Snow by Orhan Pamuk

said.
    “Where do you know him from?” Muhtar asked, in a suspicious voice that irritated Ka.
    “He was the first person Serdar Bey, the newspaper publisher, took me to meet this morning,” Ka said, but before he could continue, the girl at the switchboard had connected him to the assistant chief of police. Ka told him exactly what he had seen at the New Life Pastry Shop. Muhtar lurched toward him and, with a clumsy gesture that was faintly flirtatious, pressed his ear up next to Ka’s and tried to listen in. To help him hear better, Ka lifted the receiver and held it closer to Muhtar’s ear. Now they were so close they could feel each other’s breath on their faces. Although Ka had no idea why Muhtar would want to be part of his conversation with the assistant chief of police, instinct told him to go along. He explained that he had not seen the assailant’s face but described his build as tiny, and then he took care to repeat these facts.
    “We’d like you to come right over so we can take your statement,” the police chief said, in a friendly voice.
    “I’m at the headquarters of the Prosperity Party,” Ka said. “It won’t take me long to reach you.”
    There was a silence at the other end of the line.
    “Just a moment,” said the police chief.
    Ka and Muhtar could hear him covering the phone and whispering to his colleagues.
    “I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve ordered a patrol car for you,” the police chief said. “This snow just isn’t letting up. We will send a car in a few minutes to pick you up from the party headquarters.”
    “It’s good you told them you were here,” Muhtar said, when Ka had hung up. “In any case, they already knew. They have surveillance everywhere. And I don’t want them to get the wrong idea about the possibly suspicious things I just said to you.”
    A wave of anger swept over Ka; this dated back to his first political encounters during his bourgeois days in Ni¸santa¸s. When he was a lycée student, men like this used to turn people against each other by pinching their butts and trying to push them into the passive position. Later on this turned into a game; the object was to get people to denounce one another, particularly their political enemies, as police informers. It was the fear of police cars and the fear of being caught in a situation in which he’d be obliged to inform—forced to tell the police which houses to raid—that had put Ka off politics for good. Now here was Muhtar, running on the Islamist fundamentalist ticket, something he would have found despicable ten years earlier, and here was Ka, still making excuses for this and so much else.
    The phone rang. Muhtar resumed a respectable pose and set about bargaining with someone from Kars Border Television over the price for a commercial for Muhtar’s family’s appliance dealership that was to run during that evening’s live transmission.
    After he had hung up the phone, the two men were silent, like two peeved children with nothing to say to each other, and as they sat there Ka imagined their discussing all the things that had happened to them during the twelve years since they’d last met.
    First he imagined each describing what was on his mind: Now that we’ve both been forced into exile, without having managed to achieve much or succeed at anything, or even find happiness, we can at least agree that life’s been hard! It isn’t enough even to be a poet . . . that’s why politics still casts such a shadow over our lives. But even having said this, neither would find it in him to add what he could not admit even to himself: It’s because we failed to find happiness in poetry that we find ourselves longing for the shadow of politics.
    Ka despised Muhtar more than ever. But then he reminded himself that Muhtar might have found a bit of happiness in having brought himself to the brink of an election victory, just as he, Ka, had found a little in having gained a middling reputation as a