The Red-Haired Woman Read online

  ALSO BY ORHAN PAMUK

  A Strangeness in My Mind

  Silent House

  The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist

  The Museum of Innocence

  Other Colors

  Istanbul

  Snow

  My Name Is Red

  The New Life

  The Black Book

  The White Castle

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2017 by Orhan Pamuk

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Limited, Toronto.

  Originally published in Turkey as Kırmızı Saçlı Kadın by Yapı Kredi Yayınları, Istanbul, in 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Orhan Pamuk.

  www.aaknopf.com

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Pamuk, Orhan, [date]

  [Kırmızı saçlı kadın. English]

  The red-haired woman / Orhan Pamuk ; translated by Ekin Oklap.

  Translation of: Kırmızı saçlı kadın.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-0-7352-7270-5

  eBook ISBN 978-0-7352-7272-9

  I. Oklap, Ekin, translator II. Title. III. Title: Kırmızı saçlı kadın. English

  PL248.P34K5713 2017 | 894'.3533 | C2017-901157-X

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Pamuk, Orhan, [date] author. | Oklap, Ekin translator.

  Title: The red-haired woman / Orhan Pamuk ; translated from the Turkish by Ekin Oklap.

  Other titles: Kırmızı saçlı kadın. English

  Description: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017013115 (print) | LCCN 2016057733 (ebook) | ISBN 9780451494436 (ebook) | ISBN 9780451494429 (hardcover)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Mystery fiction

  Classification: LCC PL248.P34 (print) | LCC PL248.P34 K5713 2017 (ebook) | DDC 894/.3533—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017013115

  Ebook ISBN 9780451494436

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover photo by PhotoAlto/Alemy

  Cover design by Chip Kidd

  v4.1_r1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Orhan Pamuk

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part II

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Part III

  The Red-Haired Woman

  A Note About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  to Aslı

  Oedipus, the murderer of his father, the husband of his mother, Oedipus, the interpreter of the riddle of the Sphinx! What does the mysterious triad of these deeds of destiny tell us? There is a primitive popular belief, especially in Persia, that a wise Magian can be born only of incest.

  —NIETZSCHE, The Birth of Tragedy

  OEDIPUS: Where would a trace of this old crime be found?

  —SOPHOCLES, Oedipus the King

  As a fatherless son, so a sonless father will be embraced by none.

  —FERDOWSI, Shahnameh

  • PART I •

  1

  I HAD WANTED TO BE A WRITER. But after the events I am about to describe, I studied engineering geology and became a building contractor. Even so, readers shouldn’t conclude from my telling the story now that it is over, that I’ve put it all behind me. The more I remember, the deeper I fall into it. Perhaps you, too, will follow, lured by the enigma of fathers and sons.

  In 1984, we lived in a small apartment deep in Beşiktaş, near the nineteenth-century Ottoman Ihlamur Palace. My father had a little pharmacy called Hayat, meaning “Life.” Once a week, it stayed open all night, and my father took the late shift. On those evenings, I’d bring him his dinner. I liked to spend time there, breathing in the medicinal smells while my father, a tall, slim, handsome figure, had his meal by the cash register. Almost thirty years have passed, but even at forty-five I still love the smell of those old pharmacies lined with wooden drawers and cupboards.

  The Life Pharmacy wasn’t particularly busy. My father would while away the nights with one of those small portable television sets so popular back then. Sometimes his leftist friends would stop by, and I would arrive to find them talking in low tones. They always changed the subject at the sight of me, remarking how I was just as handsome and charming as he was, asking what year was I in, whether I liked school, what I wanted to be when I grew up.

  My father was obviously uncomfortable when I ran into his political friends, so I never stayed too long when they dropped by. At the first chance, I’d take his empty dinner box and walk back home under the plane trees and the pale streetlights. I learned never to tell my mother about seeing Father’s leftist friends at the shop. That would only get her angry at the lot of them and worried that my father might be getting into trouble and about to disappear once again.

  But my parents’ quarrels were not all about politics. They used to go through long periods when they barely said a word to each other. Perhaps they didn’t love each other. I suspected that my father was attracted to other women, and that many other women were attracted to him. Sometimes my mother hinted openly at the existence of a mistress, so that even I understood. My parents’ squabbles were so upsetting that I willed myself not to remember or think about them.

  It was an ordinary autumn evening the last time I brought my father his dinner at the pharmacy. I had just started high school. I found him watching the news on TV. While he ate at the counter, I served a customer who needed aspirin, and another who bought vitamin-C tablets and antibiotics. I put the money in the old-fashioned till, whose drawer shut with a pleasant tinkling sound. After he’d eaten, on the way out, I took one last glance back at my father; he smiled and waved at me, standing in the doorway.

  He never came home the next morning. My mother told me when I got back from school that afternoon, her eyes still puffy from crying. Had my father been picked up at the
pharmacy and taken to the Political Affairs Bureau? They’d have tortured him there with bastinado and electric shocks. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

  Years ago, soldiers had first come for him the night after the military coup. My mother was devastated. She told me that my father was a hero, that I should be proud of him; and until his release, she took over the night shifts, together with his assistant Macit. Sometimes I’d wear Macit’s white coat myself—though at the time I was of course planning to be a scientist when I grew up, as my father had wanted, not some pharmacist’s assistant.

  When my father again disappeared seven or eight years after that, it was different. Upon his return, after almost two years, my mother seemed not to care that he had been taken away, interrogated, and tortured. She was furious at him. “What did he expect?” she said.

  So, too, after my father’s final disappearance, my mother seemed resigned, made no mention of Macit, or of what was to become of the pharmacy. That’s what made me think that my father didn’t always disappear for the same reason. But what is this thing we call thinking, anyway?

  By then I’d already learned that thoughts sometimes come to us in words, and sometimes in images. There were some thoughts—such as a memory of running under the pouring rain, and how it felt—that I couldn’t even begin to put into words…Yet their image was clear in my mind. And there were other things that I could describe in words but were otherwise impossible to visualize: black light, my mother’s death, infinity.

  Perhaps I was still a child, and so able to dispel unwanted thoughts. But sometimes it was the other way around, and I would find myself with an image or a word that I could not get out of my head.

  My father didn’t contact us for a long time. There were moments when I couldn’t remember what he looked like. It felt as if the lights had gone out and everything around me had vanished. One night, I walked alone toward the Ihlamur Palace. The Life Pharmacy was bolted shut with a heavy black padlock, as if closed forever. A mist drifted out from the gardens of the palace.

  Sometime later, my mother told me that neither my father’s money nor the pharmacy was enough for us to live on. I myself had no expenses other than movie tickets, kebab sandwiches, and comic books. I used to walk to Kabataş High School and back. I had friends who trafficked in used comic books for sale or loan. But I didn’t want to spend my weekends as they did, waiting patiently for customers in the backstreets and by the back doors of cinemas in Beşiktaş.

  I spent the summer of 1985 helping out at a bookstore called Deniz on the main shopping street of Beşiktaş. My job consisted mainly of chasing off would-be thieves, most of whom were students. Every now and then, Mr. Deniz would drive with me to Çağaloğlu to replenish his stock. The boss grew fond of me: he noticed how I remembered all the authors’ and publishers’ names, and he let me borrow his books to read at home. I read a lot that summer: children’s books, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, poetry books, historical novels about the adventures of Ottoman warriors, and a book about dreams. One passage in this latter book would change my life forever.

  When Mr. Deniz’s writer friends came by the shop, the boss started introducing me as an aspiring writer. By then I had started harboring this dream and foolishly confessed it to him in an unguarded moment. Under his influence, I soon began to take it seriously.

  2

  ONE DAY AFTER SCHOOL, led by some instinct to the wardrobe and drawers in my parents’ bedroom, I discovered that my father’s shirts and all his other belongings were gone. Only his smell of tobacco and cologne still lingered in the room. My mother and I never spoke of him, and his image was already fading from my mind.

  My mother and I were becoming fast friends, though that didn’t prevent her from treating my decision to become a writer as a joke. First, I had to make sure I was admitted to a good university. To prepare for the entrance exams, I needed to make enough money for cram school, but my mother was dissatisfied with what the bookseller was paying me. The summer after I finished my second year of high school, we moved from Istanbul to Gebze. We were to stay with my maternal aunt and her husband in Gebze, living as guests in the extension they had built in their garden. My aunt’s husband was to give me a job, and I calculated that if I spent the first half of the summer at it, by the end of July I could resume work at the Deniz Bookstore in Beşiktaş while attending cram school. Mr. Deniz knew how sad I was not to be living in Beşiktaş anymore; he said I could spend the night at the bookstore whenever I wanted to.

  My aunt’s husband had arranged for me to guard his cherry and peach orchard on the outskirts of Gebze. When I saw my post, a rickety table under a gazebo, I took it to mean I’d have plenty of time to sit around and read. But I was wrong. It was cherry season: flocks of loud, audacious crows swarmed over the trees, and gangs of kids and the construction workers from the site next door were constantly trying to steal the produce.

  In the garden next to the orchard, a well was being dug. I would go over sometimes to watch the welldigger work with his spade and pickax while two apprentices lifted and removed the earth their master had dug out.

  The apprentices cranked the two handles attached to a wooden windlass, which creaked pleasantly as they hauled up bucketfuls of dirt and tipped them over into a handcart. The younger one, who was about my age, would go off to unload the handcart as the older, taller apprentice would yell, “Here it comes!,” sending the bucket back down to the welldigger.

  During the day, the welldigger rarely emerged. The first time I saw him, he was on his lunch break having a cigarette. He was tall, slender, and handsome, like my father. But unlike my naturally calm and cheerful father, the welldigger was irascible. He frequently scolded his apprentices. I thought it might embarrass them to be seen getting told off, so I steered clear of the well when the master was out.

  One day in mid-June, I heard the sounds of joyful shouting and gunshots coming from their direction and went to take a look. Water had sprung from the well, and upon hearing the good news, the owner of the plot, a man from Rize, had come over to celebrate, gleefully firing his gun into the sky. There was an alluring smell of gunpowder in the air. As was customary, the landowner distributed tips and gifts to the welldigger and his apprentices. The well would allow him to realize the various construction projects he had planned for his land; the city’s water network had yet to reach the outskirts of Gebze.

  I never heard the master shouting at his apprentices in the days that followed. Bags of cement and some iron rods arrived on a horse-drawn cart one afternoon, and the master welldigger set about lining the well with concrete before covering it with a metal lid. I spent a lot more time with the crew now that they were in such a good mood.

  One day I walked over to the well thinking there was no one there. Master Mahmut appeared from among the cherry and olive trees, holding a part from the electric motor he’d installed to power the pump.

  “You seem curious about this work, young man!”

  I thought of those people in Jules Verne’s novel who went in one end of the world and came out the other side.

  “I’m going to dig another well on the outskirts of Küçükçekmece. These two boys are leaving me. Shall I take you along instead?”

  Seeing that I was hesitant, he explained that if he did his job right, a welldigger’s apprentice could earn four times as much as an orchard watchman. We’d be done in ten days, and I’d be home in no time.

  “I will never allow it!” said my mother when I got home that evening. “You will not be a welldigger. You’re going to university.”

  But by then the thought of earning quick money had taken root in my mind. I kept telling my mother that I could earn in two weeks what I’d make at my aunt’s husband’s orchard in two months, leaving me with plenty of time to prepare for the university exams, go to cram school, and read all the books I wanted to read. I even threatened my poor mother:

  “If you don’t let me go, I�
�ll run away,” I said.

  “If the boy wants to work hard and make his own money, don’t knock the wind out of his sails,” said my aunt’s husband. “Let me ask around and find out who this welldigger is.”

  My aunt’s husband, who was a lawyer, arranged a meeting at his offices in the town hall with my mother and the welldigger. In my absence, the three of them agreed that there would be a second apprentice who would go down into the well so I wouldn’t have to. My aunt’s husband informed me what my daily wages would be. I packed some shirts and the pair of rubber-soled shoes I wore for gym class into my father’s old valise.

  On the day of my departure, it was raining, and the time to meet the pickup truck that was to take me to the job site seemed never to arrive. My mother cried several times as we waited in our one-room guesthouse with the leaky roof. Wouldn’t I change my mind? She would miss me terribly. Granted, we were poor now, but it needn’t have come to this.

  Clutching my valise, and affecting the same defiant expression I saw on my father’s face when he was put on trial, I walked out of the house, saying teasingly: “Don’t worry, I will never go down into the well.”

  The pickup was waiting in the empty lot behind the towering old mosque. Master Mahmut, cigarette in hand, observed my approach with a smile, assessing my clothes, the way I walked, and my bag, like a schoolteacher.

  “Get in, it’s time to go,” he said. I sat between him and the driver sent by Hayri Bey, the businessman who had commissioned the well. We drove for an hour in silence.