Snow (47 page)

As Serdar Bey extended his hand, his smile was so friendly that Ka began to doubt what his own eyes had read in the newspaper folded in his pocket. After serving himself soup, he reached under the table and put his hand on Ipek’s lap; he brought his head closer to hers, smelling her smell and savoring her presence, and then whispered that he was sorry to have no news of Blue for her. He had hardly finished when he came eye to eye with Kadife, sitting next to Serdar Bey; it amazed and infuriated him to realize that Ipek had already communicated his news to her.

Although his mind was full of Serdar Bey, he managed to contain his feelings and give his attention to Turgut Bey, who was complaining about the meeting at the Hotel Asia. It had succeeded only in stirring things up, he said; he then added that the police knew all about it. “But I’m not at all sorry to have taken part in this historic occasion,” he added. “I’m glad I got to see with my own eyes how low the level of political understanding has sunk. Young and old alike, they’re hopeless. I went to this meeting to protest the coup, but now I think the army is right to want to keep them out of politics—they’re the dregs of society, the most wretched, muddled, brainless people in the city. I’m glad the army couldn’t stand by and let us abandon our future to these shameless looters. I’ll say this again, Kadife: Before meddling with national politics, consider this carefully. And think also of that painted aging singer you saw turning the wheel of Fortune,” he added mysteriously. “Everyone in Ankara has known for thirty-five years that she was the mistress of Fatin Rustu Zorlu, the old foreign secretary, the one they executed.”

When Ka took out his copy of the
Border City Gazette,
they’d been sitting at the table for twenty minutes, and even with the television blaring in the background, the room seemed quiet.

“I was going to mention it myself,” said Serdar Bey. “But I couldn’t make up my mind; I thought you might take it the wrong way.”

“Serdar, Serdar, who gave you the order this time?” said Turgut Bey, when he saw the headline. “Ka, you’re not being fair to our guest. Give it to him so he can read it and see what a bad thing he has done.”

“First, let me make clear that I don’t believe a single word I wrote,” said Serdar Bey, as he took the newspaper from Ka. “If you really believed I believe it, you’d break my heart. Please realize that it’s nothing personal, and please, Turgut Bey, help me explain why it is that a journalist in Kars might be forced to write such things under orders.”

“Serdar’s always under orders to sling mud at someone,” Turgut Bey explained. “So let’s hear this article.”

“I don’t believe a single word,” Serdar Bey repeated proudly. “Our readers won’t believe it either. That’s why you have nothing to fear.” 

Serdar Bey read out his article in a sarcastic voice, pausing here and there for dramatic effect. “As you see, there’s nothing to fear!” he said, with a smile.

“Are you an atheist?” Turgut Bey asked Ka.

“That’s not the point, Father,” said Ipek with annoyance. “If this paper gets distributed, they’ll shoot him in the street tomorrow.”

“Nonsense,” said Serdar Bey. “Madam, I assure you, you have nothing to fear. The soldiers have rounded up all the radical Islamists and reactionaries in town.” He turned to Ka. “I can tell just by your eyes that you haven’t taken offense. You know how much I respect your work and how I esteem you as a human being. Please don’t do me the injustice of holding me to European standards that were never designed for us! Let me tell you what happens to fools who wander around Kars pretending to be Europeans—and Turgut Bey knows this as well as I do—three days, that’s all it takes, three days and they’re dead: gone, shot, forgotten.

“The Eastern Anatolian press is in desperate trouble. Our average Kars citizen doesn’t bother to read the paper. Almost all our subscribers are government offices. So of course we’re going to run the sort of news our subscribers want to read. All over the world—even in America—newspapers tailor the news to their readers’ desires. If your readers want nothing but lies from you, who in the world is going to sell papers that tell the truth? If the truth could raise my paper’s circulation, why wouldn’t I write the truth? Anyway, the police don’t let me print the truth either. In Istanbul and Ankara we have a hundred and fifty readers with Kars connections. And to please them we’re always bragging about how rich and successful they’ve become there; we exaggerate everything, because if we don’t they won’t renew their subscriptions. And you know what? They even come to believe the lies we print about them. But that’s another matter.” He let out a laugh.

“And who ordered you to print this article? Go on, tell him,” said Turgut Bey.

“My dear sir! As you know only too well, the first principle of Western journalism is to protect your sources.”

“My girls have grown very fond of our guest here,” said Turgut Bey. “If you distribute this paper tomorrow, they’ll never forgive you. If some crazed fundamentalist shoots him, won’t you feel responsible?”

“Are you that afraid?” Serdar smiled as he turned to Ka. “If you’re that afraid, stay off the streets tomorrow.”

“It would be better that the paper rather than Ka remain unseen,” Turgut Bey said. “Don’t circulate this edition.”

“That would offend my subscribers.”

“All right, then,” said Turgut Bey. He had an inspiration. “Whoever’s ordered a copy, let him have it. As for the others, I suggest you remove the offending article and print a new edition.” 

Ipek and Kadife agreed this was the best solution. “I’m thrilled to see my paper taken so seriously,” said Serdar Bey. “But who’s going to pay for this new print run? That’s the next thing you need to tell me.”

“My father will take you and your sons out for an evening meal at the Green Pastures Café,” said Ipek.

“I accept if you come too,” said Serdar Bey. “But let’s wait until the roads open and we can be rid of this bunch of actors! Kadife must come too. Kadife Hanım, I am wondering if you could help me with the new article to replace the one we’re taking out. If you could give me a quote about this coup, this coup de théâtre, I’m sure our readers would be very pleased.”

“No, she can’t. That’s out of the question,” said Turgut Bey. “Don’t you know my daughter at all?”

“Kadife Hanım, could you tell me if you think the Kars suicide rate is likely to go down in the wake of our theater coup? I’m sure our readers would like your views on this, especially since they know you were opposed to these Muslim girl suicides.”

“I’m not against these suicides anymore.”

“But doesn’t that make you an atheist?” Serdar Bey asked. Though he may have hoped this would set them off on a fresh discussion, he was sober enough to see that everyone at the table was glaring at him, so he relented.

“All right, then, I promise. I won’t circulate this edition.”

“Are you going to print a new edition?”

“As soon as I leave this table, before I go home.”

“We’d like to thank you, then,” said Ipek.

A long strange silence followed. Ka found it very soothing. For the first time in years, he felt part of a family; in spite of the trials and responsibilities of what was called family, he saw now that it was grounded in the joys of an unyielding togetherness, a feeling he was sorry to have known so little of in his life. Could he find lasting happiness with Ipek? It wasn’t happiness he was after—this was very clear to him following his third glass of raki; he would even go so far as to say that he preferred to be unhappy. The important thing was to share the hopelessness, to create a little nest in which two people could live together, keeping the rest of the world at bay. He now thought that he and Ipek could create such a space, just by making love for months and months on end. To sit at a table with these two girls, knowing that he’d made love to one of them only that afternoon, to feel the softness of their complexions, to know that when he went to bed tonight, he would not be lonely—as sexual bliss beckoned, he allowed himself to believe the paper would not be circulated, and his spirits soared.

His outsize happiness took the edge off the stories and rumors he then heard; they lacked the thud of bad news. It was more like listening to the chilling lines of an ancient epic. One of the children working in the kitchen had told Zahide that a large number of detainees had been taken to the football stadium. With the goalposts now only half visible, half buried in snow, most had been kept outside all day in the hope that they would fall ill or perhaps even die; it was said a few of them had been taken into the locker rooms and pumped full of bullets as an example to the others.

There were also eyewitness reports, perhaps exaggerated, about the terror Z Demirkol and friends had been visiting on the city throughout the day: they’d raided the Mesopotamia Association, founded by a number of Kurdish nationalist youths to promote “folklore and literature,” but none of them happened to be there at the time, so instead they’d taken the old man who made the tea in the office—someone who was utterly indifferent to politics—and beaten him severely.

Then there were the three men—two of them were barbers and the third was unemployed—who’d been implicated in an incident six months earlier in which parties unknown had poured colored sewer water over the statue of Atatürk that stood outside the Atatürk Work Plant; although they’d opened an investigation on these men, they’d never put them behind bars; but after beatings that had gone on all night, they’d taken responsibility for a number of other anti-Atatürk incidents in the city (taking a hammer to the nose of the Atatürk statue that stood in the garden of the Trade and Industry Lycée, writing ugly remarks on the Atatürk poster hanging on the wall at the Gang of Fifteen Café, and entering into a conspiracy to use a hatchet to destroy the Atatürk statue standing outside the government offices).

Just after the coup, they’d shot and killed one of two Kurdish boys they caught writing slogans on the walls of Halitpa¸sa Avenue; after arresting another boy, they’d beaten him until he fainted. There was also the young unemployed boy they’d taken to the religious high school so he could remove the graffiti from its walls—when he’d tried to escape, they’d shot him in the legs. Thanks to various informers, all those who’d been saying ugly things about the soldiers and the actors and spreading groundless rumors about them in the city’s teahouses had been rounded up, but—as was always the case in murderous times like these—there were still plenty of rumors and exaggerations making the rounds, from the Kurdish youths who’d died when bombs exploded in their hands to the head-scarf girls who’d killed themselves to protest the coup, to the truck laden with dynamite that they’d stopped as it approached Inönü police station.

Although Ka pricked up his ears when they mentioned the truck carrying explosives—he’d heard someone else discussing this suicide bomb attack earlier—he did nothing else that night but enjoy every moment that he sat sitting peacefully at Ipek’s side.

Much later, when Serdar Bey rose to leave and Turgut Bey and his daughters stood up to go bid him farewell before going to their rooms, it crossed Ka’s mind to ask Ipek to his room. But he was afraid of the shadow that might fall over his happiness if she refused, so he left the room without even hinting at what he wanted.

Kadife Will Never Agree to It Either
 

the mediator

Ka stood at his window smoking a cigarette. It had stopped snowing, and finally, as the pale streetlamps cast their ghostly glow over the empty snow-covered courtyard, the stillness of the scene brought him peace. But the peace he felt had more to do with love than the beauty of the snow. He was so happy he could also admit that his peace derived in part from the easy sense of superiority of knowing he was from Istanbul and Frankfurt.

There was a knock at the door; Ka was astonished to see it was Ipek.

“I can’t stop thinking about you, I can’t sleep,” she said, as she stepped inside.

Ka knew at once that they would make love till morning, even as Turgut Bey slept under the same roof. It was the most sublime surprise to wrap his arms around her without first enduring the agony of waiting. Their long night of lovemaking took Ka to a place beyond the outer reaches of happiness, or at least of what he had thought happiness to be; he was outside time, impervious to passion; his only regret was that it had taken him a lifetime to discover this paradise. He felt more at peace than he ever had before. He forgot the sexual fantasies kept in ready storage at the back of his brain, the pornographic images from magazines. As he and Ipek made love, he heard music play inside him, music he’d never heard before, never even imagined, and it was by obeying its harmonies that he found his way forward.

From time to time he fell asleep and dreamed of summer holidays bathed in heavenly light; he was running free, he was immortal; his plane was about to fall out of the sky but he was eating an apple, an apple he would never finish, an apple that would last for all time. Then he would wake to the warm apple aroma of Ipek’s skin. Guided by snow light and the faint yellow glow of the streetlamps, he would press his eyes against hers and try to see into them; when he saw she was awake and silently watching him, it seemed to him they were like two whales basking side by side in shallow water; it was only then he realized that they were holding hands.

At one such moment, when they had woken up to find themselves gazing into each other’s eyes, Ipek said, “I’m going to speak to my father. I’m going with you to Germany.”

Ka couldn’t go back to sleep for a long while after that. Instead, he watched his life play before him like a happy film.

Somewhere in the city, there was an explosion. It was strong enough to shake the bed, the room, and the hotel. They heard distant machine-gun fire. It was muffled by the snow that still covered Kars. They embraced each other and waited in silence.

The next time they woke up, the gun battle had ended. Twice Ka rose from the warm bed and smoked a cigarette as the icy air coming in through the window cooled his perspiring body. No poems came to his mind. He felt happier than he’d ever felt before.