The Red-Haired Woman Read online

  Back in the tent, I started crying again. Everything in the place I’d shared with Master Mahmut for the past month was now unbearably painful to look at. The teapot, the old newspaper I’d read a thousand times, Master Mahmut’s plastic slippers with the blue bands across the instep, the belt for the trousers he wore when he went to town, his alarm clock…

  My hands began of their own accord to gather my things. It took less than three minutes to stuff everything, including the rubber shoes I’d never worn, into my old valise.

  If I stayed here, they would at the very least arrest me for causing someone’s death by my “negligence.” My case would drag on for years, I could forget about cram school and university, my whole life would be thrown off course, I’d go to juvenile prison, and my mother would die of heartache.

  I pleaded with God to let Master Mahmut live. As I approached the mouth of the well again I hoped that I might hear him talking or whimpering. But there was no sound whatsoever.

  With only fifteen minutes to go before the twelve-thirty train to Istanbul, I left the tent with my father’s old valise in hand and hastily made my way down to Öngören in the heat, without looking back. I knew that if I turned around, I would start crying again. The dark rain clouds had almost reached the town, and everything had taken on an ominous purple hue.

  The station was crowded with villagers who had come for the market. The train was late, and as I waited, amid the baskets, sacks, crates, farmers, and soldiers, I planned how I was going to pick a window seat on the left-hand side of the carriage so I could see, until the tracks turned away, the place where Master Mahmut and I had dug the well. All month I’d been thinking of how I would do this on the day of my journey back to Istanbul. But I had always imagined it would be the day we’d found water, and I’d be carrying the gifts and the bonus Hayri Bey had promised.

  I tried to cast an eye on everyone who walked into the station until the train arrived, but it was too crowded. The Red-Haired Woman and her troupe might be returning to Istanbul on the same train, for all I could see. As the train finally pulled into the station, I took one last look at the square and at the town of Öngören before quickly stepping on board. By the time I’d settled into the carriage, I’d forgotten about all the times I’d had to swallow my pride and obey Master Mahmut and felt nothing but an immeasurable guilt.

  • PART II •

  22

  WHEN I LOOKED OUT of the carriage window, my eyes wet with tears, I could just about make out the well and our patch of land up on the plateau. Everything I saw—the cemetery on the way to town, the cypress trees—formed a picture I knew even then that I’d never forget as long as I lived. The land where we had dug the well seemed on the verge of disappearing into the blackened heavens. Lightning struck off in the distance. By the time the sound of thunder reached us, the train had already twisted away, and that familiar landscape—the well, our plateau—had fallen out of sight. A feeling of freedom swept through me. Relief and guilt mingled in time with the click-clacking of the train along the tracks.

  For a long time, I would have nothing to do with anyone. I withdrew, distancing myself from the world. The world was beautiful, and I wanted my inner world to be beautiful, too. If I ignored the guilt, the darkness inside me, I thought I would eventually forget it was there. So I began to pretend that everything was fine. If you act as if nothing has happened, and if nothing more comes of it, you will indeed find that nothing has happened after all.

  The train to Istanbul wound its way past factories, warehouses, and fields. It crossed streams, slipped by mosques, and chugged by coffeehouses and workshops. A group of boys was playing soccer in an empty schoolyard, and when it began to rain, they grabbed the shirts and bags they had arranged as goalposts and quickly dispersed.

  Puddles, streams, and rapids soon formed over the hard soil wherever I could see from the carriage window. It could have been the great flood, but a man standing at the bottom of a well wouldn’t have known the difference. Was Master Mahmut still there? Was he calling for me?

  I got off the train at Istanbul’s Sirkeci Station. I walked in the rain and bought a ticket for the car ferry to Harem, on the Asian side. The ferry was waiting for more passengers and took forever to push off, with drivers, families, crying children, bowls of sweet yogurt, the amplified noise of truck engines…I had forgotten how comforting it was to be surrounded by people. I felt like a savage who had returned to civilization. Water dripped from my hair down my neck and back as I sat motionless, watching Istanbul drift by slowly through the raindrops on the windowpane. Peering into the distance, I tried to make out Dolmabahçe Palace and the neighborhood of Beşiktaş behind it, and the tall residential block that faced the cram school.

  I bought a packet of tissues from a kiosk after disembarking and dried myself a bit before taking the bus. It was hours since I had last eaten, but I took no notice of the pastries and kebab sandwiches for sale. I said to myself, This must be what it feels like to be a murderer.

  That was the other voice inside me again, the voice I silently summoned to talk about matters I didn’t care to discuss with anybody else. But don’t think that I was losing my mind. At three o’clock, I caught a bus to Gebze. I was feverishly excited to see my mother. Basking in the warmth of the summer sun shining through the window on the right-hand side, I eventually fell asleep and dreamed I was in a sunny, balmy paradise, cleansed of crime and punishment.

  I must have been dreading what my mother might say: What’s wrong with you? You’re looking at me like a murderer. When she said nothing of the sort, I realized just how worried I had been about how she would greet me, and as soon as I embraced her, I felt much better. My mother smelled like herself. She cried a little at first, then started chattering away lightheartedly, saying that, all things considered, life in Gebze wasn’t so bad, and that she was going to make me meatballs and french fries. Her only cause to fret had been how much she’d missed me and worried about me. She started crying again. We hugged even harder.

  “My goodness, how much you’ve grown in a month, your hands are so big, and look how tall you are,” said my mother. “You’re a man now. Shall I add some tomatoes to your salad?”

  I would go for long walks on the hills surrounding Gebze and gaze on Istanbul in the distance. At times I would notice a faraway plot of land resembling our plateau, and I would become agitated, as if I were about to bump into Master Mahmut.

  I never told my mother that I had been inside the well even though I’d promised her over and over again that I wouldn’t go in. She could see that I was alive and well, so perhaps this detail was no longer relevant.

  We never mentioned my father. I could tell that he never called her. But why didn’t he call me? My last glimpse of Master Mahmut descending into the well often surfaced in my mind like a painting. I was sure that he was still doggedly digging, like a persistent fruitworm burrowing its way through a gargantuan orange.

  We went to the shops in Gebze, and my mother bought a new television and an alarm clock. I banked all the money I’d saved working with Master Mahmut. I spent three days at home, resting and recovering. My dreams were of Master Mahmut, and I was being chased by villains. But no one came looking for me in Gebze; nobody was after me. On the fourth day, I went down to Istanbul, enrolled in a cram school in Beşiktaş, and started dutifully attending classes.

  When I was alone, I couldn’t get Master Mahmut and the well out of my mind. So I made a point of rekindling friendships with old neighborhood and school friends in Beşiktaş, and we all went to the cinema together. We even tried some of the bars downtown, but unlike my friends, I wasn’t well accustomed to the art of cigarettes and rakı. They mocked me for draining my glass in one gulp like a beginner and getting drunk immediately. That didn’t bother me, though I did resent their cracks that my beard and mustache weren’t full enough, implying I wasn’t yet a man.

  “If the beard were all, the goat might preach,” I replied. “Even a vixen has whi
skers.”

  They liked that one! I had collected lots of aphorisms from the books I used to stay up reading until I couldn’t see straight on nights I slept at the Deniz Bookstore.

  But could someone heartless enough to leave his master to die at the bottom of a well ever aspire to be a writer? Had the bucket fallen entirely by accident? I often told myself that nothing bad had happened at the well. I’d simply been unable to cope with all the exertion, the scolding, and the lack of sleep. All I had done was to leave everything behind, take my money, and go home, as any normal person would have done—though I wasn’t even sure if I liked that term “normal person” any longer.

  Among my older friends were a few now attending Istanbul University. They’d grown beards and mustaches and participated in political protests, clashing with the police in the backstreets of the neighborhood, stories they were proud to tell as we drank and made merry. I knew they respected my father. But I realized one night how I inwardly resented them.

  “Cem, have you ever even held a girl’s hand?” they teased me.

  A few of them had spoken openly of love letters they’d written to this girl or that, and how they longed for a response. So I blurted out how my aunt’s husband had found me a construction job (construction sounded more impressive than welldigging) near Edirne and how I’d had a love affair with a woman there, in the town of Öngören. “Has anyone here heard of Öngören?” I asked around the table.

  They hadn’t expected something like this from me and were all briefly dumbstruck. One said he’d gone with his parents to visit his older brother doing his military service in Öngören, but he’d found the place small and dull.

  “I fell in love with an amazing woman, a theater actress twice my age. I didn’t even know who she was. I just saw her on the street. She took me to her apartment.”

  They looked at me in disbelief. I told them it was my first time with a woman.

  “How was it?” the letter writers were now asking. “Was it good?”

  “What was her name?”

  “Why didn’t you get married?” said another, taking a drag on his cigarette.

  The one who’d visited his brother at the garrison said dismissively: “You can find all sorts there: traveling theaters with belly dancers performing for the soldiers, nightclub singers, and anything else you can think of.”

  That night, I understood that if I was to be unburdened of my pain and guilt, I’d have to stay away from these childhood friends. I was also gradually coming to realize that what had happened at the well would always bar me from the joys of an ordinary life. I kept telling myself, The best thing to do is to act as if nothing happened.

  23

  BUT WAS IT POSSIBLE to pretend nothing had happened? Inside my head there was a well where, pickax in hand, Master Mahmut was still hacking away at the earth. That must mean he was still alive, or the police had yet to investigate his murder.

  I imagined that someone—perhaps Ali—would find the corpse, after which the district attorney would get on the case; he would alert Gebze first (that could take days or weeks in Turkey), my distraught mother would weep herself unconscious, and once the Gebze police had advised their counterparts in Istanbul (which in turn could take months more), they would come any day to pick me up at the cram school or the bookstore. Perhaps I should find my father and tell him everything, I thought. But he never called me, from which I inferred that even if he had, he wouldn’t have been much help. Besides, telling him would mean acknowledging that this was serious. Each day that passed without the police coming to take me away seemed a sign that I was innocent and no different from everybody else, but it also felt like my last taste of the simple, ordinary life that everyone else expected routinely. Whenever a customer at the Deniz Bookstore was particularly brusque, I would become convinced that he was a plainclothes officer and find myself on the verge of confessing. Other times I comforted myself, thinking Master Mahmut must have survived and hatefully forgotten all about me.

  I was quick and efficient and worked hard at the bookshop. Mr. Deniz, who loved my innovative ideas for window displays, promotional deals, and which books to stock, told me that I could sleep on the couch upstairs even in winter. I was to consider that little room a second home and place to study. My mother was dejected to have me far from her and Gebze again, but she was also sure that if I continued to attend Kabataş High School and the cram school in Beşiktaş, I was guaranteed a good result on the university entrance exams.

  I didn’t want to disappoint her, and I knew how pivotal this exam was for my life, so I became a real swot throughout high school, leaving no formula I might possibly need unmemorized. In my most intent immersions in the work, a vision of the Red-Haired Woman would dawn in my mind out of nowhere like a sultry sun, and I would take a little break to fantasize about the color of her skin, her belly, her breasts, her eyes.

  When the time came to register for the entrance exams and pick my subjects, my mother naturally wanted me to list medicine first. She was terrified that my literary aspirations were a road to poverty or, even worse, to the kind of political activity that had gotten my father in such trouble.

  Luckily for her, my dreams of becoming a writer had withered quickly since I’d abandoned Master Mahmut at the bottom of the well. I knew my mother would settle for my becoming an engineer, if not a doctor. So I wrote down “engineering geology” on the form. My mother had noticed that the apprenticeship with the welldigger had left some sort of mark on me. I wondered in passing whether she realized somehow that the newfound “maturity” she observed was, in fact, a black stain on my soul.

  —

  At the end of the summer of 1987, I scored fifth highest on the entrance exam and was admitted to the faculty of engineering geology at the Maçka campus of Istanbul Technical University. The 110-year-old building that composed the campus had originally been an armory and barracks for some of the new army units created in the last years of the Ottoman Empire, and in 1908, when the Young Turks who eventually deposed Abdul Hamid II marched from Thessalonica to Istanbul, the soldiers who remained loyal to the sultan were stationed here. Actual battles were fought in what were now our classrooms. I read about these things in history books and told my classmates about them. I was fascinated by the old building, its high ceilings, its interminable flights of stairs, and its cavernous echoing corridors.

  And it was only ten minutes up the hill from Beşiktaş and the Deniz Bookstore, where I was promoted to manager. Although the boss remained reluctant to admit that I wouldn’t be a writer after all, he was warming to the idea of geology and allowed that engineers could be good novelists anyway. At the dorm, I was plowing through a new book almost every night.

  In retrospect, part of pretending that nothing bad had happened involved willfully forgetting all about Sophocles’s play, with its associations of my bedtime chats with Master Mahmut. I’d been able to stay clear of it through three years at university, until one day at the Deniz Bookstore, I chanced on that old anthology about dreams. This was the very book in which I’d first read Oedipus’s story in synopsis. I now discovered that the summary was in fact by Sigmund Freud and had less to do with Sophocles than with a theory of Freud’s that every man harbors the desire to kill his own father.

  A few months later I came across a secondhand copy of Sophocles’s work in a translation published in 1941 by the Ministry of Education. I was startled to see the title Oedipus the King across its yellowing cover. Turkish editions of the play were almost impossible to find. I devoured it, as if expecting to find therein some secret truth about my own life.

  Unlike Freud’s summary, the actual play didn’t start at Oedipus’s birth, but years later, when Prince Oedipus had, by mistake, already killed his own father, taken the throne, and fathered four children by his own mother. The play glossed over how a son was sleeping with his mother, a woman at least sixteen years older than he was. I tried but couldn’t imagine what it would have been like, just as I coul
dn’t fathom that Oedipus’s children were also his siblings, in the same way his wife was simultaneously his mother. But at the start of the play, neither Oedipus, nor any of the other characters, nor even the audience, has any inkling of the scandal to be revealed. Maybe it is this ignorance that has caused the plague, and in order to save the city, they have to find out who murdered the old king. King Oedipus himself leads the search like a detective, unaware that he is the culprit. Step by step, he discovers the bitter truth until finally, racked by guilt, he carves out his own eyes.

  I hadn’t told Master Mahmut the story in this order that evening by the well three years ago. But as I read the play now, I somehow felt as if I had. I also noticed that I was feeling less guilty about having caused his death. After three years, I had stopped worrying that the police would burst into class one day and take me to jail. Maybe Master Mahmut wasn’t even dead but had been rescued from the depths of the well as in one of those old religious allegories.

  Master Mahmut used to tell me those stories and parables from the Koran to teach me a lesson. This would upset me. In turn, I had told him the story of Prince Oedipus only to upset him, but then somehow I had ended up retracing the actions of the protagonist whose story I’d chosen. That was why Master Mahmut wound up stuck at the bottom of a well: it was all owing to a story, a myth.

  Having set out trying to disprove a story and a prophecy, Oedipus ended up killing his own father. Had he laughed off the oracle’s predictions, perhaps he would never have left his home and his country, encountering his father the king on the way and inadvertently killing him. The same was true of Oedipus’s father. Had he taken no precautions to thwart Oedipus’s terrible destiny, none of the subsequent calamities would have occurred. So it was that I had come to understand that if I wanted to live a “normal,” ordinary life like everyone else, I had to do the opposite of what Oedipus did and act as if nothing bad had happened. Oedipus, who wanted so much to be good, became a killer because he was so desperate not to be one; he found out that he had killed his own father because he needed so much to know who the murderer was. Sophocles’s whole play was built not around the evil acts themselves but around the probing of his inquiring protagonist.