Chapter 16 What Najib Sees and Ka's Poems

Twenty minutes later, Kagang walked into the bathroom at the end of the hallway and saw Nejifu coming in after him.They were like two strangers waiting at the door of an occupied cubicle.Ka saw that the high ceiling in the bathroom was painted with exaggerated roses and rose leaves. As soon as the people in the compartment came out, they went in together.Ka discovered that an old man with all his teeth had fallen out had seen them.After closing the door from the inside, Najib said, "They didn't see it." He hugged Ka happily.Nejifu nimbly stepped on a protrusion on the wall in the compartment with his sneaker-wearing foot, jumped up suddenly, and reached out to touch the letter on the water tank.After landing, he carefully blew away the floating ash that fell on the envelope.

"Please tell her when I give these letters to Kadifi," he said, "I have thought about it for a long time. From the moment she read these letters, my expectation and waiting for Kadifi no longer exist. Yes. I want you to make that very clear to her." "Why would you want to let her know you love her and at the same time let her know you've given up all hope?" "I'm not as terrified of life and my passions as you are," Najib said.He worried that Ka would be sad about it. "These letters were the only relief for me: I had to fall in love with someone, obsessed with her beauty, or I simply couldn't live. I had to be happy to love someone else. But I had to get the card Diffie out of my mind. Do you know who I'm going to fall in love with with all my heart after Kadiffy?"

He gave the letter to Ka. "Who?" asked Ka, putting the letter into his coat pocket. "Allah." "Tell me about the scene you saw." "Open that window first! It stinks in here." Kafei struggled to open the rusted latch and pushed open the small window. They watched the snowflakes slowly and silently fall as if they had witnessed some miracle. "What a wonderful world!" Nejiv said softly. "What do you think is the most beautiful thing in life?" Ka said. There was a silence. "Everything!" said Nejiv, as if about to tell some secret.

"But doesn't life make us unhappy too?" "Yes, but that's our fault, not the world's and the Creator's." "Tell me about that scene." "Put your hand on my forehead first, and tell me about my future," Najib said, his eyes wide open (one of them and his head would open in twenty-six minutes). "I hope I can live a long and fulfilling life. I know that I will experience many meaningful things. But I don't know how I will feel in twenty years, and I am very curious about it." Ka pressed the delicate skin of Najif's forehead with the palm of his right hand. "Oh, my God!" He jokingly withdrew his hand quickly as if touching something very hot. "There's a lot of movement here."

"you say." "Twenty years from now, when you're thirty-seven years old, you'll finally understand why the poor are so poor and stupid, the rich are so rich and smart, rude, violent and dead , everyone has their own ideas about what causes all these problems that make you think about death and guilt,” Ka said. "So, here, everyone seems to be very moral, but in fact they are becoming more and more stupid, and they are dying day by day. You feel that you can only live well if you become bad and immoral. But you also understand The consequences of this are dire. For I can feel it under my trembling hands..."

"what is that?" "You are very smart, you know what the consequences will be today. So I still want you to talk about it first." "what?" "I know that your guilt is due to this reason, not from the poverty and misfortune of the poor as you said." "Won't I believe in Allah?" Najif said. "In that case, I will die." "You don't become like that principal in the elevator overnight. It takes a long time, and you don't even know it. People die slowly, like people who drink too much raki in the morning That way, you will find yourself living in another world for many years."

"Is that you?" Ka put his hand from his forehead: "On the contrary. Over the years I began to believe in Allah. The process was so slow that I didn't understand it until I came to Kars. Therefore, I felt happy here. , I can write poetry." "Now I think you are so happy and smart," Najib said, "I want to ask you, can people really know the future? Even if they don't know now, can they still believe that they can know and get comfort? I want to put this Into my first science fiction novel." "Some people know..." Ka said, "Mr. Serdar, the owner of the "Frontier City Newspaper", he knew what was going to happen tonight, and he even printed the paper." They looked at the card together. Newspaper drawn from pocket: "...the evening party was interrupted from time to time by enthusiastic cheers and applause."

"That's what happiness must be like," Najib said, "If we can write what will happen in the newspaper first, and then actually experience these things, we become the poets of our own lives. The paper says you're going to read your latest poem, which one is that?" Someone knocked on the door.Ka asked Najiv to talk about "that scene" right away. "I'll say it now," said Nejiv, "but don't tell anyone you heard it from me. They don't like me being so close to you." "I'm not going to tell anyone," said Ka. "Talk about it."

"I love Allah," Najif said excitedly. "Sometimes I don't want to, but I always ask myself what would happen if there is no Allah. At this time, a very frightening scene will appear before my eyes. .” "Ok." "One night, I saw it through the window. Outside were two abandoned white walls as high as castle walls, like two castles facing each other! I looked at the road between them with horror. The narrow passage, which stretched before me like a street. Where there is no Allah, the street was snow-covered and muddy like the street in Kars, but purple in color! There was something in the middle of the street Said 'stop' to me, but I still looked towards the end of the street - the end of the world. There was a tree there, leafless, bare, the only tree. Suddenly, as I looked at it, It turned red and started to burn. At this moment, I felt guilty for being so curious about the place where there is no Allah. As I was thinking this, the red tree suddenly turned back to its original dark color ...I wanted to stop looking at it, but I couldn't help myself, so I looked again, and the lonely tree at the end of the world turned red again and started to burn. This went on until morning."

"Why does this scene frighten you so much?" asked Ka. "Because sometimes I think that this scene may really appear in this world under the instigation of the devil. But what appeared before my eyes must be my hallucination. Because as I said, if there is such a place in the world, That would mean that there is no Allah - may Allah bless you. And that is simply not possible, the only remaining possibility is that I don't believe in Allah. And that is something worse than death." "I see," said Ka. "I checked the encyclopedia. The word atheist comes from the Greek word athos. This word does not refer to people who do not believe in God, but to people who have been abandoned by God. This is why people here cannot become atheists. Because even if we want to be atheists, Allah will not abandon us. To be an atheist, you must first be a Westerner.”

"I wanted to be a Westerner, but I also wanted to have faith," Ka said. "A person who has been abandoned by Allah, even if he goes to the cafe every night to play poker with his friends, jokes with his classmates every day, and chats with his friends every day, he is still alone. " "But he will still have real love and comfort," Ka said. "She must love you as you love her." Someone knocked on the door again, and Najiv hugged Ka, kissed Ka on the face like a child, and went out.Ka saw a man waiting there, but at that moment the man ran to another compartment.Ka inserted the compartment door again, smoking a cigarette and watching the heavy snow falling outside.He felt that he could recall the scene that Nejiv said word by word as if he were recalling a poem. If there was no "man from Pollock", he felt that he could recall the scene that Nejif saw. The scene is written in the notebook like a poem. Someone from Pollock! During my senior year of high school, Ka and I used to talk about literature late at night in those days, and it was a topic we enjoyed talking about.Anyone with a little knowledge of English poetry knows the note at the beginning of Korreki's poem "Kubla Khan".The poem, subtitled "A Phantom in a Dream, Part of a Poem," begins with the story of Korrej taking a drug for his illness (actually he smoked opium for pleasure), under which he fell into a coma , he has been reading this book before he goes to sleep, and the sentences in the book become real objects in his sleep and become a poem.This poem can be said to be effortless, but it is so ingenious.Kohlrecki recalled every word of the poem when he woke up.He took out the paper, pen and ink, and began eagerly writing the poem line by line.He had just written the last line of the poem as we know it now when the door knocked and he rose to open it: it was a debt collector from the neighboring city of Pollock.After dismissing the man, Kohlrecki hurried back to the table, only to find that he could no longer remember the rest of it, and only a single emotion and individual words existed in his mind. Since no one from Pollock distracted him, the poem was still in his head when Ka was called to the stage.He is taller than everyone else on stage.The German gray overcoat on his body made him stand out even more. The commotion in the hall stopped instantly.Some people, the emotional students, the unemployed, and the Islamists who came to protest, didn't know what to laugh at or object to, and they all fell silent.The officials who sat in the front row, the policemen who had been following Ka all day, the deputy mayor, the deputy police chief, and the teachers knew that Ka was a poet.The tall and slender host was a little nervous in the face of this silence.He copied the question often asked in "cultural programs" on TV: "You are a poet and you are writing poetry. Is it difficult to write poetry?" Every time I watch the video, I always want to forget Ka's simple and reluctant answer, from his The audience did not understand whether it is difficult to write poetry, but they understood that Ka was from Germany. "What do you think of our beautiful Kars?" the host then asked. After a moment of hesitation, Ka said: "Very beautiful, very poor, very melancholy." In the audience behind, two religious school students laughed at his answer, and someone else shouted: "It is your soul that is poor." Then, inspired by this, six or seven people also stood up and shouted.At this moment, half of the audience began to laugh, and the other half said what no one heard clearly.When I went to Kars, Mr. Turgut told me that Dai Han in front of the TV burst into tears after hearing this sentence.The host said: "You represent Turkish literature in Germany." "Let him tell why he's here," someone called. "I have come because I was very unhappy," said Ka, "and I feel very happy here. Now listen, I am going to read a poem." After a moment of surprise and noise, Ka began to read the poem.Years later, I got a tape of that night and watched my friend with admiration and love.This is the first time I have seen him recite poems in front of a crowd.He is like a focused and quiet walker, full of thoughts, walking forward without any affectation.Except for two pauses where he seems to be remembering something, he recites the poem smoothly and easily. Najif found that this poem was derived from the "scene" he just said, "the place without Allah" he said, every word he said was written into the poem, he seemed to be possessed stands up, but that doesn't disrupt the card's rhythm, which is reminiscent of falling snowflakes.There was sporadic applause, someone stood up and shouted in the back row, and others echoed.Whether they were responding to the poem, or bored, is unknown.If you don't count his subsequent shadow on the green screen, these are the last shots I can see of my friend of twenty-seven years.