Snow (41 page)

I know I risk offending those poor souls who insist on seeing poets as saintly or metaphysical when I suggest that my friend spent the last four years engrossed by this adult entertainment. But as I wandered the World Sex Center hunting for videos of Melinda, it seemed to me that Ka had just one thing in common with these hordes of miserable men, lonely as ghosts. It was the habit of answering his guilt by retreating into the shadows when he would watch these films. In the cinemas around New York’s 42nd Street, Frankfurt’s Kaiserstrasse, and the back streets of Beyo˘glu, the lonely, lost men who watch their films with shame and self-loathing, struggling to avoid one another’s eyes at intermissions, these men, in defiance of all national stereotypes and anthropological distinctions, in fact look exactly the same. I left the World Sex Center with my black plastic bag full of Melinda videos and walked back through the giant snowflakes down the empty streets to my hotel.

I had two more whiskeys at the makeshift bar in the lobby, and while I waited for them to take effect I looked outside at the falling snow. I decided that if I did manage to get tipsy again I’d take a break from Melinda and Ka’s notebooks. But the moment I reached my room, I picked up one of Ka’s notebooks at random, lay down on the bed without pausing to undress, and began to read. On the third—or was it the fourth?—page I found the snowflake reproduced below.

When Can We Meet Again?

a short spell of happiness

After Ka and Ipek had made love, they stayed in bed with their arms around each other; for a time, neither moved. The world was shrouded in silence.

Ka’s happiness was so great that the embrace seemed to last a very long time. This alone explains why he was seized with a sudden impatience and sprang from the bed to go look out the window. Later on, he would come to see their long shared silence as his happiest memory and would ask himself why he should have brought this unequaled bliss to an abrupt end, pulling himself out of Ipek’s arms. The answer is that he allowed panic to overtake him. It was as if something were about to happen on the other side of the window, in the snowy street, and he needed to be there before it did.

But there was nothing to see outside the window, apart from the falling snow. The electricity was still off, but there was a candle burning in the icy window of the kitchen downstairs, casting an orange light on the thick snow outside. Much later, it would occur to Ka that he had cut short the happiest moment of his life because he couldn’t bear to be so happy. But in the beginning, as he lay in bed with Ipek’s arms around him, he didn’t even know how happy he was; he felt at peace with the world, and this sense of peace seemed so natural that he had a hard time remembering why so much of his life up until this point had been sorrow and tumult. The peace he felt was like the silence that presaged a poem, but on those times before a poem came to him he would see the meaning of life stripped bare, a vision that also brought him joy. There was no such moment of enlightenment in this happy memory of Ipek; it had about it a simple childish purity, like that of a child with the words to explain the meaning of the world on the very tip of his tongue.

One by one, he recalled the facts about snow he had read in the library that afternoon; he had gone to prepare himself just in case another poem on the subject came to him. But his head was empty of poetry. Although his poems had come to him one by one, he now saw that they all fit together as neatly as the six-pointed snowflake in the encyclopedia. It was at this moment he had the first intimation that his poems were all part of a grand design.

“What are you doing over there?” Ipek asked.

“I’m looking at the snow, dear.”

It seemed to him that Ipek somehow knew he could see more than just beauty in the geometry of the snowflakes, but at the same time he knew this could not be so. Part of him knew she was not altogether happy to see his attention drawn elsewhere. Up to now he had been the pursuer, and his evident desire had made him feel uncomfortably vulnerable, so Ka was pleased to see the tables turned: From this he deduced that making love had gained him a slight advantage.

“What are you thinking?” asked Ipek.

“I’m thinking about my mother,” said Ka, at first not knowing why he said this, for though she had just died, his mother was actually far from his thoughts. Later, returning to this moment, he would explain it by saying, “My mother was on my mind throughout my visit to Kars.”

“So what are you remembering about your mother?”

“I am remembering how we were standing at the window one winter night, looking out at the snow, and she ran her hands through my hair.”

“Were you happy when you were a child?”

“People don’t know when they’re happy, at least not at the moment. I decided years later that I’d been happy as a child, but the truth is, I wasn’t.

On the other hand, I was not unhappy in the way I was during the years that followed. I just wasn’t interested in happiness at first.”

“When did you start becoming interested?” 

Ka longed to say
never
but he didn’t, partly because it wasn’t true and partly because it seemed too aggressive. He was still tempted, if only because it might impress Ipek, but there were weightier things on his mind now than the desire to make an impression.

“A moment arrived when I was so unhappy I could barely move, and that’s when I began to think about happiness,” Ka told her. Was this the right thing for him to say? The silence made him uneasy. If he told her how unhappy he’d been in Frankfurt, how in the world would he convince her to go back there with him? As a wild and nervous wind scattered the snowflakes outside, the panic that had driven Ka from the bed now returned with a vengeance, and more fiercely than ever his stomach ached with love and the agony of waiting. The happiness he’d felt only moments earlier now gave way to the awful certainty that he was going to lose it. In the place of happiness, doubts mounted. He wanted to ask Ipek, Are you coming with me to Frankfurt? but he was already afraid of not getting the answer he wanted.

He returned to bed, pressed himself up against Ipek’s back, and embraced her with all his strength. “There’s a store in the market,” he said. “It was playing a very old song called ‘Roberta,’ by Peppino di Capri. Where do you think they found it?”

“There are still a few old families hanging on in Kars,” said Ipek.“Eventually the parents die and the children sell off their belongings and leave, and so all sorts of things turn up in the market that seem very out of place in the poor city we see today. There used to be a junk dealer who’d come from Istanbul every spring, buy everything cheap, and cart it off. But now even he’s stopped coming.”

For a moment Ka thought he had recaptured his earlier unequaled bliss, but it just wasn’t the same as before. Once again, he succumbed to the fear that it might be lost to him forever; everything before his eyes increased his panic; he was never going to convince Ipek to return to Frankfurt with him, that much was clear.

“So, darling, I think it’s time for me to get up.” 

Even when she used the word
darling,
even when she kissed him sweetly, Ka still could find no peace. 

“When can we meet again?”

“I’m worried about my father. The police might have followed him.”

“I’m worried about that, too,” said Ka. “But first I’d like to know when we can meet again.”

“I’m not coming to your room if my father’s in the hotel.”

“Oh, everything’s changed now,” Ka said. But as he watched the silent ease with which Ipek dressed in the dark, he was hit by the fear that nothing had changed at all. “Why don’t I move to another hotel? Then we could see each other right away,” he said.

There was a devastating silence. Now a new wave of panic overtook him, and a helpless jealousy ran through him. He allowed himself to wonder whether Ipek might have another lover. Part of him was still sane enough to remember that this sort of jealousy was commonplace in the early stages of an untested love affair, but a stronger voice inside him told him to wrap his arms around her with all the strength he could muster and devote every ounce of his energy to overcoming the obstacles still standing between them. He knew it was a matter of urgency, but he also knew that if he acted too hastily it might make things awkward for him. Uncertain, he stayed silent.

We’re Not Stupid, We’re Just Poor

the secret meeting at the hotel asia

When Zahide rushed out to the horse-drawn carriage that was to take Turgut Bey and Kadife to the secret meeting at the Hotel Asia, the light was failing and so Ka, watching from the window, could not quite make out what the faithful servant had in her hands. In fact, it was an old pair of woolen gloves.

Uncertain as to what he should wear to the meeting, Turgut Bey had taken the two jackets he had from his teaching days—one black, one gray—and spread them out on the bed with the felt hat he saved for national holidays and inspection visits and the checked tie he had not worn for years except to amuse Zahide’s grandson. He would have spent a good deal more time poring over the other elements of his wardrobe and the contents of his drawers, but, seeing him acting like a dreamy girl wondering what her father would let her wear to the ball, Kadife stepped in to make the final selection. After buttoning his shirt for him, she helped him on with his jacket and his coat; then came the pair of white dog-leather gloves that she struggled to pull onto his small hands.

At this moment Turgut Bey remembered his old woolen gloves. Stubbornly insisting that these were the ones he had to wear, he sent Ipek and Kadife rushing around the house frantically to search every wardrobe and every chest from top to bottom; upon finally finding them, they saw how many holes the moths had made, and they threw the gloves aside. But once he was ensconced in the carriage, Turgut Bey insisted yet again that he wasn’t leaving the house without them; years ago, he explained, when his left-wing activities had landed him in prison, his dear departed wife had brought him these gloves, knitted especially for him. Kadife, who knew her father better than he knew himself, saw the matter for what it was: If the old man was insisting on these gloves as a talisman, he must be very scared indeed.

After the gloves had arrived and the carriage set off into the snow, Kadife asked her father to tell her more about his prison days; she listened to his stories (how he’d cried whenever he received letters from his wife, how he’d taught himself French, how he’d worn these very gloves to bed on winter nights) as intently as if she were hearing them for the first time, occasionally interrupting to say, “What a brave man you are, Father!” And then he did what he always did when he heard his daughters utter these words (which over the last few years, he’d hardly heard at all): Fighting back tears, Turgut Bey enfolded Kadife in his arms and, shuddering, kissed her cheeks.

When the horse-drawn carriage reached the Hotel Asia, they saw that the lights were still burning in the street outside.

As he stepped out of the carriage, Turgut Bey said, “Look at all these new shops. Let’s see what they have in the windows.” Kadife knew he was dragging his feet out of fear, so she was careful not to hurry him. Turgut Bey proposed they stop for a cup of linden tea—if a detective was following them, he said, they might as well give him a run for his money—so they made their way into a teahouse, where they sat silently watching a race on television. Just as they were leaving, Turgut Bey spotted his old barber, so they turned around and went back inside, so as not to be seen going to the meeting.

“Do you think we’re too late now? Do you think we’ll offend them if we don’t go at all?” The fat barber at a nearby table seemed to be eaves-dropping, so Turgut Bey spoke to Kadife in whispers. He took her arm, but instead of heading straight for the back courtyard, he now went into a stationery store, where he picked out a navy-blue pen. When they finally reached the back courtyard of Ersin Electric and Plumbing Supplies and turned toward the dark door that was the back entrance to the Hotel Asia, Kadife saw the blood drain from her father’s face.

Not a thing was stirring at the back entrance to the hotel. They stuck close together; no one was following them. They took a few steps inside, but in the darkness Kadife had to grope her way to the stairs that led to the lobby. “Don’t let go of my arm,” said Turgut Bey.

The lobby was in semidarkness, its high windows hidden behind heavy drapes. There was a weak, dirty lamp on the reception desk, which barely illuminated the face of the unshaven, unkempt clerk standing behind it. In the darkness beyond the desk they could make out a few other shadowy figures wandering about the lobby and gliding up and down the stairs. These were either plainclothes police or black marketeers who dealt in livestock or lumber or undocumented workers smuggled across the border. Eighty years earlier, this hotel had been popular with Russian businessmen; after the revolution, most of its custom came from Istanbul Turks and aristocratic English double agents heading into Armenia to spy on the Soviet Union; now it was full of women who’d come over from Georgia and the Ukraine to work as prostitutes and petty smugglers. By and large it was men from the villages around Kars who rented rooms for these women; they’d live there together during the day, almost as married couples, and after the men had gone back to their villages on the last minibus of the day, the women would come downstairs to drink coffee and cognac in the dark recesses of the bar.