Snow by Orhan Pamuk Page B

it always does on such cold nights; even when I knocked on a door there was no answer, either because it was one of those Armenian houses no one’s lived in for eighty years, or else because the people inside were buried under many quilts and, like hibernating animals, unwilling to leave the warmth of their holes.
    “It pleased me, in a way, to see the whole city looking abandoned and unpopulated. Soon a sweet drowsiness was spreading through my body, thanks to the drink and the cold. I decided to leave this life, so I took three or maybe five more steps before stretching out on the frozen pavement under a tree to wait for sleep and death to take me. In a drunken stupor, you can withstand that sort of cold for four or five minutes before freezing to death. As the soft drowsiness spread through my veins, I saw before me the child I never had. What a joy it was to see this child, a boy, already grown, and wearing a tie, his manner nothing like that of our tie-wearing bureaucrats—no, this son of mine was a true European. Just as he was about to tell me something, he stopped and kissed the hand of an old man. Light radiated from this good-hearted old man in all directions. At the same moment, a shaft of light pierced the place where I lay; shining right into my eyes, it went straight through me and woke me up.
    “Feeling shame and hope in equal measure, I rose to my feet. I looked and there, just across from me, I saw light pouring through an open door as people came and went. The voice inside me told me to follow them in. The new arrivals accepted me into their group and took me into the bright and warm little house. They were nothing like the hopeless and downtrodden folk who populate the city of Kars; these were happy people and, even more amazing, they were all from Kars; I even knew some of them. I realized now that this was the secret lodge of His Excellency Saadettin Efendi, the Kurdish sheikh I had heard so many rumors about. I’d been told he had many disciples in the civil service and also among the rich, that their number was growing daily, and that, at their invitation, he had come down from his village in the mountains to perform his rites for the city’s poor, unemployed, and disconsolate, but knowing the police would never permit such an antirepublican display I had paid little attention to the rumors.
    “Now here I was, climbing the sheikh’s staircase step by step, tears streaming from my eyes. Something was happening that I had secretly dreaded for a long time and that in my atheist years I would have denounced as weakness and backwardness: I was returning to Islam. Those caricatures you see of sheikhs with their long robes and their round-trimmed beards—the truth is, I found them frightening, and so even as I climbed those stairs of my own free will I began to cry. The sheikh was kind. He asked me why I was crying. Of course, I was not about to say, I’m crying because I’ve fallen among reactionary sheikhs and their disciples. Anyway, I was also deeply ashamed of the raki fumes pouring from my mouth like smoke from a chimney. So I said I’d lost my key. This must have occurred to me because I had in fact let my key ring drop in the place where I’d stretched out to die. My declaration launched his sycophant followers into a discussion of the possible metaphorical meanings of the key, but the sheikh soon sent them all out to look for the real one. Once we were alone, he smiled sweetly. I realized that he was the good-hearted old man in my dream, so I relaxed.
    “I felt such awe before this august man with his saintly expression that I kissed his hand. Then he did something that shocked me greatly: He kissed my hand too. A feeling of peace spread through me; I had not felt this way for years. I immediately understood that I could talk to him about anything, tell him all about my life, and he would bring me back to the path I had always believed in, deep down inside, even as an atheist: the