Snow (22 page)

“No one’s looking now. Give them to me quickly, and then tell me about that landscape.”

“The letters are here, but I don’t have them on me. I was afraid they’d search me at the door. My friends might have searched me too. If you go through that door next to the stage, you’ll see a toilet at the far end of the corridor. Meet me there in exactly twenty minutes.”

“Is that when you’ll tell me about the landscape?”

“One of them is coming toward us now,” said Necip, looking away. “I know him. Don’t look in his direction, just act like we’re having a normal casual conversation.”

“All right.”

“Everyone in Kars is very curious to know why you’ve come here. They think you’re on a secret government mission or else you’ve been sent here by the Western powers. My friends sent me over to ask you if these things are true. Are the rumors true?”

“No, they’re not.”

“What shall I tell them? Why have you come?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do know, but once again you’re too ashamed to admit it.” There was a silence. “You came here because you were unhappy,” said Necip.

“How can you tell?”

“From your eyes; I’ve never seen anyone look so unhappy. . . . I’m not at all happy right now either, but at least I’m young. Unhappiness gives me strength. At my age, I’d rather be unhappy than happy. The only people who can be happy in Kars are the idiots and the villains. But by the time I’m your age, I want to be able to wrap my life in happiness.”

“My unhappiness protects me from life,” said Ka. “Don’t worry about me.”

“Oh. You’re not angry at me for what I said, are you? There’s something so nice in your face I feel I can tell you whatever comes into my head, even if it’s really stupid. If I said things like this to my friends, they’d mock me without mercy.”

“Even Fazıl?”

“Fazıl’s different. If someone does something bad to me, he goes after them, and he always knows what I’m thinking. Now you say something. Someone’s watching us.”

“Who’s watching us?” Ka asked. He looked at the crowds milling behind the seating area: a man with a pear-shaped head, two pimply youths, beetle-browed teenagers in ragged clothes; they were all facing the stage now, and some were swaying like drunks.

“Looks like I’m not the only one who’s had too much to drink tonight,” Ka muttered.

“They drink because they’re unhappy,” said Necip. “But you got drunk so you could resist the hidden happiness rising inside you.” 

As he uttered these words, he plunged back into the crowd. Ka wasn’t sure he’d heard him correctly. But despite the noise and commotion around him, his mind was still; he felt relaxed, as if he were listening to his favorite music. Someone waved at him, drawing his eye to a few empty seats reserved for the performing artists; someone from the theater troop—a well-mannered but rather rough-looking stagehand—showed him where to sit.

* * *

Years later, in a video I found in the archives of Kars Border Television, I was able to see what Ka then saw onstage. It was a send-up of a well known bank advertisement, but as it had been years since Ka had watched Turkish television, he could not tell whether they were making fun or just imitating. Even so, he could tell that the man who had gone into the bank to make a deposit was an outrageous dandy, a parody of a Westerner. When it performed in towns even smaller and more remote than Kars, in teahouses never frequented by women or government officials, Sunay Zaim’s Brechtian and Bakhtinian theater company made this piece much more obscene, with the bank-card-carrying dandy played as a raving queen who reduced audiences to helpless laughter. In the next sketch, featuring a mustachioed man dressed up as a woman pouring Kelidor shampoo and conditioner onto her hair, it took Ka some time to work out that the actor was Sunay Zaim himself. Just as he did in those remote teahouses when he decided to bring some relief to his poor and angry all-male audiences with an “anticapitalist catharsis,” he treated tonight’s audience to a string of obscenities as he pretended to stick the long shampoo bottle into his back passage. Later still, Sunay’s wife, Funda Eser, did a spoof of a much-loved sausage advertisement. Weigh-ing a coil of sausages in her hand in a decidedly lewd fashion, she asked, “Is it a horse or a donkey?” and then she ran offstage before taking things further.

Vural, the famous goalkeeper from the sixties, returned to the stage to continue his account of the infamous soccer match in Istanbul when the English got eleven goals past him, as well as the details of various allegations of match-fixing and of the love affairs he’d had with famous film stars during the same period. It was a rich assortment of masochistic pleasures that his stories gave the audience, and everyone had a chance to smile at the misery of the Turk.

Where God Does Not Exist

necip describes his landscape and ka recites his poem

Twenty minutes later, Ka went down the chilly corridor to the men’s room, where Necip was standing among the men facing the urinals. For a time they stood together at the back of a line for the locked stalls in front of them, acting as if they’d never met. Ka took this opportunity to admire the molding of the high ceiling, garlands of roses and leaves.

When their turn came, they went into the same stall. Ka noticed that a toothless old man was watching them. After bolting the door from the inside, Necip said, “They didn’t see us.” He gave Ka a warm but quick embrace. Using a small protrusion as a foothold to hoist himself up the wall, he reached up and retrieved several envelopes from atop the water tank. Back on the floor, he gently blew the dust off the envelopes.

“When you give these letters to Kadife, I want you to say just one thing,” he said. “I’ve given this a great deal of thought. From the moment she reads these letters, I will neither hope nor expect to have anything to do with Kadife for the rest of my life. I want you to tell her this. Make it clear to her, so that she understands exactly what I mean.”

“If she is to find out that you’re in love with her at the very moment she discovers that there isn’t any hope in it, why tell her at all?”

“Unlike you, I’m not afraid of life or my passions,” said Necip. Worried that he might have upset Ka, he added, “These letters are all I care about: I can’t live without being passionately in love with someone or something beautiful. Now I have to find love and happiness elsewhere. But first I have to get Kadife out of my head.” He gave the letters to Ka. “Shall I tell you who it is I plan to love with all my heart after Kadife?” 

“Who?” Ka asked, as he put the letters into his pocket.

“God.”

“Tell me about that landscape you see.”

“First open that window! It’s smells really bad in here.” Ka fiddled with the rusty latch until he got it open. For a time they stood there dumbstruck, as if witnessing a miracle, watching the endless stream of snowflakes sailing silently through the night.

“How beautiful the universe is!” Necip whispered. 

“What would you say is the most beautiful part of life?” Ka asked.

There was a silence. “All of it!” said Necip, as if he were betraying a secret.

“But doesn’t life make us unhappy?”

“We do that to ourselves. It has nothing to do with the universe or its creator.”

“Tell me about that landscape.”

“First put your hand on my forehead and tell me my future,” said Necip. His eyes opened wide, one of them to be shattered twenty-six minutes later, along with his brain. “I want to live a long full life, and I know many wonderful things are going to happen to me. But I don’t know what I’ll be thinking twenty years from now, and that’s what I’m curious about.”

Ka pressed the palm of his right hand against Necip’s smooth forehead. “Oh my God!” He pulled his hand away mockingly, as if he’d touched something burning hot. “There’s a lot going on in there.”

“Tell me.”

“In twenty years’ time—in other words, when you’re thirty-seven years old—you will have understood at last that all the evil in the world—I mean the poverty and ignorance of the poor and the cunning and lavish-ness of the rich—and all the vulgarity in the world, and all the violence, and all the brutality—I mean all the things that make you feel guilty and think of suicide—by the time you’re thirty-seven you’ll know that all these things are the result of everyone’s thinking alike,” Ka said. “Therefore, just as so many in this place have done idiotic things and died in the guise of decency, you’ll discover that you can actually become a good person while appearing to be shameless and evil. But you know this may have terrible consequences. Because what I feel under my trembling hand is . . .”

“What’s that?”

“You’re very bright, and even at this age you know what I’m talking about. That’s why I want you to tell me first.”

“Tell you what?”

“The reason why you feel so guilty about the misery of the poor. I know you know what it is, but you must say it.”

“You’re not saying—God forbid—that I will no longer believe in God?” said Necip. “If that’s what you mean, I’d rather die.”

“It’s not going to happen overnight, the way it did to that poor director in the elevator! It’s going to happen so slowly you’ll hardly even notice. And because you’ll have been dying so slowly, having been in this other world so long, you’ll be just like the drunk who realizes he’s dead only after he’s had one raki too many.”

“Is that what you’re like?”

Ka took his hand off Necip’s forehead. “No, I’m just the opposite. I must have started believing in God years ago. This happened so slowly, it wasn’t until I arrived in Kars that I noticed it. That’s why I’m so happy here, and why I’m able to write poems again.”

“You surely seem happy right now, and wise,” said Necip, “so I’m wondering if you can answer this question: Can a human being really know the future? And even if he can’t, can he find peace by convincing himself that he does know the future? This is perfect for my first science-fiction novel.”

“Some people do know the future,” said Ka. “Take Serdar Bey, owner of the
Border City Gazette
—he printed the story of this evening way in advance.” Ka fished his copy of the paper from his pocket and together they read, “The entertainments were punctuated by enthusiastic clapping and applause.”

“This must be what they mean by happiness,” said Necip. “We could be the poets of our own lives if only we could first write about what shall be and later enjoy the marvels we have written. In the paper it says you read your most recent poem. Which one is that?” 

Someone banged on the door of the stall. Ka asked Necip to tell him quickly about “that landscape.”

“I’ll tell you now,” said Necip, “but you have to promise not to tell anyone else. They don’t like my fraternizing with you.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” Ka said. “Tell me what you see.”

“I love God a lot,” said Necip, in an agitated voice. “Sometimes, when I ask myself what would happen if, God forbid, God didn’t exist—I do this sometimes without even meaning to—a terrifying landscape appears before my eyes.”

“Yes.”

“I see this landscape at night, in darkness, through a window. Outside there are two blind white walls, as tall as the walls of a castle. Like two castles back to back! There is only the narrowest passageway between them, which stretches into the distance like a road, and when I look down this road I am overcome with fear. The road where God does not exist is as snowy and muddy as the roads in Kars, but it’s all purple! There’s something in the middle of the road that tells me ‘Stop!’ but I still can’t keep myself from looking right down to the end of the road, to the place where this world ends. Right at the end of this world, I can see a tree, one last tree, and it’s bare and leafless. Then, because I’m looking at it, it turns bright red and bursts into flame. It’s at this point that I begin to feel very guilty for being so curious about the land where God does not exist. Then, just as suddenly, the red tree turns back to black. I tell myself, I’d better not look again, but I can’t help it, I do look again, and the tree at the end of the world starts burning red once more. This goes on until morning.”

“What is it about this landscape that scares you so much?”

“I can’t help thinking that it’s the devil making me think such a landscape could be of this world. But if I can make something come to life before my eyes, the source must be my own imagination. Because if there really were a place like this on earth, it would mean that God—God forbid—didn’t exist. And since this can’t be true, the only possible explanation is that I myself don’t believe in God. And that would be worse than death.”

“I understand,” said Ka.

“I looked it up in an encyclopedia once, and it said that the word
atheist
comes from the Greek
athos.
But
athos
doesn’t refer to people who don’t believe in God; it refers to the lonely ones, people whom the gods have abandoned. This proves that people can’t ever really be atheists, because even if we wanted it, God would never abandon us here. To become an atheist, then, you must first become a Westerner.”

“I wanted to be a Westerner
and
a believer,” said Ka.

“A man could be at the coffeehouse every evening laughing and playing cards with his friends, he could have so much fun with his classmates that there is never a moment when they aren’t exploding into laughter, he could spend every hour of the day chatting with his intimates, but if that man has been abandoned by God, he’d still be the loneliest man on earth.”

“It might be of some consolation to have a true love,” said Ka.

“But only if she loved you as much as you loved her.” 

There was another knock on the door, and Necip put his arms around Ka, kissing him like a child on both cheeks before he left the stall. Ka caught a glimpse of the man who had been waiting, now running into the other toilet, so he bolted the door again, lit a cigarette, and watched the wondrous snow still falling outside. He thought about Necip’s landscape—he could remember his description word for word, as if it were already a poem—and if no one came from Porlock he was sure he would soon be writing that poem in his notebook.