Snow (25 page)

“Stop! Don’t fire; the guns are loaded!” 

His words gave utterance to what everyone in the hall knew in his heart but still could not bring his mind to accept. Of the five shots in the first volley, one hit the plaster laurel leaves above the box where, a quarter century earlier, the last Soviet consul in Kars had watched films in the company of his dog. This bullet went wide because the soldier who had fired the shot—a Kurd from Siirt—had no wish to kill anyone. Another shot fired with similar care, though somewhat less skillfully, had hit the ceiling, sending a cloud of 110-year-old lime and paint dust snowing down on the anxious crowd below. Another bullet flew over the nest where the TV camera was perched to hit the wooden balustrade that marked off the standing room from which poor romantic Armenian girls who could afford only the cheapest tickets had once watched theater troupes, acrobats, and chamber groups from Moscow. The fourth flew into the outer reaches of the hall, beyond range of the camera; through the back of a seat it went into the shoulder of a dealer in spare parts for tractor and agricultural equipment named Muhittin Bey, who was sitting with his wife and his widowed sister-in-law and, having seen the shower of lime dust, had stood up to see whether something had fallen from the ceiling. The fifth bullet hit a grandfather sitting just behind the Islamist students; he had come from Trabzon to see his grandson, who was doing his military service in Kars; after the bullet shattered the left lens of his spectacles, it entered his brain, but the old man, luckily asleep at the time, died silently, never knowing what had happened to him. The bullet then exited from his neck and, passing through the back of his seat, pierced a bag belonging to a twelve-year-old Kurdish egg and bread vendor. The boy had been passing between the seats to give a customer his change and so was not holding the bag at the time, and the bullet was recovered later inside one of his boiled eggs.

I am relating these details to explain why it was that most people in the audience stayed so still when the soldiers opened fire. When bullets from the second volley hit a student in the temple, the neck, and in the upper chest, just above the heart, most assumed that he was putting on another show, an encore to his terrifying but entertaining show of courage moments earlier. One of the two remaining bullets went into the chest of a relatively subdued religious high school student sitting in the back (it was later revealed that his aunt’s daughter was the city’s first suicide girl); the last struck two meters over the projection booth, hitting the face of the clock, which, having stopped working sixty years earlier, was now covered with dust and spiderwebs. According to the colonel in charge of the inquiry, the fact that one of the bullets from the second volley had hit the clock was proof that one of the marksmen chosen that evening at sunset for the assignment had violated the oath he’d sworn with his hand on the Koran: Clearly he had gone out of his way to avoid killing someone. As for the fiery Islamist student killed in the third volley, the colonel would mention in a parenthesis the careful consideration that had been given to the lawsuit that the family had brought against the state, in which it had been alleged that the lad had been not just a student but also a hardworking devoted employee of the Kars branch of MIT; but in the end the colonel found insufficient grounds for the award of damages. Of the last two bullets in this same volley, one hit Reza Bey, who had built the fountain in the Kaleiçi district and who was much loved by all the conservatives and Islamists in the city; the other struck the servant he used as his walking stick.

And so it is finally not easy to explain how so many in the audience could have remained still, watching these two lifelong friends moaning and dying on the floor as the soldiers onstage cocked their rifles for the fourth time. Years later, a dairy owner who still refused to let me use his name explained it this way: “Those of us who were sitting in the back knew something terrible had happened. But we were afraid that if we moved from our seats to get a better look, the terror would find us, so we just sat there watching without making a sound.” Even the colonel was unable to determine where all of the bullets from the fourth volley had gone. One had wounded a young salesman who had come to Kars from Ankara to sell parlor games and encyclopedias on the installment plan (he would bleed to death in the hospital two hours later). Another bullet had blown a huge hole in the lower facing wall of the private box where, in the first decade of the twentieth century, Kirkor Çizmeciyan, a wealthy leather manufacturer, had sat with his family, dressed from head to toe in fur. According to one tall tale, the bullet that hit one of Necip’s green eyes and the other that hit his wide smooth forehead did not kill him instantaneously; some eyewitnesses claimed that for a moment the teenager had looked at the stage and cried, “I can see!”

By the time the shouting and screaming had stopped, almost everyone—including those rushing for the door—crumpled. Even the TV cameraman was forced to throw himself against a back wall: His camera, which had been panning right and left all evening, now stood still. The only thing the viewers at home could see was the crowd on the stage and the silent respectable notables in the front rows. Even so, most city residents had heard enough shouting, screaming, and gunfire to realize that something very strange was going on at the National Theater. As for those who had grown bored with the play toward midnight and begun to doze off in front of their televisions, by the last eighteen seconds of the gun battle even their eyes were glued to the screen—and to Sunay Zaim. “O heroic soldiers, you have done your duty,” he said. Then, with an elegant gesture, he turned to Funda Eser, still lying on the floor, and made an exaggerated bow. Taking the hand of her savior, the woman rose.

A retired civil servant in the front row stood up to applaud. A few others sitting nearby joined in. There was scattered applause from the back, from people presumably in the habit of clapping at anything—or perhaps they were scared. The rest of the hall was silent as ice. Like someone waking up following a long bender, a few even seemed relaxed and allowed themselves weak smiles. It was as if they’d decided that the dead bodies before their eyes belonged to the dream world of the stage; a number of those who had ducked for cover now had their heads in the air but then cowered again at the sound of Sunay’s voice.

“This is not a play; it is the beginning of a revolution,” he said re-proachfully. “We are prepared to go to any lengths to protect our fatherland. Put your faith in the great and honorable Turkish army! Soldiers! Bring them over.”

Two soldiers escorted the two round-bearded “fundamentalists.” As the other soldiers cocked their guns and descended into the auditorium, a strange man rushed forward onto the stage. It was clear from the unbecoming speed of his approach and his awkward body language that he was neither a soldier nor an actor. But he still had everyone’s attention. Quite a few people were hoping he would reveal that it was all one great big joke.

“Long live the Republic!” he cried. “Long live the army! Long live the Turkish people! Long live Atatürk!” Slowly, very slowly, the curtains began to close. He took two steps forward, as did Sunay Zaim; the curtain closed behind them. The strange man was carrying a gun manufactured in Kırıkkale; he was wearing civilian clothes with military boots. “To hell with the fundamentalists!” he cried, as he walked down the steps into the auditorium. Two armed guards appeared to follow him. But the three strangers did not head to the back of the hall (where the soldiers were busy arresting the boys from the religious high school); without paying any attention to their terrified audience, they kept shouting slogans as they rushed for the exits and disappeared into the night.

The three men were in tremendously high spirits. Only at the very last minute, after lengthy discussion and bargaining, had it been agreed that they too could take part in the performance that was to begin “the little revolution of Kars.” They’d met with Sunay Zaim on the night of his arrival, and he had resisted the proposal for an entire day, fearing that the involvement of shady armed adventurers would ruin the artistic integrity of his play; but in the end he could not resist the argument that he might need a man experienced with guns to control any lowlifes in the audience who were unlikely to appreciate the nuances of “modern art.” It was later said that he felt great remorse at his decision during the hours that followed, and great pangs of passion in the face of the bloodshed caused by this band in tramp’s clothing; but as is so often the case, most of this was only rumor.

* * *

When I visited Kars years later, I had a tour of what had once been the National Theater. Half the building had been torn down; the other half had been turned into a warehouse for the Arçelik dealership. The owner, Muhtar Bey, was my guide; and it was, I think, to deflect my questions about the evening of the performance and the ensuing terror that he told me how Kars had been witness to an endless string of murders, massacres, and other evils dating all the way back to the time of the Armenians. If I wanted to bring some happiness to the people of Kars, he said, I should, upon returning to Istanbul, ignore the sins of the city’s past and write instead about the beautiful clean air and the inhabitants’

kind hearts. As we stood in the dark and mildewy auditorium-turned-warehouse surrounded by the ghostlike forms of refrigerators, stoves, and washing machines, he pointed out the sole remaining trace of that last performance: the huge gaping hole made by the bullet that had hit the outside wall of Kirkor Çizmeciyan’s private box.

And How Beautiful Was the Falling Snow
 

the night of the revolution

The leader of the boisterous trio that ran shouting into the auditorium waving pistols and rifles at the cowering audience, only to vanish into the night, was a writer and an old Communist whose alias was Z Demirkol. During the seventies he belonged to various pro-Soviet Communist organizations, and although he worked as a journalist and poet, he was best known as a bodyguard. He was a rather large man. He’d escaped to Germany after the military takeover in 1980; after the Berlin Wall came down, he received a special pardon and returned to Turkey to help defend the secular state and the Republic against Kurdish separatist guerillas and Islamist fundamentalists. The two men behind him had once been Turkish nationalist militants, former comrades of Z Demirkol himself in nighttime street battles in Istanbul during his Marxist years between 1979 and 1980, but now they had put all this behind them, gal-vanized by their adventurism and their mission to protect the nation state. Some cynics claimed that the threesome had been agents of the state from the very beginning anyway. When they rushed down from the stage and bolted out of the National Theater, no one thought much about them; it was just assumed they were part of the play.

When Z Demirkol saw how much snow there was on the ground, he jumped up and down like a child; firing two shots in the air, he cried, “Long live the Turkish people! Long live the Republic!” The crowd gathered at the entrance retreated to the sides. A few stood watching the men and smiling fearfully; some looked embarrassed, as if they were about to apologize for not staying longer. Z Demirkol and his friends ran up Atatürk Avenue, still shouting slogans and calling to one another like giddy drunks. A few old people struggling through the snow and a few of the fathers guiding their families home decided, after a few moments of indecision, to applaud them.

The happy trio caught up with Ka at the corner of Little Kâzımbey Avenue. They could see that he had seen them coming; he had stepped back under the oleander trees, as if to let a car pass.

“Mr. Poet!” cried Z Demirkol. “You’ve got to kill them before they kill you. Do you understand?”

Ka still had had no opportunity to write down the poem to which he would later give the title “The Place Where God Does Not Exist,” and it was at this moment that he forgot it.

Z Demirkol and his friends continued running straight up Atatürk Avenue. Not wishing to follow them, Ka turned right into Karada˘g Avenue, realizing that the poem had vanished, leaving not a fragment in its wake.

He felt the sort of guilt and shame he had once known as a young man leaving political meetings. Those political meetings had disturbed him not only because he was an upper-middle-class boy but because the discussions were so full of childish posturing and exaggeration. Hoping to find a way to bring back his forgotten poem, he decided to continue walking instead of going straight back to the hotel.

A few people alarmed at what they’d just seen on television were at their windows. It’s difficult to say how much Ka was aware of the terrors at the theater. The volleys had begun before he left, but it’s possible he too thought they were part of the performance, and that Z Demirkol and his friends were part of it as well.

His mind was fixated on his forgotten poem. But sensing another coming in its stead, he willed it into the back of his mind to give it time to ripen.

He heard two gunshots in the far distance, muffled by the snow.

And how beautiful was the falling snow! How large the snowflakes were, and how decisive. It was as if they knew their silent procession would continue until the end of time. The wide avenue was buried knee-deep; it climbed up a slope to disappear into the night. How white and how mysterious! There wasn’t a soul in the three-story Armenian building that now housed the city council. The icicles from one of the oleander trees reached down as low as the snow blanket draping an invisible car; the snow and ice had merged to form a tulle curtain. Ka passed an empty one-story Armenian house, its windows boarded up. As he listened to his footsteps and the sound of his own short breaths, he could feel the call of life and happiness as if for the first time, yet he also felt strong enough to turn his back on it.

Across the street from the governor’s residence, the little park with the statue of Atatürk was empty. Ka could see no sign of life in the residence itself, which dated back to the Russian period and was still the city’s grandest building. Seventy years earlier, after the First World War, when both the Ottoman and Imperial Russian armies had withdrawn and the Turks of Kars had established an independent state, this building housed both the administrative center and the assembly. Just across the street was the old Armenian building that had been attacked by the English army because it was the same doomed republic’s presidential palace. The governor’s residence was well guarded, so Ka avoided the building by turning right again and looping back toward the park. A little farther down the road, in front of another old Armenian building just as peaceful and beautiful as the rest, a tank moved past an adjoining empty lot, slow and silent, as if in a dream. Ahead, an army truck was parked near the religious high school. There was almost no snow on it, so Ka deduced it had only just arrived. There was a gunshot. Ka turned back. The sentry station in front of the governor’s residence was full of policemen trying to warm themselves, but with the windows iced over no one saw Ka walking by down Army Avenue. He knew now that if he could remain within the silence of the snow until he reached his hotel room, he’d be able to preserve not just the new poem in his head but the memory that had emerged with it.