The Red-Haired Woman Read online

  So we stayed indoors and kept the television switched off as we waited for this media nightmare to blow over. Sohrab, our son, seemed to have temporarily transfigured into a jailer.

  Meanwhile, we’d begun receiving letters—including some hate mail. We never got more than a dozen of these a week, and I discarded most of them immediately. But there was one which I held on to:

  Mr. Cem,

  I wish I could respect you; you’re my father.

  Sohrab has crossed the line in Öngören.

  As your son, I wanted to warn you.

  Write to me at this address and I’ll explain everything.

  Don’t be afraid of your son.

  Enver

  An e-mail address was given at the bottom. I figured it must be someone from Öngören trying to squeeze money out of us with threats and gossip, like Sırrı Siyahoğlu. Admittedly, I liked the respect he’d shown calling me his father. But I wondered what he could have meant by “crossing the line,” so I consulted our lawyer, Mr. Necati.

  “Everyone knows that you were a welldigger’s apprentice in Öngören about thirty years ago, back when it was still nothing more than a little godforsaken military outpost,” he explained. “But after those splashy commercials, what was once gossip has become the stuff of legend. The people of Öngören are flattered to see that a young man who used to dig wells among them is now a rich contractor showing off his modern lifestyle on TV with his wife. But that same pride also promotes unreasonable expectations about what their land is worth, and so at the first round of negotiations, their affection turns into loathing. The hatred is fed partly by your television persona, which makes you seem a snob and perhaps even a bit of a heathen, but it’s also stirred by the thought that something bad happened between you and their beloved Master Mahmut all those years ago. As the man who brought water to Öngören, he is virtually a local saint. It’s this perception you’ll have to rectify somehow. If you would just take a moment to explain in person to the people of Öngören how you spent a whole summer there thirty years ago searching for water at Master Mahmut’s side, they’d realize you’re one of them, and Sohrab would be spared further grief.”

  37

  BUT I WAS STILL HESITANT to go to Öngören. Perhaps I’d spent so many years brooding over the stories of Oedipus and Sohrab that my soul was permanently beset with foreboding.

  Five weeks later, Mr. Necati asked to have a word with me in private.

  “Mr. Cem, there is a man claiming to be your son.”

  “Who is that?”

  “Enver. The one who wrote to you.”

  “He’s an actual person?”

  “Apparently. He’s twenty-six. He says you slept with his mother in Öngören in 1986.”

  Low leaden clouds hung over Istanbul. We were sitting in my office in Sohrab’s headquarters, which took up the top three floors of the business center–cum–shopping mall at the end of Valikonağı Avenue in Nişantaşı.

  “You would have been sixteen at the time he claims it happened,” said Necati as he registered my silence. “It was almost thirty years ago. Back in the day, a judge wouldn’t even have considered a suit in which so much time has passed. Until recently there were strict statutes of limitations on paternity claims. Ordinarily they had to be filed within a year from the child’s birth…but at the very latest within a year after the child’s eighteenth birthday…It’s been eight years since this child turned eighteen.”

  “What if he’s telling the truth?”

  “We’ve looked into it and it appears that the mother was married to an actor when the child was conceived. In order to protect the institution of the family as well as preserving the authority and honor of fatherhood, Turkish law stipulates that a child born of a married woman must be registered as her husband’s son, whatever anyone else might claim. How could it be any other way? Just imagine what would happen if a woman were to say, ‘I slept with another man and this child is his son, not my husband’s’; if her husband and in-laws didn’t kill her, she’d end up in prison for adultery.”

  “But the law has changed?”

  “It’s medical science that’s changed, Mr. Cem. In the past, a particularly conscientious judge would have had to haul the supposed father and son into court and stand them side by side to look for similarities. ‘Do you know this child’s mother?’ he’d ask the older man. ‘Are there any photographs or witnesses?’ he’d ask the young claimant. But now all they need to match fathers to their sons is a couple of blood samples for a DNA test. Time was, this would have been considered an assault on the very foundations of society.”

  “But how does it hurt society for a child to find out who his real father is?”

  “You’d be amazed at the stories of my lawyer friends who handle such cases, Mr. Cem. There are men who like to carry on with girls from poorer backgrounds, and if they happen to get them pregnant, they use their superior knowledge of the law to lead the girl on with promises of marriage ‘next year’ only to marry her off finally to some underling, as the old Ottoman generals used to do…I’ve also heard of cases of an extended family living under a single roof; a nephew seduces his uncle’s young wife, or a relation visiting from the village impregnates the neighbor’s wife, or his brother’s wife, or even his own sister…It all gets swept under the carpet to save face, prevent unnecessary bloodshed, and spare the institution of the family. But people don’t forget this kind of thing too easily…So, Mr. Cem, is it true that you slept with this boy’s mother, Ms. Gülcihan, in 1986, when you were sixteen years old?”

  “Only one time,” I said. “It’s hard to believe that would have been enough to produce a child.”

  “The lawyer they’ve found is relentless; he won’t give an inch. He’s one of these young, dedicated guys. He spent his own childhood thinking his father was someone else, so he never takes on this kind of case unless he believes his client is right.”

  “How can anyone be sure who’s right?” I said. “Is Ms. Gülcihan still alive?”

  “She is.”

  “When I was sixteen, she had red hair.”

  “She still does, and she’s still rather beautiful, actually. The marriage was not a happy one, but she is full of life and passion for the theater. Her husband, Turgay, died after they separated. So it’s clear she’s not making this claim to humiliate him but to secure some kind of income for her struggling son. She must have heard about DNA tests and the repeal of the old statute of limitations…”

  “And the boy, what has he been doing?”

  “This Enver, the man who claims to be your son, holds an accounting degree from some obscure university. He is single, runs a small accounting firm in Öngören…He’s also involved with nationalist youth organizations, hates Kurds and leftists. He has a real chip on his shoulder about his father and about life.”

  “When you say ‘his father,’ do you mean Turgay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Necati, what would you do in my position?”

  “You know much better than I do what happened thirty years ago, Mr. Cem, so I can’t put myself in your shoes. But since you do recall being with the lady in question, I’d suggest arranging a blood test…I’ll request one at the first court session, no need to waste time. I’ll also petition the judge to impose a gag order, otherwise the press will get wind of it and turn you into tabloid fodder.”

  “Let’s not tell Ayşe, for now. She’d be devastated if she found out. Why don’t you meet with this Enver first? Maybe we can find an amicable solution outside the courts.”

  “The lawyer says his client does not wish to meet you.”

  I was surprised at how much these words stung and realized that, deep down, I wanted to find out more about this “son” of mine.

  Did we look alike? Did he walk the way I did? How would I feel if we were to meet? Was he really colluding with a bunch of semifascist nationalists? Why had he settled in Öngören? What did the Red-Haired Woman think of all this?

 
; 38

  TWO MONTHS LATER, I had my blood tested at the university hospital in Çapa. Necati received the results in advance, and called me before the judge was due to read them out in court. The next week, the judge ruled that Enver was to be registered officially as my son. I’d spent each stage of the process, from the initial court proceedings to the blood test, the judge’s ruling, and finally the time in the registrar’s office, secretly hoping that I might run into my son in some corridor. How would we react when we first saw each other?

  According to our Necati, my son’s refusal to see me was a good sign. Whatever their age, sons who found themselves in this position were inevitably bitter. As soon as their true paternity was officially registered, they and their mothers earned the right to sue the father for damages suffered from years of living in penury. We should be relieved that neither had done this so far. Perhaps they weren’t interested in getting anything more out of us after all. But when he saw how relieved I was by his words, the lawyer warned me not to let my guard down; for ultimately, paternity cases were always about money. Never in history had a son gone to court to claim that his father was that impoverished nobody over there, rather than this distinguished, prosperous gentleman over here. Thinking of Sohrab’s investments, Necati reiterated that it would be wise to delay no further in arranging that company presentation in Öngören.

  I had to break the news to Ayşe first, so one evening I said, “There’s something I need to tell you, but it’s important. We should sit down and talk it through.”

  “What is it?” said Ayşe, already imagining the worst. I knew this was not a secret I could keep from myself and from the rest of the world as I’d kept Master Mahmut at the bottom of that well for all those years.

  “I have a son,” I blurted out at dinner after two glasses of rakı. I told her everything exactly as it had happened. As swiftly as the weight was lifted off my shoulders, it settled onto Ayşe’s.

  “I suppose you have a responsibility toward the child,” said Ayşe after a long silence. “This is very painful news. Do you want to meet him?”

  Faced with my silence, my wife began to ask her further questions: Did I want to see the Red-Haired Woman again? Did I want to befriend my son? Did I expect Ayşe to do so, too? Did this explain why we’d spent our lives poring over various versions and interpretations of Oedipus the King and the story of Rostam and Sohrab?

  We both got completely drunk that night and soon turned to the crucial matter we couldn’t help but think about: since we had no other children, and Turkish law did not recognize wills, this son of mine would automatically inherit two-thirds of Sohrab after I died. If Ayşe were to die before me (certainly possible, considering she wasn’t much younger than I was), this child we’d never even seen would receive the whole of Sohrab after I was gone.

  “Last night I dreamed that your son was murdered,” said Ayşe the next morning.

  We were discussing inheritance law, attorneys, and trust funds another night when she went even further: “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but sometimes I just want to kill him. Imagine the irony if that bastard’s name had been Sohrab.”

  “Don’t use that word,” I told my wife. “It’s not the child’s fault. Besides, we know who the real father is now.”

  Seeing me siding with the boy hurt my wife’s feelings, and she fell silent. She tried to get me to admit to having met up with my son without her knowledge. “He doesn’t even want to see me,” I reassured her. “I think he may be a little strange.”

  “What about you? Do you want to see him? Do you wonder what he looks like?”

  “No,” I lied. I’d decided that I couldn’t tell my wife the truth: that I had begun to feel an irrepressible, fascinated sympathy for my son.

  Three months had passed when Murat called me up from Athens with a proposal. Having remembered how much I enjoyed our trip to Tehran years ago, he said I should come and join him at the Hotel Grande Bretagne, where the British had set up their military headquarters during the civil war that engulfed Greece after World War II. When we met in Athens two days later, he announced breathlessly that Greece was about to go bankrupt. As we sat in the stylish hotel lobby, Murat informed me that property prices in the city had tumbled by half and that a fair number of people lounging around us right now were foreign businessmen—mostly Germans—come to snap up some property on the cheap. He had color photographs of some of the buildings on sale in the heart of the capital.

  I spent the next two days viewing properties with Murat and his estate agent in Athens. One afternoon I hired a taxi to take us to the city of Thebes, an hour away. Here, too, we saw abandoned railway lines, old carriages crawling with vines and spiders, empty factories and depots. King Oedipus’s city stood on a steep hill, just as Ingres and Gustave Moreau had painted it. Over a cup of coffee, Murat confessed he needed cash and offered to sell me the land he’d bought in Öngören.

  Our lawyers in Istanbul, whose minds worked more swiftly and meticulously than mine, confirmed that we could go ahead and advised that Murat’s asking price was reasonable. This acquisition was bound to make Sohrab a tidy profit, but before we moved forward, it was past time we arranged that neighborhood meeting we’d been talking about to remind the locals of my Öngören days, put their minds at ease about Sohrab’s intentions, and prove that I, too, treasured the memory of Master Mahmut.

  Unbeknownst to Ayşe, I authorized Necati to hire a private detective if need be to find out how Gülcihan and Enver would react if we were to announce such a meeting in Öngören.

  Two weeks later, my lawyer reported back. The Red-Haired Woman and her son, having always been inseparable, had grown apart after the paternity suit. When Necati had approached the red-haired Ms. Gülcihan, she had initially said she wouldn’t come to the meeting, and though she briefly relented, on the condition that we not “tell anyone,” she’d later changed her mind again and decided against attending. She lived in the Bakırköy neighborhood of Istanbul, in an apartment left to her by her husband, Turgay, and earned a modest living dubbing foreign TV series.

  According to Necati, my son, Enver, wouldn’t attend the meeting either, partly out of disgust at our advertising campaign, and partly to avoid anyone else’s finding out that I was his father. My son’s accountancy skills were average at best, but local shopkeepers trusted him and let him handle their bookkeeping and tax returns. Some thought he hadn’t married yet because he was too attached to his mother, and others blamed it on his temper. He mixed with a group of young men and women who shared his mother’s love of the theater and wrote poetry which was published in conservative journals like The Crescent and The Spring. Necati had found some copies, and as I read them at home, concealing them from Ayşe, I wondered what my father would have thought of a grandson of his writing poetry for religious magazines.

  I instructed Sohrab’s marketing department to organize the meeting in Öngören. I told Ayşe I wouldn’t be attending. I was intimidated by the prospect of returning to Öngören, and I didn’t want to upset my wife, who would have preferred there to be no meeting at all.

  I scheduled a trip to Ankara on the day of the presentation. But toward noon that Saturday, as I was making my way to the office, I decided to cancel that plan. The team was getting ready to make their way to Öngören, and their anticipation was contagious. I asked Necati not to tell Ayşe that I’d be joining them after all. I told my employees that I wanted to make the journey by train—as I’d been planning in the back of my mind for thirty years. On the way out, I grabbed my Kırıkkale pistol and the gun license that the government issued on request to oil barons and construction magnates. Two weeks before, I’d tested the Kırıkkale in one of Sohrab’s empty building sites, shooting bottles I’d lined up on bags of cement. Naturally, I was worried there might be trouble.

  39

  AS THE TRAIN to Öngören shuddered alongside the old city walls and the Marmara Sea, past ancient and crooked buildings and new parks, concrete hotels,
restaurants, ships, and cars, I grew increasingly nauseous. Necati had seen me off with assurances that Enver would not be present at the meeting, wouldn’t be in Öngören at all today, but I couldn’t help thinking there was a chance my son would come to see his father. Thirty years on, the fear of facing up to my crime against Master Mahmut had transformed into the thrill of meeting my son. As the train slowly pulled into Öngören, I couldn’t distinguish our plateau for the countless concrete buildings, yet I had the distinct feeling that there was someone here I was meant to meet.

  The moment I walked out of the station, I knew that the old Öngören was gone: the building I used to stare at looking for the Red-Haired Woman’s window had been demolished, and in its place a bustling shopping mall filled the whole square, drawing a young crowd eager to eat hamburgers and drink beer and soda. Banks, kebab vendors, and sandwich stalls had opened on the ground floors of the buildings defining the square’s perimeter. Retracing the same steps I followed so frequently in my memories, I started walking automatically from the Station Square to where the Rumelian Coffeehouse had stood, and specifically toward the spot on the pavement where our table had been, but I found nothing to remind me of all the cups of tea we’d had in that place. All the people who’d once been here, and all the homes in which they’d lived, had since disappeared, replaced by new buildings inhabited by new people—rowdy, cheerful, inquisitive, and eager to find ways of amusing themselves on a Saturday afternoon.