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destitution, depression, and decay. Having described the beauty of those winters—dwelling in particular on the powdered faces of the half-naked actors who had come all the way from Ankara to perform Greek plays—the old mayor went on to tell how in the late forties he himself had invited a youth group to perform a revolutionary play in the civic center. “This work tells of the awakening of a young girl who has spent her life enveloped in a black scarf,” he said. “In the end she pulls it off and burns it.” In the late forties they’d had to search the entire city for a black scarf to use in the play; in the end they had had to phone Erzurum to ask for one to be sent. “Now the streets of Kars are filled with young women in head scarves of every kind,” Muzaffer Bey added. “And because they’ve been barred from their classes for flaunting this symbol of political Islam, they’ve begun committing suicide.”
    Ka refrained from asking questions, as he would for the rest of his stay in Kars whenever anyone mentioned the rise of political Islam or the head-scarf question. He also refrained from asking why it was, if indeed not a single head scarf could be had in Kars in the late forties, that a group of fiery youths had felt compelled to stage a revolutionary play urging women not to cover their heads. During his long walks through the city that day, Ka had paid little attention to the head scarves he saw and didn’t attempt to distinguish the political kind from any other; having been back in the country for only a week, he had not yet acquired the secular intellectual’s knack of detecting political motive when seeing a covered woman in the street. But it is also true that, since childhood, he had scarcely been in the habit of noticing covered women. In the westernized upper-middle-class circles of the young Ka’s Istanbul, a covered woman would have been someone who had come in from the suburbs—from the Kartal vineyards, say—to sell grapes. Or she might be the milk-man’s wife or someone else from the lower classes.
    * * *
    In time, I was also to hear many stories about former owners of the Snow Palace Hotel, where Ka was staying. One was a West-leaning professor whom the czar had exiled to Kars (a gentler option than Siberia); another was an Armenian in the cattle trade; subsequently the building housed a Greek orphanage. The first owner had equipped the 110-year-old structure with the sort of heating system typical of so many houses built in Kars at that time: a stove set behind the walls to radiate heat to four surrounding rooms. It was not until Kars had become part of the Turkish Republic and the building had its first Turkish owner that it was converted to a hotel, but, being unable to figure out how to operate the Russian heating system, that owner installed a big brass stove beside the door opening onto the courtyard. Only much later was he converted to the merits of central heating.
    * * *
    Ka was lying on his bed with his coat on, lost in daydreams, when there was a knock on the door; he jumped up to answer it. It was Cavit, the desk clerk who spent his days beside the stove watching television; he had come to tell Ka something he had forgotten when Ka came in.
    “I forgot to tell you. Serdar Bey, owner of the Border City Gazette, wants to see you immediately.”
    Downstairs, Ka was about to walk out of the lobby when he was stopped dead in his tracks; just at that moment, coming through the door behind the reception desk, was ˙Ipek. He’d forgotten how beautiful she was during their university days, and now, suddenly reminded, he felt slightly nervous in her presence. Yes, exactly—that’s how beautiful she was. First they shook hands in the manner of the westernized Istanbul bourgeoisie, but after a moment’s hesitation they moved their heads forward, embracing without quite letting their bodies touch, and kissed on the cheeks.
    “I knew you were coming,” Ipek said, as she stepped