The Red-Haired Woman Read online

  I thought the Red-Haired Woman must live on either the top or the middle floor with her brother and the rest of her family. If it was the top floor, they were likely somewhat better off. What did her father do for a living? I hadn’t seen him. Maybe he’d gone missing, too, like my own father.

  As I toiled by day, slowly turning the handle of the windlass to lift up the heavy bucketfuls of earth, or as I lay dozing in the shade during our lunch break, I would find my thoughts turning to her, the picture of her filling my daydreams. I was a little embarrassed, but not to be dreaming of a woman I didn’t even know while doing something that required my undivided attention; rather, I was mortified by my own naïveté and the childishness of these fantasies. For already I was imagining how we would get married, make love, and live happily ever after in a home of our own. I couldn’t take my mind off the time I’d seen her in that doorway: her quick gestures, her little hands, her tall frame, the curve of her lips, and her tender, sorrowful expression—and, most of all, the teasing look that had crossed her face as she laughed. Such dreams blossomed all over my mind like wildflowers.

  Sometimes I pictured us reading a book together, before at last kissing and making love. According to my father, the greatest happiness in life was to marry the girl you’d spent your youth reading books with in the passionate pursuit of a shared ideal. I’d heard him tell my mother as much while describing someone else’s happiness.

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  ON THE WAY back to our tent after these evenings in town, I would feel as if we were walking toward the sky itself. There were no houses on the slope that led up to our plateau, so it would be pitch-black, and I would have the impression of getting closer to the stars ahead of us with every step we took. When they were veiled by the cypress trees in the little cemetery at the top of the hill, the night turned even darker. Once, a shooting star traversed a sliver of sky still visible between the cypresses, and we both turned to each other at the same time, as if to say, Did you see that?

  We often saw shooting stars when we sat by the tent to talk. Master Mahmut believed that each star corresponded to a life. Almighty God had made summer nights starry to remind us of how many people and how many lives there were in the world. Whenever he saw a shooting star, Master Mahmut would grow mournful and say a prayer as if having witnessed someone’s death. Observing that I wasn’t particularly interested, he would resent my indifference and immediately start telling a new story. Did I have to accept everything he told me just so he wouldn’t be angry at me? Many years later, when I grasped the immeasurable effect that Master Mahmut’s stories had over the course of my life, I started reading anything I could find about their origins.

  Most of Master Mahmut’s stories were derived from the Koran. One, for instance, was about the devil who led people onto the sinful path of idolatry by tempting them to draw portraits so they could remember the dead by looking at them. But Master Mahmut’s were modified versions of familiar tales, as if he’d heard them from a dervish, or at a coffeehouse, or even as if he’d lived them himself, as when he unexpectedly tied them into personal recollections that sounded completely credible.

  He told me once about how he’d inspected a five-hundred-year-old well from the Byzantine era. Everyone thought the well was haunted by jinn or under some spell or curse. To show them that it harbored nothing more than an ordinary gas leak, Master Mahmut spread open the pages of a newspaper like the wings of a dove, which he set on fire and dropped into the well. As the blazing newspaper drifted slowly down the well, the flames faded until it reached the bottom, where they died entirely “because there was no air there.” “You mean there was no oxygen,” I corrected him. Unperturbed by my childish impertinence, he went on to explain how all the lizard- and scorpion-infested Byzantine wells of brick and hewn stone used Khorasani mortar just like the Ottomans did. And that furthermore all the master welldiggers in Istanbul before Atatürk and the founding of the republic were in fact Armenian.

  He would reminisce fondly about the countless wells he’d dug in the poor neighborhoods behind Sarıyer, Büyükdere, and Tarabya, and all the apprentices he’d taught back in the 1970s, when business was so brisk he sometimes had more than one dig going at a time. In those years, it felt as if the whole Anatolian population was coming to settle in Istanbul, building ramshackle houses on the hills overlooking the Bosphorus, where there was neither water nor electricity. A few neighbors would pool their money to hire Master Mahmut, who in those days had his own swanky horse-drawn cart, painted with flowers and fruits; like a rich developer overseeing the projects in his portfolio, he might in a single day visit up to three separate neighborhoods to inspect a dig. At each site, he would enter the well himself, rushing off to the next only once he was confident the apprentice there had the job in hand.

  “If you don’t trust your apprentice, you can’t be a welldigger,” he’d say. “The master has to know that the apprentice will do his job properly, quickly, and accurately. You can’t focus on your work down there if you’re worried about what’s going on up here. To survive, a welldigger must be able to trust his apprentice as he would his own son. Now tell me, who was my master?”

  “Who?” I’d ask, despite knowing the answer.

  “My father was my master,” he would reply with the air of a teacher, ignoring how often he’d already told me the story. “If you want to be a good apprentice, you will have to be like a son to me.”

  According to Master Mahmut, it was every master’s duty to love, protect, and educate his apprentice as a father would—for the apprentice would eventually inherit his master’s job. In return, it was the apprentice’s duty to learn from his master, to heed his instructions, and to treat him with due deference. If the relationship was soured by antipathy and defiance, it would injure both parties—just as with an actual father and son—and work on the well would have to be abandoned. Knowing that I was a good boy from a good family, Master Mahmut wasn’t worried; he did not expect impudence or disobedience from me.

  Born in the district of Suşehri near the city of Sivas, Master Mahmut had moved to Istanbul with his parents at the age of ten, spending the rest of his childhood in a makeshift house they’d built somewhere behind the neighborhood of Büyükdere. He liked pointing out that his family was poor. His father had worked many years as a gardener at one of the last few family mansions left in Büyükdere. Eventually, he learned how to dig a well when, by chance, he found himself assisting a master digger. When he realized how lucrative the work could be, he decided to change occupations, selling all of his livestock and taking his son Mahmut as an apprentice. Mahmut served his father all the way through high school, until it was time for his military service. When he returned from that in the 1970s, wells were being dug everywhere to supply water to orchards and poor neighborhoods. Soon enough the old man passed away, whereupon Mahmut bought himself a horse-drawn cart and took his father’s place. He’d go on to dig more than one hundred and fifty wells over nearly twenty years. He was now forty-three, like my father, but he’d never been married.

  Did he know that my father had left us penniless? I wondered about that every time Master Mahmut described his own boyhood in the grip of poverty. Sometimes it seemed that he was taunting me for being forced to work as a welldigger’s apprentice, having started off in life as a “little gentleman” from a family that owned a pharmacy—in other words, for being genteel.

  One evening a week after we’d started to dig, Master Mahmut told me the story of Joseph and his brothers. I listened closely to how their father, Jacob, had favored Joseph out of all his sons, only for the jealous brothers to trick Joseph and throw him down a dark well. The most memorable part was when Master Mahmut looked right at me and said, “True, Joseph was good and very clever, but a father mustn’t have favorites among his sons.” And then he added: “A father must be fair. A father who isn’t fair will blind his son.”

  What was behind this talk of blindness? How had the topic even come up? Was it to emphas
ize how dark it had been inside the well where Joseph was confined? I have asked myself this question countless times over the years. Why did that story upset me so much and make me so angry at Master Mahmut?

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  THE NEXT DAY, Master Mahmut hit upon an unexpectedly hard layer of rock, and for the first time, we felt deflated. It was so hard, he was worried about breaking his pickax, so he had to proceed very cautiously, which slowed us down even more.

  While we waited for the empty bucket to fill up, Ali would lie down on the grass to rest. But I never took my eyes off Master Mahmut chipping away down below. The heat was exhausting and the sun burned my neck.

  The landowner, Hayri Bey, who came by at noon, was displeased to hear about the rock. He stood under the blazing sun, staring into the depths of the well as he smoked a cigarette. He returned to Istanbul, leaving us a watermelon, which we had for lunch with some white cheese and warm fresh bread.

  Master Mahmut hadn’t been able to dig far enough that day to warrant pouring more concrete into the well in the afternoon. So he kept stubbornly at his digging until sundown. He was tired and restless when I served him his dinner after Ali left; we didn’t exchange a word.

  “If only we’d started digging in the spot I showed you,” Hayri Bey had said earlier that day. I thought this comment, questioning Master Mahmut’s expertise and instincts, must explain why Master Mahmut seemed so despondent.

  “Let’s not go to town today,” he said as we finished our dinner.

  It was late, he was tired, and I understood his reluctance. But I was upset anyway. In the space of a week, I had reached the point where I could not do without walking to the Station Square every evening and looking up at the windows of that building hoping to see the Red-Haired Woman inside.

  “You go ahead, though,” said Master Mahmut. “You can get me a pack of Maltepe cigarettes. You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?”

  The sky above was clear and luminous. I looked at the stars and walked briskly toward the lights of the little town of Öngören. Before reaching the cemetery, I saw two stars falling simultaneously and felt a thrill, taking it as a sign that I was certain to meet her.

  But when I got to the Station Square, the lights in their building were out. I went to the bespectacled tobacconist’s and bought Master Mahmut’s cigarettes. The sounds of a chase scene carried over from the outdoor Sun Cinema. I peeped at the screen through a gap in a wall, hoping to spy the Red-Haired Woman and her family in the audience, but they weren’t there.

  On the outskirts of town, at the start of the road that led to the army garrison, there stood a tent surrounded by theater posters. A sign on the tent said:

  THE THEATER OF MORALITY TALES

  One summer when I was little, a theater had been set up this way in a tent, not far from the amusement park in the empty lot behind the Ihlamur Palace. But that theater didn’t do too well, and it soon shut down. This one must be the same sort of provisional affair, I mused, as I lingered in the street. At length, the cinema crowd dispersed, the last TV broadcast signed off, the streets emptied out, but still the windows facing the train station remained dark.

  I scurried back, gnawed by guilt. My heart was beating fast as I climbed the hill toward the cemetery. I sensed an owl watching me silently from its perch on the cypress tree.

  Maybe the Red-Haired Woman and her family had left Öngören. Or maybe they were still in town, and I’d panicked for no reason and cut my reconnaissance short for fear of Master Mahmut. Why was I so wary of him?

  “What took you so long? I was worried,” he said.

  He’d had a nap and seemed in a better mood. He took the pack of cigarettes and lit one up straightaway. “Anything going on in town?”

  “Nothing going on,” I said. “There was a traveling theater.”

  “Those degenerates have been there since we got here,” said Master Mahmut. “All they do is dance suggestively and tell dirty jokes for the soldiers. Those places are no different from brothels. Steer clear! Now, since you’re the one who has just been to town and among people, why don’t you tell a story tonight, little gentleman?”

  I wasn’t expecting that. Why had he called me “little gentleman” again? I tried to think of something that would upset him. If Master Mahmut meant to bring me to heel with his stories, then I must at least try to unsettle him with one of mine! I kept thinking of things like blindness and theaters. So I began to tell him the story of the Greek king Oedipus. I had never read the original, but at the Deniz Bookstore last summer, I’d come across a summary, and it had stayed with me.

  This text, which I’d found in an anthology called Dreams and Life, had been lurking in some corner of my mind for the past year, like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp. Now here I was telling that same story, not as I’d learned it—secondhand and abridged—but with all the intensity of a real memory:

  As the son of Laius, king of the Greek city of Thebes, Oedipus was heir to the throne. So important was he that even while he was still in his mother’s womb, an oracle was consulted about his future. But a terrible prophecy was pronounced…Here I paused a little and, just like Master Mahmut, fixed my eyes on the indistinct apparitions that populated the TV screen.

  According to this awful prophecy, Prince Oedipus was destined to murder his father, marry his own mother, and take his father’s place on the throne. Terrified by this prospect, Laius had his son taken away at birth, to be left in the forest to die.

  The abandoned baby Oedipus was saved by a lady from the court of the neighboring kingdom who found him among the trees. Everything about the foundling indicated that he was of noble birth, so even in this other country, he was raised as a prince by the childless king and queen. But as soon as he grew up, he began to feel he did not belong there. Wondering why that might be, he too asked an oracle to divine his future and heard the same awful story again: God meant for Oedipus to kill his own father and sleep with his own mother. To escape this terrible fate, Oedipus immediately fled.

  He arrived in Thebes, not knowing that it was his true homeland; and while crossing a bridge, he got into a pointless argument with an old man. This was his real father, Laius. (I lingered on this scene for a long time, describing how father and son could fail to recognize each other and start fighting, as if in some scene from a melodramatic Turkish movie.)

  They grappled fiercely until eventually Oedipus prevailed, cutting his father down with a furious swipe of his sword. “Of course he had no idea that the man he’d just killed was his father,” I said, looking right at Master Mahmut.

  He was listening with his brows furrowed and a troubled look on his face, as if I were relaying bad news rather than just recounting an old fable.

  No one had seen Oedipus kill his father. No one in Thebes accused him of the murder. (As I listened to myself, I wondered what it might be like to get away with a crime as serious as murdering your own father.) But then the city had other problems: a monster with the head of a woman, the body of a lion, and giant wings on its back was destroying crops and killing passersby unable to answer its riddle. So when he solved the impossible riddle set by the Sphinx, Oedipus was hailed as a hero for having rid the city of this nuisance, and for good measure was crowned the new king of Thebes. That’s how he ended up married to the queen, his own mother, who didn’t know that he was her son.

  I told this last part in a hurried whisper, as if to make sure no one overheard. “Oedipus married his mother,” I repeated. “They had four children. I found this story in a book,” I added so that Master Mahmut wouldn’t think I’d dreamed up these horrors myself.

  “Years later, a plague came to the city where Oedipus lived happily with his wife and children,” I continued, watching the red tip of Master Mahmut’s cigarette. “The plague was decimating the city, and its terrified citizens sent a messenger to the gods, desperate to know their will. ‘If you want to be rid of the plague,’ said the gods, ‘you must find and banish the murderer of the previous king. When tha
t is done, the plague will be gone!’ ”

  Unaware that the old man he’d fought and killed on the bridge was both his father and the previous king of Thebes, Oedipus immediately ordered the killer to be found. In fact, he himself worked harder than anyone to discover the murderer. The more he looked, the closer he came to the truth that he had killed his own father. Even worse was the realization that he had married his mother.

  I paused at this point in the tale. Whenever he told religious stories, Master Mahmut always grew quiet at the most meaningful moment, and I would sense a vague warning in his manner: it could happen to you. I was trying to do the same now, though without even knowing what the moral of my story was. So as I reached the end of the tale, I almost felt sorry for Oedipus, and my tone sounded sympathetic:

  “When he realized he’d been sleeping with his own mother, Oedipus gouged out his own eyes,” I said. “Then, he left his city for a different world.”

  “So God’s will came to pass, after all,” said Master Mahmut. “Nobody can escape their fate.”

  I was surprised that Master Mahmut had drawn a moral about fate from this story. I wanted to forget all about fate.

  “Yes, and once Oedipus had punished himself the plague ended and the city was saved.”

  “Why did you tell me this story?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I felt guilty.

  “I don’t like your story, little gentleman,” said Master Mahmut. “What was that book you read?”

  “It was a book about dreams.”

  I knew that Master Mahmut would never again say: “Why don’t you tell a story tonight?”

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