Snow by Orhan Pamuk Page A

poet—better than no reputation at all. But as neither man was ever going to admit to happiness at these things, they could not broach the big subject, the bitter truth that stood between them: They had both inured themselves to defeat and to the piti-less unfairness of life. Ka feared that both of them longed for Ipek as a symbol of escape from this defeatist state of mind.
    “I hear you’re going to be reading your latest poem at the performance this evening,” said Muhtar, with a barely perceptible smile.
    For a few moments Ka stared fiercely into the beautiful hazel eyes of this man who had once been married to Ipek. He could not detect even the trace of a smile in them.
    “Did you see Fahir while you were in Istanbul?” asked Muhtar, this time with something closer to a grin.
    Now Ka was able to smile with him, and not disingenuously: the man Muhtar named was someone for whom he had some respect. Fahir was a contemporary of theirs, for twenty years a staunch defender of Western modernist poetry. He’d studied at St. Joseph, the French lycée; once a year he would dip into the inheritance from his crazy but rich grandmother—who was said to have come from the palace—and off he would go to Paris, where he would fill his suitcase with poetry collections from the booksellers of Saint-Germain. Back in Istanbul, he would translate them into Turkish, for publication either in the magazines he’d founded or as volumes for the poetry lists of foundering publishing houses; he secured the same accommodations for his own poems and those of several other Turkish poets in the modernist camp. But while everyone respected him for these efforts, Fahir’s own poetry—written as it was under the influence of the poems he’d translated into affected “pure Turkish”—was generally found to be, at best, devoid of inspiration and, at worst, incomprehensible.
    Ka told Muhtar that he had been unable to see Fahir in Istanbul.
    “There was a time when I really wanted Fahir to like my poetry,” said Muhtar. “Sadly, he despised poets like me, who were interested not in pure poetry but in folklore and the beauties of our country. Years went by, the military took over and we all went to prison, and like everyone else, when I was released I drifted like an idiot. The people I had once tried to imitate had changed, those whose approval I once wanted had disappeared, and none of my dreams had come true, not in poetry or in life. Rather than continue my abject, penniless frenzy in Istanbul, I came back to Kars and took over my father’s shop, which had once caused me such shame, but even with all these changes I was not happy. I couldn’t take the people here seriously, and when I saw them I did just as Fahir had done when he saw my poems: I turned up my nose. The city of Kars and the people in it—it was as if they weren’t real. Everyone wanted to die or to leave. But I had nowhere left to go. It was as if I’d been erased from history, banished from civilization. The civilized world seemed far away and I couldn’t imitate it. God wouldn’t even give me a child who might do all the things I had not done, who might release me from my misery by becoming the westernized, modern, self-possessed individual I had always dreamed of becoming.”
    Ka was impressed by the way Muhtar could occasionally mock himself; his faint smile seemed to radiate from within.
    “In the evenings I would drink, and to avoid arguing with my beautiful Ipek, I would come home late. Once, very late, on one of those Kars nights when everything, even the birds in the sky, seems to have frozen, I was the last patron to leave the Green Pastures Café. I was walking toward Army Avenue, where Ipek and I were living, not more than a ten-minute walk away but a long distance by Kars standards. The raki had gone to my head, and I hadn’t gone more than two blocks before I lost my way. There wasn’t a soul on the streets. Kars looked like an abandoned city, as