Snow by Orhan Pamuk Read Free Book Online Page A

her at her table, all thoughts of such romanticism vanished, for Ipek seemed even more beautiful now than at the hotel, lovelier even than she had been at university. The true extent of her beauty—her lightly colored lips, her pale complexion, her shining eyes, her open, intimate gaze—unsettled Ka. There was a moment when she seemed so sincere that he feared his studied composure would fail him. (This was his worst fear, after that of writing bad poems.)
    “On the way here, I saw workmen drawing a live-transmission cable all the way from Border City Television to the National Theater. They were stretching it like a clothesline,” he said, hoping to break the awkward silence. But not wanting to seem critical of the shortcomings of provincial life, he was careful not to smile.
    It took some effort to keep up the conversation, but they both applied themselves to the task with admirable determination. The snow was one thing they could discuss with ease. When they had exhausted this subject, they moved on to the poverty of Kars. After that it was Ka’s coat. Then a mutual confession that each found the other quite unchanged, and that neither had been able to give up smoking. The next subject was distant friends: Ka had just seen many of them in Istanbul. But it was the discovery that both their mothers were now dead and buried in Istanbul’s Feriköy Cemetery that induced the greater intimacy both were seeking. And so by the time they had discovered a common astrological sign, the revelation—illusory or not—produced a frisson that brought them even closer.
    Relaxed now, they were able to chat (briefly) about their mothers and (at greater length) about the demolition of the old Kars train station. They soon turned to the pastry shop in which they were sitting; it had been an Orthodox church until 1967, when the door had been removed and taken away to the museum. A section of the same museum commem-orated the Armenian Massacre (naturally, she said, some tourists came expecting to see remnants of the Turks’ massacre of the Armenians, and it was always a jolt to discover that in this museum the story was the other way around). The next topic was the pastry shop’s sole waiter, half deaf, half a ghost. Then the price of coffee, which, apparently, was no longer sold in the city’s teahouses because it was too expensive for the unemployed clientele. They went on to discuss the political views of the newspaperman who had given Ka his tour of the city, those of the various local papers (all supporters of the military and the present government), and tomorrow’s issue of the Border City Gazette, which Ka now fished out of his pocket.
    As he watched Ipek scan the front page, Ka was overcome by the fear that, like his old friends in Istanbul, she was so much consumed by Turkey’s internal problems and miserable political intrigues that she would never even consider living in Germany. He looked for a long time at Ipek’s small hands and her elegant face; her beauty still shocked him.
    “For which article did they sentence you, and how long was your sentence?”
    Ka told her. In the small political newspapers of the late seventies, considerable freedom of expression had been exercised, much more than the penal code allowed. Anyone tried and found guilty of insulting the state tended to feel rather proud of it. But no one ended up in prison, as the police made no serious effort to pursue the editors, the writers, or the translators in their ever-shifting whereabouts. But after the military coup of 1980, the authorities slowly got around to tracking down everyone who’d earlier evaded prison simply by changing address, and it was at this moment that Ka, having been tried for a hastily printed political article he had not even written, fled to Germany.
    “Was it hard for you in Germany?” asked Ipek.
    “The thing that saved me was not learning German,” said Ka. “My body rejected the language, so I was able to