Snow

Ka does not realize the extent of the terror that the revolutionaries are inflicting on the people of Kars until he sees Necip’s dead body. The language here emphasizes the loss that Ka feels and the shock of seeing a lively teenager become a corpse with a “frozen stiffness” (186). However, Ka’s tender expression of grief—kissing Necip’s cold, blue face—becomes cause for suspicion and his further interrogations by Sunay Zaim. The atmosphere of paranoia, fear, and violence contrasts with the atmosphere Ka observes elsewhere in Kars, where children are happy because the coup has given them a day off from school. Ka notes when he walks around Kars that there is a “sense of new beginnings and of a change from the vexing routines of everyday life” (217-18). People are not alarmed by the sounds of explosions because they are used to them; they have become so used to coups and other forms of political instability that Sunay Zaim’s coup seems minor.

The blood pressure check during Sunay’s dramatic speech to Ka is a moment of humor and a subtle suggestion of Sunay’s age. When Sunay makes a gesture of “deep thought,” Ka recalls a history play from the 1970s in which Sunay “uttered the exact same words” (198). However, Ka notes that Sunay isn’t nearly as attractive as he was then; now he is “tired, pale, and worn” (198). Sunay’s fame reached its peak during the height of leftist theater in the 1970s, when he played Lenin, Napoleon, and Robespierre. Sunay sought to play Atatürk, a Turkish national hero, but the public turned against him because he committed blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad. Sunay’s turn from theater to politics highlights the theatrical nature of politics, as well as the political dimensions of the media—one of the novel’s central themes.

The mansion where the revolutionaries are stationed underscores Sunay’s desire to recapture past glory, both personally and nationally: It is a 90-year-old Russian building that used to be home to a wealthy family, then became headquarters for the former mayor (Muzaffer Bey) and was most recently a sweatshop. The imagery of “old-fashioned sewing machines” and “giant pairs of scissors” emphasizes the building’s strange past (188). It also evokes “strange instruments of torture” (188), foreshadowing the torture that Ka will experience at the hands of Z Demirkol.

Sunay Zaim argues that Ka can’t believe in the same God that the people of Kars do because he is not one of them and leads an “utterly different life” (204). Ka’s conversation about God with Sunay emphasizes the material aspects of life, which is in keeping with Sunay’s ideological views, as well as Sunay’s general sense of superiority over the people of Kars. Despite this, Ka feels a sense of kinship with Sunay, and Sunay emphasizes their commonalities—for example, that they are both lovers of Western literature and modern art. Sunay says to his wife Funda that he and Ka are “as attached to each other as a fingernail is to flesh” (205), a simile that Sunay uses to ingratiate himself with Ka. Sunay ultimately intends to manipulate Ka to his own benefit. He tells Ka, “Do you know how many men they [the Europeans] hanged to establish that modern world you admire so much?” (203). In Sunay, the extremes of the Enlightenment ethos manifest themselves, the desire to educate, enlighten, and modernize serving as a pretext for control, disenfranchisement, and destruction.

The story of the policeman who is following Ka hyperbolizes the tedium of an officer’s life and the broader absurdity of Turkey’s political climate. Officer Saffet complains about the investigation of “poisonous sharbats” and the finding that the drinks were only poisonous to Turks; however, the state is hiding this conclusion because the official state position is that “Kurds and Turks [are] indistinguishable” (210).