The Red-Haired Woman Read online

  As we crossed the Bosphorus Bridge, I looked to my left at Istanbul, toward Kabataş High School, to see if I could recognize any buildings in Beşiktaş.

  “Don’t worry, it won’t take long,” said Master Mahmut. “You’ll be back in time for cram school.”

  I was pleased that my mother and my aunt’s husband had already told him my concerns; it made me feel I could trust him. Once we’d gone over the bridge, we got stuck in one of Istanbul’s traffic jams, so that by the time we were outside the city, the sun was already setting, blinding us with its searing rays.

  I say we were leaving the city, but I wouldn’t want this to confuse my readers. In those days, the population of Istanbul was not fifteen million, as it is now, but five. As soon as you passed the old city walls, the houses became fewer, smaller, and poorer, and the landscape was dotted with factories, gas stations, and the odd hotel.

  We followed the railway tracks for a while, veering off as darkness fell. We’d already passed Büyükçekmece Lake. I saw a few cypress trees, cemeteries, concrete walls, empty tracts…But most of the time I could see nothing at all, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t figure out where we were. We saw the orange glow from windows of families sitting down for dinner, and we saw neon-lit factories. We drove up a hill. Lightning struck in the distance, lighting up the sky, but nothing seemed to illuminate the lonely lands we were passing through. Sometimes a mysterious light would reveal endless stretches of wasteland, the bare, uninhabited earth, but in a moment I’d lose sight of it all again in the darkness.

  Finally, we stopped somewhere in that emptiness. I could see neither light, nor lamp, nor house, so I thought perhaps the old pickup had broken down.

  “Give me a hand, let’s unload this,” said Master Mahmut.

  There were blocks of wood, the components of a windlass, pots and pans, tools and equipment stuffed into rough plastic bags, and two mattresses bound together with rope. The driver took off saying, “Good luck and God be with you,” and when I realized the extent of the darkness surrounding us, I became nervous. There was lightning again somewhere far off, but the sky behind us was clear, and the stars shone with all their brilliance. Farther still, I could make out the lights of Istanbul reflecting off the clouds like a yellow fog.

  The ground was still damp from the rain, and there were scattered wet patches. We searched that flat expanse for a dry spot and brought our belongings there.

  Master Mahmut started pitching our tent with the wooden poles. But he couldn’t do it. The ropes that needed pulling and the little pegs that had to be driven into the ground were all lost in the night, and a dark dread had wound itself around my soul. “Pull on this, not there,” Master Mahmut called out blindly.

  We heard an owl hooting. I wondered whether it was necessary to put up the tent, since the rain had stopped, but I respected Master Mahmut’s determination. The heavy, musty cloth wouldn’t stay in place but kept folding over itself and us, like the night.

  By the time we managed to put the tent up and unroll our mattresses, it was long past midnight. The summer rain clouds gave way to a radiant starlit night. The chirping of a nearby cricket soothed me. I lay down on one of the mattresses and fell asleep immediately.

  3

  WHEN I WOKE, I was alone in the tent. A bee was buzzing. I got up and stepped outside. The sun was already so high that the light hurt my eyes.

  I was standing on a vast plateau. On my left, to the southeast, the land stretched downhill toward Istanbul. There were cornfields in the distance, light green and pale yellow; there were fields of wheat, too, but also barren land, rocky and dry. I could see a town nearby with houses and a mosque, but there was a hill obstructing the view, so I couldn’t be sure how big the settlement was.

  Where was Master Mahmut? The wind carried the sound of a bugle call, and I realized that the grayish buildings behind the town must be a military garrison. Beyond that, far away, was a row of purple mountains. For a moment, the whole world seemed to take on the silent quality of memory. I was pleased to be here, ready to make my own living, far from Istanbul, far from anyone.

  A train whistled through the flat expanse between the town and the garrison. It seemed to be heading in the direction of Europe. It crept toward our empty section of the plateau before snaking gently away and stopping at the station.

  I spotted Master Mahmut coming back from the town. He followed the road initially, but soon he was taking shortcuts, walking through wheat fields and barren patches.

  “I got us some water,” he said. “Come on, then, make me some tea.”

  While I was busy brewing tea on the portable gas burner, the landowner, Hayri Bey, arrived in his pickup, which had ferried us here the night before. A young man, slightly older than me, jumped off from the back. From their exchange I learned that the second apprentice, the one from Gebze, had pulled out at the last minute, so this young man, a worker of Hayri Bey’s named Ali, would join us instead, descending into the well as needed.

  Master Mahmut and Hayri Bey walked up and down the plot for a long time. Utterly bare in places, in others covered with rocks and grass, it was in all more than two and a half acres. A gentle breeze was blowing from their direction, and even when they’d reached the farthest corner of the plot, we could still hear them arguing. I edged closer to where they were. Hayri Bey, a textile merchant, wanted to build up a fabric-washing-and-dyeing factory here. There was much demand for these services from the big exporters of ready-to-wear clothing, but the process required large amounts of water.

  This land, which had neither water nor an electricity supply, had cost Hayri Bey almost nothing. If we managed to find water, he would reward us handsomely. His politician friends would arrange for power lines to be brought in. Hayri Bey would then build a modern factory complex—he’d already shown us the plans—with dye works, washing rooms, warehouses, a smart office building, and even a cafeteria. Master Mahmut followed Hayri Bey’s aspirations with sympathy and interest, but in truth, like me, he was mostly focused on the gifts and the money that had been promised us if we found water.

  “May God be with you, may His strength flow through your arms, and His sight open your eyes,” said Hayri Bey, like an Ottoman general sending his troops off on some heroic mission. As the pickup drove out of sight, he leaned out the window and waved at us.

  That night Master Mahmut’s snoring kept me up, so I lay my head down outside the tent. I couldn’t see the lights of the town; the sky was dark blue, but the glow of the stars seemed to turn the universe a golden hue. And here we were, perched on a colossal orange suspended in space, trying to fall asleep in the darkness. Did it seem right that, rather than reaching up toward the gleam of the stars, we had resolved to burrow into the ground on which we slept?

  4

  SOIL PROBES had yet to become widely available back then. For centuries, welldiggers had looked for groundwater and divined where to dig guided by instinct alone. Master Mahmut was well acquainted with the elaborate orations delivered by some of these garrulous old masters. But when they picked up a forked rod and traipsed up and down a plot of land reciting prayers and whispering incantations, he dismissed their antics. Still, he knew himself to be among the last practitioners of an art that had existed for thousands of years. So he approached his work with humility. “You must look for dark, damp black soil,” he told me. “You must find the lower stretches of the land, the gravelly, rocky patches, the sloping ups and downs, the shady parts, and feel the water beneath.” He was eager to teach me how it worked. “Where you see trees and vegetation, the soil will be dark and damp, understood? But look carefully, and don’t let yourself be fooled.”

  For earth was made up of many layers, just like the celestial sphere, which had seven. (Some nights I would look up at the stars and feel the dark world beneath us.) Two meters of rich black earth might conceal a loamy, impermeable, bone-dry layer of wretched soil or sand underneath. To work out where to dig for water as they paced the groun
d, the old masters had to decipher the language of the soil, of the grass, insects, and birds, and detect the signs of rock or clay underfoot.

  These particular skills led some of the old welldiggers to become convinced that, like the shamans of Central Asia, they, too, were in possession of supernatural powers and the gift of extrasensory perception, allowing them to commune with subterranean gods and jinn. I remember as a child hearing my father laugh at such tales, but those hoping for cheap ways to find water wanted to believe them. I remember people in the poorer neighborhoods of Beşiktaş turning to this divination when deciding where to dig a well in their gardens. I myself had seen that when welldiggers crouched among the creepers and pecking hens in those back gardens, listening to the soil, old men and middle-aged ladies would treat them with the same reverence usually reserved for the doctor putting his ear to their sick baby’s chest.

  “We should be done in two weeks at most, God willing. I’ll find water ten or twelve meters down,” said Master Mahmut on that first day.

  He could speak more freely with me than he could with Ali, who was the landowner’s man. I liked that and came to feel that this well was our shared project.

  The next morning, Master Mahmut chose the place where he would dig. It was not remotely where the landowner’s factory plans had envisaged it. It was in a completely different place, in another part of the plot.

  As a result of his political activities, my father had been in the habit of keeping secrets, so whenever he did anything important, he never involved me or asked what I thought. But Master Mahmut held forth in detail on the challenges of this land and freely shared with me his reasoning as he puzzled over where to dig. This was immensely gratifying and drew me to him. Still, when the time came to decide, his thoughts turned inward again, and he eventually chose the spot without consulting me or explaining anything. That’s when I first became aware of the sway Master Mahmut now held over me, and so even as I enjoyed the affection and intimacy he showed me (such as I’d never felt from my father), I began resenting him for it.

  Master Mahmut broke the surface of the earth at his chosen spot. But why, after all that walking and deliberation, had he chosen this particular place? How was it different from any other? If we kept digging there with that pickax, were we sure to find water eventually? I wanted to ask him all these questions, but I knew that I couldn’t. I was a child; he was neither my friend nor my father, but my master. Only I saw in him a father.

  He took a piece of rope and tied the spade to one end and a sharp nail to the other. The rope was one meter long, he told us. A stone wall wouldn’t do down there; he would have to line the well with concrete. The concrete wall would have to be between twenty and twenty-five centimeters thick. Keeping the rope taut, he traced a circle two meters in diameter, scoring the ground with the nail while holding the spade at the center. Ali and I carefully joined the marks, and the circle appeared.

  “The circle of a well must be drawn very precisely,” said Master Mahmut. “Any mistakes, any straight edges along the curve, and the whole thing will collapse!”

  It was the first I’d heard about the fearful prospect of a well collapsing. We set to work inside the circle. With a pickax, I helped Master Mahmut dig, and when I wasn’t doing that, I carried the loosened earth over to Ali’s handcart. But the two of us together could barely keep up with Master Mahmut. “If you don’t fill the cart up so much, I can unload it and come back quicker,” said Ali, struggling to catch his breath. The two of us soon grew tired and slowed down, but Master Mahmut’s pickax continued to swing relentlessly, and soon the pieces of rock he’d dislodged began to accumulate by the well. Whenever the pile grew too large, he’d drop his tools and have a cigarette under an olive tree as he waited for us to catch up. A couple of hours into our first day, my fellow apprentice and I had already realized that the best we could do was try and keep up with Master Mahmut and follow his instructions promptly and unquestioningly.

  Digging all day under the blazing sun exhausted me. I fell into bed straight after sunset, unable even to eat a bowl of lentil soup. Gripping the pickax had left my hands blistered, and the back of my neck was sunburned.

  “You’ll get used to it, little gentleman, you’ll get used to it,” said Master Mahmut, his eyes fixed on the small television he struggled to get reception on.

  He may have been teasing me for being too delicate for manual labor, but it made me glad to hear him call me “little gentleman.” Those two words told me that Master Mahmut knew my family was educated city folk, which meant he would look out for me as a father and not burden me with the heavier tasks. They made me feel that he cared about me and took an interest in my life.

  5

  THE SETTLEMENT was fifteen minutes on foot from our well. It was the town of Öngören, population 6,200, according to the blue sign with enormous white letters marking the entrance. After two days of ceaseless digging, two meters, we took a break on the second afternoon and went down to Öngören to acquire more supplies.

  Ali took us to the town carpenter first. Having dug past two meters, we could no longer shovel out the earth by hand, so like all welldiggers, we had to build a windlass. Master Mahmut had brought some lumber in the landowner’s pickup, but it wasn’t enough. When he explained who we were and what we were up to, the inquisitive carpenter said, “Oh, you mean that land up there!”

  Over the following days, whenever we went down to the town from “that land up there,” Master Mahmut made a point of dropping by the carpenter; the grocer, who sold cigarettes; the bespectacled tobacconist; and the ironmonger, who stayed open late. After digging all day, I relished going to Öngören with Master Mahmut for an evening stroll by his side, or to sit in the shade of the cypress and pine trees on some little bench, or at a table outside some coffeehouse, on the stoop of some shop, or in the train station.

  It was Öngören’s misfortune to be overrun by soldiers. An infantry battalion had been stationed there during World War II to defend Istanbul against German attacks via the Balkans, and Russian attacks via Bulgaria. That purpose, like the battalion itself, was soon forgotten. But forty years later, the unit was still the town’s greatest source of income, and its curse.

  Most of the shops in the town center sold postcards, socks, telephone tokens, and beer to soldiers on day passes. The stretch known among locals as Diners’ Lane was lined with various eateries and kebab shops, also catering to the military clientele. Surrounding them were pastry shops and coffeehouses that would be jammed with soldiers during the day—especially on weekends—but in the evenings, when these places emptied out, a completely different side of Öngören emerged. The gendarmes, who patrolled the area vigilantly, would have to pacify carousing infantrymen and break up fistfights among privates, in addition to restoring the peace disturbed by boisterous civilians or by the music halls when the entertainment got too loud.

  Thirty years ago, back when the garrison was even larger, a few hotels had opened to accommodate military families and other visitors, but transport links with Istanbul had since improved, and now these places stood mostly vacant. Showing us around town on that first day, Ali explained that some of them had been converted into semisecret brothels. These were all to be found in the Station Square. We took an immediate liking to this square, which boasted a small statue of Atatürk; the Star Patisserie, with its thriving ice-cream trade; a post office; and the Rumelian Coffeehouse—the entire scene lit by the golden-orange glow of the streetlamps.

  On a street leading to the station was a depot for construction vehicles, where, Ali told us, his father was employed as a night watchman by one of Hayri Bey’s relatives. Late in the afternoon, Ali also took us to a blacksmith. Master Mahmut used the money Hayri Bey had advanced him to buy timber and metal clamps with which to bind together the various parts of the windlass. He also bought four bags of cement, a trowel, nails, and some more rope. This wasn’t what he would use to lower himself into the well. That far-sturdier rope was back at
our camp, wrapped around the spool for the windlass we’d brought from Gebze.

  We loaded all of our purchases onto a horse-drawn cart someone at the blacksmith’s had summoned for us. As the cart’s metal wheels made an unholy racket against the flagstones, I thought of how these days here were numbered, how I would soon be back with my mother in Gebze and, not long thereafter, in Istanbul. Walking alongside the cart, I sometimes found myself abreast of the horse, looking into his dark, tired eyes and thinking he must be terribly old.

  When we reached the Station Square, a door opened. A middle-aged woman in blue jeans stepped out onto the street. She looked over her shoulder, calling sternly, “Hurry up, will you?”

  As the horse and I reached the open doorway, two more figures emerged: first, a man, maybe five or six years older than I was, and then a tall, red-haired woman who might have been his elder sister. There was something unusual, and very alluring, about this woman. Maybe the lady in jeans was the mother of this red-haired woman and her little brother.

  “I’ll go get it,” the lovely red-haired woman called out to her mother before disappearing inside again.

  But just as she was stepping back into the house, she glanced at me and the elderly horse behind me. A melancholy smile formed on her perfectly curved lips, as if she’d seen something unusual in me or the horse. She was tall, her smile unexpectedly sweet and tender.

  “Come on, then!” her mother called out to her while the four of us—Master Mahmut, his two apprentices, and the horse—walked past. The mother looked annoyed at the Red-Haired Woman and paid us no heed.

  Once the laden cart had rolled outside of Öngören and its flagstones, the noise of the wheels died down. When we had reached our plateau at the top of the slope, I felt as if we’d arrived at a different world altogether.