Snow (62 page)

As they were searched at the entrance, Turgut Bey announced that he was the leading lady’s father. The second act had begun, but they found two empty seats in the very last row and sat down.

This act also contained a number of the stock gags that Sunay had been falling back on for so many years, including a modified belly-dance parody by Funda Eser. But the atmosphere had grown heavier, and the silence in the hall deeper, from the cumulative effect of Kadife and Sunay’s long scenes alone onstage.

“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.

“No! It’s not like that at all,” said Sunay. “Some people kill themselves for love; others kill because they can’t bear their husbands’ beatings any longer or because poverty is piercing them to the bone, like a knife.”

“You have a very simple way of looking at life,” said Kadife. “A woman who wants to kill herself for love still knows that if she waits a little her love will fade. Poverty’s not a real reason for suicide either. And a woman doesn’t have to commit suicide to escape her husband; all she has to do is steal some of his money and leave him.”

“Very well, then, what is the real reason?”

“The main reason women commit suicide is to save their pride. At least that’s what most women kill themselves for.”

“You mean they’ve been humiliated by love?”

“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.”

“Did you use these arguments to push your friends toward suicide?”

“They came to their own decisions. The choice to commit suicide was theirs.”

“But everyone knows that here in Kars there’s no such thing as free choice; all people want is to escape from the next beating, to take refuge in the nearest community. Admit it, Kadife, you met secretly with these women and pushed them toward suicide.”

“But how could that be?” said Kadife. “All they achieved by killing themselves was an even greater loneliness. Many were disowned by their families, who in some cases refused even to arrange the funeral prayers.”

“So are you trying to tell me that you plan to kill yourself just to prove that they are not alone, just to show that you’re all in this together? You’re suddenly very quiet, Kadife. But if you kill yourself before explaining your reasons, don’t you run the risk of letting your message be misinterpreted?”

“I’m not killing myself to send any message,” said Kadife.

“But still, there are so many people watching you, and they’re all curious. The least you can do is say the first thing that comes into your mind.”

“Women kill themselves because they hope to gain something,” said Kadife. “Men kill themselves because they’ve lost hope of gaining anything.”

“That’s true,” said Sunay, and he took his Kırıkkale gun out of his pocket. Everyone in the hall could see it flashing. “When you’re sure that I’m utterly defeated, will you please use this to shoot me?”

“I don’t want to end up in jail.”

“Why worry about that when you’re planning to kill yourself too?” said Sunay. “After all, if you commit suicide you’ll go to hell, so it makes no sense to worry about the punishment you might receive for any other crime—in this world or the next.”

“But this is exactly why women commit suicide,” said Kadife. “To escape all forms of punishment.”

“When I arrive at the moment of my defeat, I want my death to be at the hands of just such a woman!” cried Sunay, now spreading his arms theatrically and facing the audience. He paused for effect. Then he launched into some tale of Atatürk’s amorous indiscretions, cutting it short when he sensed interest flagging.

When the second act ended, Turgut Bey and Ipek rushed backstage to find Kadife. Her dressing room—once used by acrobats from St. Petersburg and Moscow, Armenians playing Molière, and dancers and musicians who’d toured Russia—was ice cold.

“I thought you were leaving,” said Kadife to Ipek.

“I’m so proud of you, darling; you were wonderful!” said Turgut Bey, embracing Kadife. “But if he’d handed you that gun and said, ‘Shoot me,’ I’m afraid I would have jumped up and interrupted the play, shouting, ‘Kadife, whatever you do, don’t shoot!’ ”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because the gun could be loaded!” said Turgut Bey. He told her about the story he’d read in tomorrow’s edition of the
Border City Gazette. 
“I know that Serdar Bey is always hoping he can make things happen by writing about them first, but most of his stories turn out to be false alarms. I wouldn’t especially care about this one’s coming true anyway,” he said. “But I know that Serdar would never dream of proclaiming an assassination like this unless Sunay had talked him into it—and I find that very ominous. It may just be more self-promotion, but who knows; he could be planning to have you kill him onstage. My darling girl, please don’t pull that trigger unless you’re sure the gun isn’t loaded! And don’t bare your head just because this man wants you to. Ipek isn’t leaving. We’re going to be living in this city for some time to come, so please don’t anger the Islamists over nothing.”

“Why did Ipek decide not to go?”

“Because she loves her father and you and her family more,” said Turgut Bey, taking Kadife’s hand.

“Father dear, would you mind if we spoke alone again?” said Ipek, instantly seeing her sister’s face go cold with alarm. Turgut Bey crossed to the other end of the dusty high-ceilinged room, joining Sunay and Funda Eser, and Ipek hugged Kadife tightly and sat her on her lap. Seeing the gesture had only made her sister more fearful, Ipek took her by the hand toward a corner separated from the rest of the room by a curtain. Just then, Funda Eser emerged with a tray of glasses and a bottle of Kanyak.

“You were excellent, Kadife,” she said. “You two make yourselves at home.”

As Kadife’s anxieties mounted with every second that passed, Ipek looked into her eyes in a manner that said, unambiguously, I have some very bad news. Then she spoke. “Hande and Blue were killed during a raid.”

Kadife shrank into herself. “Were they at the same house? Who told you?” she asked. But seeing the sternness in Ipek’s face, she fell silent.

“It was Fazıl, that religious high school boy, who told us, and I believed him because he saw it with his own eyes.” She paused for a moment, to give Kadife a chance to take it in. Kadife grew only paler, but Ipek pressed on. “Ka knew where he was hiding, and after his last visit to see you here, he never returned to the hotel. I think Ka betrayed them to the special operations team. That’s why I didn’t go back to Germany with him.”

“How can you be so sure?” said Kadife. “Maybe it wasn’t him; maybe someone else told them.”

“It’s possible. I’ve considered that myself. But I’m so sure in my heart that it was Ka, it almost doesn’t matter: I know I’d never be able to convince my rational self that he didn’t do it. And so I didn’t go to Germany because I knew I could never love him.”

Kadife was spent, trying to absorb the news. Only on seeing Kadife’s strength failing could Ipek tell that her sister had begun to accept that Blue was really dead.

Kadife buried her face in her hands and began to sob. Ipek folded her arms around Kadife’s and they cried together, though Ipek knew they were crying for different reasons. They had cried this way before, once or twice during those shameful days when neither of them could give up Blue and they dueled mercilessly for his affections. Now Ipek realized that this terrible vendetta was over, once and for all; she wasn’t going to leave Kars. She felt herself age suddenly. To reconcile and grow old in peace, and have the wit to want nothing from the world—this was her wish now.

She could see that her sister’s pain was deeper and more destructive than her own. For a moment she was thankful not to be in Kadife’s place—was it the sweetness of revenge?—and guilt swept over her. In the background they were playing the familiar taped medley that the National Theater’s management always played during intermissions to encourage sales of soda and dried chickpeas: The song right then was one she remembered from the earliest years of their youth in Istanbul: “Baby, come closer, closer to me.” In those days, both of them had wanted to learn to speak good English; neither succeeded. It seemed to Ipek that her sister only cried harder on hearing this song. Peeking through the curtains, she could see her father and Sunay in animated conversation at the other end of the room, as Funda filled their glasses with more Kanyak.

“Kadife Hanım, I’m Colonel Osman Nuri Çolak.” A middle-aged soldier had yanked open the curtain. With a gesture evidently acquired from a film, he bowed so low he almost wiped the floor with his pate. “With all due respect, miss, how can I ease your pain? If you do not wish to go onstage, I have some good news for you: The roads have reopened and the armed forces will be entering the city at any moment.” 

Later on, at his court-martial, Osman Nuri Çolak would offer these words as evidence that he’d been doing all he could to save the city from the ludicrous officers who’d staged the coup.

“I’m absolutely fine, but thank you, sir, for your concern,” said Kadife.

Ipek saw that Kadife had already assumed a number of Funda’s affectations. At the same time, she had to admire her sister’s determination to pull herself together. Kadife forced herself to stand: She drank a glass of water and then began to pace quietly up and down the long backstage room like a theater ghost.

Ipek was hoping to get away before her father could talk to Kadife, but Turgut Bey crept up to join them just as the third act had begun. “Don’t be afraid,” said Sunay, nodding to his friends. “These people are modern.”

The third act began with Funda Eser singing a folk song about a woman who’d been raped, an engaging number to make up for earlier parts of the drama that the audience had found too intellectual or otherwise obscure. It was Funda’s usual routine: One moment she was crying and cursing the men in the audience, and the next moment she was showering them with whatever compliments came into her head. Following two songs and a little commercial parody only the children thought funny (she tried to suggest that Aygaz filled their canisters not with propane gas but with farts), the stage grew dark, and—in an ominous reprise of the finale two days earlier—two armed soldiers marched onstage. The audience watched in tense silence as they erected a gallows center stage. Sunay limped confidently across the stage with Kadife to stand right beneath the noose.

“I never expected things to happen so quickly,” he said.

“Is this your way of admitting you’ve failed at this thing you’ve set out to accomplish, or is it simply that you’re old and tired now and looking for a way to go out in style?” said Kadife.

Ipek saw Kadife was drawing on unsuspected reserves of strength.

“You’re very intelligent, Kadife,” said Sunay.

“Does this frighten you?” said Kadife, her voice taut and angry.

“Yes,” said Sunay in a lecherous languor.

“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.”

“You do realize, don’t you, Kadife, that when you act like an individual and commit suicide, the Europeans will applaud you? Don’t think you haven’t already turned some heads with your animated performance in the so-called secret meeting at the Hotel Asia. There are even rumors that you organized the suicide girls, just as you did the head-scarf girls.”

“There was only one suicide who was involved in the head-scarf protest, and that was Teslime.”

“And now you mean to be the second.”

“No, because before I kill myself, I’m going to bare my head.”

“Have you thought this through?”

“Yes,” said Kadife. “I have.”

“Then you must have thought about this, too: Suicides go to hell. And since I’m going to hell anyway, you can kill me first with a clear conscience.”

“No,” said Kadife. “Because I don’t believe I’m going to hell after I kill myself. I’m going to kill you to rid our country of a microbe, an enemy of our nation, our religion, and our women!”

“You’re a courageous woman, Kadife, and you speak with great frankness. But our religion prohibits suicide.”

“Yes, it’s certainly true the Nisa verse of the glorious Koran proclaims that we shouldn’t kill ourselves. But this does not prevent God in his greatness from finding it in his heart to pardon the suicide girls and spare them from going to hell after all.”

“In other words, you’ve found a way to twist the Koran to suit your purposes.”

“In fact, the contrary is true,” said Kadife. “It happens that a few young women in Kars killed themselves because they were forbidden to cover their heads as they wished. As surely as the world is God’s creation, he can see their suffering. So long as I feel the love of God in my heart, there’s no place for me in Kars, so I’m going to do as they did and end my life.”

“You’re going to anger all those religious leaders who’ve come to Kars through snow and ice to deliver their sermons hoping the helpless women of Kars might be delivered from their suicidal wishes—you do know that, Kadife, don’t you? And while we’re on the subject, the Koran—”