The Red-Haired Woman Read online

  Trying to find something to balance the scene with the weeping Tahmina, we introduced a reenactment of that moment when the prophet Abraham prepares to cut his only son’s throat to prove his submission to the will of God; I played a woman crying in the background and later the angel who walks onstage carrying a toy lamb. In fact, there was no real room for women in this story, and I wasn’t making much impact. So I reworked Oedipus’s exchange with his mother, Jocasta, for my monologue. The notion that a son might kill his own father by accident was met mostly with emotional detachment, but at least it stimulated the audience intellectually. That should have been enough. How I wish I’d left out the bit about the son sleeping with his red-haired mother…Today I can see what an ill-fated choice that was. Turgay had warned me. But I ignored him, just as I ignored the boy who brought us tea during rehearsals and exclaimed, “What the hell?” when he heard the speech, not to mention our manager Yusuf’s anxious response: “I’m not sure about this one!”

  In 1986, in the town of Güdül, I played Jocasta with red hair, shedding genuine tears as I spoke of how I’d inadvertently slept with my own son. We received a number of threats after the first performance, and after the second, the tent was set ablaze in the middle of the night, and we barely managed to extinguish the flames. I performed the same monologue again a month later in Samsun, where we’d set up near the shanties on the coast, and the next morning, local kids pelted our tent with rocks. In Erzurum, angry young nationalists accused us of peddling “Greek plays”; cowed by their threats, I had to hole up in our hotel while troops of brave and honorable policemen stood guard around our tent. We had begun to think that perhaps our art was too explicit for the hinterlands, but even when we went to the Progressive Patriots’ Society of Ankara, in a tiny auditorium stinking of coffee and rakı, we were ordered to stop after just a couple of performances for “offending the sensibilities and susceptibilities of the public.” It was hard to disagree with the judge in a country where every man’s favorite curse starts with “your mother.”

  I used to discuss these matters with Akın, my son’s future grandfather, back in my twenties when we were in love. He was always astonished to recall all the profanities boys learned in school and military service, swear words I’d never even heard of when he mentioned them, commenting how “disgusting” they were and launching into a tirade on the “oppression of women,” which always ended with his assurances that no such obscenities would survive the establishment of a working-class utopia. I had only to be patient and stand behind our men while they prepared the revolution. But this is neither the time nor the place to broach the age-old debate about sexism in the Turkish left-wing movement. My closing monologues are never just angry; they are lyrical and elegant, too. I hope my son’s book can match that tone and convey to its readers as full a range of emotions as I used to convey from the stage. It was in fact my idea that Enver should write a book about our experiences, beginning with his father and grandfather.

  When he was still a child, I considered schooling Enver at home rather than sending him to a place where he was bound to lose all the goodness and the humanity he was born with and pick up all the foul habits boys seem to acquire as they grow. But Turgay dismissed my idea as fantasy. By the time we enrolled our son in elementary school in Bakırköy, we had both quit the theater and started working as voice actors on those foreign TV series that were appearing on every channel. What kept us coming back to Öngören was Sırrı Siyahoğlu. Our leftist and socialist enthusiasms may have faded, but we still kept in touch with old friends. It was Sırrı in fact who would reunite us with Master Mahmut all those years later.

  Our Enver delighted in Master Mahmut’s stories. We would visit him in his house, where he had a beautiful well in the back garden. He had made a lot of money digging wells there during the flurry of construction projects that had followed his first one, and having also bought, early on, a good bit of local land that had since appreciated, he was living rather comfortably. The locals arranged for him to marry a beautiful widow whose husband had abandoned her and their son and gone to Germany, never to be seen again. Master Mahmut adopted the boy as his own; he was a good father to him. Enver became good friends with this boy, Salih. I tried, without luck, to get Salih interested in the theater. But most of my youth theater group was composed of Enver’s friends as well as other boys and girls from Öngören. I had started spending more time there because of Enver. The love of theater can be infectious. Most of these kids were frequent visitors at Master Mahmut’s house. He’d padlocked the lid on the well he’d dug in his honeysuckle-scented garden so none of the children would fall in while playing in the yard. But watching them from his second-floor balcony at the back I’d still call out to warn them: “Stay away from the well.” The things you hear in old myths and folktales always end up happening in real life.

  I played a central role in rescuing Master Mahmut from the well. The night before, I had been seduced by my clumsy teenaged lover—who would leave me pregnant, an outcome neither of us could have even remotely envisaged—and as he’d gulped down yet another glass of Club Rakı, he had confessed to me absolutely everything (those were his exact words): his master was putting far too much pressure on him, he’d had enough and just wanted to go home to his mother, he didn’t believe they’d ever find water, but he didn’t even care anymore; his only reason for remaining in Öngören was me.

  So when around noon the next day I saw him sprinting toward the train station with his little valise, I was perplexed. The men who fell in love with me (however fleetingly) after watching me perform weren’t often content with seeing me once; usually they were intensely jealous.

  I was probably just disappointed that I’d never see Cem again. He’d told me so little about his father; had he suspected something from the outset? My colleagues and I had planned to take the next train out of town, but I could not understand why Cem had fled Öngören like a bandit. The station was swarming with children and villagers bearing baskets of produce for the market. The night before Cem’s visit, Turgay had enlisted apprentice Ali to bring Master Mahmut to our tent, where he saw our show in respectful silence. We discovered that Ali was no longer helping him and that the landowner who’d commissioned the dig had stopped financing it. Burning with curiosity, we sent Turgay to the plateau to find out more, and since our train came and went in the meantime, the rest of us soon headed up the hill to the well like a gang of characters in an old fairy tale. After we lowered Ali down, he came back up carrying a semiconscious Master Mahmut.

  They took Master Mahmut to the hospital, but as we later discovered, he returned to his well before giving his broken collarbone a chance to heal properly. We never knew whether he found another apprentice; we’d left Öngören by then. To be honest, I was eager to forget how I’d slept with a high-school boy there one night in a moment of theatrical abandon, not to mention having been in love with that same boy’s father before him, only for that flame to burn out. I wasn’t yet thirty-five, and already I’d discovered how proud and fragile men could be, the sense of self that courses through their veins. I knew that fathers and sons were capable of killing each other. Whether it was fathers killing their sons, or sons killing the fathers, men always emerged victorious, and all that was left for me to do was weep. I thought perhaps I needed to unlearn everything and begin a new life elsewhere.

  Never mind Turgay; even I hardly suspected that Cem could be Enver’s father. It did cross my mind as I was working out when he could have been conceived, but I didn’t give it much more thought. Yet as Enver grew up and I saw clearly that his eyes and especially his nose looked nothing like Turgay’s, I began to think once more that perhaps my young lover was indeed the father of my son. Did Turgay ever wonder?

  Enver and Turgay never got along. It seemed that every time he looked at our son, Turgay remembered that I had originally been his brother Turhan’s wife. He also shared his brother’s opinion that having previously had an affair with a m
arried man, I must have been unfaithful to Turhan, too. I knew this was how he felt, though he never said as much. He couldn’t stand my red hair because it reminded him of my past—though he never admitted to that, either.

  I brought Turgay translations of plays and novels originally written in French or English to show him that the West portrayed red-haired women as fiery, assertive shrews, but he was unimpressed. I read an article entitled “Women According to Men,” which a women’s magazine had lifted verbatim from an English one. There was a painting of a beautiful red-haired woman with the caption: “Fierce and mysterious.” Her expression and the shape of her lips were comparable to mine. I clipped the picture out and stuck it on the wall, but my husband ignored it. Turgay’s horizons had always been much narrower than his leftist and internationalist pretenses implied. According to him, in our country, a redhead was a woman of easy virtue. If she’d chosen to color her hair red on purpose, it was tantamount to choosing that identity. Only the fact that I was an actress mitigated my offense by turning it into a kind of theatrical spectacle.

  Thus, in our years working as voice actors, Turgay and I grew apart. We lived in an apartment in Bakırköy that my husband had inherited from his parents, but Enver didn’t see much of his father at all. Turgay was busy dubbing commercials and adding in those jobs he took on the side, and he always got home late, if at all. Sadly, I know what it’s like to raise a child whose father may or may not be back for dinner.

  So Enver and I became very close. I was there to witness the evolution of his shifting moods, of his delicate soul and sensibility. I felt his fury, his loneliness, and his hopelessness as clearly as I observed his terrors, his silences, and his little anxieties. I loved running my fingers over the smooth skin on his arms and his neck, and I was gratified by the sight of his shoulders and ears spreading out. The development of his sexual organs was no less gratifying than the burgeoning of his intelligence, his powers of reason, and the survival of his childish silliness.

  Some days we were just as he wanted us to be, best friends chatting, laughing, playing hide-and-seek at home, solving crossword puzzles, and shopping together. But sometimes a veil of melancholy and loneliness would descend upon us, and we would take refuge even from each other, terrified by the sheer size of the world and fed up with our place in it. I understood in those moments how difficult it is to empathize with anyone, to truly know another and commune with their soul—even when the person in question was Enver, the one I loved most in life. I would take him by the hand and show him the whole world: streets, houses, paintings, parks, oceans, ships. I wanted him to play out in the street with his friends in Bakırköy and Öngören, also to learn how to fight for himself and stand on his own two feet, but I wanted just as badly for him to steer clear of those delinquents who called one another motherfucker, lest he should turn into one of those men who used to jeer us in the theater tent.

  Enver spent much less time than the other children playing outside. But to my dismay, he was also an average student and never top of his class. Sometimes I wondered why this upset me so much. After all, more than I wanted him to have a successful career—or even to be rich—I wanted my son to be compassionate, to value justice, and to be at peace. But I felt he could be happy and a hero both! I had such high hopes for him. I used to pray that he would never be the kind to fill his head with trivial concerns. When, as a little boy, he would bawl his eyes out with his pink mouth hanging wide open, I would chant, “May life be kind to my darling son.”

  I would look earnestly into his liquid eyes and tell him that he was different from everyone else, that there was something special about his spirit. We read children’s books, old fairy tales, and poems together. We watched cartoons and children’s theater shows on TV. I could see that he was more thoughtful and sensitive than his father and grandfather. I told him he would write plays one day. He liked the idea of writing but rejected the theater.

  After his elementary-school years, an angrier and pricklier side to Enver started to emerge; I’d never seen it in either his father or his grandfather. I made allowances for his rages, thinking he might have inherited them from me. He’d been such a serene child. As a baby, my Enver used to love bath time, when I rinsed his graceful, delicate little body with warm water, carefully soaping up his slender arms, his sweet, melon-shaped head, his little bean of a penis, and his strawberry-pink nipples. The bathroom would be nice and warm, and sometimes I would wash myself after washing him. In the house in Bakırköy the bathroom always took forever to warm up, so we bathed in the tub together until he turned ten. Afterward, I taught him how to bathe on his own, how to wash his head, his hair, and his legs without opening his eyes.

  My son didn’t like that at all, and I’ve come to believe that his fits of rage, which grew more protracted and severe as he grew older, took root at this time. During his high-school years, when Turgay stopped coming home altogether, Enver became miserable, his sorrow exacerbated by failing to get into a decent university and by my disappointment, which I couldn’t hide despite how much I adored him. He seemed to relish arguing with me and contradicting me just for the sake of it. When I criticized his comic books or changed the TV channel he was watching, he would snarl, “What would you know?” He would shave his head like a fugitive or grow a beard like a religious fanatic or leave his cheeks unshaven for days like a lunatic, and taking a twisted satisfaction in my alarm, he would pick a fight. We would end up screaming at each other until he stormed off, slamming the door behind him.

  At the university, he started going often to Öngören to see his childhood friends. He had fallen in with a bunch of unemployed idealists he’d met at Master Mahmut’s place. He went through a phase of gambling on the horse races at the Veliefendi track near our house in Bakırköy, but quickly repented, and never once asked me for money. During his military service in Burdur, he was so lonely that he would spend his weekend leave on the phone with me, crying. When he came home to Istanbul, my eyes would well up with tender tears to see him with such short hair, so sunburned, and so skinny, his neck like a cherry stalk. We were always on the verge of another shouting match, after which we could sometimes go several days without speaking. He would retaliate by staying out late or, worse, not coming home at all, and I would spend sleepless nights waiting for him. I was terrified that he might fall for some half-witted girl or a damaged, aggressive older woman. But no matter how much we argued and sulked, and in spite of all our heavy silences and snide remarks, at some point we would hug each other tight and make up. In those moments, I would realize that I could not endure being separated from my son, or survive without him.

  Since we were already estranged from his father (or the man he thought was his father), Enver was unaffected when Turgay and I formally divorced and even when Turgay eventually passed away. I ascribed the boy’s fits of rage, his irrational furies, his increasingly taciturn and judgmental ways to his sensitive nature and to the absence of a father figure. But the chief cause, I also believed, was poverty. So when I saw Cem and his property developments in newspaper ads, and read in those same papers how Western medicine had worked out fail-safe ways for anyone to determine the true identity of their father, even to the satisfaction of the Turkish courts, it got me thinking.

  In my youth, I would never have dreamed of filing this kind of lawsuit. Using the police and the laws of the state to corner a man into accepting his responsibility for a child he would otherwise never have acknowledged; dangling the threat of another lawsuit to extract more money; showing up at the public meeting he’d organized…My son was appalled at the things I was doing. But he also knew that it was all for his sake, and once the flurries of rage abated, he was mollified.

  For months I’d begged and cajoled him into filing the suit; we yelled and quarreled endlessly. Obviously it was asking a lot for him to accept that his mother had had an extramarital affair that had produced a child, let alone that she’d kept it a secret for all these years. He would ask me a
gain and again, with furious embarrassment, “Are you sure?” and as many times I would answer, “Would I have said anything if I wasn’t?” He would look away—or perhaps I would—and we would both fall silent.

  But mostly, we screamed at each other. “It’s for your own good!” I’d tell him. That was the strongest case I could make. During one row, he pulled down the picture of the red-haired woman on the wall and ripped it in half. He told me he’d learned on the Internet that she was as bad as I was. So I looked her up, too. The picture I’d taken from a magazine was of a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Struck by his model’s alluring eyes and her full lips, he fell in love and married her. I repaired the picture with tape and put it back up on the wall.

  My son could only ever broach the subject of suing his father when drinking rakı, whose influence fortified him with the confidence to discuss anything while also exacerbating his stern irritability and causing him to address his mother in language befitting a sailor. As when he first moved to Öngören after university, now too he would curse me after every row, vowing not to waste another moment’s thought on a whore like me (or horrible words to that effect). But then, unable to cope on his own, he’d take the train from Öngören and show up in Bakırköy for dinner a day or two later.

  “I’m glad you came,” I used to say. “I made meatballs.”

  We’d chat about this and that as if nothing had happened only two days before. After dinner, we would sit side by side on the couch, just a mother and her son watching television, as we used to do every evening when he was still in school and we awaited his father, who never came home. When the show was over, he would be too proud to admit his reluctance to go back home and spend the night on his own, so he would instead start switching channels looking for another program to become engrossed in.