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Ka considers calling the police about the murder at the pastry café but can’t find a phone. Instead, he goes to the headquarters of the Prosperity Party, where he sees Muhtar for the first time since university. Ka is irritated that Muhtar is running for mayor as an Islamist fundamentalist. During their days as students, Muhtar was a leftist. Muhtar tells Ka that he was saved from suicide by a Kurdish sheikh named Saadettin Efendi. Muhtar began attending religious meetings, which he hid from his then-wife, İpek. Muhtar’s conversion to Islam drove him and İpek apart, and they divorced. He began sending poems to magazines, but they were rejected. His hope lies in winning the election and becoming Kars’s mayor.

The electricity goes off. Ka and Muhtar sit in darkness discussing what happened to their leftist friends from school. Muhtar asks Ka to tell İpek that he wants to remarry her. As Muhtar and Ka talk, the secret police (MIT) arrive to search the Prosperity Party’s office. They then take Ka and Muhtar to their headquarters. They beat up Muhtar and show Ka pictures of Islamists, but Ka does not recognize the shooter from the cafe.

Afterward, as Ka walks past the pastry shop where the shooting occurred, a teenage boy named

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