Snow

by Orhan Pamuk

Just then a new poem came rushing into his mind; it was so powerful, so strangely exhilarating, that Ka now found himself turning to the hook-nosed intelligence agent and asking, “Might it be possible to stop off at a teahouse along the way?”

Ka was sure he was just going through the motions, so he sat down at the table next to the cold stove and with no difficulty set down the poem in his head. He would later give this poem the title “Dream Streets”; although it opens on the snowy streets of Kars, the thirty-six-line poem also contains numerous references to the streets of old Istanbul, the Armenian ghost town of Ani, and the wondrous, fearsome, empty cities Ka had seen in his dreams. When Ka finished his poem, he looked up at the black-and-white television to see that the morning folksinger had gone; in his place they were rebroadcasting the first moments of the drama at the National Theater.

After looking for three or four seconds at the suspects in the first classroom, Ka’s first thought was of the shortness of mankind’s journey from birth to death. One look at these freshly interrogated suspects was enough to conjure up fond wishful dreams of distant civilizations and countries he’d never visited. And so it was Ka knew with absolute certainty that he and all the others in the room were fast approaching the end of their allotted time; their candles would soon burn themselves out. In his notebook, Ka would call this place the yellow room.

Ka knew very well that life was a meaningless string of random incidents.

In his last letter from Frankfurt, Ka had happily announced that after four years of hard work he had finally completed a new book of poetry. The title was Snow. Most of the poems were based on childhood memories that had come to him in flashes during his visit to Kars, and he had carefully recorded these inspirations in a green notebook.

Just say the word and I’ll come to you, he has written in one letter, though in another he declares he would never return to Kars because I would never allow you to misunderstand me again.

That evening, I laid out all Ka’s belongings, on the bed and on every other surface in the room, examining every item with a forensic eye, and so it is with certainty that I can say Ka never received a single letter from Ïpek. Why did he pretend to answer one, even knowing that he would never send her a single letter either? 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?

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 my life I’ve felt as lost and lonely as a wounded animal [Ka wrote]. Perhaps if I hadn’t embraced you with such violence, I wouldn’t have angered you so much, and I might not have undone the work of twelve years, ending up exactly where I started. But here I am, abandoned and wasting away; I carry the scars of my unbearable suffering on every inch of my body. Sometimes I think it’s not just you I’ve lost, but that I’ve lost everything in the world.

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 Ïpek’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 Ïpek; 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.

When I see so many people around me leading such stupid lives and then vanishing without a trace, an anger runs through me because I know then that nothing really matters more in life than love. And when I think that, my feelings for Kadife become all the more unbearable—it hurts to know that my only consolation would be to spend the rest of my life with my arms around her.”

For Ka, heaven was the place where you kept your memories. Recalling this poem afterward, he would summon one by one a string of recollections: the summer holidays of his childhood, the days he’d skipped out of school, the times he and his sister had gone into their parents’ bed, various drawings he’d done as a child, and the time he went on a date with a girl he’d met at a school party and dared to kiss her.

Ïpek looked so beautiful, and Ka felt such happiness at the sight of her, that tears came to his eyes—although it’s possible that his reaction might have had something to do with the raki he’d just drunk on an empty stomach. To sit at a table with two lovely women didn’t just make him happy, it made him proud. He thought of those worn-out Turkish shopkeepers in Frankfurt who smiled and waved at him every morning and evening and imagined what they would think to see him now with these two women. Today he had no audience; no one else was here apart from the old waiter who’d been present when the director of the Institute of Education was assassinated.

Ka knew he would always remember this scene; like a photograph taken from outside the shop, it showed him sitting at a table with two beautiful women—never mind that one of them had wrapped her head in a scarf. The two women were as agitated as Ka was calm. After Ka explained that Fazιl had given him a full report of the meeting at the Hotel Asia, Ïpek came right to the point. “Blue left the meeting in a fury. And Kadife now regrets what she said there. We sent Zahide to his hiding place but he wasn’t there. We can’t find Blue anywhere.”

He was seized by the certainty that everything he saw—the banners for the Motherland Party, the little window hidden behind those tightly drawn curtains, the slip of paper someone had taped to the icy window of the Knowledge Pharmacy months earlier to announce that the shot for Japanese influenza had finally arrived, the yellow antisuicide poster—every last one of these little details would stay with him for the rest of his life. There arose from these minor things a vision of extraordinary power: So certain was he that “everything on earth is interconnected and I too am inextricably linked to this deep and beautiful world,” he could only conclude another poem was on its way, and so he stepped into one of the teahouses on Atatürk Avenue. But the poem never arrived.

After warning him not to wander the streets like a moving target, Muhtar left him alone at the teahouse. Ka was overtaken by the fear that he could be shot at any moment.

Finally, what frightened him most was the thought of dying just at the dawn of his hope of living happily ever after in Frankfurt with Ïpek. The many writers killed in recent years by Islamist bullets paraded before his eyes: first the old preacher-turned-atheist who had tried to point out “inconsistencies” in the Koran (they’d shot him from behind, in the head); behind him came the righteous columnist whose love of positivism had led him to refer in a number of columns to girls wearing head scarves as “cockroaches” (they strafed him and his chauffeur one morning as he drove to work); then there was the investigative journalist who had tenaciously sought to uncover the links between the Turkish Islamist movement and Iran (when he turned on the ignition, he and his car went sailing into the sky).

Nurettin dusted off his old ideas and passionately reasserted them; the army-backed secular press warmed to his fine Kemalist words and inflated their importance to make him seem the lifelong hero. Then one morning a device in a plastic bag hanging from the front tire of his car blew him into so many bits that his ostentatious throng of mourners had to march behind an empty coffin.

he turned left into the Unity Café. Here he took a table between the wall and the stove and wrote the poem he would later call “To Be Shot and Killed.” As he would explain, in his notes, this poem was an expression of pure fear, so he placed it between the axes of memory and imagination on the six-pronged snowflake and humbly turned his back on the content of its prophecy.

He went downstairs to find the entire family seated around the dinner table with that evening’s guest, and his heart leaped to see Ïpek’s hair shimmering behind the bowl of soup that Zahide had just set before her. When Ïpek beckoned him to take the place next to her, Ka was proud that everyone at the table knew they were in love, very proud; then, across the table, he saw Serdar Bey, the owner of the Border City Gazette. 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.

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.

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 Ïpek 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.

“I don’t want to get involved,” said Ka. “Why not?” “Well, it could be because I’m scared. I’m very happy right now. I don’t want to turn myself into a target for the Islamists. When they see her bare her head, those students will think I’m the atheist who arranged the performance. And even if I can manage to escape to Germany, they’ll track me down. I’ll be walking down a street late one night, and someone will shoot me.”

I’m the coward to end all cowards, believe me. The only ones who survive in this country are the cowards. But there’s not a coward in the world who doesn’t dream of the day when he might find himself capable of great courage. Don’t you agree?”

Heroic dreams are the consolation of the unhappy. After all, when people like us say we’re being heroic, it usually means we’re about to kill each other—or kill ourselves.” “Yes,” Sunay insisted, “but isn’t there a small voice somewhere inside reminding you that this happiness of yours is not destined to last very long?”

“No happiness lasts very long,” said Ka cautiously. “But I have no desire to do something heroic that will get me killed just because I know how likely it is that I’ll be unhappy again at some point in the future.”

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.

Beliefs, high ideals—only people living in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.” “Actually, it’s the other way round. In a poor country, the only consolation people can have is the one that comes from their beliefs.” Ka wanted to say, But the things they believe aren’t true! but he managed to hold his tongue. Instead he said, “But you’re not one of the poor, Kadife. You’re from Istanbul.” “That’s why I do what I believe in.

“You’re jealous of Blue; you hate him,” said Kadife. “You don’t even want to see him as a human being. You’re like all republican secularists, you see someone who isn’t westernized and you dismiss him as a primitive underclass reprobate.

While he was explaining the gravity of the present circumstances and the pressure certain merciless parties were putting on Sunay to hang Blue at the first opportunity, he felt a certain joy, but as this joy was soon followed by a certain guilt, he went on to denounce Sunay as the crackpot to end all crackpots and to assure Blue that as soon as the snow melted everything would go back to normal.

Love equaled pain. The poem refers to his great fear of dogs as a child, to the strays that would bark at him in Maçka Park when he was six, and to a cruel neighbor who was always letting out his dog to chase passersby. Later in life, Ka had come to see his fear of dogs as punishment for his many hours of childhood bliss. But he felt a paradox underlying all this: Heaven and hell were in the same place. In those same streets he had played soccer, gathered mulberries, and collected those player trading cards you got with chewing gum; it was precisely because the dogs turned the scene of these childish joys into a living hell that he felt the joys so keenly.

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.

“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.

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 Ïpek could search the Border City Television archives on his behalf.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ka, she said, was a dutiful, clever, lonesome child whose life was dominated by a restless hunger for mothering—he knew he’d never find it, but also that if he did he’d run the other way—so while he was an easy man to love, he was an impossible one to live with. Ka had never spoken to her about me. (I’ve no idea why I asked her that question or, indeed, why I mention it here again.) After an interview that lasted an hour and a quarter, Hildegard showed me something I had failed to notice: The top segment of the index finger on her beautiful slender-wristed right hand was missing. She added with a smile that once, in a moment of anger, Ka had mocked her for this defect.

As Ka had so often suggested to me, I simply did not understand poetry well enough, nor the great sadness from which it issues, and so there had been a wall between us, a wall that now divided me not just from the melancholy city described in his notes but from the impoverished place I was now seeing with my own eyes.

In a smoky corner of my mind I was reminded of a truth drawn from bitter experience: Immersing oneself in the problems of a book is a good way to keep from thinking of love.

Watching the Kars Border Television archive videotape of the evening’s performance, I was struck by the silence in the hall; it was as if the audience had left behind the struggles that defined them—the tussle of fathers and sons, the skirmishes between the guilty and the powerful—to sink into a collective terror; and I was not immune to the power of that shimmering fiction that any citizen of an oppressive and aggressively nationalistic country will understand only too well: the magical unity conjured by the word we. In Sunay’s eyes, it was as if there were not a single outsider in the hall: all were inextricably bound by the same hopeless story.

Blue took one look at the soldiers and the police officers assembled outside and rushed to get his weapon; he did not hesitate to open fire, though several neighbors and the young Islamists who would turn him into a legend almost overnight remember that after getting off a few rounds he’d cried, “Don’t shoot!” Perhaps he was hoping to save Hande, but in vain; Z Demirkol’s special operations team had already taken up positions around the perimeter, and in less than a minute not just Blue and Hande but every wall of their safe house was riddled with bullets.

It was not only that the people of Kars were accustomed to such nocturnal raids; they simply wouldn’t be distracted from the live broadcast from the National Theater. All the sidewalks in town were empty, all the shutters closed, and apart from the odd teahouse with a television no one was open for business. Sunay was well aware that all eyes in the city were on him, and this made him feel not just secure but extraordinarily powerful.

Over the next forty minutes, as the audience began to grasp that Kadife was faced with two important decisions—one about baring her head, the other about committing suicide—their admiration for her grew and grew. And as her stature increased, the play evolved into a drama more serious than that implied by Sunay and Funda’s half didactic, half vaudevillian fury.

When the whistle blew, there was still no sign of Ïpek, and even as the train began to move, Ka’s wet eyes were still scanning the crowds on the platform; training them on the station entrance, the door that looked out at the statue of Kâzιm Karabekir, he continued trying to conjure up a tall woman walking straight toward him, bag in hand. As the train gathered speed, it blew its whistle once again. Ïpek and Turgut Bey were on their way from the Snow Palace Hotel to the National Theater when they heard it. “The train’s on its way,” said Turgut Bey.

Was her mind really on Ka, though? How much was she thinking about Blue’s death? Even four years later, she herself wasn’t sure, and finding my questions and my suspicions irksome, she tried to deflect them. But she did say that far stronger than any regret at missing her chance for happiness was her anger at Ka. After that night, she knew, there was no hope of ever loving him again. When she heard Ka’s train pull out of the station, the only thing she felt was heartbreak, and perhaps that came with a bit of surprise. In any case, all she wanted was to share her grief with Kadife.

“May I again insist that you explain to me why you wish to kill yourself?” said Sunay. “It’s not a question anyone can really answer,” said Kadife. “What do you mean?” “If a person knew exactly why she was committing suicide and could state her reasons openly, she wouldn’t have to kill herself,” said Kadife.

“You don’t understand a thing!” said Kadife. “A woman doesn’t commit suicide because she’s lost her pride, she does it to show her pride.” “Is that why your friends committed suicide?” “I can’t speak for them. Everyone has her own reasons. But every time I have ideas of killing myself, I can’t help thinking they were thinking the same way I am. The moment of suicide is the time when they understand best how lonely it is to be a woman and what being a woman really means.”

“It’s not my intelligence that frightens you, you fear me because I’m my own person,” said Kadife. “Because here in our city, men don’t fear their women’s intelligence, they fear their independence.” “To the contrary,” said Sunay. “I staged this revolution precisely so you women could be as independent as women in Europe. That’s why I’m asking you to remove that scarf.” “I am going to bare my head now,” said Kadife, “and then, to prove that I’m motivated neither by your coercion nor by any wish to be a European, I’m going to hang myself.”

There were still many who thought Sunay was only acting; they were ready for him to sit up at any moment and deliver a long instructive tirade on death; but at the uncommonly realistic sight of his bloodied face, they lost hope. Nuriye Hanιm, whose admiration for theatrical effects surpassed even her reverence for the script itself, rose to her feet; she was just about to applaud Sunay when she too saw his bloody face and sank fearfully back into her seat. “I guess I killed him!” said Kadife, turning to the audience. “You did well!” shouted a religious high school student from the back of the hall.