Snow (4 page)

It was less a certainty than a faint image at this point, like struggling to remember a particular picture after taking a swift tour through the gal-leries of a museum. You try to conjure up the painting only to lose it again. It wasn’t the first time Ka had had this sensation.

Ka had grown up in a secular republican family and had had no religious teaching outside school. Although he’d had similar visions on occasion over the past few years, they had caused him no anxiety, nor had they inspired any poetic impulse. At most he would feel happy that the world was such a beautiful thing to behold.

When he returned to his hotel room for a bit of warmth and rest, he spent some time leafing happily through the histories of Kars he had brought with him from Istanbul, confusing what he read with the stories he had been hearing all day and with the tales from childhood that these books brought to mind.

Once upon a time in Kars, there had been a large and prosperous middle class, and although it had been far removed from Ka’s own world it had engaged in all the rituals Ka remembered from childhood; there had been great balls in those mansions, festivities that went on for days. Kars was an important station on the trade route to Georgia, Tabriz, and the Caucasus; being on the border between two empires now defunct, the Ottoman and the Russian, the mountain city also benefited from the protection of the standing armies each power had in turn placed in Kars for that purpose. During the Ottoman period, many different peoples had made Kars their home. There had been a large Armenian community; it no longer existed, but its thousand-year-old churches still stood in all their splendor. Many Persians fleeing first the Moghul and later the Iranian armies had settled in Kars over the years; there were Greeks with roots going back to the Byzantine and Pontus periods; there were also Georgians and Kurds and Circassians from various tribes. Some of the Muslims were driven out when the Russian army took possession of the city’s five-hundred-year-old castle in 1878, and thereafter the pasha’s mansions and
hamams
and the Ottoman buildings on the slopes below the castle fell into decay. Kars was still prosperous and diverse when the czar’s architects went to work along the southern bank of the Kars River, and soon they had built a thriving new city defined by five perfectly straight parallel avenues and by streets that intersected these avenues at right angles, something never before seen in the East. Czar Alexander came here for the hunting—and to meet secretly with his mistress. To the Russians, Kars was a gateway to the south and to the Mediterranean, and with an eye to controlling the trade routes running through it they invested a great deal in civic projects. These were the things that had so impressed Ka during his stay twenty years earlier. The streets and the large cobblestone pavements, the plane trees and the oleanders that had been planted after the founding of the Turkish Republic—these gave the city a melancholy air unknown in Ottoman cities, whose wooden houses burned down during the years of nationalist struggle and tribal warfare.

After endless wars, rebellions, massacres, and atrocity, the city was occupied by Armenian and Russian armies at different times and even, briefly, by the British. For a short time, when the Russian and Ottoman forces had left the city following the First World War, Kars was an independent state; in October 1920, the Turkish army entered under the command of Kâzım Karabekir, the general whose statue now stood in Station Square. This new generation of Turks made the most of the grand plan initiated by the czar’s architects forty-three years earlier: The culture that the Russians brought to Kars now fit perfectly with the Republic’s westernizing project. But when it came to renaming the five great Russian avenues, they couldn’t think of enough great men from the city’s history who weren’t soldiers, so they ended up memorializing five great pashas.

These were the city’s westernizing years, as Muzaffer Bey, the ex-mayor from the People’s Party, related with both pride and anger. He talked about the great balls in the civic centers, and the skating competi-tions held under the now rusty and ruined wrought-iron bridges Ka had crossed during his morning walk. When a theater company from Ankara came to perform
Oedipus Rex,
the Kars bourgeoisie received them with great enthusiasm, even though less than twenty years had passed since the war with Greece. The elderly rich in coats with fur collars would go out for rides on sleighs pulled by hearty Hungarian horses adorned with roses and silver tassels. At the National Gardens, balls were held under the acacia trees to support the football team, and the people of Kars would dance the latest dances as pianos, accordions, and clarinets were played in the open air. In summertime, girls could wear short-sleeved dresses and ride bicycles through the city without being bothered. Many lycée students who glided to school on ice skates expressed their patriotic fervor by sporting bow ties. In his youth, Muzaffer Bey had been one of them, and when as a lawyer he eagerly returned to the city to run for office, he took to wearing them again; his party associates warned him that this fashion was a vote-loser, likely to inspire people to dismiss him as the worst sort of poseur, but Muzaffer Bey paid no mind.

Now they were lost, those endless cold winters, and to listen to Muzaffer Bey it was as if this explained the city’s plunge into destitution, depression, and decay. Having described the beauty of those winters—dwelling in particular on the powdered faces of the half-naked actors who had come all the way from Ankara to perform Greek plays—the old mayor went on to tell how in the late forties he himself had invited a youth group to perform a revolutionary play in the civic center. “This work tells of the awakening of a young girl who has spent her life enveloped in a black scarf,” he said. “In the end she pulls it off and burns it.” In the late forties they’d had to search the entire city for a black scarf to use in the play; in the end they had had to phone Erzurum to ask for one to be sent. “Now the streets of Kars are filled with young women in head scarves of every kind,” Muzaffer Bey added. “And because they’ve been barred from their classes for flaunting this symbol of political Islam, they’ve begun committing suicide.”

Ka refrained from asking questions, as he would for the rest of his stay in Kars whenever anyone mentioned the rise of political Islam or the head-scarf question. He also refrained from asking why it was, if indeed not a single head scarf could be had in Kars in the late forties, that a group of fiery youths had felt compelled to stage a revolutionary play urging women not to cover their heads. During his long walks through the city that day, Ka had paid little attention to the head scarves he saw and didn’t attempt to distinguish the political kind from any other; having been back in the country for only a week, he had not yet acquired the secular intellectual’s knack of detecting political motive when seeing a covered woman in the street. But it is also true that, since childhood, he had scarcely been in the habit of noticing covered women. In the westernized upper-middle-class circles of the young Ka’s Istanbul, a covered woman would have been someone who had come in from the suburbs—from the Kartal vineyards, say—to sell grapes. Or she might be the milk-man’s wife or someone else from the lower classes.

* * *

In time, I was also to hear many stories about former owners of the Snow Palace Hotel, where Ka was staying. One was a West-leaning professor whom the czar had exiled to Kars (a gentler option than Siberia); another was an Armenian in the cattle trade; subsequently the building housed a Greek orphanage. The first owner had equipped the 110-year-old structure with the sort of heating system typical of so many houses built in Kars at that time: a stove set behind the walls to radiate heat to four surrounding rooms. It was not until Kars had become part of the Turkish Republic and the building had its first Turkish owner that it was converted to a hotel, but, being unable to figure out how to operate the Russian heating system, that owner installed a big brass stove beside the door opening onto the courtyard. Only much later was he converted to the merits of central heating.

* * *

Ka was lying on his bed with his coat on, lost in daydreams, when there was a knock on the door; he jumped up to answer it. It was Cavit, the desk clerk who spent his days beside the stove watching television; he had come to tell Ka something he had forgotten when Ka came in.

“I forgot to tell you. Serdar Bey, owner of the
Border City Gazette,
wants to see you immediately.”

Downstairs, Ka was about to walk out of the lobby when he was stopped dead in his tracks; just at that moment, coming through the door behind the reception desk, was ˙Ipek. He’d forgotten how beautiful she was during their university days, and now, suddenly reminded, he felt slightly nervous in her presence. Yes, exactly—that’s how beautiful she was. First they shook hands in the manner of the westernized Istanbul bourgeoisie, but after a moment’s hesitation they moved their heads forward, embracing without quite letting their bodies touch, and kissed on the cheeks.

“I knew you were coming,” Ipek said, as she stepped back. Ka was surprised to hear her speaking so openly. “Taner called to tell me.” She looked straight into Ka’s eyes when she said this.

“I came to report on the municipal elections and the suicide girls.”

“How long are you staying?” asked Ipek. “I’m busy with my father right now, but there’s a place called the New Life Pastry Shop, right next door to the Hotel Asia. Let’s meet there at half past one. We can catch up then.”

If they’d run into each other in Istanbul—somewhere in Beyo˘glu, say—this would have been a normal conversation: it was because it was happening in Kars that Ka felt so strange. He was unsure how much of his agitation had to do with Ipek’s beauty. After walking through the snow for some time, Ka found himself thinking, I’m so glad I bought this coat!

On the way to the newspaper office, his heart revealed a thing or two that his mind refused to accept: First, in returning to Istanbul from Frankfurt for the first time in twelve years, Ka’s purpose was not simply to attend his mother’s funeral but also to find a Turkish girl to make his wife; second, it was because he secretly hoped that this girl might be Ipek that he had traveled all the way from Istanbul to Kars.

If a close friend had suggested this second possibility, Ka would never have forgiven him; its truth would cause Ka guilt and shame for the rest of his life. Ka, you see, was one of those moralists who believe that the greatest happiness comes from never doing anything for the sake of personal happiness. On top of that, he did not think it appropriate for an educated, westernized, literary man like himself to go in search of marriage to someone he hardly knew. In spite of this, he felt quite content when he arrived at the
Border City Gazette.
This was because his first meeting with Ipek—the thing he had been dreaming of from the moment he stepped on the bus in Istanbul—had gone much better than he could have predicted.

The
Border City Gazette
was on Faikbey Avenue, one street down from Ka’s hotel, and its offices and printing facilities took up only slightly more space than Ka’s small hotel room. It was a two-room affair with a wooden partition on which were displayed portraits of Atatürk, calendars, sample business cards and wedding invitations (a printing sideline), and photographs of the owner with important government officials and other famous Turks who had paid visits to Kars. There was also a framed copy of the newspaper’s first issue, published forty years before. In the background was the reassuring sound of the press’s swinging treadle; years old, it was manufactured in Leipzig by the Baumann Company for its first owners in Hamburg. After working it for a quarter century, they sold it to a newspaper in Istanbul (this was in 1910, during the free press period following the establishment of the second constitutional monar-chy). In 1955—just as it was about to be sold off as scrap—Serdar Bey’s dear departed father bought the press and shipped it to Kars.

Ka found Serdar Bey’s twenty-two-year-old son moistening his finger with spit, about to feed a clean sheet into the machine with his right hand while skillfully removing the printed paper with his left; the collection basket had been broken during an argument with his younger brother eleven years earlier. But even performing the complex maneuver, he was able to wave hello to Ka. Serdar Bey’s second son was seated before a jet-black table, its top divided into countless small compartments and surrounded by rows of lead letters, molds, and plates. The elder son resembled his father, but when Ka looked at the younger he saw the slant-eyed, moon-faced, short, fat mother. Hand-setting advertisements for the issue due out in three days, this boy showed the painstaking patience of a calligrapher who has renounced the world for his art.

“So now you see what difficult conditions we in the Eastern Anatolian press have to work under,” said Serdar Bey.

At that very moment, the electricity went off. As the printing press whirred to a halt and the shop fell into an enchanted darkness, Ka was struck by the beautiful whiteness of the snow falling outside.

“How many copies did you print?” Serdar Bey asked. Lighting a candle, he sat Ka down on a chair in the front office.

“I’ve done a hundred and sixty, baba.”

“When the electricity comes back on, bring it up to three hundred and forty. Our sales are bound to increase, what with the visiting theater company.”

The
Border City Gazette
was sold at only one outlet, just across from the National Theater, and this outlet sold on average twenty copies of each edition; including subscriptions, the paper’s circulation was 320, a fact that inspired not a little pride in Serdar Bey. Of these, 240 went to government offices and places of business; Serdar Bey was often obliged to report on their achievements. The other 80 went to “honest and important people of influence” who had moved to Istanbul but still maintained their links with the city.

When the electricity came back on, Ka noticed an angry vein popping out of Serdar Bey’s forehead.