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back. Ka was surprised to hear her speaking so openly. “Taner called to tell me.” She looked straight into Ka’s eyes when she said this.
    “I came to report on the municipal elections and the suicide girls.”
    “How long are you staying?” asked Ipek. “I’m busy with my father right now, but there’s a place called the New Life Pastry Shop, right next door to the Hotel Asia. Let’s meet there at half past one. We can catch up then.”
    If they’d run into each other in Istanbul—somewhere in Beyo˘glu, say—this would have been a normal conversation: it was because it was happening in Kars that Ka felt so strange. He was unsure how much of his agitation had to do with Ipek’s beauty. After walking through the snow for some time, Ka found himself thinking, I’m so glad I bought this coat!
    On the way to the newspaper office, his heart revealed a thing or two that his mind refused to accept: First, in returning to Istanbul from Frankfurt for the first time in twelve years, Ka’s purpose was not simply to attend his mother’s funeral but also to find a Turkish girl to make his wife; second, it was because he secretly hoped that this girl might be Ipek that he had traveled all the way from Istanbul to Kars.
    If a close friend had suggested this second possibility, Ka would never have forgiven him; its truth would cause Ka guilt and shame for the rest of his life. Ka, you see, was one of those moralists who believe that the greatest happiness comes from never doing anything for the sake of personal happiness. On top of that, he did not think it appropriate for an educated, westernized, literary man like himself to go in search of marriage to someone he hardly knew. In spite of this, he felt quite content when he arrived at the Border City Gazette. This was because his first meeting with Ipek—the thing he had been dreaming of from the moment he stepped on the bus in Istanbul—had gone much better than he could have predicted.
    The Border City Gazette was on Faikbey Avenue, one street down from Ka’s hotel, and its offices and printing facilities took up only slightly more space than Ka’s small hotel room. It was a two-room affair with a wooden partition on which were displayed portraits of Atatürk, calendars, sample business cards and wedding invitations (a printing sideline), and photographs of the owner with important government officials and other famous Turks who had paid visits to Kars. There was also a framed copy of the newspaper’s first issue, published forty years before. In the background was the reassuring sound of the press’s swinging treadle; years old, it was manufactured in Leipzig by the Baumann Company for its first owners in Hamburg. After working it for a quarter century, they sold it to a newspaper in Istanbul (this was in 1910, during the free press period following the establishment of the second constitutional monar-chy). In 1955—just as it was about to be sold off as scrap—Serdar Bey’s dear departed father bought the press and shipped it to Kars.
    Ka found Serdar Bey’s twenty-two-year-old son moistening his finger with spit, about to feed a clean sheet into the machine with his right hand while skillfully removing the printed paper with his left; the collection basket had been broken during an argument with his younger brother eleven years earlier. But even performing the complex maneuver, he was able to wave hello to Ka. Serdar Bey’s second son was seated before a jet-black table, its top divided into countless small compartments and surrounded by rows of lead letters, molds, and plates. The elder son resembled his father, but when Ka looked at the younger he saw the slant-eyed, moon-faced, short, fat mother. Hand-setting advertisements for the issue due out in three days, this boy showed the painstaking patience of a calligrapher who has renounced the world for his art.
    “So now you see what difficult conditions we in the Eastern Anatolian press have to