The Red-Haired Woman Read online

  Even more intriguing was the fact that Europe, with its far broader and richer tradition of depicting human subjects, had failed to produce more images of Oedipus; there were no paintings of the pivotal scenes, such as when Oedipus murders his father or when he sleeps with his mother. European painters may have been able to describe these moments in words and comprehend their significance. But they were incapable of visualizing the acts described and rendering them on the canvas. And so they confined themselves to the scene in which Oedipus solves the riddle of the Sphinx. By contrast, in Muslim lands, where portraiture had never thrived and indeed was often banned, artists had fervently created thousands of depictions of the exact moment when Rostam kills his son Sohrab.

  Only Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian novelist, painter, and filmmaker, had ever broken the unwritten rule with his film Oedipus Rex. I watched his disquieting adaptation when it was screened as part of a weeklong Pasolini retrospective sponsored by the Italian consulate in Istanbul. The young actor playing Oedipus embraces, kisses, and sleeps with his mother, played by the older but still captivating Silvana Mangano. When mother and son made love, the audience of Istanbul cinephiles and intellectuals filling Casa d’Italia’s wood-paneled auditorium that night sank into a deafening silence.

  Pasolini had shot the film in Morocco against a backdrop of local landscapes, reddish soil, and an ancient, ghostly red fort.

  “I wouldn’t mind watching this red film again,” I said. “Do you think we might find a DVD or cassette copy somewhere?”

  “That beautiful Silvana Mangano…even her hair was red,” said my wife.

  32

  READERS SHOULDN’T IMAGINE us as a couple of effete intellectuals who did nothing but watch art films and look at old manuscripts and paintings all day. Ayşe went out with me every morning, taking her place at the helm of our company, Sohrab, whose rapid growth astonished us both. I’d stop by its bustling offices in Nişantaşı every evening after leaving my day job. We would work with our engineers until late at night and dine out somewhere before finally going home.

  Toward the end of 2011, a year to the day after the Pasolini retrospective opened, I handed in my resignation, planning to devote my time exclusively to Sohrab. I still spent my days supervising construction sites all over Istanbul, except now I was doing it for my own firm, and while our driver from Samsun crept through the city’s traffic jams, I kept doing business on my mobile phone. Most of the suppliers, site managers, and estate agents I spoke to during those inching rides were likewise stuck in traffic somewhere else in the city. Sometimes they would interrupt our discussion of building codes or profit margins to argue with the driver or to stop people on the street and ask them what that area was called. I would be dismayed to realize that my interlocutor was probably gridlocked in some rising neighborhood no one had ever heard of before but which was already overflowing with people. Everyone was building, buying whatever they could afford to buy, and the city was growing at a baffling pace.

  Whenever I noticed poor people, young people, street vendors, or parking attendants jostling in the street, I would recognize that I was now a wealthy middle-aged man, and—more important—one well accustomed to this condition. I would ask myself, Are there any joys in my life other than my wife’s companionship and my layman’s enthusiasm for some ancient tales? I would think about my father, I would call my wife, and I would try to convince myself that I was at peace in the urban throng. Childlessness had trained me in melancholy and humility. Sometimes I stopped to think that if I’d had a child, he or she would have been twenty by now.

  Initially we spent all the money we were making on designer clothes, decorative figurines, Ottoman treasures, antiques, handwritten royal edicts, exquisite carpets, and Italian furniture; but this conspicuous consumption, far from fulfilling either of us, merely left us feeling shallow and insincere. A part of me was still strongly disposed to resent the very friends to whom we would have wanted to display our finery, precisely because their existence encouraged us to do so. This was probably owing to the influence of my father’s left-wing views. So even as our fortune grew, we continued to get by with our ordinary Renault Megane.

  We started investing most of our money in land for new construction projects and old buildings in promising neighborhoods. As we bought up empty plots on the outskirts of the city, I felt like a sultan trying to forget his lack of an heir by annexing new provinces to his empire. Like Istanbul itself, Sohrab was growing at an astonishing rate.

  We’d equipped our car with one of those satellite navigation devices that announced what street you were on at any given moment. We would follow the route traced on its screen all the way to new neighborhoods we’d never seen before, and up hills from which you could see the Princes’ Islands on the horizon, and marvel at the city’s sprawl. But instead of endlessly complaining, as so many others did, that the old city was being wiped out, we welcomed these new neighborhoods as business opportunities. Every day at the office, Ayşe perused the public auction notices in the government’s Official Gazette and combed through the daily Hürriyet’s and other websites’ real-estate pages.

  One day, Ayşe called my attention to an auction she thought we should bid in. Before I’d even had the chance to look at the notice, she’d already located the lot on Google Maps and zoomed in. When I saw the word “Öngören” on the screen, my heart leaped. But like a seasoned assassin, I remained impassive. I maneuvered the cursor around the screen and stole up on the most important town in my life.

  The word “Öngören” had been affixed to the Station Square. Some of the surrounding streets seemed vaguely familiar, but Google’s map had marked them as they were officially known rather than with names like “Diners’ Lane,” by which the locals had known them nearly thirty years ago. So there were very few names I could recognize. I found the station first, then the cemetery, and by these I tried to work out where our plateau would be on the map, but there was no way to tell by the street names, for the whole area was now covered with roads.

  “Murat says they’re going to build a new highway through here and there is a spot with nice views that might be perfect for a new residential. Shall we go take a look on Sunday morning on the way to your mother’s?”

  Murat was that same university friend who’d invited me to Tehran. He’d dropped all his other business ventures to join the construction gold rush, and thanks to his friends in the conservative ruling party, his turnover dwarfed ours, though he was kind enough to tip us off when an area was likely to appreciate.

  “I feel there’s some sort of curse on this Öngören,” I told Ayşe, “like a place in one of those fairy tales they used to tell us as children. Let’s leave it for now. Besides, what kind of view could you sell to people who’ve always had that glimmering night sky to look at?”

  33

  THERE WAS A DROUGHT in Istanbul that summer after an unusually dry spring. With the reservoirs low, the city’s decrepit plumbing could pump only half as much water as usual. In some neighborhoods, mothers and fathers would wake up in the middle of the night to listen to the pipes, just as they used to do as children, so that when the water was turned back on they could be ready to shower and to refill the tub with a reserve of fresh water. Water rationing became a subject of fierce political debate and occasional violence throughout the city.

  The end of summer brought days of lightning and heavy, roaring rainfall, flooding some areas of Istanbul. One night in the wake of those stormy days my father invited us for dinner. His new wife had sent Ayşe an e-mail. “Is he in such a bad state that he can’t write to us himself?” I wondered.

  He was renting an apartment in a new residential development behind Sarıyer, on a hill overlooking the Black Sea. It took us two hours to drive there. The Black Sea was a smudge in the distance, and even though the tiny place was new, it already looked dilapidated, teeming with my father’s forty-year-old possessions, which I remembered from my childhood. Rainwater had stained the ce
ilings. Once we’d dragged ourselves through the initial pleasantries, strained jokes, and exchange of endearments, I was struck by my father’s weariness and his deprivation.

  As a child, I had idolized him, always desperate to enjoy a little more of his time, to talk to him, to have him pick me up in his arms and tease me. But now that man had grown feeble; he’d slowed down, hunched over, and worst of all accepted the defeat handed him by life. The former womanizer who’d always dressed so impeccably no longer seemed to care about the clothes he wore or about his health, joking half-heartedly about the sorry state of each: “Leftists care about principles, not appearances.”

  Nevertheless, he kept flirting with his beaming, bucktoothed, busty wife, firing off double entendres that hinted at their robust sex life. Ayşe joined in their banter, and soon the conversation drawing on our collective experience turned to love, marriage, and youth. Since I couldn’t bring myself to discuss such personal matters in front of my father, I took my glass of rakı and retreated to the bookshelf in the corner, where I glanced at the spines of the old leftist tomes he’d owned since I was a child. I did, however, continue to listen to the conversation at the dinner table, and when my father’s wife mentioned the terrible water shortage that summer, I thought of Master Mahmut.

  “I bet you could still dig a well the old way, up here in Sarıyer,” I piped up. “You’d just need a wooden mold and a slide to pour the concrete through.”

  “What do you know about it?” said my father.

  “In 1986, the summer after you left us, I needed to pay for cram school so I spent a month as apprentice to an old master welldigger,” I said. “I’ve never even told Ayşe about it.”

  “Why not? Were you ashamed of your stint in the proletariat?” said my father.

  I was glad to have finally told him about my time of toil—though my father had no objections to our being well-off. My mistake was not letting it go at that; instead, I let myself get carried away, telling my father about Oedipus and Sohrab and Rostam, all the reading I’d done, the museums we’d visited in Europe, all just to show him how well versed I was in cultural and social history.

  “The real authority on these matters is Wittfogel,” said my father dismissively. “I’ve got his book here somewhere. Not that anyone reads him anymore, they’ve forgotten all about him…What would he say if he knew there was a French translation of one of his books tucked away on an Istanbul leftist’s bookshelf?”

  He had formulated the same kind of question I’d often asked myself about him (“What would my father say if he knew?”), and so my curiosity was piqued. I scanned the dusty volumes on the rickety bookshelf.

  As I drank another glass of rakı, my father sat quiet at the end of the table. Our wives had started talking between themselves.

  “Dad…,” I said. “Those militant groups from your time…do you remember the National Revolutionary Maoists…what were they like?”

  “I knew a lot of guys from that group,” said my father. “And plenty of girls, too,” he added lasciviously, like a drunken schoolboy.

  “What kind of girls?” asked my father’s wife, as if to boast of her husband’s youthful dalliances.

  I’d had a sneaking suspicion for all these years, however artfully I’d managed to keep it hidden even from myself: it was perfectly possible that during his militant heyday my father had been acquainted with the troupe that staged the Theater of Morality Tales and might even have seen the Red-Haired Woman perform one of its political plays. I wondered: What would he have thought of the first woman I’d ever slept with?

  By now, however, he’d started to sober up, his face again composed in that same careful expression of detachment he customarily assumed whenever he wanted to conceal the details of his personal life and militant activities from me. He seized upon a lull to ask me gravely how my mother was doing. I told him I’d bought her a house in Gebze—she didn’t want to move to Istanbul—and Ayşe and I drove up to see her every other Sunday. That was enough: “I’m glad your mother is well!” he said, closing the subject.

  I’d had too much drink, so Ayşe drove on the way home. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d worked as a welldigger’s apprentice?” she asked like a mother gently reprimanding her son. It was past midnight, and as the car wound its way through the Belgrad Forest and its dams, I dozed off in the front passenger seat to the sound of cicadas croaking in a cool thyme-scented breeze.

  A copy of Wittfogel’s now-outmoded treatise Oriental Despotism rested on my lap. But when we got home, I switched the computer on instead. I found Öngören on Google Maps and quietly zoomed in from the sky. I saw billboards advertising a patisserie and a bank on the Station Square and a service station on the highway to Istanbul. I tried to remember each of these spots and to picture all the places I’d passed while following the Red-Haired Woman around.

  If she had been truthful about her age when we met in Öngören, she would be sixty by now. My father’s new wife was more or less the same vintage, and so I could easily imagine him living with the Red-Haired Woman in that little apartment overlooking the Black Sea.

  I’d forbidden myself from trying to find out where she was or what she was doing, and I hadn’t happened upon a single trace of her in the almost thirty years since our meeting. Of course, I did wonder about her from time to time, particularly during TV commercials for detergents, credit cards, and retirement plans featuring women of her generation—including some who no doubt had come up performing in the same folk theaters as she had, playing the part of the contented mother (or, in later years, the happy grandmother). Some evenings I would watch soap operas set in Ottoman palaces hundreds of years ago, and I’d peer at the screen through senses dulled by rakı, trying to work out whether the tall, full-lipped courtesan teaching the sultan’s latest young consort how to handle harem politics and keep her man interested was actually Her or whether I had simply forgotten the face of the first woman I’d slept with. Sometimes a voice-over actress dubbing a foreign TV series into Turkish might sound like her, and I would try to recall how she’d delivered her furious final monologue years ago in the yellow tent and the sound of that voice I’d latched on to as we strolled through the Station Square that night.

  Our company was flourishing, but I was overworked, and when stress woke me one night, I stared in wonder at an e-mail from the veteran engineer who now handled Sohrab’s real-estate investments and was forwarding an advertisement for a property in Öngören. On offer was an old warehouse and workshop near where Master Mahmut and I had dug our well. Thirty years on, the derelict buildings themselves were mostly useless; what was really being advertised was the land they sat on and the development opportunities presented. Without consulting Ayşe, who was still sleeping, I wrote our employee to express our interest.

  34

  KARL A. WITTFOGEL’S Oriental Despotism had certainly had its moment, but neither Ayşe nor I could understand at first why my father had referred to it. It contained nothing about Oedipus or Sohrab or anything else I’d been talking about. It was obvious that he had never read it but merely leafed through it because it was considered a classic leftist text on Eastern societies.

  First published in 1957, at the height of the Cold War, the book contains long discussions of droughts and floods. Wittfogel devotes much attention to the network of canals, dams, roads, and aqueducts needed to support agriculture in the challenging terrain of certain Asian nations, like China, as well as to the vast bureaucracies required to build that kind of infrastructure. He argues that such organizational structures can be established only under strictly authoritarian regimes, whose rulers brook no resistance or rebellion. Thus, Wittfogel continues, rather than fill the harems and the ranks of officialdom with the independent-minded, such rulers prefer to govern by surrounding themselves with slaves and sycophants.

  “When a king treats his wives and ministers that way, it’s not hard to imagine him killing off his own son,” said Ayşe. “That’s no surprise. We kno
w exactly what these people are like. But it doesn’t explain the court painters. Why should they have so relished depicting that awful moment?”

  “Because they had a chance to paint a weeping king,” I said. “Besides, those scenes are only in appearance all about remorse and sorrow…The real purpose was to emphasize the sultan’s absolute power. After all, he’s the one commissioning the art in the first place—not the foolish, pathetic Sohrabs of this world.”

  “So Sohrab was just foolish, but was Oedipus any smarter?” said Ayşe.

  The lure of Wittfogel may have quickly faded, but this book suggested by my father did point to a connection between the nature of a civilization and its approach to notions of patricide and filicide. For that alone I was glad to have consulted this encyclopedic historical and anthropological treatise on waterways and “hydraulic societies” in Asia.

  By winter, I’d decided to buy that parcel of land in Öngören. Istanbul’s surplus population was sweeping into the area in wave upon wave. Furthermore, a while back, Murat had told us that the roads and ramps to the third bridge over the Bosphorus, soon to be built across the Black Sea side, would pass through and thus breathe new life into these neighborhoods. I needed to stop finding excuses in folktales, bad omens, and old memories and start putting Sohrab first.

  We’d dedicated all our energies to the firm, but whenever I considered our lack of children, I lost heart: Who would inherit all this once I was gone? Anyway, even if I’d had a son, he would probably have done just as I had, choosing a completely different path instead of following in his father’s footsteps. But at least he would still have been my son! He might even have become a writer. The stories of Oedipus and Sohrab seemed altogether trivial in comparison.

  My father’s wife called Ayşe’s mobile one night to tell us he’d been unwell. We got into the car immediately, but the drive there took exactly three hours and fifteen minutes from our office to their house. I was taken aback, and even somewhat irritated, when I saw no light in their windows, and when my father’s wife opened the door in tears, my first thought was that they must have had an argument. But as soon as I stepped inside, I realized that my father had died. Someone switched the lights on, and I felt remorseful as I gazed at what I hadn’t wanted to see: my father stretched out on the same couch on which he’d sat regaling us with his stories on our last visit.