Snow (34 page)

“Necip,” he said. He wanted to throw his arms around the boy and kiss him.

“I’m Fazıl,” said the youth. “I saw you in the street and followed you.” He glanced over at the library table where Saffet was sitting. “Tell me quickly—is it true that Necip’s dead?”

“It’s true. I saw him with my own eyes.”

“Then why did you call me Necip? You’re still not sure, are you?”

“No, I’m not.”

For a moment Fazıl’s face crumpled, but then he pulled himself together.

“He wants me to take revenge. This is why I am convinced he’s dead. But when school opens all I want to do is study; I don’t want to take revenge. I don’t want to get involved in politics.”

“Revenge is a terrible thing.”

“Even so, I would do it if I thought I had to,” said Fazıl. “I’ve been told you discussed this with him. Did you give those letters to Hicran—I mean Kadife?”

“I did.” Fazıl’s gaze made him uncomfortable. Should I correct that? he asked himself. Say
I was intending to
instead? But it was already too late. For some reason, his lie made him feel more secure. The pain on Fazıl’s face was hard to bear.

Fazıl covered his face with his hands and cried a little. But he was so angry the tears wouldn’t come. “If Necip is dead, who is the person I should be taking revenge on?” When Ka said nothing, Fazıl looked him straight in the eye. “You know who it is,” he said sternly.

“I was told that sometimes the two of you thought the same thing at the same time,” said Ka. “If you can still do that, you know who it is.”

“But what he thinks, the thing he wants me to think, causes me terrible pain,” said Fazıl. For the first time, Ka saw in his eyes the same light he’d seen in Necip’s. It was like sitting across from a ghost.

“So what is it that he’s forcing you to think?”

“Revenge,” said Fazıl. He cried a little more.

Ka could tell right away that Fazıl’s own thoughts were of something other than revenge. And Fazıl said so himself when he saw Saffet the detective rise from his table to join them.

“Please, may I see your identity card?” said Saffet the detective, giving him a fierce look.

“They have my school identity card at the circulation desk.” 

Ka watched the fear that swept over Fazıl as he realized he was talking to a plainclothes policeman. They all walked over to the circulation desk. The detective snatched the identity card from the hand of the terrified woman on duty, and when he saw that Fazıl was a student at the religious high school, he shot Ka a look that said
I might have known
and, like an old man confiscating a child’s toy, he put the identity card into his pocket.

“If you want this religious high school ID of yours back, you’ll have to come to police headquarters and ask for it.”

“With all due respect,” said Ka, “this boy has gone to great lengths to stay out of trouble, and he’s only just heard that his best friend is dead. Couldn’t you give him his card back now?” 

Having tried so hard to ingratiate himself earlier in the day so that Ka might put in a good word for him, Saffet now refused to budge.

Hoping he might persuade Saffet to entrust the card to him later on, when no one was watching, Ka arranged to meet Fazıl at five o’clock at the Iron Bridge. Fazıl left the library at once. By now all the other people in the reading room were on tenterhooks, thinking that they too were going to have their identity cards checked. But Saffet was not paying attention; he went straight to his table, where he returned to a 1960s volume of
Life
magazine to read about the sad Princess Sureyya, who had been spurned by her husband the shah after failing to give him a child, and to look at the last picture taken of Adnan Menderes, the former prime minister, before he was hanged.

Calculating now that he would not be able to get Saffet to give him Fazıl’s identity card, Ka too left the library. When he returned to the enchanted white street to see swarms of joyous children throwing snowballs, he forgot all his fears. He felt like running. In Government Square he saw a gloomy line of shivering men clutching burlap sacks and packets wrapped in newspaper, tied up with string. These cautious citizens of Kars had decided to take the coup seriously and were turning over all the weapons in their houses to the state. The authorities didn’t trust them and had refused to let them inside the provincial headquarters, but they were still lined up like cold little lambs at the main entrance. When it was first announced that all weapons were to be turned in, most Kars residents had gone straight out into the snow in the dead of night to hide their guns in the frozen ground where no one would think to look for them.

While he was walking down Faikbey Avenue, Ka ran into Kadife and felt his face go red. He’d just been thinking of Ipek, and because he associated one sister with the other he now thought Kadife extraordinarily beautiful. He had to exercise great self-control to keep himself from embracing her.

“I must have a very quick word with you,” said Kadife. “But there’s a man following you, so I can’t say anything while he’s looking. Could you go back to the hotel and come to Room Two-seventeen at two o’clock? It’s the last room at the end of your corridor.”

“Are you sure we can speak openly there?”

“If you don’t tell anyone we’ve spoken”—Kadife opened her eyes wide—“and I mean not even Ipek, no one will ever know.” She gave him a stern and businesslike handshake. “Now look behind you as casually as you can and tell me if I have one or maybe even two detectives following me.”

Ka nodded, smiling slightly. He was surprised at his own cold-bloodedness. Although the thought of meeting Kadife secretly in a room confused him, he had no trouble putting it out of his mind.

He knew at once that he didn’t want to see Ipek again before his meeting with Kadife, not even by chance, so he decided to continue his walk to kill time. No one seemed to be complaining about the coup; instead, the mood was much as he remembered from the coups of his childhood: There was a sense of new beginnings and of a change from the vexing routines of everyday life. The women had gathered up their handbags and their children and gone out to pick through the fruit in the stalls and at the greengrocer’s in search of a bargain; the men with their thick mustaches stood on street corners, smoking filterless cigarettes and gossiping as they watched the crowds go by; the beggar he’d seen feigning blindness twice the day before was no longer in his station under the eaves of an empty building between the garages and the market. The vendors who had been selling oranges and apples out of pickup trucks parked right in the middle of the street were gone. The traffic, normally light, was lighter still, but it was hard to say whether this was owing to the coup or to the snow. There were more plainclothes policemen out on the streets (one had been made a goalkeeper by the boys playing soccer at the bottom of Halitpa¸sa Avenue). The two hotels next to the garages that served as brothels (the Hotel Pan and the Hotel Freedom) were, like the cockfight ring and the unlicensed butchers, not to be permitted to pursue their black arts “indefinitely.” As for the explosions they’d heard coming from the shanty areas, especially at night, the people of Kars were accustomed to this, so their calm was generally undisturbed. Ka found the general lack of interest liberating. This is why he went into the snack bar on the corner of Little Kâzımbey Avenue and Kâzım Karabekir Avenue, and ordered himself a cinnamon sharbat, and he drank it with relish.

This Is the Only Time We’ll

Ever Be Free in Kars

ka with kadife in the hotel room

When he stepped into Room 217 sixteen minutes later, Ka was so worried someone might have seen him that he tried to joke with Kadife about the cinnamon sharbat, its sour taste still in his mouth.

“For a while there were rumors of angry Kurds poisoning that sharbat to kill military personnel,” said Kadife. “It’s even said that secret investigators were sent in to solve the mystery.”

“Do you believe these rumors?” Ka asked.

“When educated, westernized outsiders come to Kars and hear these conspiracy theories,” said Kadife, “they immediately try to disprove them by going to the snack bar and ordering a
salep,
and then the fools end up poisoning themselves because the rumors are true. Some Kurds are so unhappy they know no God.”

“Then why, after all this time, hasn’t the state stepped in?”

“Like all westernized intellectuals, you put your trust in the state without even realizing it. MIT knows everything that goes on in Kars, and they know about the sharbat, too, but they don’t stop it.”

“So does MIT know we’re here together in this room?”

“Don’t worry, right now they don’t,” said Kadife with a smile. “One day they’ll find out, but until that day comes we’re free here. This is the only time we’ll ever be free in Kars. Appreciate it, and take off your coat.”

“This coat protects me from evil,” said Ka. Seeing fear in Kadife’s face, he added, “And it’s cold in here.” 

The room in which they were meeting was half of an old storage room. One narrow window looked onto the inner courtyard, and there was room only for the single bed on which they were now sitting, Ka perched uncertainly at one end of it, Kadife at the other. The room had that stifling dusty smell that you find only in unaired hotel rooms. Kadife leaned over to fiddle with the dial on the radiator, but when it refused to budge she gave up. When she saw Ka had jumped nervously to his feet, she tried to conjure up a smile.

For a moment it seemed to Ka that Kadife was taking great pleasure from this assignation. After so many years of solitude, he too was pleased to be alone in a room with a beautiful girl, but he sensed she had no time for such soft thoughts; the light shining in her eyes spoke of something darker and more destructive.

“Don’t worry, right now the only agent they have following you is that poor man with the bag of oranges. You can take this to mean that the state isn’t afraid of you, it just wants to frighten you a little. Who was following me?”

“I forgot to look,” said Ka, with embarrassment.

“What?” Kadife shot him a poisonous look. “You’re in love, aren’t you. You’re madly in love.” But she quickly pulled herself together. “I’m sorry, it’s just that we’re all so scared,” she said, and once again the expression on her face changed abruptly. “You must make my sister happy. She’s a very good person.”

“Do you think she’ll love me back?” Ka asked, in a near whisper.

“Of course she will—she must; you’re a very charming man,” said Kadife. When she saw how much she’d shocked him, she added, “What’s more, you’re a Gemini like Ipek. ” She then explained that while Gemini men are best suited to Virgo women, the double personality of Geminis, which makes them both light and shallow, can either delight a Gemini woman or disgust her. “But you both deserve to be happy,” she added consolingly.

“When you’ve discussed me with your sister, has the question of her coming back with me to Germany ever come up?”

“She thinks you’re very handsome,” said Kadife, “but she doesn’t trust you. Trust takes time. Impatient men like you don’t fall in love with a woman, they take possession of her.”

“Is this what she said to you?” said Ka, raising his eyebrows. “Time is a scarce commodity in this city.”

Kadife glanced at her watch. “First let me thank you for coming here. I’ve summoned you to discuss something very important. Blue has a message he wants to give you.”

“If we meet again, they’ll follow me and arrest him on the spot,” said Ka. “Then they’ll torture us all. They’ve been in his house. The police hear everything he says.”

“Blue knew they were listening,” said Kadife. “He sent you this message before the coup, and he also sent a message for you to pass on to the West. He sent it to make a philosophical point. Stop sticking your nose into this suicide business—that’s what he wanted you to tell them. But now everything’s changed; there’s something more important. He wants to cancel that message and give you a new one.” 

The more Kadife insisted, the more uncertain Ka became. “It’s not possible to go from one point to another in this city without anyone seeing you,” he said finally.

“There’s a horse-drawn carriage. Twice a day it stops just outside the kitchen door to drop off gas canisters, coal, and bottled water. It then goes on to make deliveries all over the city, and it’s draped in canvas to protect its goods from snow and rain. The driver can be trusted.”

“Am I to hide under the canvas like a thief ?”

“I’ve done it plenty of times myself,” said Kadife. “It’s lots of fun to go right across the city without anyone knowing. If you agree to this meeting, I promise I’ll do everything in my power to help you with Ipek. I want you to marry her.”

“Why?”

“What woman wouldn’t want her older sister to be happy?” 

In his entire life, Ka had never known a pair of siblings who didn’t feel deep hatred for each other; even if they seemed to get along, there was something oppressive about their solidarity, something to indicate that they were just going through the motions. But that wasn’t why Ka dismissed Kadife’s claim; what inclined him to doubt her was the way her left eyebrow shot up almost of its own accord and the way she pouted her half-open lips like a child about to cry—or, rather, like a Turkish film actress simulating innocence. Nevertheless, when Kadife looked at her watch again and said that the horse-drawn carriage was arriving in seventeen minutes, and if he promised immediately to accompany her to see Blue, she would tell him everything, Ka agreed without hesitation. “But first you have to tell me why you’re willing to put this much trust in me.”

“You’re a dervish; Blue says so. He believes God has graced you with lifelong innocence.”

“Okay, then,” said Ka hurriedly. “Is Ipek also aware of this special gift from God?”

“Why should she know? This is Blue’s view.” 

“Please tell me everything Ipek thinks about me.”

“Actually, I’ve already told you everything.” Seeing that she was breaking Ka’s heart, Kadife thought for a few moments, or else made as if to think—Ka was too upset by now to tell the difference—and then she said, “She thinks you’re fun. You’ve just arrived from Germany and whatnot. You have so much to talk about.”