The Red-Haired Woman Read online

  We didn’t speak again for a long while. Even the factory dog had gone inexplicably quiet. The silence that reigned was profound, and it reminded me of the time when my father abandoned us years ago, that feeling of forgetting even what his face looked like. It would feel like being in a room when the lights go out or like going momentarily blind.

  As I looked at Enver, he looked at me, trying to read my thoughts. I felt a building disillusionment. Our reunion would be nothing like those emotional scenes from Turkish melodramas, with tearful embraces and cries of “Father!” and “Son!”

  “It seems you’re the one who’s been pretending,” I said eventually. “Why would my son, Enver, try to pass himself off as Serhat?”

  “To decide whether he’s even going to like his father…To see whether I’ll warm to you. Fatherhood means a lot to me.”

  “What is a father to you?”

  “A father is a doting, charismatic figure who will until his dying day accept and watch over the child he sires. He is the origin and the center of the universe. When you believe that you have a father, you are at peace even when you can’t see him, because you know that he is always there, ready to love and protect you. I never had a father like that.”

  “Neither did I,” I said impassively. “But if I’d had one, he’d have expected me to obey him, and he’d have suppressed my individuality with his affection and the force of his personality!”

  Enver’s eyes widened with the realization that his father had clearly given the question some prior thought. He seemed genuinely, even respectfully, interested in what I had to say; that was encouraging.

  “Would I have been happy if I’d bowed to my father’s will?” I wondered aloud. “That might have made me a good son, but I would have fallen short of being a true individual.”

  He bluntly put a stop to my musings: “Our wealthy, Westernized classes are so obsessed with individualism, they’ve forgotten how to be themselves, let alone how to be individuals,” he said. “These Westernized Turks are too conceited to believe in God. Their individuality is all they care about. Most choose not to believe in God just to prove they’re not like everyone else, though they won’t even acknowledge that’s the reason why. But faith is precisely about being like everyone else. Religion is the haven and the consolation of the meek.”

  “I agree.”

  “So you’re saying you do believe in God. That must be hard to admit, for a rich and Westernized Turk.”

  “Yes.”

  “If you really believe in God and you’ve read the Koran, why did you leave Master Mahmut in this bottomless well? How could you? True believers have a conscience.”

  “I’ve thought about that a lot. I was a child, back then.”

  “No, you weren’t. You were old enough to sleep around and get women pregnant.”

  I was stunned by the sharpness of his response. “You know everything,” I murmured.

  “Yes, Master Mahmut told me everything,” snarled Enver. “You left him at the bottom of the well because you are vain, and you thought your life was worth more than his. Your school, your university dreams, and your life were more important to you than the existence of that poor man.”

  “But that’s normal. Everyone thinks that way.”

  “Some people don’t!”

  “You’re right,” I said, backing away from the well.

  There was a long silence. The dog began to bark again.

  “Are you afraid?” asked my son.

  “Of what?”

  “Of falling into the well.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “People must be wondering where we are. Let’s head back…This kind of impertinence is not what I would expect of a son…”

  “Oh, and how should I have addressed you, dear Father?” he said, derisively. “If you want me to be an obedient son, I can’t be a modern individual, can I? If you want me to be a modern individual, then I can’t be an obedient son. You have to help me out here.”

  “My son can obey his father of his own volition, and still remain a fully formed individual,” I said. “Our character is forged not just by our freedoms, but also by the forces of history and memory. This well is history and memory to me. I’m grateful to you for bringing me here, Mr. Enver. But this conversation is over now.”

  “Why do you want to go back? Are you afraid?”

  “Why would I be afraid!”

  “You’re not worried about falling into the well by accident; you’re scared that I might push you in,” he said, looking into my eyes.

  I looked right back at him. “Why would you do something like that to your father?” I said.

  “To avenge Master Mahmut…,” he began. “To make you pay for abandoning me, for seducing my married mother, for not even bothering to write back to your own son after all those years…Or perhaps just to be the Westernized individual you want me to be. Oh, and of course to inherit your fortune…”

  I was alarmed at the length of this list. I tried to talk him—my son—out of it. “You’d be dragged through the courts and end up rotting in jail,” I warned him tenderly. “You’d spend the rest of your life in prison waiting for your mother’s next visit. Things like murdering your father or protesting the government are only celebrated in the West. Over here, everyone except your mother would hate you for what you’d done. Besides, patricidal sons are not entitled to their father’s inheritance; it’s the law.”

  “Nobody does something like this thinking of the consequences,” said my son. “If you think of the consequences, you can’t be free. Freedom requires forgetting about history and ethics. Have you ever read Nietzsche?”

  I decided to keep quiet.

  “Anyway, if I were to push you into the well right now and tell everyone you fell in by accident…no one would be able to prove me wrong.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Sometimes my anger at you is so intense that the thing I want most is to gouge out your eyes,” said my son meditatively. “The most unbearable thing about fathers is that they can always see you!”

  “A father’s regard is something to be cherished.”

  “Only if he’s a real father! A real father is a just father. You’re not even a real father. I’d definitely start by blinding you.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I’m a poet; playing with words is my calling. At the same time, I know that what we really think can’t be expressed in words, only in pictures. I can’t ever put the essence of what I’m thinking into words, but I can visualize it as an image. And the only way I can imagine becoming the sort of independent individual you want me to be is to blind you right now. Do you know why? Because if I do that, it’ll mean I’ve finally become my own self; I’ll have written my own story and created my own legend.”

  It was hurtful to hear all his animosity and hostility directed at me. I should have embraced him and kissed him as a proper father would have done. But in the grips of disappointment and remorse, I said something I shouldn’t have said:

  “You’re not a real son, either. You’re both too resentful and too submissive.”

  “Submissive? Tell me how!”

  I took a step back, flinching at the furious gesture punctuating his words. He stepped closer.

  My second mistake was, at this point, to draw the Kırıkkale pistol from my inner pocket and to make a show of cocking it, half in jest.

  “Stop right there, Son. Don’t make me do this. It might go off!” I said.

  “You don’t even know how to use that,” he said, lunging at the Kırıkkale.

  We toppled over in the obscurity, father and son, and wrestled on the musty earth near the well. We’d rolled around several times until he pinned me down, grabbed my arm, and started smashing it against the side of the well, trying to release my grip on the gun…

  • PART III •

  THE RED-HAIRED WOMAN

  ONE NIGHT around thirty years ago, in the earlier half of the 1980s, a few members of our theater tro
upe were having dinner and drinks with a group of political activists from the provincial town where we were performing, when a red-haired woman appeared at the other end of the table. Everybody started commenting on the remarkable coincidence of having two redheads at the same table, saying, “What are the odds” and debating whether we were in fact harbingers of good luck or of some other kind, when suddenly the red-haired woman at the far end of the table declared:

  “I’m a natural redhead.”

  She seemed at once apologetic and proud. “Look, I have freckles on my face and on my arms. My skin is fair, and my eyes are green.”

  The whole table turned to me, eager to see how I would respond.

  “You may have been born a redhead, but I chose to become one,” I replied immediately.

  Now, I’m not normally one to have such ready answers in life, but I’d given the matter a lot of thought previously. “God blessed you with red hair; what was destiny for you was a conscious decision for me.”

  I left it at that, not wanting my drinking companions to think I was too full of myself. I could already hear them scoffing. But had I held my tongue, it would have been like saying, “Yes, guilty, my hair color is fake,” and my silence would have been taken for capitulation. They would have come to the wrong conclusions about my character and labeled me an impostor with unsophisticated aspirations.

  For those of us who become redheads later in life, choosing the color is equivalent to selecting a personality. After becoming a redhead, I spent the rest of my days trying to stay true to my choice.

  In my midtwenties, I was active in reviving the open-air folk theater tradition for modern audiences and hadn’t yet begun spinning morality tales out of ancient myths and fables. Though I was full of righteous liberal sentiments, I was basically content. My lover at the time—a handsome militant ten years my senior—had just left me after a secret affair lasting three years. Oh, how romantic, how blissful, we’d felt all those hours we’d spent poring over books together! Though I was angry at him for leaving me, I couldn’t really blame him; our affair had been discovered, and our comrades wouldn’t stand for it. They insisted that the romance would poison the group and end in tears for all those involved. Then before we knew it, it was 1980, and there’d been another military coup. Some of us went underground; some crossed over by boat into Greece and from there on to Germany, where they became political exiles; some were arrested and tortured. My old lover Akın went back home to his wife, his son, and his pharmacy. Turhan, whose attentions had always annoyed me, and whom I’d always resented for bad-mouthing my lover, now treated me with great kindness. One thing led to another, and we decided to get married, thinking it would also be good for our leftist group, the National Revolutionaries.

  But my new husband couldn’t get over my old relationship. He was convinced my past was undermining his authority with the organization’s rank and file, though he stopped short of blaming me for being “easy.” He was nothing like my married lover Akın, who forgot as fast as he loved. For Turhan there was no pretending that nothing was wrong. He started hearing veiled gibes and insinuations in the most innocent comments. Pretty soon he accused his National Revolutionary comrades of ineffectiveness and went off to Malatya to marshal an armed resistance. But when those very people my husband was trying to muster alerted the authorities to the presence of a rabble-rouser, the gendarmes cornered him in a ditch somewhere. I’m sure you can guess what happened next.

  Having suffered a second major loss in such a short space of time, I felt even more alienated from politics. I considered going back home to live with my parents (my father had been involved in local government before retiring), but I could never commit myself to doing so. Going home would mean both a defeat and giving up acting—and it would have been a struggle to find another theater company willing to let me join them. I had reached a point in life where I wanted to be involved in the theater for its own sake—not because of politics.

  So I stayed within the organization and eventually married my late husband’s younger brother, just like those wives of Ottoman cavalrymen sent to the Persian front never to return, the only difference being that it was my idea to marry Turgay. I was also the one who encouraged him to set up a traveling theater. In the early days, our marriage was thus unexpectedly harmonious. I had already loved and lost two men, and Turgay’s boyish youth seemed like a guarantee that he would last. We spent winters in big cities like Istanbul or Ankara, performing in the auditoriums of left-wing organizations and in meeting halls you could hardly call theaters, and during the summers we followed our friends’ recommendations, taking our tent to provincial towns, holiday resorts, military garrisons, and newly built plants and factories. We’d been living like this for three years when I met that other red-haired woman at the dinner table, and it had been only one year before that I’d decided to dye my hair red.

  It wasn’t a deliberate decision. One day, I just went into some nondescript salon in Bakırköy and told the middle-aged hairdresser: “I want to change my color.” I didn’t even have a specific one in mind.

  “Your hair is already rather light; blond would suit you.”

  “Dye it red,” I said instinctively. “That’ll look good.”

  He chose a shade somewhere between an orange and a fire truck. It really stood out, but neither Turgay nor anyone else I cared about complained. Perhaps they thought I was preparing for a show. I knew they also put it down to the unfortunate run of love affairs I’d suffered through. “Can you blame her?” they might have said, before looking away.

  The reactions I received helped me realize the full import of what I’d done. Turkish people are singularly preoccupied with the distinction between authentic and artificial. After that other redhead’s pompous dinner-table affirmation, I stopped relying on hairdressers and their chemicals and started dyeing my own hair with henna bought from the market. I suppose this was the upshot of my encounter with the natural redhead.

  Onstage, I always paid particular attention to the high-school boys, university students, and lonely soldiers in the audience, keeping my heart wide open to their dreams and longings. They are much better than older men at distinguishing what is real from what is fake, between affected and genuine emotion. If I hadn’t been dyeing my hair with my own henna recipe, perhaps I would never have caught Cem’s eye.

  I noticed him because he noticed me. He looked so much like his father that it was a joy to look at him. I realized he had fallen for me when I caught him looking up at the windows of the building we were living in. He was shy, which I also appreciated. Shameless men scare me, and we certainly have plenty of those to go around. Of course shamelessness is contagious, and so widespread that this country can sometimes feel suffocating. Most of these men expect you to be as shameless as they are. But Cem was gentle and timid. I worked out who he was during our stroll around the Station Square the night he came to see our show.

  I was surprised, but perhaps some part of me had known who he was all along. Theater has taught me not to dismiss anything in life as mere coincidence. It’s no coincidence that both my son and his father dreamed of being writers; that I was reunited with the father of my boy here in Öngören thirty years later; that my son experienced the agony of fatherlessness just as his own father had before him; and that, after years of shedding tears onstage, I now have real reason to weep.

  In the wake of the coup of 1980, our folk theater group shifted its political stance to stave off any run-ins with the government. We diluted our leftist rhetoric. Trying to appeal to the widest audience possible, I picked speeches from Rumi’s Masnavi and old Sufi stories and fables, as well as emotional scenes and dialogues from familiar tales like “Farhad and Shirin” or Asli and Karam. But by far our most popular piece was the monologue I’d adapted from the story of Rostam and Sohrab at the suggestion of an old screenwriter friend who used to write melodramas for the Yeşilçam films and who assured us that this particular story never got old.

/>   After a few spoofs of popular television commercials, I would break into a belly dance, at which point the catcalling lechers in the audience, driven wild by my long legs and short skirt, would either fall in love on the spot or else lose themselves in elaborate sexual fantasies; but the moment I stepped back onstage as Sohrab’s mother, Tahmina, and shrieked at the sight of what my husband had done to my son, every single one of them—even the perverts who’d just been howling, “Take it off!”—would fall into a ponderous, unnerving silence.

  I would start to cry, softly at first, but building quickly to full-throated sobs. As I wept, I would revel in my power over them and rejoice in having devoted my life to the theater. Standing onstage in my long, revealing red dress, the costume jewelry, the broad military sash around my waist, and an antique bracelet on my arm, I cried with a grief only mothers can know, and looking at those men seated before me, feeling their souls tremble, seeing their eyes well up, I’d recognize the guilt stirring in them all. From the way they all sided with him as soon as the fight began, I could tell that most of the angry, young provincial men identified with Sohrab, not his powerful, overbearing father, Rostam. It was therefore essentially their own deaths they were mourning. But they would not allow themselves to weep at their fates until their red-haired mother led the way with her uncontainable grief.

  Even in the grip of such excruciating emotions, my adoring fans couldn’t help but let their eyes roam over my face, neck, cleavage, legs, and of course my red hair, in keeping with how abstract suffering is commonly joined with sexual arousal in the old folktales. In certain rare and glorious moments, I was able with every glance, every turn of the neck, and every measured step to engage those men in their minds and hearts at once, appealing to their youthful sensuality. Sometimes one of them would burst into noisy tears, his sobs quickly infecting others around him. Someone else, feeling uncomfortable, might start clapping in the middle of the piece, drowning me out and provoking a scuffle. On several occasions, I witnessed the entire audience inside the tent lose its collective mind: the loud bawlers tangled with the buttoned-up weepers; the swearing hecklers taking on both those who cheered us and those who watched quietly. Normally this kind of energy and intensity from the crowd is something I crave, but the threat of violence could make me nervous.