The Red-Haired Woman Read online

  He would soon curl up and fall asleep in front of the television, and I would quietly watch over him and blame myself for not having found him a suitable girl to marry. But I suspect I would have disapproved of any girl he liked, and that he was perfectly capable of refusing, out of sheer spite, any girl I might pick for him. Besides, my son had neither the financial means nor the social standing to guarantee him a good match.

  I have never regretted any of my decisions after the day I dyed my hair red. My only regret is my hopeful insistence that my son meet and get to know his father. Enver was scathing about the idea, though he never dismissed it entirely. Mostly, though, he accused me of being a fantasist or of doing it all for the money. It’s no coincidence that all the newspapers wound up accusing him of the very same thing after Cem’s death. But my son didn’t mean to kill his father. He is certainly no murderer, despite the liberal use the press has made of that slur, tainting his name forever.

  My son was merely trying to defend himself against the blind rage of a man with a gun, who happened to be his father. Enver’s only hope coming to the meeting that night was to be finally reunited with the father he’d never known. It was I who stirred that need in him; it is all that I regret now. I don’t for a second regret all the stories I told him as a child about Rostam and Sohrab, Oedipus and his mother, or Abraham and Isaac. As for the youths, the students, the angry men who came to our yellow theater tent…No one had ever told them these stories, but somehow they knew them anyway, just as people can sometimes still know, deep down, things they’ve forgotten.

  Whatever the prosecutor may have claimed, my son’s familiarity with these old stories, and with life’s occasional tendency to imitate myths and fables, does not prove his guilt. Enver would have dearly wished to leave that well without causing the death of his father. But was there even a moment to think as he tried to wrest the gun out of his father’s hand? My son killed his father by accident. This much was clear to me as soon as I heard his own sincere account of what had happened. It should have been clear to most journalists, too, had they not preferred to deceive their readers for the sake of a good story.

  The success of Sohrab, Cem’s incredible wealth, the technology that now allowed Enver to prove who his father was…It all made for irresistibly titillating copy. Countless paragraphs described how I’d wept upon reaching the scene of the crime. Well-meaning columnists who enjoyed wallowing in melodrama wrote lengthy pieces on the tribulations of the “former stage and voice actress” who’d witnessed her son killing his father. Other more malicious hacks, whose newspapers sold advertising space to Sohrab, published disgraceful slanders about how my tears should fool no one, for this was no accident but a murder plot we had been hatching for years, and how we’d acted solely because we couldn’t wait to get our hands on childless Cem’s inheritance. They presented my red hair as proof of my disreputable character. Never mind that it wasn’t my son but his father who’d brought a gun to Öngören and drew it in a fit of rage by the well…

  The gun was registered to Cem, and the judge will take this into account when assessing my son’s integrity, together with the lack of any proof of premeditation on our part. I am sure of it. But of course the newspapers have ignored these facts. And now my son and I will go down in Istanbul history as the evil red-haired mother and her conniving son who killed the father out of greed. I can’t bear to think of it. Every time I visit my son in Silivri Prison, there is always some brazen inmate staring daggers at me or taunting me with gibes based on lies in the papers; even the more helpful wardens sometimes give me such looks that I want to die. These stares and accusations are so much worse than anything I experienced in all those years’ of hearing shameless hecklers yelling, “Strip! Strip!” I asked Enver to write down a complete account of how he’d come to kill his father by mistake. When he reads it, the judge will surely have no choice but to acquit him on the grounds that he acted in self-defense. But to present the story in its full context, he must start from the very beginning, with the summer his father went to dig that well—and that has made it necessary for me to help him discover everything that happened before and since. The fruit of all those efforts is the text you are now holding, offered as a statement for the defense to the criminal court of Silivri. The whole thing—and not just the next few pages—can be regarded as the investigative report of a murder, with every piece of evidence subject to and withstanding legal scrutiny. Just as in Sophocles’s Oedipus the King.

  That day, I’d introduced my son to everyone as Serhat, so it would be easier for him to approach his father, but somehow this has been presented as evidence of our delinquency. The press has also published a series of allegations about the paternity suit, all unfounded. But the account you will find here is complete and unequivocally true. So I’ll pick up where I left off:

  When I realized that my son and his father weren’t coming back to the banquet hall, I rushed to the well myself. A few witnesses came with me.

  The night watchman directed us to the old cafeteria building. As we stepped inside, an ugly, unruly cur was barking as if his life depended on it. I saw my son sitting alone on the floor a few steps from the open mouth of the well, and I realized immediately what must have happened. My son had accidentally killed his father. I ran to his side and held him close. I cried just as profusely as I used to cry in the theater.

  But my misery was far more complex than the stage version. As I let out each piercing wail, hoping for some release from the anguish, I became aware of why even the most insolent soldiers, the most foulmouthed drunks, and the most shameless perverts were always silenced by the sight of a woman weeping: the logic of the universe turns on the tears of mothers. That explained why I was crying now. I was crying about everything, and it was comforting to do so, for it seemed to free my mind to think about other things.

  The drunken busybodies who’d followed me from the banquet hall were trying to determine the whereabouts of their boss when my son announced that Mr. Cem (he did not refer to him as his father) had fallen into the well.

  Someone from Sohrab called the police. Cem’s wife, Ayşe, arrived before they did; she was led to the well, and like all the others, she too refused to believe that her husband could be all the way down there. I wanted to embrace her as one woman reaching out to another, I wanted to mourn with her for the dead father, for the son who’d killed him, and for our lives. But they wouldn’t let me anywhere near her.

  The newspapers later wrote in ominous tones about the depth of the well, the murky waters inside, and the surreal notion that anyone could have dug a hole so deep in the ground all those years ago with nothing more than a shovel and a pickax. They started talking about fate, and although I wasn’t much convinced, I too liked the idea nonetheless.

  I would have dearly loved a chance to talk to Ayşe in the days following my son’s arrest, to console her for her loss and try to assuage the hatred she must have felt toward us. I wanted to tell her that, as women, we were not responsible for what had happened, for it had all been dictated by myth and history. But understandably, she was more interested in what she read in the newspapers every day than she was in ancient myths and legends. We were disheartened to discover that Sohrab’s employees were feeding gossip to the same journalists who were writing that my son had killed Ayşe’s husband for his estate and that I had masterminded everything.

  The police found a single spent cartridge near the well. But there was no sign of the gun. A diver who was accustomed to the depths and strong currents of the Bosphorus was secured to a rope and lowered into the muddy hole, from where he emerged with Cem’s wretched corpse, already unrecognizable just two days after his death. My son’s father was then subjected to a brutal autopsy in which every one of his organs was extracted and dissected. Since no trace of the dirty well water was found inside his lungs, it was clear that he must have died before falling in.

  The same autopsy also revealed the cause of death. The coroner’s verdict was
splashed across the next day’s front pages: “He shot his father in the eye!” But no one wrote about their tussle by the well or mentioned my son’s court statement, in which he explained that he’d acted only to defend himself and that the gun had gone off by accident while he was trying to disarm his father.

  The judge sent the diver into the well again, and this time he surfaced with the Kırıkkale pistol. It helped our case that it was registered to Cem and that the bullet that had entered his left eye came from its barrel, according to the ballistics analysis. We were therefore confident that the judge would rule that my son had acted in self-defense and that he wasn’t a murderer. It hadn’t been a case of an embittered son who’d brought the gun to the well, but of a father who feared his own child.

  Ms. Ayşe’s and Sohrab’s conduct toward me changed after the retrieval of the weapon. When it became clear that my son hadn’t planned to kill his father and that he might even be acquitted—free therefore to inherit Cem’s estate after all and become Sohrab’s biggest shareholder—their animosity lessened considerably.

  In our first meeting at the Sohrab offices, I found Ayşe poised and dignified. Did she believe any of the tabloid gossip about me? I could tell from the look in her eyes that she was suppressing all her bitterness and anger in the effort to remain composed. It was obvious that she’d decided to bury her grief over the loss of her beloved husband for the time being and was willing herself to get along with me.

  I tried to reassure her: though I couldn’t speak for Enver, who was still in prison awaiting the conclusion of his trial, she could be sure that neither of us had any intention of dismantling the construction empire on which my son’s late father had expended all his wits and creativity, much less of leaving its hundreds of employees out in the cold. In fact, we hoped to do the very opposite: we wanted Sohrab to reach even greater heights. I told her I believed Sohrab was born on that day in 1986—thirty years ago—when my son’s late father began to dig that well with Master Mahmut.

  Having made this delicate point, I described how, during that same year, Master Mahmut and the father of my son had each visited the yellow tent of the Theater of Morality Tales, only a day apart, and how struck they had both been by the tragedy of Rostam and Sohrab. The tears I’d shed in the tent that night were thus related to those I’d shed by the well thirty years later by the same inexorable bonds between myth and life.

  “Life follows myth!” I said, electrified. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I do,” said Ayşe politely.

  I could sense that neither she nor Sohrab’s board of directors was prepared to do anything that might antagonize me and my son.

  “Don’t forget that I was right there in Öngören when our company was digging its very first well. And even its name, Sohrab, was taken from what was my closing monologue at the time.”

  Ayşe blinked as if to dispel her disbelief at what she’d just heard. Of course, the name Sohrab didn’t come from my monologue, but from Ferdowsi’s thousand-year-old Shahnameh. She had been studying “these matters” (she couldn’t bring herself to say the words “filicide” or “patricide”) with her husband for years, during which they’d examined untold paintings and ancient manuscripts in museums across Europe and the rest of the world. She looked out of the windows of the Sohrab headquarters, her eyes roaming over Istanbul’s skyscrapers and its sea of roofs and chimneys, and started describing scenes from a happier past, as though she had a point to prove. She spoke of a museum in Saint Petersburg, of a house in Tehran, of Athens, of signs, symbols, and artworks scattered over a huge geographical expanse, and though her tone was enigmatic, her satisfaction and enjoyment at recalling these moments were palpable. This woman had been a companion to my son’s father, and they’d been happy together. Now, due to a series of legal quirks, there was a chance my son might end up owning most of the company they had surely worked so hard to build, for alongside my son’s father, it was this woman who’d raised and nurtured Sohrab.

  Taking care to ensure that her tone would not offend me, provoke my imprisoned son, or reveal how much she loathed us, Ayşe told me the story you have been reading in this book, starting all the way back to when she met her husband at university and they used to visit the Deniz Bookstore together. Watching her closely as she spoke, I got the unmistakable feeling that she was using her blissful memories to exact some sort of revenge on me. But I didn’t let that get to me and listened humbly to her account; after all, both the child and Sohrab belonged, in a sense, to me.

  Over my next few visits to Silivri Prison, I began to tell my son some of the stories I’d heard from Ayşe. Despite how far it was from home, and all the buses I had to take to get there from Bakırköy, I still made it to the gates every time, asking myself what it could mean that my son was being held here, just five kilometers from where his father and Master Mahmut had dug their well, in this prison whose warden and guards proudly proclaimed was not only the biggest in Turkey but “in the whole of Europe.” Once I was through the gates, there was the endless merry-go-round of metal detectors, female guards never without a snide remark about my red hair as they searched me, waiting rooms, doors opening and doors closing, locks clicking open and locks clicking shut, halls and hallways, until I would lose all sense of time and place. As I waited for my son to appear beyond the soundproof glass of the visiting room, I would daydream, mistaking other inmates for him, and growing either sleepy or restless in my barely contained fury, and when my son finally arrived, it was as if the figure behind the glass wasn’t him but his dead father—no, his dead grandfather.

  If our lawyer happened to be present, we would talk through the latest developments in our case, the nonsense peddled by the press, and any particular difficulties my son might be suffering in his cell block. There was the abuse from those who believed he’d killed his father for money, the awful prison food, and the frustration of hearing about a new wave of pardons that proved to be merely rumor. Enver’d tell us harrowing stories of pro-opposition journalists and Kurds now being held in the same cells once occupied by coup-plotting generals, and he’d have us write yet another useless petition asking for privacy, a little more fresh-air time, or the review of an unjust verdict. This would all take so long that usually our allotted hour would pass before the two of us, mother and son, even had the chance to exchange a few tender words in private.

  But there was usually nobody but the prison guard monitoring our conversation. Remembering the stories I had heard from Ayşe and read in books she’d mentioned, I would try to explain everything to my son as if the ideas and the fantasies had been my own. Enver didn’t like hearing about ancient myths, since they reminded him of his crime, and often he would pretend not to understand the point I was trying to make. He didn’t believe me when I told him I had once heard these stories from Master Mahmut himself, but he listened anyway. For what really mattered wasn’t the myth itself, but the fact that we were here together, talking face-to-face. Sometimes I would stop talking and just reflect for a while, struggling to hold back tears at the sight of how much bulk my son had put on, how he was steadily taking on the appearance of a prison thug.

  The hardest thing was parting when the hour was over. I could manage somehow to leave that room, but my son couldn’t bring himself to say goodbye, just as he couldn’t as a child, and though he would valiantly stand when the guard warned him that our time was up, he couldn’t face the thought of walking out. He would stand by the door staring helplessly as I left, and I would recall how before he was old enough to go to school, he used to beg me not to leave him alone even for a five-minute trip to the grocery store. I’d tell him, “I’ll be back before you know it,” but he never believed me. He would follow me to the door, pulling on my arm and my skirts, crying, “Don’t leave,” and refusing to let go, as if he were convinced that whenever I walked out the door it would be the last time he would ever see me.

  Our greatest consolation was that they allowed physical contact betwe
en prisoners and their families during the monthly social visits. The whole block was attuned to these occasions, waiting patiently for the next one, feeling crushed if one happened to be postponed as a punishment of some sort, and rejoicing when new ones were added by ministerial decree during religious holidays. Because there were so many leftist and Kurdish militants in the prison, we were not allowed to bring any food, books, or mobile phones. But with a little gift to the warden, I managed to slip my darling son the notebook he’d kept in Öngören, his pens, and a few of his favorite poetry anthologies. I realized that writing might be an effective therapy for his suffering and rage. That’s how I came to suggest that he start an account of his life, perhaps even working the entire story, now nearing its end, into the form of a novel. I made sure to check on his progress during those social visits.

  In the visiting room in the felons’ block, the two of us would embrace in some secluded corner, sitting apart from the hordes of common smugglers, killers, armed robbers, thieves, and swindlers huddling with their own families and friends. From the moment I touched my son again, that same luminous look would dawn on his face that used to appear whenever I bathed him as a child. He would then launch into cheerful descriptions of his fellow prisoners, the corrupt wardens, and all the dirty business he’d witnessed inside, concluding that things really weren’t so bad, even though he knew I would never believe him. And then full of courage, he would recite for me a poem he’d written about the view from his cell window or the sky above the courtyard.

  After expressing sincere admiration for my son’s poetry, I would lead the conversation back to the book I knew he must write, not only to convince the judge of his innocence, but also as an act of moral witness for people generally. I would give him my latest thoughts, talk to him about Oedipus and Sohrab (neither book was to be found on the shelves of the prison library, but I managed to smuggle those in for him, too) and his late father’s momentous trip to Tehran, or about my life in the theater, about the summer I met his father, the plays we used to stage in our yellow tent, and the meaning of the monologue I would deliver at the end of every performance. “Those shows I did were all for the sake of that final monologue,” I told my son, looking fervently into his eyes.