The Red-Haired Woman Read online

  Listening to his stories became the most enjoyable part of the time I spent with him. As he looked at the snowy image on the television, he told me that night what he understood about the subterranean layers of the earth. Some of these were so deep and broad that an inexperienced welldigger could easily think they would never end. But you had to persevere. These layers were not so different from human blood vessels. Just as human veins carried the blood that fuels our bodies, so these enormous underground veins channeled the earth’s lifeblood in the form of iron, zinc, and limestone. Nestled among these veins were streams, gullies, and underground lakes of all shapes and sizes.

  Many of Master Mahmut’s stories turned on how water could spring from a well when you least expected it. One time five years ago, for example, a man from Sivas had called him to a plot on the outskirts of Sarıyer, close to the Black Sea, but seeing bucket after bucket of sand come out of the hole, the man had lost faith in the whole endeavor and decided to call it off. Master Mahmut explained that sand could be deceiving, and that the different layers of the earth were sometimes tangled up like the organs of the body. Soon enough, he’d found water.

  Master Mahmut would boast of being called to old, historic mosques. “You won’t find a single ancient mosque in Istanbul that doesn’t have a well,” he once proudly proclaimed. He liked to pepper his anecdotes with trivia: the well in the Yahya Efendi Mosque, for example, was just inside the entrance, while the one at the Mahmutpaşa Mosque, thirty-five meters deep, was situated in the courtyard at the top of a slope. Before descending into old wells, Master Mahmut would send down a lit candle placed in the bucket. If the flame continued to burn even at the bottom of the well, he knew there was no gas leaking down there, and he could safely enter the blessed place himself.

  Master Mahmut also loved to describe the things that the people of Istanbul had been discarding or hiding in wells for hundreds of years; in his time, he’d discovered countless swords, spoons, bottles, bottle caps, lamps, as well as bombs, rifles, pistols, dolls, skulls, combs, horseshoes, and a whole host of other unimaginable things. He’d even found the odd silver coin. Clearly some of these things had been tossed into dried-out wells for safekeeping, only to be forgotten as years and then centuries passed. Wasn’t that strange? If you cared about something, something valuable, but then left it inside a well and forgot about it, what did that mean?

  13

  ON ONE OF THOSE stifling July afternoons, Hayri Bey drove by in his pickup truck and, deciding that the situation was desperate, made an announcement that broke all our hearts: if there was no progress after three more days, he would give up on this well and put a stop to the work. Master Mahmut was welcome to continue digging if he liked, but Hayri Bey would no longer pay our wages. Now, should Master Mahmut persist and find water in the end, Hayri Bey would, of course, reward him accordingly, as well as honor him in public for having made construction of the factory complex possible. But for now, he couldn’t bear to see a skillful, industrious, and trustworthy welldigger like Master Mahmut squander his energies and talents on a hopeless patch of this unforgiving land.

  “You’re right, we won’t find water here in three days. We’ll find it in two,” said Master Mahmut, seemingly unruffled. “Don’t worry, boss.”

  Hayri Bey drove off amid the chirping of cicadas, and we didn’t speak at all for a long time. After the chug-chug-chug of the twelve-thirty passenger train to Istanbul, I lay down under the walnut tree but couldn’t sleep. Even thinking of the Red-Haired Woman and the theater couldn’t console me.

  Five hundred meters from the walnut tree, beyond the boundaries of the boss’s land, stood a concrete casemate dating from World War II. We’d gone to look at it once, and Master Mahmut guessed it must have been part of a machine-gun turret built to defend against infantry charges. With childish curiosity, I tried to rip through the nettles and brambles blocking the entrance, but when I couldn’t get through, I lay down in the grass to think. Unless we found water in the next three days, I wouldn’t be getting my bonus. But I calculated that I’d already saved more than I needed. So if there was no water after three days, the best thing to do was to forget about the prize and go home.

  That evening as we sat enjoying a gentle breeze at the Rumelian Coffeehouse in Öngören, Master Mahmut said, “How long has it been since we started digging?” He liked to ask me this question every few days, though he knew the answer perfectly well.

  “Twenty-four days,” I said carefully.

  “Including today?”

  “Yes, we’re done for today, so I’m counting it, too.”

  “We’ve built thirteen meters of wall down there, fourteen at most,” said Master Mahmut, and he looked at me for a moment as if I were the cause of all his disappointments.

  I had started to notice this look on his face more frequently as we toiled at the windlass together. I felt a certain guilt, but also a mutinous desire to take off, and my own rebellious thoughts frightened me.

  Before I knew what was happening my heart sped up. I stood completely still, as if turned to stone. There was the Red-Haired Woman and her family walking across the square.

  If I started following them now, Master Mahmut might realize my fixation. But my legs sprang into action before I could think things through. I bolted from the table without a word of explanation. Taking care not to lose sight of them, I took a detour across the square so that Master Mahmut would think I was going to phone my mother from the post office.

  She was taller than I remembered. Why was I following them? I didn’t even know these people, but it felt good to go after them. I longed for her to look at me once more with that tender expression of recognition. It was as if this woman’s kind, gently teasing gaze had revealed to me just how wondrous the world could be. And yet a part of me couldn’t help but feel that all these thoughts were just fantasies.

  In those moments, I thought: I am most completely myself when nobody’s watching. I had only just begun to discover this truth. When there is no one to observe us, the other self we keep hidden inside can come out and do as it pleases. But when you have a father near enough to keep an eye on you, that second self remains buried within.

  There was a man by the Red-Haired Woman’s side who might have been her father. They were walking ahead of her brother and mother. From behind I got close enough to hear that there was a conversation, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  When we got to the Sun Cinema, they stopped at the gap in the wall where passersby inevitably paused to steal a look at the film. There was a smaller gap, five or six steps away from them and closer to the screen, where no one else was standing. I positioned myself there, between them and the screen, but I was so focused on them that I couldn’t concentrate for a moment on what was playing.

  From up close, her face was not as pretty as I recalled. Perhaps the bluish glow from the screen was to blame. But the same playfully tender expression was there in her eyes and on her perfectly round lips, that look whose charms had sustained me through more than three weeks of backbreaking work.

  Was she amused by what she saw on the screen? Or was it something else? Then, as I looked over my shoulder, I realized quite abruptly that the Red-Haired Woman was smiling not at the film but at me. She was looking at me with that same expression again.

  I began to sweat profusely. I wanted to get closer and talk to her. She had to be at least ten years older than me.

  “Come on, let’s get going, we’ll be late,” said the man I took for the father.

  I can’t remember what I did exactly, but I think I must have stepped away from the wall and stood in their way.

  “What’s this? Are you following us?” said the brother.

  “Who is this, Turgay?” the mother asked him.

  “What do you even do all day?” said Turgay, the Red-Haired Woman’s brother.

  “Is he a soldier?” said their father.

  “He’s no soldier…he’s a little gentleman,” said t
he mother.

  The Red-Haired Woman smiled at what her mother said, never losing that kindly, playful look she’d worn when I noticed her looking at me.

  “I’m in high school in Istanbul,” I said. “But right now I’m helping my master dig a well up there.”

  The Red-Haired Woman kept observing me, looking intently, meaningfully, into my eyes. “You and your master should come to our theater one of these evenings,” she said, and off she walked with the others.

  They were heading toward the theater tent. I didn’t follow. But as I watched them continue until the turn in the road, I realized that they weren’t a family but a theater troupe, and I began to dream and wonder.

  On my way back to Master Mahmut, I saw the aging, tired horse that had pulled our cart three weeks ago, when I’d first seen them. He was chewing on some grass by the roadside, tethered to a pole, his eyes now filled with an even-greater sorrow.

  14

  JUST BEFORE OUR LUNCH BREAK the next day, we heard Ali whooping with joy from inside the well. We had gotten past the rocky layer, and he could see soft soil again. Master Mahmut pulled him up and clambered down there to see for himself. He emerged shortly to announce that we had in fact broken through, and that darker soil and water would certainly follow. It raised our spirits to see him stop work to have a smoke and pace by the well with a glint in his eye.

  We pressed on until late that day, and when evening came, we were too tired to go down to town; waking up at the crack of dawn the next day, we picked up right where we’d left off. But soon we found that all we excavated was a dry and grayish-yellow dirt. It was so soft there was almost no need for the pickax. Master Mahmut shoveled it straight into the bucket, and since it was so light, Ali and I could hoist it up and wheel it off quickly. Before long I began to lose hope.

  It wasn’t even eleven when Master Mahmut came up and sent Ali down in his place.

  “Work slowly, don’t kick up too much dust,” he told him. “Dust like that could suffocate you, and you wouldn’t even be able to see the light above.”

  Though neither Ali nor I said a thing, it was obvious from how different this sandy soil was from what we’d found right under the rock that we were nowhere near any water. Earlier that morning, Ali had started piling this earth up separately. I added buckets and buckets to Ali’s new pile.

  After dinner, we headed down to Öngören. Sitting at the Rumelian Coffeehouse, I returned to the issue I’d been mulling over for two days, until finally it was decided: I wouldn’t tell Master Mahmut that the Red-Haired Woman had invited him to the theater, too. I wanted to watch her performance alone. Besides, if he caught wind of my interest in her, he would try to interfere, and we might end up quarreling. I had never even once been as scared of my own father as I was of Master Mahmut now. I couldn’t say how this fear had come to lodge inside my soul, but I did know that somehow the Red-Haired Woman only exacerbated it.

  Before I’d even finished my tea, I got up, saying, “I’m going to call my mother.” I rounded the corner, loping toward the theater tent as if in a dream.

  The sight of the glossy yellow tent thrilled me, just as the circus tents visiting Dolmabahçe from Europe during my childhood used to do. I read the words on the posters again without registering what any of them said, until I spotted a new sign, whose words on rough brown paper in big, black letters came as a shock:

  LAST TEN DAYS

  I wandered the streets like a sleepwalker. I didn’t see the man who sold tickets at the tent, I didn’t see Turgay (who must, I thought, be the ticket seller’s son), and I didn’t see the Red-Haired Woman or her mother, either. There was plenty of time before the show was to begin, so I went to Diners’ Lane, where, looking through one of the windows, I saw Turgay at a crowded table. I went inside.

  The Red-Haired Woman wasn’t there, but Turgay gestured me over as soon as he saw me. No one paid me any heed as I sat beside him.

  “Help me get a ticket for the theater,” I said. “Tell me how much it costs and I’ll give you the money.”

  “Don’t worry about money. Whenever you want to go, come and find me here before the show starts.”

  “But you don’t come here every night.”

  “Have you been following us?” He raised an eyebrow and smiled archly. Picking up two ice cubes with a pair of tongs, he placed them in an empty glass, which he filled with Club Rakı. “Here you go!” he said, handing me the tall, slender drink. “If you down it all in one go, I’ll sneak you into the tent through the back.”

  “Not tonight,” I said, but even so I gulped all the rakı down at once like a streetwise tough. I didn’t linger for much longer, and soon returned to Master Mahmut.

  Back at the Rumelian Coffeehouse, I felt how difficult it would be to bring myself to disobey him. I realized I was bound to him and to the well by our duty to find that water, not to mention all the effort we’d put in so far. The only conceivable way I could defy him was to ask for my money and say I’d decided to go home. But that would mean admitting defeat regarding the water—like a coward losing his nerve in the face of adversity.

  The rakı made my head swim. On the way home, as we climbed up the cemetery hill, I felt as if every star was a thought, a moment, a fact, a memory of mine. You could see them together, but it was impossible to conceive of them all at once. It was the same way the words in my head couldn’t keep up with my dreams. My emotions moved too fast for words to do them justice.

  Emotions, then, were more like pictures, like the gleaming sky before me. I could feel the whole of creation, but it was harder to think about it. That was why I wanted to be a writer. I would contemplate all the images and emotions I couldn’t express and finally put them into words. What’s more, I’d do a much better job of it than those friends of Mr. Deniz’s who used to drop by the bookstore.

  Master Mahmut marched full steam ahead, stopping only every now and then to yell, “Hurry up!” into the darkness behind him.

  We took shortcuts through the fields, and every time my foot caught on something, I paused and stared, bewildered at the beauty of the sky. Already the evening chill could be felt among the tall grasses.

  “Master Mahmut! Master Mahmut!” I called into the night. “What if the shards of iron and nickel we keep finding in the well are shooting stars that have fallen from the sky?”

  15

  NOT THREE, but five whole days passed before Hayri Bey returned in his pickup truck. He knew we still hadn’t found any water but acted as if this didn’t bother him. He’d brought his wife along, too, and their young son. He took them around his land, pointing out where the washing-and-dyeing workshops were to be built. He’d brought the blueprints with him, and he could indicate these locations in relation to where the warehouse, the offices, and the workers’ cafeteria would be. Hayri Bey’s son was wearing new soccer shoes and cradling a rubber ball as he listened to his father.

  Father and son went to practice penalty kicks at one end of the land, using two rocks for goalposts. Their mother spread a blanket under my walnut tree and unpacked a basket of food she’d prepared. When she sent Ali around to call us all over for lunch, Master Mahmut was irked. He could see that this elaborate and unnecessary picnic was a stunted version of the celebrations that usually marked the discovery of water in a well. Hayri Bey had obviously long fantasized about the day water would be found. Master Mahmut finally joined us with great reluctance, sitting on the edge of the blanket and taking only a single bite of the boiled eggs, the onion and tomato salad, and the savory pastries.

  After the meal, Hayri Bey’s son lay down next to his mother and went to sleep. The mother—an overweight lady with strong arms and a permanent smile—smoked a cigarette and read the daily Günaydın, its edges rustling in the soft breeze.

  I followed Master Mahmut and Hayri Bey to where we’d piled up all the earth we’d excavated. I could see from the landowner’s demoralized expression that he knew there was no water to be found down that hole and that t
here wouldn’t be anytime soon, either—perhaps ever.

  “Hayri Bey, give us three more days, if you please…,” said Master Mahmut.

  He sounded so meek. It was embarrassing to see Master Mahmut reduced to this, and I resented Hayri Bey for it. Hayri Bey returned to the walnut tree and came back after talking to his wife and son.

  “Last time we were here, you asked us for three more days, Master Mahmut,” he said. “I’ve given you more than three days. But still there is no water. The soil here is terrible. I’m pulling out of this well. We’re neither the first nor the last people to give up on a well that’s been dug in the wrong place. Find another spot to excavate; you’ll know best where.”

  “The veins in the earth can switch over when you least expect it,” said Master Mahmut. “I want to keep going right here.”

  “Then if you find water, let me know. I’ll come straightaway. And I’ll give you an even bigger bonus. But I’m a businessman. I can’t keep pouring cement into a dry hole forever. From now on, I won’t be paying you any more wages or buying your supplies. Ali won’t be working here anymore, either. If you decide to start digging in a new spot, I’ll send him back, of course.”

  “I will find water here,” said Master Mahmut.

  Master Mahmut and Hayri Bey stepped away to work out the final balance of fees and wages due. I watched the landowner pay Master Mahmut everything he owed him and saw that there was no disagreement between them as to the amount.

  Hayri Bey’s wife sent Ali over with the leftover boiled eggs, pastries, and tomatoes, as well as the watermelon they’d brought. She felt as bad for us as for her husband’s business plans.

  “We’ll drop you home,” they told Ali, and when he stepped into the pickup truck, Master Mahmut and I were left alone. We stood watching as they drove off with Ali waving at us from the back. I noticed once again how quiet the world was. The only sound was the incessant droning of the crickets, and even the thrum of Istanbul was inaudible.