Authors: Orhan Pamuk
Snow
Snow
Orhan Pamuk’s novel
My Name Is Red
won the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary
Award. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in
Istanbul.
ALSO BY ORHAN PAMUK
My Name Is Red
The White Castle
The New Life
The Black Book
Istanbul
Orhan Pamuk
Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Vintage Books
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York
F I R S T V I N T A G E I N T E R N A T I O N A L E D I T I O N , A U G U S T 2 0 0 5
Translation copyright © 2004 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Turkey as
Kar
by İleti¸sim, Istanbul, in 2002. Copyright 2002
İleti¸sim Yayıncılık A. ¸
S. This translation originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2004.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: Pamuk, Orhan [date]
[Kar, English]
Snow / Orhan Pamuk ; translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely—1st American ed.
p. cm.
I. Freely, Maureen, [date] II. Title.
PL248.P34K36513 2004
894'.3533—dc22
2003065935
eISBN-13: 978-0-307-38647-2
eISBN-10: 0-307-38647-3
Book design by Robert C. Olsson
v1.0
To Rüya
Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things.
The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist.
—Robert Browning, “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”
Politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though one impossible to ignore. We are about to speak of very ugly matters.
—Stendhal,
The Charterhouse of Parma
Richard Howard’s translation
Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. Because the European enlightenment is more important than people.
—Dostoevsky, notebooks for
The Brothers Karamazov
The Westerner in me was discomposed.
—Joseph Conrad,
Under Western Eyes
CONTENTS
4. Ka Meets Ipek in the New Life P
astry Shop
5. The First and Last Conversation Between the
Murderer and His Victim
6. Love, Religion, and Poetry: Muhtar’s
Sad Story
7. At Party Headquarters, Police Headquarters,
and Once Again in the Streets
9. A Nonbeliever Who Does Not Want to Kill
Himself
12. The Sad Story of Necip and Hicran
13. A Walk Through the Snow with Kadife
14. The Dinner Conversation Turns to Love,
Head Scarves, and Suicide
16. Necip Describes His Landscape and Ka
Recites His Poem
17. A Play About a Girl Who Burns Her
Head Scarf
19. The Night of the Revolution
20. While Ka Slept and When He Woke the Next
Morning
21. Ka in the Cold Rooms of Terror
22. Sunay Zaim’s Military and Theatrical Careers
23. With Sunay at Military Headquarters
25. Ka with Kadife in the Hotel Room
26. Blue’s Statement to the West
27. Ka Urges Turgut Bey to Sign the Statement
28. Ka with Ipek in the Hotel R
oom
30. A Short Spell of Happiness
31. The Secret Meeting at the Hotel Asia
32. On Love, Insignificance, and Blue’s
Disappearance
36. Bargaining in Which Life Vies with Theater,
and Art with Politics
37. Preparations for the Play to End All Plays
39. Ka and Ipek Meet at the Hotel
40. The First Half of the Chapter
41. The Missing Green Notebook
CHAPTER ONE
The Silence of Snow
the journey to kars
The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow.
He’d boarded the bus from Erzurum to Kars with only seconds to spare. He’d just come into the station on a bus from Istanbul—a snowy, stormy, two-day journey—and was rushing up and down the dirty wet corridors with his bag in tow, looking for his connection, when someone told him the bus for Kars was leaving immediately.
He’d managed to find it, an ancient Magirus, but the conductor had just shut the luggage compartment and, being “in a hurry,” refused to open it again. That’s why our traveler had taken his bag on board with him; the big dark-red Bally valise was now wedged between his legs. He was sitting next to the window and wearing a thick charcoal coat he’d bought at a Frankfurt
Kaufhof
five years earlier. We should note straightaway that this soft, downy beauty of a coat would cause him shame and disquiet during the days he was to spend in Kars, while also furnishing a sense of security.
As soon as the bus set off, our traveler glued his eyes to the window next to him; perhaps hoping to see something new, he peered into the wretched little shops and bakeries and broken-down coffeehouses that lined the streets of Erzurum’s outlying suburbs, and as he did it began to snow. It was heavier and thicker than the snow he’d seen between Istanbul and Erzurum. If he hadn’t been so tired, if he’d paid a bit more attention to the snowflakes swirling out of the sky like feathers, he might have realized that he was traveling straight into a blizzard; he might have seen at the start that he was setting out on a journey that would change his life forever and chosen to turn back.
But the thought didn’t even cross his mind. As evening fell, he lost himself in the light still lingering in the sky above; in the snowflakes whirling ever more wildly in the wind he saw nothing of the impending blizzard but rather a promise, a sign pointing the way back to the happiness and purity he had known, once, as a child. Our traveler had spent his years of happiness and childhood in Istanbul; he’d returned a week ago, for the first time in twelve years, to attend his mother’s funeral, and having stayed there four days he decided to take this trip to Kars. Years later, he would still recall the extraordinary beauty of the snow that night; the happiness it brought him was far greater than any he’d known in Istanbul. He was a poet and, as he himself had written—in an early poem still largely unknown to Turkish readers—it snows only once in our dreams.
As he watched the snow fall outside his window, as slowly and silently as the snow in a dream, the traveler fell into a long-desired, long-awaited reverie; cleansed by memories of innocence and childhood, he succumbed to optimism and dared to believe himself at home in this world. Soon afterward, he felt something else that he had not known for quite a long time and fell asleep in his seat.
* * *
Let us take advantage of this lull to whisper a few biographical details. Although he had spent the last twelve years in political exile in Germany, our traveler had never been very much involved in politics. His real passion, his only thought, was for poetry. He was forty-two years old and single, never married. Although it might be hard to tell as he curled up in his seat, he was tall for a Turk, with brown hair and a pale complexion that had become even paler during this journey. He was shy and enjoyed being alone. Had he known what would happen soon after he fell asleep—with the swaying of the bus his head would come to lean first on his neighbor’s shoulder and then on the man’s chest—he would have been very much ashamed. For the traveler we see leaning on his neighbor is an honest and well-meaning man and full of melancholy, like those Chekhov characters so laden with virtues that they never know success in life. We’ll have a lot to say about melancholy later on. But as he is not likely to remain asleep for very long in that awkward position, suffice it for now to say that the traveler’s name is Kerim Alakusoglu, that he doesn’t like this name but prefers to be called Ka (from his initials), and that I’ll be doing the same in this book. Even as a schoolboy, our hero stubbornly insisted on writing
Ka
on his homework and exam papers; he signed
Ka
on university registration forms; and he took every opportunity to defend his right to continue to do so, even if it meant conflict with teachers and government officials. His mother, his family, and his friends all called him Ka, and, having also published some poetry collections under this name, he enjoyed a small enigmatic fame as Ka, both in Turkey and in Turkish circles in Germany.
That’s all we have time for at present. As the bus driver wished his passengers a safe journey as we departed Erzurum station, let me just add these words: “May your road be open, dear Ka.” But I don’t wish to deceive you. I’m an old friend of Ka’s, and I begin this story knowing everything that will happen to him during his time in Kars.
* * *
After leaving Horasan, the bus turned north, heading directly for Kars. As it climbed the winding road, the driver had to slam on the brakes to avoid a horse and carriage that had sprung up out of nowhere on one of the hairpin bends, and Ka woke up. Fear had already fostered a strong fellow feeling among the passengers; before long, Ka too felt at one with them. Even though he was sitting just behind the bus driver, Ka was soon behaving like the passengers behind him: Whenever the bus slowed to negotiate a bend in the road or avoid going over the edge of a cliff, he stood up to get a better view; when the zealous passenger who’d committed himself to helping the driver by wiping the condensation from the windshield missed a corner, Ka would point it out with his forefinger (which contribution went unnoticed); and when the blizzard got so bad that the wipers could no longer keep the snow from piling up on the windshield, Ka joined the driver in trying to guess where the road was.
Once caked with snow, the road signs were impossible to read. When the snowstorm began to rage in earnest, the driver turned off his brights and dimmed the lights inside the bus, hoping to conjure up the road out of the semidarkness. The passengers fell into a fearful silence with their eyes on the scene outside: the snow-covered streets of destitute villages, the dimly lit, ramshackle one-story houses, the roads to farther villages that were already closed, and the ravines barely visible beyond the streetlamps. If they spoke, it was in whispers.
So it was in the gentlest of whispers that Ka’s neighbor, the man onto whose shoulder Ka had fallen asleep earlier, asked him why he was traveling to Kars. It was easy to see that Ka was not a local.
“I’m a journalist,” Ka whispered in reply. This was a lie. “I’m interested in the municipal elections—and also the young women who’ve been committing suicide.” This was true.
“When the mayor of Kars was murdered, every newspaper in Istanbul ran the story,” Ka’s neighbor replied. “And it’s the same for the women who’ve been committing suicide.” It was hard for Ka to know whether it was pride or shame he heard in the man’s voice. Three days later, standing in the snow on Halitpa¸sa Avenue with tears streaming from his eyes, Ka was to see this slim handsome villager again.
During the desultory conversation that continued on and off for the rest of the bus journey, Ka found out that the man had just taken his mother to Erzurum because the hospital in Kars wasn’t good enough, that he was a livestock dealer who served the villages in the Kars vicinity, that he’d been through hard times but hadn’t become a rebel, and that—for mysterious reasons he did not disclose to Ka—he was sorry not for himself but for his country and was happy to see that a well-read, educated gentleman like Ka had taken the trouble to travel all the way from Istanbul to find out more about his city’s problems. There was something so noble in the plainness of his speech and the pride of his bearing that Ka felt respect for him.