Snow (58 page)

“Because Blue doesn’t want her to.”

“Why?” asked Ka.

“Because Kadife’s in love with Blue, that’s why. The reason you’re going there is to protect my sister from danger. You have to forget you’re jealous of Blue.”

“As if I could.”

“When we get to Germany, we’re going to be very happy,” said Ipek, her arms around Ka’s neck. “Tell me about the cinema you’ll take me to.”

“There’s a cinema in the Film Museum that shows undubbed American art films late on Saturday nights,” said Ka. “That’s where we’ll go. We’ll stop along the way at one of those restaurants around the station and have
döner
and sweet pickles. After we come home, we can relax in front of the television set. Then we’ll make love. We can live on my political exile allowance and the money I’ll make doing readings from this new poetry book of mine—and neither of us has to do anything more than that: just make love.”

Ipek asked him what the title of his book was, and Ka told her.

“That’s beautiful,” she said. “But now you’ve got to go, darling. If you don’t, Father will get so worried he’ll decide to go himself.”

“I’m not afraid anymore,” he told her. This was a lie. “But whatever happens, if there’s some sort of mix-up, I’ll be waiting for you on the first train that leaves the city.”

“If I can get out of this room, that is,” Ipek said, with a smile.

“Would you wait at this window and watch me until I’ve disappeared around the corner?”

“Of course.”

“I’m so afraid I won’t see you again,” said Ka.

He closed the door, locked it, and dropped the key into his coat pocket. He wanted to make sure he’d be able to turn around and take one last leisurely look at Ipek in the window, so when he reached the street he kept several paces ahead of his two army bodyguards. Sure enough, when he turned around there she was, like a statue, in the window of Room 203 of the Snow Palace Hotel, still wearing the black velvet evening gown, her honeyed shoulders now covered with goose bumps from the cold. Standing there bathed in the orange light of the bedside night-light, she was his image of happiness, an image Ka would hold close to him throughout the last four years of his life.

He never saw her again.

It Must Be Hard Being a Double Agent
 

the first half of the chapter

The streets Ka took to the National Theater were mostly empty—here and there he could see a restaurant open for business, but all the other shopowners in town had rolled down their shutters. The last stragglers were leaving the teahouses, exhausted by their long day of drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, but even on the way out, their eyes remained glued to the television. As he approached the National Theater, Ka saw three army vehicles. They all had their lights on, and when Ka looked down the lane he saw the shadow of a tank nestling among the oleanders. The thaw had begun in earnest that evening, and the icicles that had formed on the eaves of houses were dripping water onto the pavements below. Walking under the live transmission cable that stretched across Atatürk Avenue, he entered the theater, and, taking the key from his pocket, pressed it into the palm of his hand.

The theater was empty except for the soldiers and policemen lined up along the aisles, listening to the echoes of the actors rehearsing. Ka settled down into one of the empty seats to enjoy Sunay’s deep rich voice and perfect diction, Kadife’s weak and wavering answers, and Funda Eser’s hectoring direction (“Say it with feeling, darling Kadife!”) as she rushed about the stage moving the props, a tree and a vanity table.

While Funda Eser was rehearsing a scene with Kadife, Sunay noticed the ember of Ka’s cigarette and came to sit next to him. “These are the happiest moments of my life,” he said. He stank of raki but didn’t seem at all drunk. “No matter how much we rehearse, everything depends on how we feel when we walk onstage. But it’s clear already that Kadife has a talent for improvisation.”

“I’ve brought her a message from her father and also an eye of Fatima for protection,” said Ka. “Do you think I could have a word with her in private?”

“We know you’ve given your bodyguards the slip. I hear the snow is melting and the trains are about to run again. But before any of this happens, we’re determined to put on our play,” Sunay said. “Has Blue hidden himself well for once?” he added, with a smile.

“I don’t know.”

Sunay stood up and called Kadife over; then he returned to the rehearsal. The spotlight came on, and as he looked at the three figures framed onstage, Ka could sense their deep affinity for one other. Looking at Kadife, at the scarf still draped around her head, he was alarmed at the ease with which she now negotiated the intimate world of the stage. And if she was to bare her head, Ka thought, what a shame that she would still be wearing one of those ugly raincoats favored by all covered women; how much closer to her he would have felt if like her sister she’d been wearing a skirt and showing off those long legs of hers. But when she left the stage to sit with him, there was a moment when he understood why Blue had left Ipek and fallen in love with Kadife instead.

“Kadife, I’ve seen Blue. They released him and he’s found himself a hiding place. But he doesn’t want you to go onstage and bare your head tonight. He sent you a letter.”

Lest Sunay should see him, he passed her the letter under his arm, as one might pass the answers to a friend during an exam, but Kadife made no effort at concealment; she read the letter openly and smiled, so it was some time before Ka saw the tears in her angry eyes.

“Your father thinks the same thing, Kadife. You might be right in deciding to bare your head, but it would be insane to do it this evening, in front of all those angry religious high school boys. There’s no need for you to stay. You can tell them you’re ill.”

“I don’t need an excuse. Sunay’s already told me I’m free to go home if I wish.”

It was clear to Ka that he was not dealing with some young girl upset at failing in her last-minute bid for permission to appear in the school play; the anger and heartbreak he read in her face were far too deep.

“So are you planning to stay here, Kadife?”

“Yes. I’m staying here and I’m doing the play.”

“Do you know how much this will upset your father?”

“Give me the evil eye he sent me.”

“I just mentioned an evil eye so they’d let me speak to you privately.”

“It must be hard being a double agent.”

He could tell Kadife was heartbroken, and it was with some pain that he realized the girl’s mind was far away. He wanted to take her by the shoulders and embrace her, but he did nothing of the sort.

“Ipek has told me about her old relationship with Blue,” Ka said.

Kadife took out a pack of cigarettes, slowly raised a cigarette to her lips, and lit it.

“I gave him the cigarettes and the lighter you sent with me,” Ka said clumsily. For a few moments, neither spoke. “Are you doing this because you’re so in love with Blue? What is it about him that makes you love him so much, Kadife? Tell me, please.”

When Ka saw that he was digging himself into a hole, he fell silent.

Funda Eser called from the stage to announce that they’d come to Kadife’s next scene.

She gave Ka a tearful look and stood up. At the last moment, they embraced each other. Still feeling her presence, still smelling her scent, Ka lingered for a while to watch the play, but his mind was elsewhere; he did not understand a thing. He could no longer trust his instincts; he was missing something. Jealousy and remorse were defeating his every effort to think logically. He could barely manage to identify what was causing him such pain; what he couldn’t fathom was why this pain was so destructive, so violent.

Looking ahead to those years he hoped to spend with Ipek in Frankfurt—assuming he succeeded in getting her to go with him—he could now see that this crushing, soul-destroying pain would eat away at their happiness. And as he thought this he lit a cigarette, his mind stubbornly refusing to make order of things. He went off to the toilet where he’d met with Necip two days earlier and walked into the same stall. Opening the window high on the wall, he looked out at the black night and stood there, puffing helplessly.

At his first intimation that another poem was on the way, he could hardly believe it. Holding his breath, he pulled out his notebook to jot it down. He hoped the poem had been sent to console him, to give him hope. But when it was done, he still felt crushing pain throughout his body, so he left the National Theater in distress.

When he reached the snowy pavement, he decided the cold air would do him good. His two army bodyguards were still with him, and his mind was in total disarray. At this point, to enhance the enjoyment of my story and make it easier to understand, I must cut short this chapter and start a new one. It doesn’t mean that Ka did nothing more worth narrating but, rather, that I must first locate “The Place Where the World Ends,” the poem Ka jotted down with so little effort, which would be the last in the book he would entitle
Snow
.

Everyone Has His Own Snowflake

the missing green notebook

The Place Where the World Ends,” the nineteenth poem Ka wrote “ in Kars, was also his last. As we already know, he recorded eighteen of his poems in the green notebook he carried everywhere he went; he wrote them down just as he first “heard” them, even if a few words here and there were missing. The only poem he did not write down was the one he read onstage the night of the revolution. Ka alluded to it in two of his letters from Frankfurt, written but never sent to Ipek. In both instances he called it “The Place Where God Does Not Exist” and as he’d been unable to get it out of his mind, he said there was no finishing his new collection until he’d found it; he would be grateful if Ipek could search the Border City Television archives on his behalf. When I first read this letter in my hotel room in Frankfurt, I sensed a certain disquiet between the lines. It was almost as if Ka was worried that Ipek would think he was using the problem of the poem as an excuse to write her love letters.

In the twenty-ninth chapter, I described how, on returning to my hotel room in Frankfurt one evening, feeling pleasantly tipsy and still holding the Melinda tapes in my hand, I happened on Ka’s diagram of a snowflake in a notebook picked at random. While I can’t possibly know Ka’s exact intent, I can say that I spent a few days reading through all the notebooks, and I believed I was beginning to grasp Ka’s purpose in giving each of his nineteen Kars poems a position on this snowflake.

After leaving Kars, Ka apparently read a number of books about snow, and one of his discoveries was this: Once a six-pronged snowflake crystallizes, it takes between eight and ten minutes for it to fall through the sky, lose its original shape, and vanish; when, with further inquiry, he discovered that the form of each snowflake is determined by the temperature, the direction and strength of the wind, the altitude of the cloud, and any number of other mysterious forces, Ka decided that snowflakes have much in common with people. It was a snowflake that inspired “I, Ka,” the poem he wrote sitting in the Kars public library, and later, when he was to arrange all nineteen titles for his new collection,
Snow,
he would assign “I, Ka” to the center point of that same snowflake.

Applying the same logic to “Heaven,” “Chess,” and “The Chocolate Box” he was able to see that each of these poems, too, had its natural and unique position on the imaginary snowflake. Soon he was certain that every poem in his new collection—and, indeed, everything that made him the man he was—could be indicated on the same set of crystalline axes. It was, in short, a snowflake that mapped out the spiritual course of every person who had ever lived. The three axes onto which he mapped his poems—Memory, Imagination, and Reason—were, he said, inspired by the classifications in Bacon’s tree of knowledge, but he wrote extensively about his own efforts to elucidate the meaning of the six-pronged snowflake’s nineteen points.

Ka’s three notebooks recording his thoughts about the poems he wrote in Kars are, for the most part, attempts to discover the significance of that geometry, but it should be clear by now that he was also trying to puzzle out the meaning of his own life, and we should take care to see these objectives in the same light. For example, to read his musings on where to place the poem “To Be Shot and Killed” is to be struck by the priority he gives to the fear that inspired the poem. He explains why it is that a poem inspired by fear belongs near the axis labeled Imagination, at the top of the axis labeled Memory, and near enough the poem entitled “The Place Where the World Ends” to be under its influence. Lurking throughout these commentaries is the belief that his poetic materials were shaped by mysterious external forces. And by the time he was recording these thoughts in the notebooks, Ka was convinced that everyone has his own snowflake; individual existences might look identical from afar, but to understand one’s own eternally mysterious uniqueness one had only to plot the mysteries of his or her own snowflake.

Ka’s exegesis of his new poetry collection and of his personal snowflake was vast (Why was it that “The Chocolate Box” was located on the axis labeled Imagination? How had the poem called “All Humanity and the Stars” shaped Ka’s own snowflake?), but we shall not dwell on these notes any longer than our novel requires. As a young poet, Ka had many unkind things to say about older peers who took themselves too seriously, especially those poets who spent their later years convinced that every bit of nonsense they produced would one day inform serious literary debate and who carved their own statues, oblivious of the fact that no one wanted to look at them.

In the harsh light of many years spent criticizing poets of obscure verse, in thrall to the myths of modernism, there are but one or two excuses for Ka’s extensive self-commentary. A careful reading reveals that Ka did not believe himself to be the true author of any of the poems that came to him in Kars. Rather, he believed himself to be but the medium, the amanuensis, in a manner well exampled by predecessors of his modernist bêtes noires. But as he wrote in several places, having produced the poems, he was now determined to throw off his passivity, and it was by coming to understand them—by revealing their hidden symmetry—that he hoped to achieve this purpose. But there was a more practical urgency as well: Without understanding what his Kars poems meant, he could have no hope of filling in the blanks, of completing the half-finished lines—or of recovering his lost poem, “The Place Where God Does Not Exist”—and thus no hope of completing the book. For after Ka returned to Frankfurt, no poem ever came to him again.