispatched because the city’s intelligence services were keen to know what I was trying to dig up here (was it to do with the “Armenian thing,” the Kurdish rebels, the religious associations, the political parties?). Smiling graciously, he added that if I could tell him my true business, I’d be helping him make a little money.

Choosing my words carefully, I told him about Ka; I reminded him that he had followed my friend step by step around the city during his visit four years earlier. What did he remember about him? I asked.

“He was a man who cared about people, and he loved dogs too—a good man,” he said. “But his mind was still in Germany, and he was very introverted. No one here likes Ka these days.” 

For a long time we remained silent. Hoping he might know something, but still apprehensive, I finally asked about Blue, and I discovered that a year ago, just as I was now here asking about Ka, several young Islamists had come from Istanbul to ask about Blue, this enemy of the state. They left without finding his grave, probably because the corpse had been dumped into the sea from an airplane, to keep his burial site from becoming a place of pilgrimage.

When Fazıl came to join us at the table, he said he’d heard similar stories; he’d also heard that those same young Islamists were following the same path Blue had taken on his own pilgrimage. They’d escaped to Germany, where they founded a fast-growing radical Islamist group in Berlin; according to Fazıl’s old classmates from the religious high school, they’d written a statement—published on the first page of a German-based journal called
Pilgrimage
—in which they’d vowed revenge against those responsible for Blue’s death. It was this group, we guessed, that had killed Ka. Perhaps the only existing manuscript of his book was now in Berlin, in the hands of Blue’s Pilgrims—or so I imagined for a moment as I gazed out at the snow.

At that point another policeman joined us at the table to tell me that all the gossip about him was untrue. “I don’t have gray eyes!” he said. He had no idea what it meant to have gray eyes. He’d loved the late Teslime with all his heart, and if she hadn’t committed suicide they would certainly have married. It was then I remembered from Ka’s notebooks how, four years ago, Saffet had confiscated Fazıl’s student identity card at the public library. It occurred to me that both Saffet and Fazıl had long forgotten the transaction.

When Fazıl and I returned to the snowy streets, the two policemen came out with us—whether in a spirit of friendship or professional curiosity, I couldn’t tell—and as we walked, they spoke unbidden about their lives, the emptiness of life in general, the pain of love and growing old. Neither had a hat, and when the snowflakes landed on each man’s thinning white hair, they didn’t melt. When I asked whether the city was now even poorer and emptier than four years earlier, Fazıl said everyone had been watching a lot more television in recent years, and that, rather than spend their days sitting in a teahouse, the unemployed now preferred to sit at home watching free films beamed from all over the world by satellite. Everyone in the city had scrimped and saved up to buy these white dishes about the size of stewpot lids now hitched to the edge of every window; this, he said, was the only new development in the city.

We stopped off at the New Life Pastry Shop, where we each bought one of the delicious nut-filled crescent rolls that had cost the director of the Institute of Education his life: It would be our evening meal. When the police had ascertained that we were heading for the station, they said their farewells, and as Fazıl and I walked on past shuttered shops, empty teahouses, abandoned Armenian mansions, and brightly glistening shop windows, I looked up from time to time at the snow-laden branches of the chestnut and poplar trees above streets unevenly illuminated by the odd neon light. We took the side streets since the police weren’t following us. The snow, which had given signs of abating, now began to fall more thickly. It may have been the emptiness of the streets, or it may have been my pain at the prospect of leaving Kars, but I began to feel guilty, as if I were somehow abandoning Fazıl to solitary life in this empty city. I could see that the icicles hanging from the bare branches of two oleander trees had intertwined to form a tulle curtain; in a nest of ice I saw a sparrow fluttering; it took off into swirls of giant snowflakes and flew away over our heads. The blanket of fresh white snow had buried the empty streets in a silence so deep that, apart from our footsteps, all we could hear was our own breathing. The longer we walked, the more labored and thunderous our breathing became, the shops and houses remaining silent as a dream.

I stopped for a moment in the middle of a street to watch a single snowflake fall through the night to its ultimate resting place. At that same moment, Fazıl pointed above the entrance of the Divine Light Teahouse: There, high up on the wall, was a faintly lettered poster, now four years old:

HUMAN BEINGS ARE GOD’S MASTERPIECES

AND

SUICIDE IS BLASPHEMY

“This teahouse is popular with the police, so no one dared touch that poster,” said Fazıl.

“Do you feel as if you’re God’s masterpiece?” I asked.

“No. Only Necip was God’s masterpiece. Ever since God took his life, I’ve let go my anxieties about atheism and my desire to love God more. May God forgive me.”

The snowflakes falling so slowly now seemed suspended in the sky, and we did not speak again until we’d reached the train station. The beautiful stone station house, the early republican structure I’d mentioned in
The Black Book
, was gone now; they’d replaced it with the typical concrete monstrosity. We found Muhtar and the charcoal-colored dog waiting for us.

Ten minutes before the train’s scheduled departure, Serdar Bey arrived with some back issues of the
Border City Gazette
that mentioned Ka. Giving them to me, he asked me if I could take care not to say anything bad about Kars or its troubles, the city or its people, when I wrote my book. When he saw Serdar Bey bringing out a present, a nervous, almost guilty-looking Muhtar handed me a plastic shopping bag; inside was a bottle of cologne, a little wheel of the famous Kars cheese, and a signed copy of his first poetry collection, printed in Erzurum at his own expense.

I bought my ticket and a sandwich for the little dog my friend had mentioned in his poem. The dog wagged his curly tail happily as he approached me, and I was still feeding him the sandwich when I saw Turgut Bey and Kadife rushing into the station. They’d only just heard from Zahide that I’d gone. We exchanged a few pleasantries about the ticket agent, the journey, the snow. Turgut Bey reached shamefacedly into his pocket and pulled out a new edition of
First Love
, the Turgenev novel he’d translated from the French while he was in prison. Ömercan was sitting on Kadife’s lap, and I stroked his head. His mother’s head was wrapped in one of her elegant Istanbul scarves, and the snow it had collected was falling from the edges. Afraid to look too long into his wife’s beautiful eyes, I turned back to Fazıl and asked him whether he knew now what he might want to say to my readers if ever I was to write a book set in Kars.

“Nothing.” His voice was determined.

When he saw my face fall, he relented. “I did think of something, but you may not like it,” he said. “If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I’d like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away.”

“But no one believes in that way what he reads in a novel,” I said.

“Oh, yes, they do,” he cried. “If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you would put in what I’ve just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds.” 

I promised I would put what he’d said into my novel.

When Kadife saw me eyeing the station entrance, she came toward me. “I hear you have a beautiful little daughter called Rüya,” she said. “My sister isn’t coming, but she asked me to send warm wishes to you and your daughter. And I brought you this memento of my short theatrical career.” She gave me a photograph of herself with Sunay Zaim on the stage of the National Theater.