The Red-Haired Woman Read online

  It should have seemed suspicious that Serhat had mentioned Enver again, but I was preoccupied taking in all the concrete and walls that had piled up on this patch of land that had been empty and barren only thirty years ago and by the sheer numbers of people and animals (such as the menacing mud-brown stray that loped up to us for a sniff) now living here; my priority in that moment was to assimilate this new reality as quickly as possible. Would I be able to find even a brick or a window or catch even one familiar whiff to summon a memory from those days?

  “This is the house where Master Mahmut first told us that story from the Koran about the prince who left his father to die at the bottom of a well,” said pushy Serhat.

  “There’s no such story in the Koran, or in the Shahnameh, for that matter,” I said.

  “How do you know?” said Serhat. “Are you religious? Have you read the Koran?”

  I stood silent in the face of his aggressive demeanor, which I ascribed to my son Enver’s influence. I was heartbroken and had to concede that coming here had been a bad idea. “I was fond of Master Mahmut. He was like a father to me, during that summer I spent here,” I said.

  “If you want I can show you where Enver lives,” said my guide.

  “Is it close?”

  I followed Serhat into a side street; as we walked past apartment blocks with unlit porches, vans and minibuses parked haphazardly on both sides of the road, a small first-aid clinic and pharmacy, a garage, and warehouses with morose, chain-smoking watchmen, I wondered how it was possible that all of this had somehow been squeezed onto our plateau.

  “Enver lives here,” said Serhat. “Second floor, the windows on the left.”

  My heart beat to an odd, shallow rhythm. I knew I would never be able to disregard this longing to know my son.

  “Mr. Enver’s lights are on,” I said, with drunken disinhibition. “Shall we try his doorbell?”

  “Just because his lights are on doesn’t mean he’s home,” said quick-thinking Serhat. “Enver has chosen to be alone. He leaves his lights on when he goes out at night so thieves and foes will think there’s someone home, and so that when he gets back, he won’t remember how lonely he is.”

  “You seem to know your friend well. Surely Enver wouldn’t mind your showing up at his door.”

  “You never know what Enver will do.”

  Did he mean that my son was fearless? Should I be proud? I walked toward the door. “But why would he be lonely when his mother loves him so much and he can count on a friend as close as you?” I said.

  “He isn’t close to anyone…”

  “Is that because he grew up without a father?”

  “Perhaps, but if I were you I’d think twice about ringing that bell…,” said my son’s prudent friend. But I ignored his warning, and as my eyes roamed down the list of names and numbers on the buzzer, the size and style of handwriting changing with each entry, I froze, spellbound, at the following label:

  6: ENVER YENIER

  (FREELANCE ACCOUNTANT)

  I pressed the bell three times.

  “Enver’s door is always open for uninvited guests who show up in the middle of the night,” said Serhat. “He’ll let you in if he’s home.”

  But the door stayed shut. I became convinced that my son was at home and refusing to let me in out of sheer stubbornness, even though I’d come all this way to see him. My frustration with him and with Serhat’s insinuations grew.

  “Why are you so keen to meet Enver?” asked intrusive, irritating Serhat. Perhaps he’d caught wind of the gossip after all.

  “Show me this well so I can go home before it gets any later,” I said. I figured I could always sneak back here another day to see my son.

  “When you grow up without a father, you think there is no center and no end to the universe, and you think you can do whatever you want…,” said Serhat. “But eventually you find you don’t know what you want, and you start looking for some sort of meaning, some focus in your life: someone to tell you no.”

  I did not reply. I sensed that we were getting closer to our well, and that I was nearing the end of the quest I’d spent my life on.

  42

  “YOUR WELL IS IN THERE,” said Serhat, peering into my face as we stood before the rusty gate of a derelict factory.

  “After Hayri Bey died, his son outsourced all of the dyeing, washing, and stitching to Bangladesh, and production here stopped altogether. They’ve been using this place as a storage depot for the past five years, but ultimately they plan to get someone like you to tear it down and build high-rises on the land.”

  “I didn’t come here to scout new construction sites; I came for my memories,” I said.

  As Serhat approached the guardhouse, I spotted on the bare wall a Perspex panel that said ENDEAVOR TEXTILES LLC. I looked around trying to remember what the place had been like thirty years ago. The only indication that this was indeed Hayri Bey’s land was the way the factory walls seemed to stretch on endlessly, and that feeling I’d first had at age sixteen that I was much closer to the sky than usual.

  I heard the furious barking of a dog. Serhat returned.

  “There’s no one there, but I know the watchman,” he said. “He’s left the dog on its leash; he’ll be back soon.”

  “It’s getting late.”

  “If I remember, there’s a low spot further along the wall. I’ll go and take a look,” said Serhat, dissolving into the night.

  It wasn’t completely black beyond the wall, and despite the dog’s relentless bark, I was reassured by the reflection of the neon lights off the low roofs and metal poles on the opposite side, so I decided I would just take a quick look at the well and come straight back. Serhat, meanwhile, seemed to have disappeared. I was beginning to lose patience with my young guide when the phone rang in my pocket. It was Ayşe.

  “They told me you’re in Öngören,” she said.

  “I am.”

  “You lied to me, Cem. And you’re making a terrible mistake.”

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Everything went fine.”

  “There’s a lot to be afraid of. Where are you now?”

  “My guide has brought me to see the well I dug with Master Mahmut.”

  “Who is he?”

  “A young man from Öngören. A bit arrogant, but he’s been extremely helpful.”

  “Who introduced you?”

  “The Red-Haired Woman,” I said, and for a moment, I was able to think clearly through the fog of rakı.

  “Is anyone with you now?” said Ayşe, almost whispering into the phone.

  “Do you mean the Red-Haired Woman?”

  “No, I mean the man she introduced you to. Is he there right now?”

  “He’s not, he’s gone to look for a way through the wall. He’s going to sneak me into the empty factory.”

  “Cem…listen…come back immediately!”

  “Why?”

  “Get away from that boy and make sure he doesn’t follow you.”

  “What are you so worried about?” I said, but already the fear I could sense through the phone had begun to affect me, too.

  “Have you simply forgotten the stories we’ve been reading all these years?” said Ayşe. “Of course you went to Öngören to find your son. That’s why you didn’t want me to come along. Who introduced you to this guide of yours? The Red-Haired Woman! Do you realize now who he is?”

  “Who? Serhat?”

  “He’s probably your son, Enver! You’ve got to get away, Cem.”

  “Calm down. People here are all right. Master Mahmut was barely mentioned.”

  “Now listen to me very carefully,” said Ayşe. “What if they had someone stab you under the pretense of a political squabble, what if they got someone to shoot you and say it was some sort of drunken brawl?”

  “Then I’d be dead,” I said, with a chuckle.

  “And Sohrab would end up belonging to the Red-Haired Woman and her son,” said Ayşe. “These people wouldn’
t hesitate to kill a man for that.”

  “Are you saying someone’s going to kill me tonight to get their hands on my estate?” I asked. “No one knew I was going to come here today; not even me.”

  “Is that young man with you?”

  “I told you he isn’t!”

  “I’m begging you, please just go somewhere he can’t find you.”

  I did as my wife said. I hid on the gloomy porch of a shop on the other side of the road.

  “Listen to me,” said Ayşe. “If it’s true, everything we’ve always believed about Oedipus and his father, and about Rostam and Sohrab…then if that young man is your son, he is going to kill you! He’s a textbook case of the rebellious Western individualist…”

  “Don’t worry. If he tries anything, then I’ll be the authoritarian Asian father, like Rostam, and kill the brat myself,” I said lightheartedly.

  “You would never do anything of that sort,” said Ayşe, taking her drunk husband seriously. “Stay where you are. I’m taking the car. I’ll be right there.”

  In the dark, oppressive Öngören night, ancient books, myths, paintings, and civilizations seemed so remote that I could not understand why my wife was so anxious. But I stayed where I was, and, hearing nothing from my guide, Serhat, I too began to worry. Could he really be my son? The silence stretched on, and I grew annoyed with the young man who’d forgotten me here.

  “Mr. Cem, Mr. Cem,” he finally called from the other side of the wall.

  I stayed silent, feeling suddenly tense. The young man kept calling out to me.

  Presently, he reappeared in the very spot where I’d lost sight of him earlier. He began to amble toward me. He was roughly my height, and there was something about his bearing that was reminiscent of my father. It scared me.

  When he reached the point where he’d left me, he called out twice: “Mr. Cem!”

  I yearned for another look at him from up close; from where I stood I couldn’t see his face. There was a dreamlike quality to how I was hiding from this young man, all these years later, because he might be my son. Emboldened by the gun in my pocket, I stepped out toward him.

  “Where were you?” he said. “Follow me if you want to go inside.”

  He turned around and continued along the wall. The street was completely dark now. It occurred to me that he might be trying to lure me to some desolate, unlit corner in which to cut my throat. How I wished I’d had at least one good look at his face! I marched into the darkness to the sound of his footsteps.

  When we got to the lower section of the wall, Serhat sprang like a cat and vanished over the side. Grabbing hold of his clammy hand (and wondering briefly whether it could really belong to a son of mine), I too climbed over the wall. The empty factory’s guard dog was straining on its chain and barking madly. This was definitely our plateau.

  I thought I’d shoot the dog down if it managed to break free of its chain, so I maintained my composure as I walked among the industrial buildings. Evidently, once water had begun to come from the well, Hayri Bey and his son—who’d been wearing new soccer shoes the day I met him—had set up a washing-and-dyeing operation even more extensive than the one they’d first proposed. Scattered throughout the complex were also a number of more rudimentary constructions, which must have been built before the textile industry migrated to China, Bangladesh, and the Far East over the past ten years. Some—like the administrative building with the marble staircase—had since been abandoned and now served to store surplus construction materials, empty crates, and dusty rust-covered junk. Some had been reduced to ruins.

  Our well had been engulfed by the cafeteria, which Hayri Bey had always promised he’d build during visits to our dig site. The windows were all broken, so the place had no use even as a warehouse. I followed my guide in the faint light from a neon lamp on the other side of the wall, past spiderwebs, corroded sheet metal, loose pipes, and formless furniture, until we reached the concrete rim of what had been our well.

  “This lock never works,” said my guide, crouching as he fiddled with the padlock fastening the lid on the well.

  “You seem familiar with this place,” I said.

  “Enver used to bring me here all the time.”

  “Why was that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, still fussing with the lock. “Why did you want to come here?”

  “I’ve never forgotten how I worked here with Master Mahmut,” I said.

  “Trust me, he never forgot, either.”

  Was he driving at how I’d crippled Master Mahmut?

  When my young companion straightened up to gather his strength for a last attempt at the lock, a beam of light caught his face, and I inspected it carefully. A parched tenderness lay dormant inside me, ready to bloom at the first sign of moisture.

  But I was disappointed. While it was true that the young man’s features, gestures, and build were similar to mine, I disliked his personality—what our elders would have called his temperament. Ayşe was wrong. This couldn’t be my son.

  My shrewd guide perceived immediately that something about him had rubbed me the wrong way. There was a silence. Now he was looking back at me with unveiled hostility.

  “Let me have a go at it,” I said, getting on my knees in the semidarkness to try and force the lock.

  43

  KNEELING BY THE LOCK helped temporarily relieve the guilt inflaming my conscience. Why had I come here? The lock snapped open.

  I stood and handed the padlock to the young man. “Now open the lid,” I said, like a German tourist instructing a peasant to show him the Byzantine-era well in his back garden. I was disenchanted with my guide and troubled by his disdain.

  He heaved against the rusty metal lid but couldn’t get it to budge. I watched him struggle, and when I couldn’t resist any longer, I grabbed hold of the lid myself. It creaked open under our combined efforts, like the gate of a Byzantine dungeon.

  In the faint light of the distant neon lamp I saw a spiderweb and the flicker of a lizard. A dense smell of rot stung my throat, and the words Journey to the Center of the Earth rose up from the recesses of my memory.

  The foot of the well was so far down that we couldn’t even see it at first. But my eyes soon adjusted to the dark. Finally, I could see light reflected in a pool of water or mud at the bottom. The distance was startling.

  We stared into the abyss, dumbstruck. The well was so deep that one couldn’t help feeling terror but also admiration for the person who’d dug it using nothing but a spade and pickax. I pictured Master Mahmut thirty years ago, scolding me from the depths below.

  “I’m getting dizzy,” said my young guide. “It would be easy to fall. It’s so deep it pulls you in.”

  “Don’t ask me why, but just now I’ve thought of God,” I whispered into his ear, as if it were a secret, and for a moment I felt a sense of communion with the young man. “Master Mahmut wasn’t the type to pray five times a day. Even so, when we were digging this well thirty years ago, it felt not as if we were burrowing into the ground but ascending toward the sky and the stars, to the kingdom of God and His angels.”

  “God is everywhere,” said cocky Serhat. “Above and below, north and south. Everywhere.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Then why don’t you believe in Him?”

  “In whom?”

  “In Allah the Almighty, Creator of the universe,” he said.

  “How do you know whether I believe in God or not?”

  “It’s pretty obvious…”

  We studied each other wordlessly. He certainly seemed angry enough to be my son, and I was gratified to discover his strong, combative nature. But I was also afraid of what might happen were his anger turned on me here by the well.

  “Rich Westernized Turks always say ‘My relationship with God is none of your business!’ when they’re defending secularism,” said Serhat. “But they couldn’t care less about God; they’re only set on secularism so they can dress up their wickedn
ess as modernity.”

  “What have you got against modernity?”

  “I don’t have anything against anyone!” he said, sounding calmer now. “But I won’t have my enemies define me, and I won’t be caught in false dichotomies like left and right, or godly and modern. I just want to be myself. So I avoid people and concentrate on my poetry. Someone rang my doorbell earlier, but I was working on a poem, so I didn’t let them in.”

  I was confused. But I also sensed that the young man’s anger might be diluted if the conversation were to take a more academic turn. “Do you think modernity is a bad thing?” I asked with drunken guilelessness.

  “The modern man is lost in the chaos of the city. He is, in a way, rendered fatherless. But his search for a father is effectively pointless. For if he is an individual in the modern sense, he will never find a father in the tumult of the city. And if he does find him, he will cease to be an individual. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French pioneer of modernity, knew this to be true, so he abandoned each of his four children just to ensure they would be modern. Rousseau never showed the slightest interest in his children, nor did he ever seek them out. And you? Is that why you left me here, so that I would be modern? If so, then you were right.”

  “What?”

  “Why didn’t you answer my letter?” he asked, stepping closer.

  “What letter?”

  “You know full well what I’m talking about.”

  “I’m sorry, it must be the rakı making me forget things. Why don’t we head back to the dinner, and you can remind me on the way?”

  “I sent you a letter signed ‘your son.’ Why didn’t you write back to me? I left my e-mail address at the bottom.”

  “Forgive me, please, but what letter do you say you signed?”

  “Don’t pretend to be formal all of a sudden,” said Serhat. “You must have figured out by now who I am.”

  “I’m not sure I understand, Mr. Serhat.”

  “My name is not Serhat. I’m your son, Enver.”