Snow

by Orhan Pamuk

In twice showing the audience that the clip was empty, Sunay Zaim had duped Kadife and indeed the entire city of Kars. Here, perhaps, I should quote the colonel himself, who took early retirement not long after the publication of his report. When I met him at his home in Ankara and pointed to the rows of Agatha Christie books on his shelves, he told me that what he liked most about them were their titles. When we moved to the case of the actor’s gun, he said simply, “The clip was full!”

If we follow this line of reasoning, it becomes clear that Kadife was not Sunay’s only accomplice; Sunay, after all, had gone so far as to advertise his death in advance, and if the people of Kars were so eager to see him kill himself onstage, if they were still prepared to enjoy the drama, telling themselves it was just a play, they too were complicit. Another rumor, that Kadife had killed Sunay to avenge Blue’s death, was refuted on the grounds that anyone handed a loaded gun with the express notification that it was empty could not be accused of using it with intent to kill.

Because the inspecting colonel’s report had also implicated Ka in the coup, the military court summoned him as a witness; after his failure to appear at two hearings, they charged him with obstruction and issued a warrant for his arrest.

To keep his daughter from seeing her sentence as a cause for shame, Turgut Bey insisted on treating the prison like a boarding school, a place through which all proper folk had to pass sometime; occasionally he would invite friends along, like the journalist Serdar Bey.

I watched Fazιl race down the street to the Palace of Light Photo Studio. How much of Necip do I see in him? Could he still feel Necip inside him in the way he had described to Ka? How much can a man hear another’s voice inside him?

as we proceeded through the gloomy corridors of the arcade a rich dairy owner standing in front of the Association of Animal Enthusiasts cried, “Orhan Bey!” He invited me in and flaunted his remarkable memory by describing how Ka had visited the association around the time of the assassination of the director of the Institute of Education, and how he had gone off in a corner and lost himself in thought. It was difficult to listen to his description of the moment Ka had realized he was in love with Ïpek, just as I was about to meet Ïpek at the New Life Pastry Shop.

After the coup, they closed it; they called it a nest of terrorists and reactionary militancy.

“Doesn’t all this make you afraid of turning into an atheist so gradually you don’t even notice, like the man in the story?” Fazιl was not pleased to learn that I knew of the doubts he’d expressed to Ka four years earlier. “I’m a married man now; I have a child,” he said. “I’m no longer interested in such matters.”

“Orhan Bey,” said Ïpek, “I tried hard to love Muhtar, but it didn’t work out. I loved Blue with all my heart, but it didn’t work out. I believed I would learn to love Ka, but that didn’t work out either. I longed for a child but the child never came. I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone again, I just don’t have the heart for it. All I want to do now is look after my little nephew, Ömercan. But I’d like to thank you anyway, even though I can’t take you seriously.”

As I was leaving through the kitchen door, I met Saffet the detective. He was retired now, but he still came every night for Zahide’s soup. He recognized me straightaway from my television interview and said he had things he wanted to tell me.

Choosing my words carefully, I told him about Ka; I reminded him that he had followed my friend step by step around the city during his visit four years earlier. What did he remember about him? I asked. “He was a man who cared about people, and he loved dogs too—a good man,” he said. “But his mind was still in Germany, and he was very introverted. No one here likes Ka these days.” For a long time we remained silent.

When Fazιl came to join us at the table, he said he’d heard similar stories; he’d also heard that those same young Islamists were following the same path Blue had taken on his own pilgrimage. They’d escaped to Germany, where they founded a fast-growing radical Islamist group in Berlin; according to Fazιl’s old classmates from the religious high school, they’d written a statement—published on the first page of a German-based journal called Pilgrimage—in which they’d vowed revenge against those responsible for Blue’s death.

I looked up from time to time at the snow-laden branches of the chestnut and poplar trees above streets unevenly illuminated by the odd neon light. We took the side streets since the police weren’t following us. The snow, which had given signs of abating, now began to fall more thickly. It may have been the emptiness of the streets, or it may have been my pain at the prospect of leaving Kars, but I began to feel guilty, as if I were somehow abandoning Fazιl to solitary life in this empty city. I could see that the icicles hanging from the bare branches of two oleander trees had intertwined to form a tulle curtain; in a nest of ice I saw a sparrow fluttering; it took off into swirls of giant snowflakes and flew away over our heads. The blanket of fresh white snow had buried the empty streets in a silence so deep that, apart from our footsteps, all we could hear was our own breathing.

“If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I’d like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away.” “But no one believes in that way what he reads in a novel,” I said. “Oh, yes, they do,” he cried. “If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you would put in what I’ve just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds.”

I sat down and as I looked out the window through the snow at the orange lights of the outermost houses of the outlying neighborhoods, the shabby rooms full of people watching television, and the last snow-covered rooftops, the thin and elegantly quivering ribbons of smoke rising from the broken chimneys at last seemed a smudge through my tears.