having insisted on settling in this godforsaken city but for having succumbed once again to the desire for power; I won’t let them break my spirit, but I still hate myself for knowing all this and so I feel inferior to you. Please, when you look me straight in the eye, don’t throw my shame back at me.
While the plainclothesmen didn’t separate Ka from Muhtar after parking the patrol car in the inner courtyard of police headquarters, there was nevertheless a marked difference in the treatment of the two men. Ka was a famous journalist from Istanbul who could, if he wrote something critical, get them into a lot of trouble, so they treated him like a witness who was there to help the authorities with their investigation. But with Muhtar it was as if to say, Not you again! and so even when they returned to Ka it was as if to say, What is a man like you doing with a man like him? Innocently Ka assumed it was Muhtar’s ingratiating replies that made them think him, on the one hand, stupid (do you really think we’re going to let you take over the country?) and, on the other, confused (if only you could get your own life in order). Only much later would Ka make the painful discovery that the police were pursuing a different line altogether.
Hoping he might be able to identify the tiny man who had shot the director of the Institute of Education, they took Ka into a side room to peruse an archive of about a hundred black-and-white photographs. Here was every political Islamist from Kars and the surrounding areas who had ever been detained even once by the police. Most of them were young Kurds, from the villages or else unemployed, but there were also mug shots of street vendors, students attending religious high schools or universities, teachers, and Sunni Turks. As Ka looked at photograph after photograph of doleful youths staring miserably into the police camera, he thought he recognized two teenagers from his walk around the city earlier in the day, but he saw no one who resembled the tiny and, it seemed to him, older man who’d committed the murder.
Ka returned to find Muhtar hunched on the same stool, but his nose was bleeding and one eye was shot with red. Muhtar made one or two shameful gestures and then hid his face behind a handkerchief. In the silence Ka imagined that Muhtar had found redemption in this beating; it might have released him from the guilt and spiritual agony he felt at the misery and stupidity of his country. Two days later, just before receiving the unhappiest news of his life—and having by then fallen into the same state as Muhtar—Ka would have reason to recall his foolish fantasy.
Moments later, they returned Ka to the side room to give his statement. Sitting across from a young policeman using the same old Reming-ton typewriter he remembered his lawyer father using on nights when he brought work home, Ka described the slaying of the director of the Institute of Education, and as he spoke it occurred to him that they had shown him Muhtar in order to frighten him.
He was released soon afterward, but Muhtar’s face remained before his eyes for some time. In the old days, the provincial police weren’t quite so ready to beat up religious conservatives. But Muhtar was not from one of the center-right parties; he was a proponent of radical Islam. Once again Ka wondered if this stance had something to do with Muhtar’s personality. He walked through the snow for a long, long time. At the end of Army Avenue, he sat down on a wall and smoked a cigarette, while he watched a group of children slipping and sliding on a side street in the lamplight. The poverty and the violence he had seen that day had tired him, but he was propped up by the hope that with Ipek’s love he would be able to begin a new life.
Later on, walking through the snow again, he found himself on the pavement across the street from the New Life Pastry Shop. The window was broken and the navy-blue light atop the police patrol
While the plainclothesmen didn’t separate Ka from Muhtar after parking the patrol car in the inner courtyard of police headquarters, there was nevertheless a marked difference in the treatment of the two men. Ka was a famous journalist from Istanbul who could, if he wrote something critical, get them into a lot of trouble, so they treated him like a witness who was there to help the authorities with their investigation. But with Muhtar it was as if to say, Not you again! and so even when they returned to Ka it was as if to say, What is a man like you doing with a man like him? Innocently Ka assumed it was Muhtar’s ingratiating replies that made them think him, on the one hand, stupid (do you really think we’re going to let you take over the country?) and, on the other, confused (if only you could get your own life in order). Only much later would Ka make the painful discovery that the police were pursuing a different line altogether.
Hoping he might be able to identify the tiny man who had shot the director of the Institute of Education, they took Ka into a side room to peruse an archive of about a hundred black-and-white photographs. Here was every political Islamist from Kars and the surrounding areas who had ever been detained even once by the police. Most of them were young Kurds, from the villages or else unemployed, but there were also mug shots of street vendors, students attending religious high schools or universities, teachers, and Sunni Turks. As Ka looked at photograph after photograph of doleful youths staring miserably into the police camera, he thought he recognized two teenagers from his walk around the city earlier in the day, but he saw no one who resembled the tiny and, it seemed to him, older man who’d committed the murder.
Ka returned to find Muhtar hunched on the same stool, but his nose was bleeding and one eye was shot with red. Muhtar made one or two shameful gestures and then hid his face behind a handkerchief. In the silence Ka imagined that Muhtar had found redemption in this beating; it might have released him from the guilt and spiritual agony he felt at the misery and stupidity of his country. Two days later, just before receiving the unhappiest news of his life—and having by then fallen into the same state as Muhtar—Ka would have reason to recall his foolish fantasy.
Moments later, they returned Ka to the side room to give his statement. Sitting across from a young policeman using the same old Reming-ton typewriter he remembered his lawyer father using on nights when he brought work home, Ka described the slaying of the director of the Institute of Education, and as he spoke it occurred to him that they had shown him Muhtar in order to frighten him.
He was released soon afterward, but Muhtar’s face remained before his eyes for some time. In the old days, the provincial police weren’t quite so ready to beat up religious conservatives. But Muhtar was not from one of the center-right parties; he was a proponent of radical Islam. Once again Ka wondered if this stance had something to do with Muhtar’s personality. He walked through the snow for a long, long time. At the end of Army Avenue, he sat down on a wall and smoked a cigarette, while he watched a group of children slipping and sliding on a side street in the lamplight. The poverty and the violence he had seen that day had tired him, but he was propped up by the hope that with Ipek’s love he would be able to begin a new life.
Later on, walking through the snow again, he found himself on the pavement across the street from the New Life Pastry Shop. The window was broken and the navy-blue light atop the police patrol
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