The Red-Haired Woman Read online

  The clouds had dispersed, the sun was out, and even our mostly barren patch of ground seemed filled with color. Noisy black crows hopped onto the road that snaked between the cornfields, spreading their wings and taking off as soon as they saw us. The purple peaks toward the Black Sea had assumed a strange blue shade, and the rare clumps of trees among the drab, jaundiced plots in the plains behind the mountains seemed particularly green. Our land up here, the whole of creation, the pale houses in the distance, the quivering poplars, and the winding train tracks—it was all beautiful, and a part of me knew that the reason I felt this way was that beautiful red-haired woman I had just seen standing in the doorway of her house.

  I hadn’t even gotten a proper look at her face. Why had she been arguing with her mother? Her whole demeanor had struck me as her red hair gleamed uncannily in the light. For a moment, she looked at me as if she already knew me, as if to ask what I was doing there. In that moment when we caught each other’s eye, it was as if we were both trying to summon, perhaps even to question, an ancient memory.

  I looked at the stars and tried to picture her face as I drifted off to sleep.

  6

  THE NEXT MORNING, our fourth day on the job, we used the equipment brought from Gebze and the wood and the other materials purchased in Öngören to build a windlass. It had a tapering crank at either end and a large drum around which the rope was spooled, and the axis nestled into two X-shaped wooden rests. There was also a rough plank on which to set the bucket once we’d pulled it up from the well. With surprising deftness, Master Mahmut drew a detailed pencil sketch of the machine so that I could see how it was to be assembled.

  Down in the hole, Master Mahmut would shovel earth into the bucket, and once it was full, Ali and I would hoist it up on the windlass. The bucket was larger than a pail for water, and much heavier when filled to capacity with dirt and rocks, so that even working in tandem, the two of us would struggle to haul it up. It also took a lot of strength and not a little skill to rest the bucket on the plank and slacken the rope enough to unhook it. Every time we managed that feat without a hiccup, Ali and I would glance at each other as if to say Mission accomplished, and breathe a sigh of relief.

  We would then frantically rake some of the debris out of the bucket and into the handcart, until the bucket was light enough that we could lift it outright and tip what remained straight into the cart. I would lower the empty bucket carefully back into the well, and as it was about to reach Master Mahmut, I’d shout “Here it comes!” as he’d instructed me to do. Master Mahmut would leave his pickax to one side, pull the bucket toward himself, and without detaching it quickly fill it with what he’d dug up in the meantime. In those early days, I could still hear him say “Oof!” with each determined, furious stroke of his shovel and pickax. But as he receded into the earth at a rate of a meter per day, the grunts that announced his every exertion became gradually inaudible.

  Once the bucket was full again, Master Mahmut would shout “Puuull!” often without so much as an upward glance. When Ali and I were both ready, we’d grab the handles of the windlass and start cranking. But sometimes that slacker Ali would dawdle with the cart, and since it was difficult to operate the windlass on my own, I would have to wait for him. Occasionally, however, Master Mahmut slowed down, and Ali and I would have a moment to sit, gasping for breath, and watch Master Mahmut shovel earth from the well.

  During these idle moments, our only breaks from the relentless labor, we would have a chance to make small talk. But I knew instinctively that there was no point asking him about the people I had seen in town, let alone about the identity of the Red-Haired Woman with the mysterious, melancholy eyes and perfect lips. Did I assume he wouldn’t know who they were? Or was I afraid that he might tell me something that would break my heart?

  The fact that I had begun to think of the Red-Haired Woman from time to time was something I was as eager to hide from myself as from Ali. At night, as I was about to drift off with one eye on the stars and the other on Master Mahmut’s tiny television, I pictured the way she had smiled at me. If not for that smile, I reflected, the look that said, I know you, and the tenderness in her expression, perhaps I wouldn’t be thinking about her this much.

  Around noon every three days, the landowner, Hayri Bey, would come by in his pickup truck and ask impatiently if everything was going according to plan. If we happened to be on our lunch break, Master Mahmut would tell him, “Join us,” and invite him to share our meal of tomatoes, bread, fresh cheese, olives, grapes, and Coca-Cola. If Master Mahmut was still inside the well, three, four meters down, Hayri Bey would peer inside and watch him at work, standing with us two apprentices in respectful silence.

  When he emerged, Master Mahmut would walk Hayri Bey to the other end of the plot where Ali dumped the earth we extracted, showing him pieces of rock, rolling in his hands clumps of soil of various shades, and speculating on how much farther the water was. We’d started off at a moderate pace, through light soil, but after three meters, we had hit a particularly hard layer, which had slowed us down on the fourth and fifth days. Master Mahmut was confident that once we broke past this hard vein, we would get to the more humid layer, to which the textile merchant replied, “Of course, God willing.” He promised once more that as soon as we found water, he’d slaughter a lamb to roast in celebration and the master and his apprentices would receive a sizable tip. He even mentioned which shop in Istanbul he’d order the baklava from.

  Once Hayri Bey was gone and after we’d had our lunch, we would slow down. There was a large walnut tree about a minute’s walk from the site. I would lie down in its shade and start dozing off as the Red-Haired Woman appeared in my mind, vivid and unbidden, telling me with that look, I know you! I felt euphoric. Sometimes I would remember her while toiling in the noonday heat and feeling as if I was about to pass out. Thinking about her regenerated me and filled me with optimism.

  When it got really hot, Ali and I drank large amounts of water, as well as pouring it over each other to keep cool. The water came from enormous plastic jerricans loaded onto Hayri Bey’s pickup truck. When the pickup came, every two or three days, it also delivered the provisions we had ordered from town—tomatoes, green peppers, margarine, bread, olives. The driver collected payment for these from Master Mahmut, but he also brought things that Hayri Bey’s wife had sent us: melons and watermelons, chocolates and sweets, and sometimes even pots of lovingly cooked meals, like stuffed peppers, tomato-flavored rice, and meat stew.

  Master Mahmut was very particular about our evening meal. Every afternoon, before preparing to pour concrete into the well, he’d have me wash whatever ingredients were on hand—potatoes, eggplant, lentils, tomatoes, fresh peppers—before meticulously chopping everything up himself and throwing it with a knob of butter into the small pot we’d brought from Gebze. This was then placed on the gas stove over a low flame. It was my responsibility to watch this pot until sunset, making sure its simmering contents didn’t stick.

  The last two hours of each workday were devoted to pouring concrete into a wooden mold lining the depth he’d dug that day. Ali and I would mix the cement and sand with water in the handcart and then use a wooden contraption that looked like half a funnel, which Master Mahmut proudly claimed to have invented himself, to transfer the concrete directly into the well, without need for another bucket. As we tipped the mixture into the wooden slide, he would direct the flow from the depths of the well: “A little to the right, now ease up a bit!”

  If we took too long to mix and pour the concrete into the well, Master Mahmut would shout at us that it had gone cold. In those moments, I would miss my father, who never raised his voice and never told me off. But then I would get angry at him, too, since it was his fault that we were poor and I had to work here. Master Mahmut took much more of an interest in my life than my father ever had: he told me stories and taught me lessons; he never forgot to ask if I was all right, if I was hungry, whether I was tired. Was this why
it made me so angry to be dressed down by him? For had my father done the same, I would have taken his point, felt suitably contrite, and then forgotten the whole thing. But for some reason, Master Mahmut’s scolding seemed to leave a scar, and I would nurse a rage against him even as I deferred to his instructions.

  At the end of the day, Master Mahmut would step into the bucket and shout, “Enough!” Slowly, we’d crank the windlass, using it like an elevator to raise him up into the light. Once he emerged, he would lie down under the nearby olive tree, and a sudden silence would envelop the world; I would become more aware of our being entirely surrounded by nature, of our total isolation, of how far I was from Istanbul and its crowds, and then I would long for my mother and father, and for our life in Beşiktaş.

  I would follow Master Mahmut’s example and lie down in a patch of shade somewhere, watching Ali walk back home to his nearby town. Instead of following the meandering road, he would take shortcuts through empty tracts, fields of grass and nettles. We hadn’t seen his house; what part of town was it in? Did he live anywhere near where we’d seen that ill-tempered woman in jeans standing outside her house?

  As my thoughts idled along these lines, I would smell the pleasant aroma of Master Mahmut’s cigarette, hear the buzzing of a bee and the soldiers in the distant garrison shouting “Yessir! Yessir!” at the evening muster, and I would think to myself how peculiar it was to be here to witness this world, how strange it was to be alive.

  One day, as I got up to check on dinner, I found that Master Mahmut had fallen asleep, and just as I used to do when I was little and caught my father sleeping, I began to watch the way he lay there like an inanimate object, examining his long arms and legs and pretending that he was a colossus and I a tiny creature like Gulliver in the land of giants. Master Mahmut’s hands and fingers were hard and knobby, not graceful like my father’s. His arms were covered in cuts, moles, and black hairs, the true pallor of his skin visible only under the short sleeves of his shirt, where the sun didn’t reach. As he breathed through his long nose, I watched in wonder—as I used to do when my father was asleep—as his nostrils slowly flared and contracted. Little clumps of earth clung to his thick mane of hair, which I could now see was graying, and curious harried ants clambered over his neck.

  7

  “DO YOU NEED TO BATHE?” Master Mahmut would ask me every evening at sunset.

  The plastic jerricans the pickup truck brought every two or three days were equipped with taps, but these dispensed only enough water to wash our hands and faces. To bathe properly, we needed to collect the water in a large plastic barrel. As Master Mahmut bailed water from the barrel with a pitcher and poured it over my head, I would shiver—not because the water was still cold despite the sun, but because Master Mahmut could see my nakedness.

  “You’re still a child,” he told me once. Was he implying that my muscles were underdeveloped, that I was a weakling? Or was it something else? His own body was sturdy and strong, and he had hair both on his chest and his back.

  I had never seen my father or any other man naked. When it was my turn to take the tin pitcher and pour water over Master Mahmut’s soapy head, I tried to avoid looking at him. Although I could see that his arms, legs, and back were covered with the bruises and scars he’d gotten from digging, I never said a thing. But when helping me to bathe, Master Mahmut, half out of concern and half to tease, would press his thick, coarse fingers into any bruises he spotted on my back or arms; and when I shuddered and groaned “Ow!” in response, he would laugh and tell me tenderly to “be more careful next time.”

  Tenderly or reproachfully, Master Mahmut warned me to be careful rather a lot: “Unless he has his wits about him, a welldigger’s apprentice can risk maiming his master, and if he’s careless, he could even end up killing him.” “Now remember, your eyes and ears must always be alert to what’s going on down inside the well,” he’d say, describing how the bucket could come loose from its hook and fall, crushing the welldigger below. With a few quick words, he would likewise paint the scene of a welldigger overcome by a gas leak, and how he could cross over into the afterlife in the three minutes it might take a particularly distracted apprentice to notice.

  I loved it when Master Mahmut looked me in the eye and told me these fearsome stories of instruction. Listening to his vivid accounts of careless apprentices, I could sense that in his mind, the underworld, the realm of the dead, and the farthest depths of the earth each corresponded to particular and recognizable parts of heaven and hell. According to Master Mahmut, the deeper we dug, the closer we got to the sphere of God and His angels—although the cool breeze that blew at midnight reminded us that the blue dome of the sky and the thousands of trembling stars that clung to it were to be found in the opposite direction.

  In the peaceful silence that reigned at sunset, Master Mahmut would divide his attentions between the progress of dinner by intermittently unlidding the pot, and the image on the television, which required incessant adjustment. This television, too, he’d brought from Gebze, together with an old car battery to power it, but when the battery died on the second night, he loaded it onto the pickup and sent it off to Öngören to be recharged. It worked now, but that didn’t spare Master Mahmut the eternal struggle for a clear signal. When his patience failed, he’d call me over, shove the metal aerial, which looked like an unsheathed cable, at me, and try to direct me—“A little to the right, but not too far”—into a position which would reveal a clear image.

  After our protracted efforts, a picture would finally appear onscreen, though as we ate our meal and watched the news, it would soon go blurry again like a distant memory, coming and going of its own accord, in waves and shudders. At first we’d resume the effort to adjust it, but when that only made things worse, we gave up, making do with the news anchor’s voice and the commercials.

  Around that time, the sun would begin to set. We would hear the songs of strange rare birds that were nowhere to be seen during the day. A pinkish full moon would appear before nightfall. I could hear rustling around the tent and dogs barking in the distance, smell the dying fire and feel the shadows of cypress trees that weren’t even there.

  My father had never told me stories or fairy tales. But Master Mahmut did so every night, inspired by the blurry, fading image he’d seen on TV or some obstacle we’d overcome that day or simply an old memory. It was hard to tell which parts of his stories were real and which imagined, let alone where they began and ended. Still, I liked getting swept up in the telling and hearing what lessons Master Mahmut derived from it. Not that I could always fully understand what these stories meant. He once told me that when he was little, he was kidnapped by a giant and taken to the underworld. But it wasn’t dark down there: it was bright. He was taken to a shimmering palace and invited to feast at a table littered with walnut shells and spider carapaces, fish heads and bones. They served him the world’s most delicious dishes, but when Master Mahmut heard the sound of women weeping behind him, he couldn’t eat a single bite. The women crying in the underground sultan’s palace sounded just like that female presenter on TV.

  Another time he told me about two mountains—one of cork, the other of marble—which had spent thousands of years staring at each other without any mutual comprehension, and he concluded this tale by telling me about the verse in the Holy Koran which says to build your homes on high ground. This was because earthquakes never struck there. We were lucky to be digging a well so far up. It was easier to find water on high ground.

  Darkness would descend as Master Mahmut told these stories, and since there was nothing else to look at, we would both stare at the snowy image on TV as if the picture were clear and we could actually tell what was going on.

  “Look, you can see it in there, too!” Master Mahmut would sometimes say, pointing at a spot on the screen. “That’s a sign.”

  Among the ghostly pictures on the screen, I too might suddenly spot two mountains staring each other down. Before I could
even think to myself that this might just be an illusion, Master Mahmut would change the subject, offering some practical advice: “Don’t fill up the handcart too much tomorrow.” I marveled at how a man who seemed like a bona fide engineer when it came to pouring cement, wiring a television to a car battery, and drawing the plans for a windlass could also speak of myths and fairy tales as if they’d really happened.

  As I tidied up after dinner, sometimes Master Mahmut would say, “Let’s go to town, we need to buy more nails” or “I’ve run out of cigarettes.”

  During our first few nights, moonlight shone off the asphalt road as we walked to Öngören in the cool darkness. I felt the presence of the sky, so close overhead, stronger than I’d ever felt it before, and thought of my father and my mother as the cicadas click-clicked pleasantly through the night. When there was no moon, I looked up in wonder at the tens of thousands of stars in the spangled sky.

  In town, when I called my mother to tell her everything was fine, she started crying. I tried to comfort her, saying Master Mahmut had paid me (this was true). I told her I’d be back in a fortnight (though I wasn’t so sure about that). Deep down I knew I was content to be here with Master Mahmut. Perhaps it was because I was able to make my own living this way, as the man of the house, now that my father was gone.

  But on those nighttime visits to Öngören, I understood distinctly that the true cause of my gladness was the Red-Haired Woman. I wanted to see her again after that first time at the Station Square. Whenever I was in town with Master Mahmut, I tried to steer us toward that house. If the evening had gone by and we still hadn’t passed the Station Square, I would find any excuse to leave Master Mahmut’s side and go there myself, slowing my pace as I walked by.

  It was a shabby, unplastered three-story building. The lights on the top two floors stayed on after the evening news. The curtains on the middle story were always shut. On the top floor, though, they stayed half drawn, and sometimes one window was left open.