The Transformation of Snow
At the very beginning of the novel, as Ka travels to and wanders around Kars, he is initially struck by the silence and beauty of the constantly falling snow, which reminds him of his childhood. It is not long, however, before Ka's opinions of the snow change:
Veiling as it did the dirt, the mud, and the darkness, the snow would continue to speak to Ka of purity, but after his first day in Kars it no longer promised innocence. The snow here was tiring, irritating, terrorizing. It had snowed all night. It continued snowing all morning, while Ka walked the streets playing the intrepid reporter—visiting coffeehouses packed with unemployed Kurds, interviewing voters, taking notes—and it was still snowing later, when he climbed the steep and frozen streets to interview the former mayor and the governor’s assistant and the families of the girls who had committed suicide. But it no longer took him back to the white-covered streets of his childhood; no longer did he think, as he had done as a child standing at the windows of the sturdy houses of Nisantas, that he was peering into a fairy tale; no longer was he returned to a place where he could enjoy the middle-class life he missed too much even to visit in his dreams. Instead, the snow spoke to him of hopelessness and misery. (10)
Here, Pamuk loads imagery of the snow with negative sense data—dirt, mud, darkness, suicide, and so on—to show us that, even if the snow is able to cast everything in a uniform light and being quiet to the chaotic streets of Kars, it comes at the cost of things being only obscured from sight and not permanently fixed. If anything, the "steep and frozen" landscape reminds us that keeping certain things hidden can be even more painful and hostile than keeping them out in plain sight.
Ka's Creative Process
After Ka's dinner with Hande, Ipek, Turgut, and Kadife, Hande tells Ka about Teslime's suicide and discusses Ka's creative process with him. At the end of their conversation, when Ka insists that his poems are sent to him by God, the following action ensues:
Ka suddenly jumped to his feet, as if someone were pointing a gun at him—or so it seemed to everyone else at the table. "Where is he?" cried Turgut Bey, as if he too sensed there was someone about to shoot them.
[...]
Like everyone else, she was looking at Ka and trying to figure out where the danger was. Years later, Serdar Bey told me that Ka’s face turned ashen at this point, but there was nothing in his expression to suggest fear or dizziness; what Serdar Bey recalled seeing in his face was sub-lime joy. The maid went further and told me that a light had entered the room and bathed all those present with divine radiance. In her eyes, he achieved sainthood. Apparently someone then said, "A poem has arrived," an announcement that caused more fear and amazement than the imaginary gun.
According to the more measured account in Ka’s notes, the tense, expectant air in the room brought back memories of the séances we had witnessed as children a quarter century ago in a house in one of the back streets of Nisantas. These evenings had been organized by the fat mother of a friend; she’d been widowed at an early age; most of her guests were unhappy housewives, but there was also a pianist with paralyzed fingers, a neurotic middle-aged film star (but only because we kept asking for her), her forever-yawning sister, a retired pasha who was "wooing" the fading star, and also, when our friend could sneak us in, Ka and myself. During the uneasy waiting period, someone would say, "Oh, soul, if you’ve come back to us, speak!" and after a long silence there would be an almost imperceptible rattling, the scraping of a chair, a moan, and sometimes the sound of someone giving a swift kick to a leg of the table, whereupon someone would announce in a trembling voice, "The soul has arrived." But as he headed for the kitchen, Ka was not at all like a man who’d made contact with the dead. His face was radiating joy. (133–134)
Here, we get a sense that Ka's divine inspiration is not just a kind of welcome and happy revelation: rather, it is something more fraught, tinged with alien and strange elements of danger. Ka's welcoming of a poem is so strange as to evoke the seances of his youth, to scare the maid, but also convey a sense that he has been touched in an inscrutable way by the cosmos. This underscores the feel of his Kars poems—both in his mind and the mind of our narrator Orhan—as having been written by someone other than Ka himself, under strange circumstances. It is also clear from a creative process like this how Ka is able to question his faith and encounter the divine in Kars.
Hans Hansen; a Contest of Stereotypes
In Chapter 26, when Kadife brings Ka before Blue so that Blue can issue his statement to the West regarding the Kars coup, Ka lies and tells Blue that a friend of his, Hans Hansen, will publish the statement in a German newspaper. In reality, of course, Hans Hansen is the man who sold Ka his charcoal-colored coat in Frankfurt, and he is merely lying in order to comply with Blue and escape Kars in one piece. When pressed about Hans, however, Ka invents an entire scene of Hans' entire home, tinged with stereotypical German imagery and decor, to seem like he really does have such an acquaintance. In challenging Ka, Blue then pushes back against this invented scene by calling to mind a series of small details—for example, were there crosses on the wall in Hans' home (249)? When Ka says that there were not, Blue retorts that there likely were, and that Ka simply did not notice them. From here, Ka and Blue engage in a back-and-forth about the imaginary Hans Hansen, using stereotyped images of Westernization and Germanic culture (which bring Ka comfort and security; e.g., the thin slices of bread they ate or the scenes from the Alps on the wall) and pitting them against the stereotyped images of Christian zeal and childishness (which Blue projects on the West and all of its emissaries).
Ipek's Keepsakes
Just before Funda Eser arrives at the Snow Palace Hotel to begin rehearsals with Kadife for the play at the novel's end, Ipek and Ka begin their preparations to leave Kars and travel together to Frankfurt. At this time, the two look over the various heirlooms and treasures that Ipek has held on to throughout the years:
Ka took stock of those things Ipek insisted she couldn’t leave behind: a wristwatch her mother had given her when Ipek was a child in Istanbul, all the more precious now that Kadife had lost the one given her on the same day; an ice-blue angora sweater that her late uncle had brought her from Germany, a garment of high quality but so tight-fitting she’d never been able to wear it in Kars; a tablecloth from her trousseau, embroidered by her mother with silver filigree, that Muhtar had stained with marmalade on the very first use—which explained why there hadn’t been a second; seventeen miniature perfume and alcohol bottles holding the collection of evil eyes that she’d started for no particular reason many years ago and now saw as bringing her good luck; photographs of herself as a child on her parents' laps (the moment she mentioned these, Ka wanted to see them); the beautiful black velvet evening dress Muhtar had bought her in Istanbul, its back so low he had only allowed her to wear it at home; the embroidered silk satin shawl she’d bought to conceal the plunging neckline, in the hope of one day inducing Muhtar to change his mind; the suede shoes never worn for fear the Kars mud would ruin them; the jade necklace that she was able to show him because she happened to have it with her. (370)
In the case of almost all these keepsakes, the articles in question are all the more precious or cherished because they have failed or been thwarted in some way by the city of Kars. Kadife, for example, has lost her twin wristwatch; the sweater cannot be worn for fear of impropriety, just as the velvet dress cannot; and the tablecloth has been stained by Muhtar. From these scattered images of Ipek's childhood and life in Kars, we get the sense that her life has been marked by a great deal of ruination, disappointment, and restraint, which explains her eagerness to break free of it all with Ka. This also makes it all the more shocking when she chooses to stay in Kars at the novel's end after Ka's betrayal of Blue. Kars is a city of stasis and decadence, but it is also the place where Ipek is able to navigate the patterned misfortunes that befall her.
