The Red-Haired Woman Read online

  We didn’t do any work that afternoon. I lay down under the walnut tree, lost in lazy daydreams. I thought of the Red-Haired Woman, of becoming a playwright, of going home, of seeing my friends in Beşiktaş. I was studying an anthill near the brambles at the entrance to the concrete casemate when Master Mahmut came by.

  “Son, let’s give it another week here,” he said. “I owe you a few days’ wages…We’ll be done by next Wednesday, God willing, and then we’ll get the big prize, too.”

  “But Master Mahmut, what if the bad soil goes on forever and we never get to the water?”

  “Trust your master, do as I say, and leave the rest to me,” he said, looking into my eyes. He stroked my hair and grabbed my shoulder, pulling me into a reassuring hug. “You’re going to be a great man, one day. I can feel it.”

  I could no longer muster the strength to contradict him. This in turn made me inwardly resentful and despondent. I remember thinking, Only one week to go. During this last week, I planned to find the Red-Haired Woman again and see the play in the tent theater.

  16

  FOR THREE DAYS, the color of the soil stayed the same. Since I struggled to turn the windlass on my own, Master Mahmut didn’t fill the bucket to the brim, and that only slowed us down even more. The soil was so soft that he made quick work of it; I’d lower the empty bucket and he’d fill it up again with a few swipes of his shovel. “Pulllll!” he’d cry immediately.

  Even so, it took me ages to hoist the half-filled bucket and empty it into the handcart. Growing impatient in the well, Master Mahmut would soon be complaining about my sluggishness, occasionally losing his temper. As I ran to tip the earth and dust out of the handcart, sometimes all my strength would desert me, and I’d have to rest on the ground for a while. By the time I got back to the well, Master Mahmut would be shouting even louder. Sometimes I’d take so long that he’d insist I pull him up, so he could see with his own eyes why I was so slow. But since hauling him up on the windlass was the hardest job of all, he’d emerge to find me completely spent and wouldn’t have the heart to really tell me off. “You look like a wreck, son,” he might say, going to lie down under the olive tree while he waited for me to recover. It was both disconcerting and touching to hear him show such fatherly concern. I would have barely gone to lie down under the walnut tree myself before I heard Master Mahmut’s voice commanding and cajoling me to get up.

  We now went down to Öngören together every evening. Each time, I’d get up from the table outside the Rumelian Coffeehouse and start wandering the streets in the hopes of running into the Red-Haired Woman or sneaking into the theater tent.

  I had no luck on the first two nights, but on the third night, Turgay caught up with me near where the carpenter had his shop.

  “You seem distracted, little welldigger!”

  “Get me into the theater,” I said. “I can pay for the ticket.”

  “Come to the restaurant.”

  We headed for the lace curtains of the Liberation Restaurant and went inside to join the actors’ table. “Before attending the theater, one must learn the proper way to drink rakı,” said Turgay.

  He looked five, maybe six, years older than me. While I gulped down the ice-cold potion he’d mirthfully set in front of me, Turgay whispered something to the people sitting next to him. What time was it? Was Master Mahmut waiting impatiently? Never mind him; if they let me in tonight, I was going.

  “Come back this time the day after tomorrow,” said Turgay. “And bring your master.”

  “Master Mahmut doesn’t approve of drinking and theaters.”

  “We’ll persuade him. You come back here on Sunday evening. My father will pick you up and take you to the theater. No need for money or tickets.”

  I didn’t stay much longer, and soon I was again at Master Mahmut’s side. On the way back to our tent, he reminisced about happier days, when he had discovered water. One time, the landowner who’d hired him celebrated the good news with a feast by the well, roasting four whole lambs and feeding a hundred people. Water could spring up from the earth at the most unexpected moments, catching you by surprise. God Himself would intervene to douse the faithful welldigger’s face with water, the first spray always as powerful as the arc of a baby boy’s urine. On first seeing the water, the welldigger would smile delightedly like a father beholding his newborn son. Once, a welldigger’s success had caused such jubilation that those up on the ground accidentally dropped a stone into the well, injuring his shoulder. There was also the time a village elder was so beside himself with joy at the discovery of water that he visited the site every day just to hear the two apprentices describe one more time the moment the water had first sprung. Every time, he would reward each storyteller with two large old banknotes. But there were no elders like that left anymore. In the old days, no landowner would ever dream of telling a devoted, hardworking welldigger, “That’s it from me, but you’re welcome to keep digging with your own men and at your own expense if you want to!”—a man of means would have felt paternally honorbound to supply the welldigger on his land with food, cover all his expenses, reward him appropriately, and tip him handsomely, regardless of whether water was found. But there were no hard feelings with Hayri Bey; he was a decent man, and as soon as we found water, he would give us all that we were due and bury us under a mountain of gifts, just as those good men of old used to do.

  17

  THE NEXT DAY, the soil we dug turned even paler and lighter. With every bucket, I could see it was arid and as light as hay. The dusty sand contained frayed, membranous pieces of animal skin, smooth fragments like mother-of-pearl and fragile as the toy soldiers made of mica I played with as a child, million-year-old pebbles the color of my skin, translucent shells, strange pieces of rock as big as ostrich eggs, and stones so light they’d float like pumice if you threw them in water. It seemed the more we dug, the farther we got from water, so we toiled in grim silence.

  But inwardly I was elated to know that I’d finally be going to the theater the next evening—nothing could spoil my mood. I worked even harder than Master Mahmut asked of me, so that by the end of the day I could barely stand. There was no reason to go down to Öngören that day anyway. After dinner, I lay down at the edge of the tent; I fell asleep looking at the stars.

  Sometime after midnight I woke up with a start. Master Mahmut wasn’t in the tent. I walked warily into the black night. It seemed the whole world was empty, and I was the last living thing left in the universe. The thought made me shiver, as did an impalpable wind. Yet everything also seemed imbued with an enchanted beauty. I felt the stars drawing closer above my head, and I sensed that I had a very happy life ahead of me. Could it have been the Red-Haired Woman herself who had asked Turgay to let me into the theater tomorrow evening? But where could Master Mahmut have gone at this hour?

  A fresh gust of wind blew, and I retreated into the tent.

  When I woke up the next day, Master Mahmut was back. I also saw a fresh pack of cigarettes in the tent. We worked until late that day, not getting anywhere. The bottom of the well was really far now and constantly churning up dust. When we were finished for the day, Master Mahmut and I poured water over each other’s heads. By now I was used to seeing his naked torso. I noticed how many bruises and scratches marked his body, how thin and bony he was despite his broad frame, and how pale and wrinkled his skin was, and I thought that we would never find water.

  I hoped Master Mahmut would decide not to come down to Öngören that evening so that I wouldn’t have any trouble going to the theater. But he said, “Let me buy some cigarettes,” and set off before I did. I was nervous as we sat at our usual spot at the Rumelian Coffeehouse. At eight-thirty, I quietly got up and went to Diners’ Lane. I had fantasized about how glorious it would be to get to sit at the restaurant and talk to the Red-Haired Woman before the play, but neither she nor her brother was there. Someone else who was sitting at their usual table waved me over.

  “Come to the back of
the tent at five past nine,” he said. “They’re not around tonight.”

  At first I took this to mean “They’re not at the theater tonight,” and I felt devastated. I sat at the table as if I were joining my friends for dinner, filled an empty glass with ice and rakı, and drank it all in one go, quick as a thief.

  Leaving the restaurant, I made my way to the theater tent through the backstreets, where Master Mahmut wouldn’t see me. At five past nine, I was waiting behind the yellow tent when someone emerged and quickly pulled me inside.

  The show had started, and there were somewhere between twenty-five and thirty people in the audience, give or take. I couldn’t make out what the shadows in the darkened corners were. The high space in the center was lit brightly with naked lightbulbs, which gave the tent of the Theater of Morality Tales an otherworldly appearance. The inside of the tent cloth was dark blue, like the night sky, and painted with large yellow stars. Some of these came with tails, while others were small and remote. For years after, the memory of the starry sky above our plain would merge in my mind with the sky inside the Theater of Morality Tales.

  The rakı had gone to my head, and I was drunk. But I could never have predicted the indelible effect on my life of some of the things I would see during the hour I spent in the tent that evening, much like the story of Oedipus, which I’d happened to read one day and have never forgotten since. In that moment, however, I wasn’t interested so much in the story being enacted onstage as in watching the Red-Haired Woman. So I will try to describe what I saw that night through my clouded senses, filling in the gaps with what I learned years later from reading and research.

  The Theater of Morality Tales was seeking to carry on the tradition of the itinerant theater companies which, from the mid-1970s up until the military coup of 1980, had toured the Anatolian peninsula, putting on politically charged left-wing shows for local communities. But instead of anticapitalist agitprop, its repertoire consisted mostly of old love stories, scenes from ancient epics and folktales, and parables from the Islamic and Sufi traditions. Some of these were completely lost on me at the time. When I entered the tent, they were performing two short sketches satirizing some much-loved television commercials. In the first, a little boy wearing shorts and sporting a mustache walked onstage holding a piggy bank and asked his hunchbacked granny what he should do with the money he’d saved up. When the granny—played, I think, by the Red-Haired Woman’s mother—responded with a dirty joke, everyone laughed at this mockery of those advertisements that banks always ran.

  I really couldn’t say what the second sketch was about because by then the Red-Haired Woman had appeared in a miniskirt: I had never seen such long legs; her neck and shoulders were also bare, making for a magnificent and unsettling presence. She had drawn thick lines of kohl around her eyes and painted her full round lips red, a kind of lipstick that seemed to glisten under the lights. She picked up a box of laundry powder and spoke. A yellow-and-green parrot onstage answered back. It was only a stuffed parrot, but someone spoke its lines from the wings. The setting was maybe meant to be a grocery store, with the parrot playing pranks on customers while making pronouncements on life, love, and money. As everyone laughed, I thought for a moment that the Red-Haired Woman was looking at me, and my heart raced. Her smile was so kind; her delicate hands moved so nimbly. I was so in love with her, and that feeling, together with the rakı, prevented me from entirely following what was happening onstage.

  Each sketch lasted a few minutes and was quickly followed by another. Years later, I consulted various books and films to trace the sources of each piece. One sketch, for instance, saw the man whom I took for the Red-Haired Woman’s father come onstage with a nose the length of a carrot. Initially I thought this must be Pinocchio, but then the man launched into a long monologue which I would eventually figure out had been taken from Cyrano de Bergerac. The moral of this little sketch was “What matters most is not physical appearance, but the beauty of your soul.”

  After a scene from Hamlet featuring a skull, a book, and “To be or not to be,” the actors all joined in singing an old folk song. The song said that love was an illusion, but money was true. Now, the Red-Haired Woman was trying deliberately to catch my eye, which made my head spin. Under the effects of love and rakı, I couldn’t fully understand everything being said or what the sketches were about, but the things I did see etched themselves permanently in my memory, just as the Red-Haired Woman’s eyes had.

  There was one sketch I understood for sure, and that was because I’d learned the story of the prophet Abraham from my father, as well as our lesson on the Feast of the Sacrifice at school. The childless prophet was played by the man who’d first turned me away from the tent. Abraham pleaded with God to give him a son, and eventually his wish was granted (in the form of a doll). When his son—now played by a child actor—grew up, Abraham lay him down on the floor and put a knife to his throat, making throughout the scene a number of profound pronouncements about fathers and sons and obedience.

  His words made a powerful impression on everyone. The ensuing hush that fell over the tent was broken by the return of the Red-Haired Woman. She was in a new costume, an angel now with cardboard wings and fresh makeup. It suited her perfectly. Flanked by a toy lamb, she was met with loud applause, in which I joined enthusiastically.

  The last and most striking scene presented a tableau I would never forget. I knew so even as I watched, though again I did not understand the full story at the time.

  Two armored knights in steel helmets and visors took center stage, brandishing swords and shields. As they clashed, a recording of clanging swords was played over the loudspeakers. The knights stopped briefly to exchange a few words, but soon resumed doing battle once more. I guessed that Turgay and the Red-Haired Woman’s father must be hidden under each set of armor. They wrestled and lunged for each other’s throat, became entangled on the floor, and finally broke apart.

  I was hardly alone in being swept away by this exhilarating spectacle. Suddenly, the older warrior knocked the younger one down with a single blow, straddled him, and plunged the sword into his opponent’s heart. It all happened so fast, and everyone was startled, forgetting momentarily that this was a play and the swords were only plastic.

  The young knight cried out; he was not dead yet. There was something he had to say. The older warrior leaned in to hear, doffing his helmet with all the confidence of a righteous victor (he was indeed played by the man I took to be the Red-Haired Woman’s father). But then he noticed a bracelet on the dying man’s wrist, and he was horrified. Lifting the visor off the young man’s face (it wasn’t Turgay, actually, but some other actor), he shrank back in agony. His exaggerated gestures made clear that there had been a terrible mistake. His suffering seemed bottomless. Just moments ago we’d all been laughing at the same actors’ spoof of television commercials. But now a respectful silence fell over everyone, because even the Red-Haired Woman was crying.

  Sinking to the floor, the older knight sobbed as he cradled the dying young warrior. His tears seemed so genuine that we were all unexpectedly touched. The old warrior was weeping with remorse. And soon I was feeling remorseful as well.

  I had never seen this emotion expressed so openly before, not at the cinema or in comic books. Until that moment, I had understood it as something that could be described only in words. But now I was feeling the torment of remorse merely by watching someone’s experience of it onstage. It was like reliving a forgotten memory.

  The Red-Haired Woman was anguished by the scene before her. She was no less full of remorse than the two warriors. Her tears fell thicker than before. Perhaps the two men were related, just as she and her fellow actors were. No other sound could be heard inside the tent. The Red-Haired Woman’s weeping turned into a lament and then into an epic poem. In this poem, her concluding speech, the Red-Haired Woman spoke angrily of men, and what they’d put her through, and of life; I listened, trying to catch her eye, but it was too
dark for her to spot me in the crowd. Because our eyes never met, it was almost as if I couldn’t properly follow or remember the things she said. I felt an overwhelming urge to talk to her and be close to her. The show ended with her extended monologue in verse, after which the small crowd of spectators quickly dispersed.

  18

  ON THE WAY OUT of the theater tent, I took a few backward steps and I saw the Red-Haired Woman near the table that served as the box office.

  She’d already exchanged her costume for her street clothes and was wearing a long sky-blue skirt.

  My unpracticed passion, the action onstage, and the rakı I’d been drinking had conspired to leave me unable to grasp that this was the present. Instead I felt that I was somewhere in the past. Everything seemed fragmented, like a memory.

  “Did you enjoy our play?” said the Red-Haired Woman, smiling at me. “Thank you for clapping.”

  “I loved it,” I said, emboldened by her gentle smile.

  Many years have now gone by, and jealousy urges me still to keep her name a secret, even from my readers. But I must provide a full and truthful account of what happened next. We introduced ourselves the way Americans did in the movies:

  “Cem.”

  “Gülcihan.”

  “You were really good,” I said. “I was watching you throughout the whole performance.” I had to force myself to use the informal “you,” since she was plainly older than she had seemed from afar.

  “How is the well coming along?”

  “Sometimes I think we will never find water,” I said. I also wanted to add, The only reason I’m still here is so I can see you! but I thought she might find that off-putting.