Summary
Chapter 15
Just after deciding that he could have a happy future with Ipek, Ka is rushing to the performance at the National Theater. When Ka re-entered the room with Ipek at the end of the last chapter, Turgut Bey changed the channel back to the performance, and all those in the room noticed the building tension between the dignitaries in the show's front row and the youths at the back of the auditorium. After watching a famous goalkeeper speak on the stage, Ka and company then watched the emcee announce Ka's upcoming performance. This made Turgut remark to Ka that it would be a great dishonor if Ka did not show up at the theater. Suddenly, the night receptionist entered and told them that Dr. Yilmaz died in hospital. Turgut then advised Ka to increase the visibility of his religious zeal, after which Ka agreed to finally go to the theater and read his poem "Snow."
On his way to the theater, Ka is reminded of his outsider status in Kars, but he also looks ahead at the people watching the snow fall all around, and he is reminded of the holiness of this place's isolation. He also notes the shifting lights of the Palace of Light Photo Studio sign, as well as the way this light plays off of an oleander tree nearby. Upon entering the theater, Ka is then struck by a variety of foul smells, but soon after, he is surprised to see Necip emerging from the crowd. Necip then has two questions for Ka: first, Necip asks if Ka mentioned him to Kadife; second, he asks if Ka and Kadife talked about anything superficial, or whether their conversation strictly remained serious and deep. When Ka says that he did not and that they only talked of serious things, respectively, it becomes clear to Ka that he has only made Necip more devastatingly in love with Kadife.
Necip then thinks out loud with Ka for a moment. He asks why God has made him think so much about Kadife, and then he imagines his future with Kadife as a writer. He even goes so far as to explicitly tell Ka that he thinks Ka to be his future, and he tells Ka that he knows exactly what Ka was thinking 20 years ago. Necip tells Ka that he believes that only unhappy people can write good poetry, but that one thing Ka did not realize is that, when the poetic voice died down, Ka would be left alone in an empty universe. From here, Ka then talks to Necip about his faith, and Necip tells him about a landscape he often imagines as a test of his own faith—that is, a place where God does not exist. Ka asks him about this landscape, but Necip instead says that they are being watched, and that he will meet Ka in a bathroom stall in 20 minutes, at which point he will give Ka some letters he has written to Kadife. Necip leaves Ka with the idea that Ka is only unhappy because he keeps the happiness and divinity inside him from rising up (through things like drunkenness).
From here, we get a break to the narrator's point of view. The narrator tells us that, years later, he would have a chance to watch what Ka saw that night onstage. Primarily, it consisted of Sunay Zaim and his wife Funda Eser doing parodies of popular commercials and joking with ribald and overblown humor. Vural, the famous goalkeeper who was announced earlier by the emcee, also was on stage telling a series of masochistic stories about his defeat by the English and the failures of his personal life. As the narrator puts it, the evening gave everyone present "a chance to smile at the misery of the Turk" (148).
Chapter 16
Ka meets Necip later in the bathroom stall, and Necip turns over his letters to Ka, saying that he wants him to deliver them to Kadife (though he wants to make it clear he has no expectations of Kadife responding favorably to the letters). Necip says that he is doing this because he does not want to run in fear of his feelings, and also so that he can more fully devote himself to loving God. Ka once again asks Necip about the landscape where God does not exist, but Necip asks Ka to first read his future by putting his hand on his forehead. He tells Necip that, one day, he will realize that all the evils of the world are the result of people all thinking alike, and that as a result, he will become more and more atheistic. Necip asks Ka if he thinks human beings can really predict the future, and Ka tells him that some people, like Serdar Bey, are able. Someone pounds of the door of the stall that Ka and Necip are meeting in, so Necip then hurriedly tells Ka about the landscape of his imagination.
Necip's landscape revolves around a narrow passage, at the end of which there is a tree. The tree burns bright red, then goes dark just as Necip begins to get curious about the possible non-existence of God. It then flickers back on and off until morning. Necip says that what scares him most about the landscape is that he can imagine it, meaning that he is able to conceptualize a world in which God is not real and that he is not a true believer. Necip then says that, etymologically, atheists are those who have been abandoned by God, never to find belonging or peace on earth, even when surrounded by company. He then kisses Ka on the cheeks and leaves. Ka, meanwhile, is getting ready to copy Necip's description of the landscape into a poem. He worries for a moment that a figure like Coleridge's man from Porlock will interrupt him, but he is uninterrupted. This brand new poem is in his mind as he then gets on the stage.
Onstage, Ka is asked by the emcee whether it is difficult to write poetry, and how he finds Kars. Ka is elliptical in general, but he admits that he finds Kars to be very beautiful, poor, and sad. This makes many in the audience feel affronted, but Ka interrupts their heckling to recite his poem about the place where God does not exist. The narrator then tells us that this public appearance, taped, was the last image of his friend Ka for 27 years.
Chapter 17
After Ka's reading, the main event of the evening begins, a staging of the play My Fatherland or My Head Scarf. According to the narrator, the play was old-fashioned and features a woman who, after removing her headscarf and becoming liberated, is forced back into wearing one by fundamentalists and family. In response, she burns it, and this causes the fundamentalists to make an attempt on the woman's life. In the nick of time, however, the Republic's soldiers come on stage and kill the Islamic fundamentalists, saving the woman. The narrator then tells us that Funda Eser and he discussed the play years later, and Funda told him that her mother had played the central role in 1948, and that what followed the play that evening denied her the critical acclaim that was afforded to her mother.
Our attention then turns to the audience as the play is put on. When Funda took off her headscarf in the first scene, the audience—a mix of secular authorities, religious high school students, and everyday citizens of Kars—was terrified and unsure of how the others would react. When a teacher stood to applaud Funda, youths in the back then jeered him back down. Even the Republicans who support taking off the hijab were not totally happy; rather, they were worried about the message being conveyed in the lascivious Funda being the central woman who goes uncovered. Even so, the omnipresence of their surveillance teams puts them at ease.
Funda takes off her headscarf and tosses it into a copper basin of liquid. At this point, the audience anticipates that she is once again doing a parody of some kind of laundry commercial. Only when she lights it on fire later do they realize that she was adding gasoline, not water and detergent to the basin. This shocks the entire audience, and it immediately sends the religious high school boys in the back into angry fits. The officials at the front of the theater are uneasy, and they begin to get up and leave the theater. Ka too wants to get up and leave to return to Ipek. Funda then begins a monologue about the religious clothing that is allegedly symbolic of the "reactionary darkness in our souls," including the fez and turban (162). This makes someone in the audience quip that, if this is so, they all might as well just "run to Europe stark naked" (162). Ka stands up to leave, and people continue to shout over Funda Eser's monologue.
Chapter 18
The actors playing fundamentalists come on stage and tie Funda up in a provocative manner for her defiance of God's laws. The narrator remarks that the audience was out of control at this point, but that it was a type of trap, since the egging of the audience only made the situation on stage even more helpless. The audience is enjoying themselves with their excessive jeers and taunts, and some are even laughing, but the scene is enough to completely scare off the dignitaries in the front row, as well as Ka, who leaves in order to preserve the poem in his head. Meanwhile, on stage, Sunay Zaim appears in order to rescue Funda from the two fundamentalists. Sunay is stately and imposing, and he delivers a strong denunciation of Islamists and their "regressive" social and cultural ambitions for Turkey. Suddenly, a detachment of soldiers comes on the stage, and a young messenger boy, Glasses, runs on stage. Glasses tells Sunay of Dr. Yilmaz's death in hospital, and this news makes Sunay very upset. Moreover, it drives Sunay into angrily announcing that this attack will be the last such assault on the freedom of the Turkish people and Republic.
The soldiers then fire their rifles into the audience. Sunay yells out for everyone to sit still, but Necip rises up and curse the secular authoritarians that Sunay Zaim backs. The soldiers fire again, and a young boy who had earlier taunted the play begins to jerk. A third round is fired, and it only now that people begin to realize that the rounds being fired are live ammunition. Symbolically, a stovepipe bursts in the theater at this time and seems to indicate that the situation has reached a boiling point with the noise that it makes. With a fourth volley, the soldiers onstage kill Necip as well as a sleeping grandfather in the audience. Just before dying, Necip calls out for the soldiers to stop and announces that the guns are loaded.
The narrator relates to us that so many people in the audience stayed still because they were unsure how much of the violence was real and how much of it was theater. Many others were wounded and killed in the violence, but those watching at home were confused because the cameraman had been forced against a wall himself while the others in the back of the theater crumpled together. They knew something had happened, but could only see Funda bowing with relish and Sunay's subsequent announcement that the preceding was not a play, but rather the beginning of a revolution. As the curtains close, three very strange men cry out Republican slogans in an impassioned way and run for the exits with guns drawn. Here, we get a narrative aside telling us that these men were about to effect a great deal of bloodshed and violence, and that Sunay would later come to regret including them in his performance.
A larger break then happens, and the narrator tells us that years later, he visited Kars and visited the National Theater himself with Muhtar. Muhtar deflected the narrator's questions about the events of the revolution, and instead told him to write only of the strong progress Kars has made from the events of its unhappy past. Nonetheless, the narrator was able to see some of the traces of the revolution in the theater, including a bullet hole in the outside wall of an old Russian oligarch's private theater box.
Chapter 19
Here we get some more information about the three zealous men who appeared at the end of the play. Their leader was a former pro-Soviet Communist and bodyguard named Z Demirkol, who—along with his partners—have been galvanized into taking extreme measures in order to defend the Turkish Republic.They are even more excited by the snow upon leaving the theater and, catching up with Ka, they tell him that he must kill the Islamists before they kill him. This shocks Ka and makes him forget his poem, and he thinks to himself with shame about the childish posturing he once witnessed at the political meetings of his youth. He also hears Z fire some shots from a distance, but he instead turns his attention to the beautiful large flakes of falling snow. As Ka walks through the streets of Kars, he begins to see army trucks and tanks encroaching, and he also sees Z Dermirkol and company attempting to break into the city telephone office.
Z Demirkol is arguing with Recai Bey, the head manager of the office, about how to get in. Recai will not let them in, saying that when the roads open up again, the central government will hold Z and his cronies to account. In response, Z says that they are the state, and gunshots from far off at the student dorms convince Recai to let them in (he does not want to see state property destroyed). Ka then continues along on his walk after witnessing this interaction, and he sees many everyday people's small reactions to the beginning of the revolution. Ka makes it back to the hotel, and Ipek compliments his reading of the poem. Turgut mentions that there is a new curfew, but when he asks Ka what happened at the theater, Ka only replies that he is not interested in politics. Ka then returns to his room, where he writes a poem portraying the bed, hotel, and city of Kars he is in as one kind of divine unity. Finally, he connects this revolution in his mind and poem to those of his youth, treating each with a cool detachment that is essential to the poet's enterprise. The chapter then ends with Ka lighting a cigarette and going to the window.
Chapter 20
Ka sleeps soundly through the night, since the snow all over the city absorbs the sound of various gunfights. At the religious high school, a skirmish unfolded that led to the arrests of many political Islamists and even killed one boy. At the same time, the performance of Sunay Zaim was rebroadcast on the television, with most of the city watching it run again in order to make sense of what happened. Also, the office of the Prosperity Party was raided, and the executive board of the party was also rounded up on charges of Kurdish nationalism. Other "Kurdish nationalists" were also killed that night, including Sadullah Bey, a journalist who was held in high esteem by the local Kurdish community. Months later, when the snow finally all melted, many more bodies would be discovered. At the same time, the coup regime was focused on getting out a nationalist folk message, so they searched far and wide for a "deep-voiced folksinger to celebrate the heroes of the borderlands" with songs on the radio (183). The person eventually chosen is a fireman, and it is this person's sonorous voice that Ka wakes to hear the following morning on the radio.
Ka looks out the window at the snow around him in the morning and sees the deathly silence that has engulfed the city, which makes him recall the martial law days of his youth. He recalls as a middle-class person of Istanbul that those days were like holidays to him, and he also recalls how much he and his family loathed soldiers for their harsh discipline and low wages. A strange man then comes in and congratulates Ka on the revolution, saying that it is a great day for Turkey. After, Ka enters the kitchen of the hotel and sees Ipek, though he fails to greet her. Ka feels a deep shame for acting so common towards Ipek. Ipek and Ka then sit together while she feeds him, and Ka is reticent. This allows Ipek to sense that Ka has changed as a result of watching the coup, and this understanding of the darkness inside Ka binds them together. At the same time, however, Ka only thinks to himself about how poorly and provincially Ipek cuts her bread. He feels deep shame once more for having fallen for such a strange and rustic woman, and he gets up to leave Ipek at the table. Later however, she appears at his door and tells him that some army men have arrived to pick up Ka. He then sits with her for a bit, then gathers his coat up and leaves. On his way out, Ka recalls the German who sold him his coat, a blond man named Hans Hansen.
Chapter 21
Ka is being taken to the police station by people he suspects are MIT agents, and on the way, he notices that most people have closed their curtains and become fixated on the television (in effect, turning the city in on itself). Ka sees a great deal of young men beaten and waiting for their interrogations, and he is taken to a room much like the last room he was in at the police station. He is asked to identify the director's killer from the religious high school boys gathered at the station. They then ask Ka what he was doing yesterday, but they already know he has met with Blue and the Sheikh Saadettin. They ask about who arranged Ka's meeting with Blue, and Ka tells them that it was a boy from the high school. They then take Ka down to see if he can identify the person in question, and Ka sees people crammed into filthy cells. He tells the agents that he is unable to identify any of these people, and the MIT agents assure him that he has nothing to worry about (i.e., they think he is holding back). Ka sees more beat-up boys, and eventually he is greeted by a retired major. Ka concludes that they are trying to find the director's assassin to produce an achievement for the revolution, so he continues to hold out and, when the major suggests that people at this prison are treated well, an agent suggests taking Ka to see the detainees from the veterinary school.
Ka then gets back in the army truck, where he swears to himself that he will not cooperate with either the police or the army. At a teahouse, they stop to check the papers of some unemployed men at gunpoint. Ka is inspired, and he writes a poem right then and there. After, when a new men who enters the teahouse does not have his papers, Ka follows him and an agent down an icy back passage of the teahouse to a ramshackle concrete building, where a beautiful woman is sitting in a shabby bed. It turns out that the man and her are a Georgian couple who are planning to earn money through prostitution and small trades, which the MIT agent sees as a parasitic leeching of the city's jobs and money. Back at the teahouse, Ka then listens to a group of unemployed men discuss the coup, and they seem to not really be focused on anything else but the prospect of the coup helping them all find jobs.
Later, Ka arrives at the veterinary school, where they have rounded up people suspected of Kurdish nationalism. Here, they visit classrooms where torture so cruel is happening that neither Ka nor the narrator sees it fit to tell us explicitly about it. All Ka can think about in the classrooms are the brevity of human life and the torment of not being able to know what God's will is during one's life on earth. Afterwards, the MIT agents suggest that Ka go to look at the corpses and attempt to identify them. Ka then is shown many bodies, among them Necip's and he feels at once grateful to be alive and sickened at the death of the young man. He then kisses Necip's body on both cheeks and explains that he does so because the boy had a pure heart.
Chapter 22
After Ka identifies Necip's body, a report is hastily drawn up, and he is taken in the truck to an old Russian mansion two streets from the National Theater. Though the house once belonged to Maruf Bey, a well-known merchant who dealt with the Soviets, he was arrested after the Second World War. In the time since, the building sat empty and was recently converted into a warehouse and sweatshop by an appliance dealer and a tailor, respectively. Ka enters the former tailor's shop and sees Sunay Zaim pacing the room with a cigarette. From what Ka can see, this tailor shop is the center of operations for the ongoing revolution. Sunay then begins to talk to Ka in a friendly way about the 1980s, during which time he was adrift in the countryside and evading the hatred of Ankara and Istanbul, touring and hoping to perform anywhere that would have him. Out of this desperation, Sunay then decided that he would use his art to intervene in the flow of history. Ka then reflects on what he himself knows of Sunay's past, specifically in the 1970s.
In the 1970s, Turkey had a golden age of leftist theater, and it was during this time that Sunay rose to prominence playing various Jacobins and despots like Robespierre and Enver Pasha. He was always a stately and imposing figure, and when the military took over in 1980, Sunay thought that he could be called on to play Atatürk and come into an entirely new kind of domestic and international renown. A public vote even suggested that Sunay was the people's pick to play Atatürk, so he began to take his "campaign" for the role seriously. He appeared on shows and in papers, modeling himself after Atatürk, posing with volumes of his works, and espousing Kemalist philosophy. One day, however, his campaign reached a faltering point when he said that he may be fit to play the Prophet Muhammad. This turned the Islamists against him, and they used Sunay as a proxy to attack the Republic. In retaliation, the secularists then started to paint Sunay out as an Islamist himself when he attempted to do damage control, saying that he was unfit to play Atatürk.
The back-and-forth between the religious and secular factions in Turkey then led to widespread public gossip about Sunay. People called him a Communist, suggested that Funda was a lesbian, and even said that he and Funda had done dubbing for porn. Ultimately, Sunay was called in to a military office and told to end his campaign; moreover, the Atatürk film was indefinitely postponed. Sunay's real undoing came later, however, when Sunay's association with Atatürk had become cemented through his campaign, and he found himself unable to find any work for either the secularists or Islamists. Eventually rumor around Sunay and Funda became so wild that they had to withdraw from society entirely, touring the provinces and finding work as hotel activity directors in Antalya. Eventually, they formed a touring theater group that toured all of Anatolia.
Returning to the narrative present, Sunay then tells Ka about the political condition of the dispossessed in Kars. Such men, Sunay claims, are unable to find work and are so masochistic as to vote for the parties that least benefit them in elections. Funda then comes in an adds that, behind all the unhappy men, there are the women holding them together and keeping life going. Out of the shame and knowledge that their husbands cannot repay them, they are then beaten by their poor husbands. Sunay explains that he believes that the purpose of theater is to help people and uplift them, and this coup is a prime example of this. Sunay says that when he came into town, he ran into Colonel Osman Nuri Colak, an old friend from the Kuleli Military Academy who was one of the only other people at the school who loved drama or literature. When Osman explained that all the high-ranking government officials would be out of town and that Kars would be sealed off for a few days, Sunay says that he and his old friend hatched the coup plot with the ultimate goal of pleasing Ankara. They then used existing surveillance networks and people like Z Demirkol to round up all the Islamists.
Sunay then shows Ka outside, where he is immediately struck by the smallness and fragility of human life before things like the cold winds of Kars. Sunay takes him to a shantytown and says that this is the most beautiful area of Kars, then watches with Ka as the entire valley before them is razed by a tank and machine gun. Sunay then comments to Ka, after Hegel, that "history and theater are made of the same materials [...] Just as in the theater, history chooses those who play the leading roles. And just as actors put their courage to the test onstage, so too do the chosen few on the stage of history" (213). They then return to the tailor shop, where Ka writes another poem, which he feels gives the most authentic expression to the things he has seen in Kars.
Chapter 23
Sunay complements the poem that Ka read the previous evening, and he asks him why he didn't identify anyone yesterday when prompted to by the MIT agents. Sunay then explains that, after seeing Ka's tenderness towards Necip, they were very suspicious of Ka and wanted to arrest him, but Sunay stopped them. Sunay then shows Ka a piece of paper showing that Necip had a history of delinquency and radical ideology; moreover, he claims that Necip even plotted with Fazil to kill a man. Sunay also tells Ka that the Sheikh's house is bugged, so MIT was worried that Ka was trying to join the side of the Islamists in order to guarantee his safety. Sunay attempts to bond with Ka then by telling him about their shared love for modernist poetry, but when Ka brings up that Muhtar too loves modernist poetry, they say that he signed a document withdrawing from the mayoral elections.
Ka tells Sunay that, in a few days when the snow melts, he will have to answer for his sins, and Sunay replies that he has a diseased heart and does not have much time left anyway. Moreover, he adds that if they caught the killer of the director, they would be able to enjoy the support of Ankara. Ka says that hanging a criminal will only increase the terror of the outside world at Kars, but Sunay reminds Ka that the entire Western world was built on similar acts of violence and terror. Moreover, Sunay says, Ka is himself vilified by Islam and Islamists, and they would just as soon kill him if he does not take action against them first. Sunay offers Ka bodyguard protection, but he also asks Ka to confess the evil that lies deep in Ka's heart. Ka tells Sunay that he thinks he is starting to believe in God, but Sunay tells him this makes no sense. God knows, says Sunay, how you live your life in his service, and when you are not part of the wider community of believers, belief in him does not make any sense.
Sunay then brings Ka to speak with Funda. She and Sunay talk for a while about logistical trifles, and Sunay then poses the question of why Ka is entangled in all of this Kars business. Funda reads in Ka's face that it is all because he is in love. Sunay then reveals to Ka that Kadife is Blue's mistress, and he also mentions that Blue vanished just before the raid on the religious high school. He asks Ka to wear some microphones and travel around the city to find Blue so that they can capture him, but Ka does not warm to this proposal. Sunay asks Ka what it is about Blue that has successfully created such passion and mythos around him, but when Ka is unable to answer, Sunay instead offers to let Ka hear his next speech. Ka declines kindly, and he leaves Sunay.
As Ka walks through the streets, he finds that he is being followed. Eventually, he confronts the detective following him, and they agree to sit down at the Green Pastures Café for a bit and chat. The detective, named Saffet, then drinks and eats with Ka as they listen to Sunay's jingoistic and fascist speech. Some while in, Saffet asks Ka to help him be reassigned. When Ka is confused as to why, Saffet explains that the MIT was worried that the cinnamon sharbat sold at Modern Buffet, located near military headquarters, was poisoned, since it negatively affected a couple different soldiers. At first, it seemed like accidental food poisoning, but it later came out that a Kurdish granny was the one making the sharbat. As a result, interest picked up, but it was discovered that many men's wives were unaffected by the sharbat. They tried desperately to find out the ingredients and inspected much of the Buffet, but they found no poison each time, making things only more confusing. Eventually, a detective stationed in the kitchen found that the sharbat was truly a tonic—still, he was distrusted because he was a Kurd. Their conclusion was thus that the tonic was poison to Turks but not Kurds, and in order to further unravel the situation, MIT and the coup leaders have been sending all the city's detectives and plainclothes officers around to follow those who drink the sharbat.
When Saffet is done telling his story, Ka promises to do something about this exhausting mission, and Saffet kisses him on the cheeks.
Chapter 24
Ka returns to his hotel room, and he tells Ipek to come see him at once. Ipek then arrives, and Ka confesses his love to her once more. Ka tries to get her to have sex with him, but she says that she will not do anything with Ka while her father is under the same roof. Ipek then excuses herself, and Ka writes another poem. Ka realizes that, in Kars, all he has to do is chase Ipek and write poetry. This realization both inflates him and makes him feel desolate, so he goes out and sees the people begin to stir again after the curfew.
Ka notices Saffet following him again, and they chat briefly, but Ka eventually winds up at the city's library. He flips through the Encyclopedia of Life, a volume he remembers spending a great deal of time leafing through as a child. Back then, he recalls finding a diagram of a baby nestled within a mother's stomach, but these are torn out in the book before him now. Instead, he flips to the entry for snow, which talks about the unique geometries and mysteries of the precipitation.
The narrator then inserts an aside here, telling us that he is unsure to what degree Ka internalized the image of the snowflake over the time he was in Kars. Moreover, he tells us that, when he went to Ka's childhood home years later to look through his father's library, he found not only the pregnant woman image but also a 32-year-old piece of blotting paper.
We then flash back to Ka, who begins to write a poem after reading through the encyclopedia, which concerns his place in the universe and his distinctive attributes, called "I, Ka." Suddenly, he lifts his eyes and thinks that he sees Necip. In reality, it is Fazil, and he asks why Ka called him Necip if he was sure that Necip was dead and saw him with his own eyes. Ka finally says that he is not really sure Necip is dead, and Fazil says that he plans on taking revenge on Necip's killer.
Suddenly, Saffet appears and checks Fazil's ID card, realizes that it is from the religious high school, and confiscates it. Ka then agrees to meet Fazil later, where he hopes to be able to return his ID card to him. Afterwards, however, he realizes that he will not be able to persuade Saffet right now to return the card, so he leaves the library. On his way out, he runs into Kadife, who says she wants to have a word with him at the hotel. Ka thinks to himself that he does not want to see Ipek before his meeting with Kadife, and he looks around to see that no one is really affected on a deep level by the coup. Rather, they are gossiping and hopeful for new beginnings. Ka drinks a cinnamon sharbat at a snack bar, then returns to the hotel.
Chapter 25
Ka meets Kadife in the hotel room, and they talk briefly about the sharbat he just drank. Kadife talks about the fact that the rumors of it being poisoned are part of a state-fueled conspiracy theory, and she alludes to the fact that MIT already know everything that goes on in Kars, though they do not yet know about this meeting. Kadife tells him to take off his coat, but Ka insists that the coat protects him from evil, so he keeps it on.
Kadife tells Ka that the only person following him around town is Saffet, but they soon after turn their conversation to Ipek. Kadife tells Ka that Ipek and he are astrologically compatible, and that, while she knows that Ka is in love with Ipek, Ipek will require more time to turn her attraction to Ka into love. They then turn to more pressing matters: Blue has a message that he wants to give to Ka, so that he will give it to the West. However, since things have changed in recent hours, he needs Ka to come and hear it in person.
In order to get to Blue, Ka will need to hide in a horse-drawn carriage under a tarp and stay in wait until they arrive at their destination. Kadife then tells Ka that, if he agrees to this meeting, she will help Ka marry Ipek. She then helps Ka to focus his mind on the vision of his future with Ipek, and she tells him to think of a cinema that he would take Ipek to in Germany. She tells him that she hopes Ka will find happiness with Ipek in the Turkish-German world, then draws a gun on him so that he will have no hesitations about getting into the carriage to go meet Blue.
Kadife instructs Ka not to tell Blue anything about their friendship, nor anything about his love for Ipek. She also tells him to show Blue respect, then ushers him into the cart. Ka then begins to ride around town in the cart and anticipates meeting Blue once more.
Analysis
These chapters see a key turning point in the novel—that is, the advent of Sunay Zaim's revolution and the immediate aftermath of this coup. At the same time as this key plot device is introduced, however, note that a great deal of key development happens here regarding some of our aforementioned thematic concerns and questions. Regarding the separation between artistic imagination and reality, note that there are two separate ways in which Sunay Zaim provides a counterpoint to what we earlier saw with Ka, as well as how Ka's own artistic development begins to contravene his original artistic philosophy of aloofness. Second, regarding the dispute over religion's connection to community, note Sunay's rebuttal against Ka's newfound discovery of faith in God. Finally, regarding the image of snow, note here that it is developed by Ka into its final iteration—an understanding of human life as parallel to a snowflake—as well as the consequences of this distillation.
On the separation of artistic imagination and material reality, Sunay's actions and experiences seem to contravene Ka's creative philosophies in two main ways. First, there is the experience of Sunay's theatrical career in the 1970s, during which point his artistic ambitions were so strong as to leak into both the everyday and the political. When Sunay wanted to play Atatürk, after all, he allowed this artistic pretension to consume his life and, when it came with the consequence of his own ostracism, was forced to suffer in real life as a result of the persuasive power of his art. He, in a way, literally became an Atatürk-like figure in his desire to appeal to the masses and represent them on a national and international stage. Moreover, as Sunay tells Ka in the tailor shop, Sunay's vision of art is that it is so effective and tied to everyday life that it can elate a crowd and bring about immediate change in the lives of its consumers. Second, there is the fact of Sunay's coup, which quite literally blurs the lines between art and reality, politics and performance. As we will see with the play staged later in the novel, too, Sunay thus attempts to bring art to its highest level and reach mythic status by drawing art into proximity with reality.
Ka, too, seems to grow keen on incorporating reality into his art while in Kars, most notably here incorporating Necip's description of the place where God does not exist into the poem he recites at the National Theater. At the same time, however, he remains on a surface level steadfastly committed to distancing himself from the subjects of his art. When Z Demirkol accosts him in the street after all, it is not the fact of his impending violent spree that disturbs Ka, but rather the fact that he makes Ka forget the poem he had in mind. Perhaps, then, it is Ka's attempts to constantly distance himself from his artistic subjects that ironically draws him further and further under their influence. Consider here, the fact that, when Ka attempts to extricate himself from the Kars streets and sits to write at the café, he finds himself entangled in the experiences of the Georgian couple in some ramshackle backrooms. Moreover, in going to the library, he finds himself face to face with his own past, as well as both Fazil and the image of snow. In this way, one might say that, though Ka ostensibly espouses the philosophy of separating art from reality, his actions and experiences seem to directly contravene this claim in a manner similar to his religious experience, which seems him drawn closer and closer to the spirituality he once decried.
On the point of spirituality, a closer look at Ka's evolving spiritual thoughts is warranted—in addition to how Sunay Zaim attempts to throw a wrench in this process. Though Ka seems to be utterly unconcerned with religion where it interfaces with politics—as is evidenced by his getting up and leaving from the theater when the political tensions concerning the headscarf play become unbearable—he seems to grow closer and closer to faith in these chapters. For example, when faced with things like the cold winds of Kars, as well as the large flakes of falling snow, Ka thinks immediately of the fragility and smallness of human life when compared to all of creation. Additionally, when viewing the rooms of torture at police and MIT headquarters, he thinks of how the inability to know God's will on earth dooms man to tragedy and misery. Importantly, too, this movement towards spirituality is accompanied by a rise in Ka's loyalty to a wider religious community. For example, Ka is seized by sudden feelings of loyalty and guilt upon seeing Necip's body, feelings of longing for the Sheikh's company, and feelings of sorrow for discrimination against Fazil by turns in these chapters. Thus, while Ka still adamantly claims he is not an Eastern fundamentalist who needs a community to believe in God (this is also linked with his internalized hatred of Ipek for being provincial that we see in Chapter 20), he seems to be irrevocably drawn more and more into these communities as he says so. This is what Sunay seems to be pointing out when he talks to Ka by saying that God knows how one lives their life and whether it is done in the correct spirit of honoring him. If Ka is really beginning to believe in the same God as those around him, he must be joining in a community with them in some form. Again, however, the division between communal belief and individual belief is textured throughout with the undertones of the East/West divide.
Finally, it is here that we get the final crystallization of Ka's poetic imagining of snow as a symbol. Where before, he was comfortable saying that snow was parallel to human society and life in general, here we see Ka internalize the image of the snowflake and apply it to his own life. In other words, snow not just serves as a larger metaphor for life, but also directly applies to Ka himself, with its unique geometries and hidden patterns corresponding to the experiences and details of Ka's specific life. This is important not just because it comes to define the final collection of poetry Ka writes (pieced together by our narrator), but also because it sheds a great deal of light on Ka's creative inspiration at the hands of Kars and its residents. Ka is constantly inspired by the snowflakes in Kars, and if the flakes of snow are symbolically meant to be read as a unique series of life experiences, then it might be said that what truly inspires Ka about Kars is not the weather, but rather the color and diversity of life there, despite its isolation from and abandonment by the rest of the world. By existing in a vacuum and also as a self-contained world, everything that happens in Kars is thrown into greater relief and not lost in the monotonous drone of city life, and this is what makes Ka see the world through new eyes while in Kars. It is also this new perspective on life that allows Ka to begin and derive happiness form the sad milieu that surrounds him.
One other thing to keep track of in these chapters is the way in which both Ka and the narrator address history in Kars. By providing almost historiographic accounts of buildings, places, and things, and then cementing them with the narrator's "real" experiences trying to piece together Ka's work (e.g., going to the library of Ka's father), we get the sense that everything in the novel is happening in reality simultaneously as it unfolds in fiction. This is another important link emerging in the novel between artistic philosophy and metaphysical reality.
