Snow

Snow 

Orhan Pamuk

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.

The honest thief, the tender murder,

The superstitious atheist.

~ Robert Browing, 'Bishop Blougram' Apology'

Politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though one possible to ignore. We are about to speak of very ugly matters.

~ Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma

Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. Because the European Enlightenment is more important than people.

~ Fyodor Destoevsky, Notebooks for The Brothers Karamazov

The Westerner in me was discomposed.

~ Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

As he watched the snow outside the window fall as slowly and silently as the snow in his dream, the traveller fell into a long-desired, long-awaited reverie; cleansed by memories of innocence, he succumbed to optimism and dared to believe himself at home in this world. 

After a lifetime whose every experience of affection was touched by shame and suffering, the prospect of falling in love filled Ka with an intense, almost instinctive dread.

He found almost nothing he recognized. The landmarks that hadn't been torn down, had lost their souls.

'I don't have a poem called "Snow", and I'm not going to the theatre this evening. Your newspaper will look like it's made a mistake.'

'Don't be so sure. There are those who despise us for writing the news before it happens; they fear us not because we are journalists but because we can predict the future. You should see how amazed they are when things turn out exactly as we have written them. And quite a few things do happen only because we've written them up first. This is what modern journalism is all about. I know you won't want to stand in the way of our being modern - you don't want to break our hearts - and that is why I am sure you will write a poem called "Snow", and then come to the theater to read it.'

At this moment Ka realized he was in love with Ipek. And, sensing that this love would determine the rest of his life, he was filled with dread

'but I didn't tell you this beautiful story to show you what it means to me or how I relate it is to my life. I told it to point out that this thousand-year-old story, which comes from Firdevsi's Shehname, is now forgotten,' said blue, 'once upon a time, millions of people knew it by heart- from Tabriz to Istanbul,from Bosnia to Trapzon-  and when they recalled this story they found the meaning in their lives. The story spoke to them in just the same way the Oedipus's murder of his father and Macbeth's obsession with power and death speak to people throughout the Western world.But now,because we have fallen under the spell of the West, we have forgotten our own stories.They have removed all the old stories from our children's textbooks. These days you can't find a single Bookseller who stocks the Shehname in all of Istanbul! How do you explain that?'

Ka didn't reply.

' let me guess what you're thinking,' said Blue. 'Is this story so beautiful that a man could kill for it? that's what you're thinking, isn't it?'

' I don't know', said Ka.

 'then think about it,'says Blue, and he left the room.

I'm provincial, too, and I want to become even more provincial. I want to be forgotten in the most unknown corner of the world under a blanket of snow.

I felt guilty about having refused all my life to believe in the same God as the uneducated.

By now, it is difficult to explain why so many in the audience remained still, watching these two lifelong friends moaning and dying on the floor as the soldiers on stage cocked their rifles for the fourth time. Years later, a dairy owner who still refuses to let me use his name, explained it as follows:'Those of us who were sitting at the back knew something terrible had happened, but we were afraid that if we moved from our seats to get a better look, the terror would find us, so we just sat there watching, without making a sound.'

he had come to the conclusion that all the men in the country were paralyzed by depression. 'For days on end, they sit in those tea-houses; day after day they go there and do nothing,' he said. 'You see hundreds of these poor jobless, luckless, hopeless, motionless creatures in every town. In the country as a whole there must be hundreds of thousands of them, if not millions. They've forgotten how to keep themselves presentable; they've lost the will to button up their stained, oily jackets; they have so little energy they can hardly move their arms and legs; their powers of concentration are so weak they can't even follow a story to its conclusion; and they've forgotten how to laugh at a joke, these poor brothers of mine.'

Most of them were too unhappy to sleep; they took pleasure in knowing that the cigarettes they smoked were killing them; they began sentences only to let their voices trail off as they remembered how pointless it was to carry on; they watched television not because they liked it enjoyed the programmes, but because that couldn't bear to hear about their friends'depression and TV helped to drown them out. What they really wanted was to die, but they didn't even think themselves worthy of suicide. During elections, masochistically they voted for the most wretched of parties and the most loathsome candidates. Sunay insisted that these men preferred the generals at the head of the military coup over politicians because the former spoke with honest realism about the need for punishment while the latter just endlessly promised hope.

When a good poet was confronted with difficult facts that he knew to be true but that were also inimical to poetry, he had no choice but to flee to the margins. It was, he said, this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that was the source of all art.

Contrary to what the west seems to think, it's not poverty that brings people like us so close to God. it's the fact that no one is more curious than we are to learn why we are here on earth and what will happen to us in the next world.

It was this pain, this deadly wait, he now remembered, that had made him afraid to fall in love.

From time to time, Ka turned his head to watch the Snow falling in Ipek's eyes.

That evening, I laid out all Ka's belongings on the bed and in every other surface in the room, and examined every item with a forensic eye. And it is with certainty that I can say Ka never received a single letter from Ipek. So why did Ka pretend to answer one, even knowing that he would never send her a single letter, either?

Here, perhaps we have arrived at the heart of our story. How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another's heart? How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another's heart ? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known? Even if the world's rich and powerful should even try to put themselves in the shoes of the rest, how much would they really understand the wretched millions suffering around them? So it is when Orhan the novelist peers into the dark corner of his poet friend's difficult and painful life: how much can he really see?

Why, given his reluctance, did he decide to go? It was an old habit. In school, whenever a teacher asked a question he knew he couldn't answer, he'd always raise his hand. He was the sort who went into a shop and, finding the perfect sweater, perversely bought something else not nearly as suitable for the same money, knowing all the while it made no sense. It may have been a form of anxiety that made him do this, or perhaps it was his fear of happiness.

It is tempting to read too much into this moment. We are, after all, fast approaching the point of no return, and the mission on which Ka was now embarked would change his life for ever. So I feel obliged to caution readers against viewing Ka's decision to accept Blue's invitation as the pivotal moment in this story. Certainly, I am not of this view myself: Ka had not yet run out of chances. He still had time to make a success of his visit to Kars, and he would have other opportunities to put right his fortunes and find 'happiness' - whatever it was he meant by that word. But, with all his bridges burned, when the events in this story had reached their conclusion, it was this moment that Ka himself would look back to with stinging regret and undying curiosity as to how things might have turned out if only Ipek had managed to keep him in his room. She might have said something to talk him out of going to see Blue, but, even after he'd racked his brain hundreds of times over the following years, he's still had no idea what the right words might have been.

''I knew you'd come,' said Blue. He seemed pleased.

'I have no idea why I'm here,' said Ka.

'You're here because of the turmoil inside you,' said Blue. Now he looked very knowing.

Ka had been bound to all of these fellows by an unveiled contempt and a secret adoration  The title of the poem, 'Jealousy', referred to the feeling that bound together these two conflicting emotions.

'If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I'd like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away.'

'But no one believes everything they read in a novel,' I said. 

'Oh yes, they do believe it,' he cried. 'If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you would put in what I've just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds.'