Snow (17 page)

“And so it came to pass that a number of Gazzalians traveled to the most remote corner of their planet to set up the Islamic Lycée for the Study of Science and Oration. It took only the cleverest and most hardworking students.

“Two close friends attended this lycée. Inspired by books written 1600 years earlier, books that illuminated this East–West problem so beautifully they could have been written yesterday, they called each other Necip and Fazıl. Together they read
The Great East,
their revered master’s finest book, over and over, and in the evenings they would meet secretly in Fazıl’s bed, the higher bunk, where under the covers they would lie side by side watching the blue snowflakes fall onto the glass roof above them and disappear just like planets. Here they would whisper into each other’s ears about the meaning of life and the things they hoped to do when they were older.

“The evil-hearted tried in vain to tarnish this pure friendship with snide and jealous jokes. But then one day the two came under a cloud. It so happened that they had simultaneously fallen in love with the same girl, a virgin named Hicran. Even when they discovered that Hicran’s father was an atheist, they couldn’t cure themselves of their hopeless longing; on the contrary, their love grew all the more intense.

“In this way they came to realize that there was no longer enough room on Gazzali for both of them; they knew in their hearts that one of them would have to die. But they made the following promise. After spending some time in the next world, no matter how many light-years away it was, the one who died would come back to this world to visit his surviving friend and answer his most urgent questions—about life after death.

“As for the question of who would kill whom and how it would be done, they just couldn’t make up their minds—mainly because they both knew that true happiness could only come for the one who sacrificed his own life for the other. So, for example, if one of them—let’s say it was Fazıl—said, ‘Let’s both stick our naked hands into the sockets at the same time and electrocute ourselves together,’

Necip would see it at once for what it was: a clever trick Fazıl had invented to sacrifice himself for his friend (clearly, Fazıl would have arranged for Necip’s socket to be harmless). After many months of hemming and hawing, months that caused both boys great pain, the question was decided in a matter of seconds: Necip returned from his evening lessons one night to discover his dear friend lying dead in his bed, riddled with bullets.

“The following year, Necip married Hicran, and on their wedding night he told her what had passed between him and his friend and how one day Fazıl would return from the spirit world. Hicran told him she had really loved Fazıl; after his death she had cried for days, cried so much that blood had run from her eyes, and she had married Necip only because he was Fazıl’s friend and bore him some resemblance. They decided not to consummate their marriage and agreed that the ban on love should continue until Fazıl returned from the other world.

“But as the years passed, they began to long for each other. First their longing was spiritual, and then it became physical. One night, during an interplanetary inspection, while shining their beams on a city on Earth that went by the name of Kars, they were no longer able to control themselves; they fell upon each other like crazy people and made passionate love. You might think this meant they had forgotten Fazıl, whose memory had for so long plagued them like a toothache. But they had not forgotten him, and the shame in their hearts scared them as it grew with every day.

“A night arrived when they awoke suddenly, having both decided at the same time that this strange cocktail of fear and other emotions was going to destroy them. At the same moment, the television across the room turned on by itself, and there, shining brightly, the ghostly form of Fazıl took shape. The deadly shots to the forehead were still fresh, and his lower lip and other wounds were still dripping with blood.

“ ‘I am racked with pain,’ said Fazıl. ‘There is not a single corner of the other world I have not seen.’ [I will write about these travels in full detail using Gazzali’s
Victories of Mecca
and Ibn Arabi as my inspirations, said Necip.] ‘I have earned the highest compliments of God’s angels, and I have traveled to what is thought to be the summit of the highest plain of heaven; I have seen the terrible punishments meted out in hell to tie-wearing atheists and arrogant colonialist posi-tivists who make fun of the common people and their faith—but everywhere happiness eluded me, because my mind was here with you.’

“Husband and wife were overwhelmed with fearful admiration as they listened to the sad ghost.

“ ‘The thing that made me so unhappy all those years was not the thought that I might one day see you two sitting so happily together, as I am seeing you tonight. On the contrary, I longed for Necip’s happiness more than I longed for my own. Because of the profound feeling between us, we had been unable to find any way to kill either ourselves or each other. Because each valued the other’s life more than his own, it was as if we were both wearing protective armor that made us immortal. How happy that made me feel!

But my death proved to me that I had been wrong to believe in this feeling.’

“ ‘No!’ Necip cried. ‘Not once did I give my own life more value than I gave to yours!’

“ ‘If this had been true, I never would have died,’ said Fazıl’s ghost, ‘and you would never have married the beautiful Hicran. I died because you harbored a secret wish—a wish so secret you even hid it from yourself—to see me dead.’

“Necip objected violently to this accusation, but the ghost refused to listen.

“ ‘It was not just the suspicion that you wished me dead that deprived me of peace in the other world,’ said the ghost. ‘It was also that you had a hand in my murder, for it was you who so treacher-ously shot me in the head, and here, and here, as I lay in my bed sleeping. And there was another fear, too—the fear that you acted as an agent for the enemies of the Holy Koran.’ By now Necip had given up objecting and fallen silent.

“ ‘There is only one way for you to deliver me from my suffering and restore me to heaven, and only by following this same path can you deliver yourself from suspicion in this heinous crime,’ said the ghost. ‘Find my killer, whoever he might be. In seven years and seven months, they haven’t found a single suspect. And when you’ve found whoever killed me or wanted me dead, I want to see the crime avenged. An eye for an eye. So long as that villain remains unpunished, there is no peace for me in this life, nor will there be any peace for you in the transitory realm that you still insist on calling the “real world.” ’

“Neither Necip nor Hicran could think what to say; they watched in tearful amazement as the ghost vanished from the screen.”

“And then what? What happened next?” Ka asked.

“I haven’t decided yet,” said Necip, “but if I wrote the whole story, do you think I could sell it?” When he saw Ka hesitating, he added, “Listen, every line I write comes from the bottom of my heart. They all express my deepest convictions. What does this story mean to you? What did you feel when I was reading it to you?”

“It shook me to the core, because it showed me that you believe with all your heart that this world is nothing more than a preparation for the next.”

“Yes, I do believe that,” said Necip with excitement. “It’s not enough, though. God wants us to be happy in this world too. But that’s the hardest thing.”

They fell silent as they pondered the hardest thing.

After a moment the lights came back on, but the people in the teahouse remained as silent as they had been in the darkness. And the television screen was still dark; the owner began to hit it with his fist.

“We’ve been sitting here together for twenty minutes now,” said Necip.

“My friends must be dying of curiosity.”

“Who are your friends?” asked Ka. “Is one of them Fazıl? And are those your real names?”

“No, of course not. I’m using an assumed name, just like the Necip in the story. You’re not a policeman; stop interrogating me! As for Fazıl, he refuses to come to places like this,” Necip told him, turning quite mysterious. “Fazıl is the most religious person in our group, and he’s the person I trust more than anyone else in the world. But he’s worried that if he gets involved in politics, he’ll get a police file and be kicked out of school. He has an uncle in Germany who’s going to send for him, and we love each other just as much as the two boys in the story, so if someone killed me, I am certain that he would take revenge. In fact, it’s just as in the story—we’re so close that no matter how far apart we are, we can always tell what the other is doing.”

“So what’s Fazıl doing right now?”

“Hmmm,” said Necip, assuming a strange pose. “He’s in the dormitory, reading.”

“Who is Hicran?”

“That’s not a real name either. But it’s not a name she took herself, it’s a name we’ve given her. Some of us write her love letters and poems non-stop, but we’re too afraid to send them. If I had a daughter, I’d want her to be as beautiful, as intelligent, and as courageous as she is. She’s the leader of the head-scarf girls, and she’s afraid of nothing. Her mind is her own.

“To tell you the truth, in the beginning she was an infidel—this was because she was under the influence of her atheist father. She was a model in Istanbul; she’d go on television and bare her bottom and flaunt her legs. She came here to do a shampoo commercial for television. In it she was going to be walking along Ahmet Muhtar the Conqueror Avenue—the meanest, dirtiest street in Kars but also the most beautiful. Then when she stopped in front of the camera, she was to swing her magnificent waist-length brown hair like a flag and say, ‘Even in the filth of the beautiful city of Kars, my hair is still sparkling clean—thanks to Blendax.’ The commercial was going to be shown everywhere; the whole world would laugh at us.

“At that time, the head-scarf business at the Institute of Education was just getting started, and two of the girls had seen Hicran on television and also recognized her from photographs in gossip magazines that had reported on her behavior with rich kids in Istanbul. Secretly, the girls admired her, so they invited her for tea. Hicran accepted, though for her it was a big joke. She got bored with the girls almost immediately, and do you know what she said? ‘If our religion’—no, she didn’t say
our
religion, she said
your
religion—‘if your religion requires you to hide your hair, and the state forbids you to wear a head scarf, why don’t you be like so-andso’—here she gave the name of a foreign rock star—‘and just shave your hair off and wear a nose ring? Then the whole world would stand up and take notice!’

“Our poor girls were so taken aback to hear these affronts that they couldn’t even keep from laughing with her! This made Hicran even bolder, so she said, ‘These scarves are sending you back to the Middle Ages. Why don’t you take them off and flaunt your beautiful hair?’

“And as Hicran was about to remove the scarf from the silliest girl among them, her hand froze. Suddenly, Hicran threw herself at the silly girl’s feet—this girl’s brother is one of our classmates, and he’s so stupid even the morons call him a moron—and begged the girl’s pardon. Hicran returned the next day, and the day after that, and in the end she joined them instead of going back to Istanbul. She’s one of the saints who’ll help turn the head scarf into the flag of Anatolia’s oppressed Muslim women—mark my words!”

“Then why did you say nothing about her in your story except that she was a virgin?” asked Ka. “Why didn’t Necip and Fazıl ask for her opinion before deciding to kill themselves for her sake?” 

There was a tense silence, during which Necip raised his beautiful eyes, one of which, in two hours and three minutes, would be shattered by a bullet; he looked up at the dark street to watch the snow fall slowly, like a poem. Then he whispered, “There she is. It’s her!”

“Who?”

“Hicran! She’s out there in the street!” 

I’m Not Going to Discuss

My Faith with an Atheist

a walk through the snow with kadife

She was wearing a purple raincoat, her eyes were hidden behind futuristic dark glasses, and on her head was one of those nonde-script head scarves Ka had seen thousands of women wearing since childhood and which were now the symbol of political Islam. When he saw that this young woman entering the teahouse was walking directly toward him, Ka jumped to his feet as though the teacher had just entered the classroom.

“I’m Ipek’s sister, Kadife,” said the woman, smiling faintly. “Everyone’s expecting you for dinner. My father sent me to tell you.”

“How did you know I was here?” Ka asked.

“In Kars everyone always knows about everything that’s going on,” said Kadife. She wasn’t smiling at all now. “If it’s happening in Kars, of course.”

Ka could detect some pain in her expression, but he had no idea where it came from. Necip made the introductions: “Meet my poet-novelist friend!” he said. They looked each other over but did not shake hands. Ka took it for a sign of tension. Much later, looking back on these events, he would work out that the omission was out of deference to Islamic convention. Necip turned ghostly white, looking at Kadife as if looking at a Hicran just arrived from outer space, but Kadife’s manner was so matter-of-fact that not a single man in the crowded teahouse even turned around to look at her. She wasn’t as beautiful as her sister, either.

But as he walked with her through the snow and down Atatürk Avenue, Ka felt very happy. She was wrapped up in a scarf, and though plainer than her sister’s her face was pleasant and clean. When he looked right into her eyes, hazel like Ipek’s, he found he was able to talk to her with great ease; this made her attractive to him, so much so that he felt as if he were betraying her older sister.