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“If Kars is a peaceful place, then I don’t need protection,” said Ka. He was secretly hoping that the assistant chief of police would take this opportunity to reassure him once again that Kars was a peaceful place, but Kasιm Bey did not repeat his statement.
Ka is
It fascinated Ka, the desperate speed with which these girls had plunged from life into death. The care they had taken—the hooks put into the ceiling, the loaded rifles, the medicine bottles transferred from pantry to bedroom—suggested suicidal thoughts they’d carried around with them for a long time.
In his fantasies, suicide was a solemn ceremony with sleeping pills and whiskey, a final act performed alone and of one’s own free will; in fact, every time he had ever imagined doing away with himself, it was the indispensable loneliness of it that scared him off. For that reason, he had to admit, he had never been seriously suicidal.
“Why are so many people giving themselves to religion all of a sudden?” Ka asked.
“It’s not everyone who’s committing suicide, it’s just girls and women,” said Ïpek. “The men give themselves to religion, and the women kill themselves.”
We live in a secular state. It’s the secular state that has banned covered girls, from schools as well as classrooms.
It’s because we failed to find happiness in poetry that we find ourselves longing for the shadow of politics.
he despised poets like me, who were interested not in pure poetry but in folklore and the beauties of our country. Years went by, the military took over and we all went to prison, and like everyone else, when I was released I drifted like an idiot. The people I had once tried to imitate had changed, those whose approval I once wanted had disappeared, and none of my dreams had come true, not in poetry or in life.
The city of Kars and the people in it—it was as if they weren’t real. Everyone wanted to die or to leave. But I had nowhere left to go. It was as if I’d been erased from history, banished from civilization. The civilized world seemed far away and I couldn’t imitate it. God wouldn’t even give me a child who might do all the things I had not done, who might release me from my misery by becoming the westernized, modern, self-possessed individual I had always dreamed of becoming.”
Existential dread
Most of the time it’s not the Europeans who belittle us. What happens when we look at them is that we belittle ourselves.
“Of course you know why: You belong to the Istanbul bourgeoisie. Anyone can tell, just by looking at your skin and the way you hold yourself. He must have friends in high places—that’s what they said to one another, there’s no doubt about
As for Muhtar, one look and you know he has no connections, no importance whatsoever. In fact, the reason Muhtar went into politics in the first place was to be able to stand up to those people the way you can.
The story spoke to them in just the same way that Oedipus’ murder of his father and Macbeth’s obsession with power and death speak to people throughout the Western world. But now, because we’ve fallen under the spell of the West, we’ve forgotten our own stories. They’ve removed all the old stories from our children’s textbooks. These days, you can’t find a single bookseller who stocks the Shehname in all of Istanbul! How do you explain this?”
don’t want you ever to leave me,” Ka told Ïpek. “I’ve fallen wildly in love with you.”
Solitude is essentially a matter of pride; you bury yourself in your own scent.
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.”
to help defend the secular state and the Republic against Kurdish separatist guerillas and Islamist fundamentalists.
“The day will come when we will call them to account!”;
Here, perhaps, we have arrived at the heart of our story. How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another’s heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known? Even if the world’s rich and powerful were to put themselves in the shoes of the rest, how much would they really understand the wretched millions suffering around them? So it is when Orhan the novelist peers into the dark corners of his poet friend’s difficult and painful life: How much can he really see? All
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this is brilliant
Heroic dreams are the consolation of the unhappy.
I’m saying this to you as someone who’s spent years as a political exile. Listen to me: Life’s not about principles, it’s about happiness.”
“But if you don’t have any principles, and if you don’t have faith, you can’t be happy at all,” said Kadife. “That’s true. But in a brutal country like ours where human life is cheap, it’s stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs, high ideals—only people living in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.”
You’re just a typical little European from Nişantaş. Not only were you brought up to look down on your own traditions, you also think you live on a higher plane than ordinary people. According to your kind, the road to a good moral life is not through God or religion, or through taking part in the life of the common people—no, it’s just a matter of imitating the West.
“They’ve been taping your phone conversations for four years.” He lay down again, weeping silently. “I want to die,” he said.
hahhhaa. sdboi ulit eh
Sharp-eyed Kadife, on the other hand, had worked it all out by the end of her first day in the city; her only real motivation for associating with the head-scarf girls was to get closer to Blue. Ïpek, who’d been living with Kadife’s jealousy since childhood, was not blind to her interest in Blue; it was only on seeing the fickle Blue returning Kadife’s affection that Ïpek’s own feelings cooled. And she saw opportunities: If Kadife was to become involved with him, Ïpek would be free of him; and once her father moved to Kars too, she was able to keep her faithless lover at bay.
ang kalat ng karat
“Most of the time, being a Turk is either an excuse or a pretext for evil.”
He never saw her again.
