Snow by Orhan Pamuk Read Free Book Online Page B

preserve my purity and my soul.”
    He was suddenly afraid he was making a fool of himself, but in his delight to have Ipek as his audience, he went on to tell a story he’d never told anyone—about the silence buried inside him, the silence that had kept him from writing a single poem for the past four years.
    “I rented a small place next to the train station; it had a window looking out over the rooftops of Frankfurt. In the evening, when I thought back on the day, I found that my memories were shrouded in a sort of silence. At first, out of this silence would come a poem. Over time, I had gained some recognition in Turkey as a poet, and now I began to get invitations to give readings. The approaches came from Turkish immigrants, city councils, libraries, and third-class schools hoping to draw in Turkish audiences, and also from Turks hoping to acquaint their children with a poet writing in Turkish.”
    So, when invited, Ka would board one of those orderly, punctual German trains he so admired; through the smoky mirror of the window, he’d watch the delicate church towers rising above remote villages. He’d peer into the beech forests, searching for the darkness at their heart. He’d see the sturdy children returning home with their rucksacks, and that same silence would descend on him; because he could not understand the language, he felt as safe, as comfortable, as if he were sitting in his own house, and this was when he wrote his poems.
    On days when he wasn’t traveling, he’d leave home at eight in the morning, walk the length of Kaiserstrasse, and go to the city library on the Zeil and read books. “There were enough English books there to last me twenty lifetimes.” Here he read magnificent nineteenth-century novels, English romantic poetry, histories of engineering and related topics, museum catalogs—he read whatever he wanted, and he read it all with the pleasure of a child who knows death is too far off to imagine. As he sat in the library turning pages, stopping now and again to study the illustrations in old encyclopedias, rereading Turgenev’s novels from cover to cover, he was able to block out the buzz of the city; he was surrounded by silence, just as he was on trains. Even after dark, when he would go by another route, walking in front of the Jewish Museum and the length of the River Main; even on weekends, when he walked from one end of the city to the other, this silence still enveloped him.
    “Four years ago these silences took over my entire life. I needed noise—it was only by shutting out noise that I was able to write poetry,” said Ka. “But now I lived in utter silence. I wasn’t speaking with any Germans, and my relations with the Turks weren’t good either—they dismissed me as a half-crazed, effete intellectual. I wasn’t seeing anyone, I wasn’t talking to anyone, and I wasn’t writing poems.”
    “But it says in the paper that you’re going to be reading your latest poem tonight.”
    “I don’t have a latest poem, so how can I read it?” There were only two other customers in the pastry shop. They were seated at a table on the other side of the room, in a corner next to the window. One was a tiny young man; his companion, old, thin, and tired, was patiently trying to explain something to him. Behind them, on the other side of the plate-glass window, great snowflakes were falling into the darkness; the pastry shop’s neon sign tinged the flakes with pink. Set against this backdrop, the two men locked in intense conversation in the far corner of the pastry shop looked like characters in a grainy black-and-white film.
    “My sister Kadife was at university in Istanbul, but she failed her finals in the first year,” Ipek said. “She managed to transfer to the Institute of Education here in Kars. The thin man sitting just behind me, way in the back, is Dr. Yılmaz, the director of the Institute. When my mother died in a car accident, my father, who adores my sister