by Orhan Pamuk
“Your master came to our tent yesterday,” said the Red-Haired Woman.
“Who?”
“Master Mahmut. He’s convinced he’ll find that water. He loved the theater, and he loved our show. He bought himself a ticket.”
“I doubt Master Mahmut has ever been to the theater before,” I said possessively. “I told him about Oedipus and Sophocles once, and he got angry at me. How did you persuade him?”
“He’s right. Greek plays don’t work in Turkey.”
Did the Red-Haired Woman mean to make me jealous of Master Mahmut?
“He disapproves of that play because the son sleeps with the mother.”
“It didn’t bother him at all when the father killed his son at the end of our show…,” she said. “He really seemed to enjoy all the old myths and legends.”
Had she approached Master Mahmut and spoken to him after the play? Somehow I couldn’t picture him going down to Öngören after I went to sleep to see the show like some soldier out on a weekend pass.
“Master Mahmut is very hard with me,” I said. “All he cares about is finding water. He didn’t even want me going to the theater. He’d be furious if he knew I came here tonight.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll talk to him,” said the Red-Haired Woman.
I was so jealous I could scarcely speak. Had Master Mahmut and the Red-Haired Woman become friends?
“Is your master very domineering? Is he strict?”
“Well, yes, but he looks out for me like a father, and he talks to me and cares about me. But he also expects me to obey his orders and always do as he says.”
“So do as he says!” said the Red-Haired Woman, smiling sweetly. “He’s not forcing you to be his apprentice…Isn’t your family well-off?”
Had Master Mahmut told the Red-Haired Woman that I was a little gentleman? Had they spoken about me?
“My father left us!” I said.
“Then he wasn’t a father at all,” she said. “Find yourself a new father. We all have many fathers in this country. The fatherland, Allah, the army, the Mafia…No one here should ever be fatherless.”
The Red-Haired Woman now seemed to me clever as well as beautiful.
“My father was a Marxist,” I said. (Why had I said “was,” and not “is”?) “He was arrested and tortured. He went to prison for years, when I was little.”
“What’s your father’s name?”
“Akın Çelik. But our pharmacy was called Hayat, like ‘life,’ not Çelik, like ‘steel.’ ”
At this the Red-Haired Woman fell into a reverie. She seemed to withdraw and said nothing more for quite a while. Had I made a mistake? What did she care if my father was a Marxist? Perhaps she was just tired and pensive. So I told her about my father’s late nights at the pharmacy, how I used to bring him dinner, and I described the shopping district in Beşiktas. She listened closely to everything I said. But I didn’t like talking about my father in the same way that I didn’t like bringing up Master Mahmut. We fell silent for a time.
“My husband and I live here,” she said, pointing at the building I had passed countless times, and whose windows I’d so often scrutinized.
I was heartbroken and furious, as if I’d been cheated on. But even though I was drunk, I could still understand that for a woman as old as she was, traveling through Turkey with a ragtag theater troupe, it was essential to be married. How hadn’t I thought of this before?
“What floor are you on?”
“You can’t see our windows from the street. A former Maoist who invited us to Öngören lives here; we’re staying in his first-floor rooms. Turgay’s parents live on the floor above. Our windows face the back garden. Turgay told me he’s seen you staring at the windows every time you walk by.”
I was ashamed that my secret was out. But the Red-Haired Woman’s smile was kind, her lips lovely and luscious as ever.
“Good night,” I said. “It was a wonderful play.”
“No, let’s go for a walk. I’m curious to hear about your father.”
A note to inquisitive souls reading this story in the future: unfortunately, in those days, when an attractive, red-haired woman, possibly in her thirties, wearing makeup (even if just for the stage) and a pretty sky-blue skirt, told a man, “Let’s go for a walk” at ten-thirty at night, most men could infer only one thing. Of course I wasn’t one of those men, only a high-school boy who couldn’t hide his childish infatuation. Besides, this woman was married, and we were near Istanbul, and therefore Europe—far from the conservative Anatolian heartland. And by this point my head was full of the morality of leftist politics—my father’s morality, in other words.
We walked for a stretch without a word, and I thought all the while about how we weren’t talking. Dark corners seemed less so, but the sky over Öngören was starless. Someone had rested a bicycle against the Atatürk statue in the Station Square.
“Did he ever talk to you about politics?” asked the Red-Haired Woman.
“Who?”
“Did your father’s militant friends ever come to the house?”
“Actually, my father was never home. And both he and my mother wanted to make sure I didn’t get involved in politics.”
“So your father didn’t turn you into a leftist?”
“I’m going to be a writer…”
“You can write us a play, then,” she said, smiling mysteriously. Now that her mood had lifted, she had become breathtakingly, dizzyingly beguiling. “I would love for someone to write a play or a book about my life, something along the lines of my monologue at the end of the show.”
“I didn’t really understand that monologue. Do you have it written down somewhere?”
“No, those speeches tend to be improvised, whichever way inspiration takes me. A glass of rakı helps.”
“I’ve been thinking of writing plays,” I said, with the self-important air of a pretentious schoolboy. “But first I should read some. I’ll start with the classics: Oedipus the King.”
That night in July, the Station Square felt as familiar as a memory. Nighttime had disguised Öngören’s poverty and general disrepair, the pale-orange streetlamps having transformed the old station building and the square into a picture postcard. The fierce headlights of the military jeep prowling slowly around the square fell upon a nearby pack of wild dogs.
“They’re looking for fugitives and troublemakers,” said the Red-Haired Woman. “I don’t know why, but the soldiers in this town seem to be particularly shameless.”
“But don’t you put on special weekend matinees for them?”
“I suppose we have to make money somehow…,” she said, looking straight into my eyes. “We’re a folk theater, we can’t rely on a government salary like state companies.”
She leaned in to pick a stalk of hay off my collar. Her body, her long legs, and her breasts felt very close to my body.
We walked back in silence. The Red-Haired Woman’s black eyes seemed to turn green as we passed under the almond trees. I was anxious. In the distance, I could see the building whose windows I’d spied on so often in the past month.
“My husband says you handle your rakı pretty well for your age,” she said. “Did your father drink, too?”
I answered with a nod yes. My mind was busy trying to work out when and where I might have sat down for a drink with her husband. I couldn’t remember, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask, either; my heart was breaking and I just wanted to forget all about them. I was already suffering like a child at the thought that I would never see her again once the well was finished. The pain was worse than the knowledge that my secret fixation on their windows (which, as it turned out, weren’t even theirs) had been discovered.
We stopped under one of the almond trees about a hundred meters from their house. Even now I can’t recall whether she or I stopped first. She seemed so intelligent, so tender. She smiled at me with kindness and affection, and the same certain, optimistic look she’d given me from the sta
ge. I felt again that remorse I’d felt at the theater watching the warring, weeping father and his son.
“Turgay is away in Istanbul tonight,” she said. “Perhaps you could have some of his rakı, if you like it as much as your father does.”
“I’d like that,” I said. “And I’ll get to meet your husband, too.”
“Turgay is my husband,” she said. “You had a drink with him the other day and you told him you wanted to see the play, remember?”
She said nothing more for a while, letting the revelation sink in. “Sometimes Turgay feels embarrassed that his wife is seven years older than he is, so he forgets to mention that we’re married,” she said. “He may be young, but he’s very bright, and a good husband.”
We started walking again.
“I was trying to remember where it was that I had a drink with your husband.”
“Turgay told me you shared a Club Rakı at the restaurant that night. There’s half a bottle left at home. Our old Maoist friend has some local cognac, too. He’ll be coming back soon, and then we’ll be off. I’ll miss you, little gentleman!”
“What do you mean?”
“You know how it works, our time here is up.”
“I’ll miss you, too.”
We stood outside their building, our bodies close. I found her astonishingly beautiful.
She took out her keys and unlocked the main door, saying, “We have ice and snacks for your rakı.”
“No need for snacks,” I said, as if I were in a rush and couldn’t stay long.
The front door opened, and we walked through a narrow, pitch-black hallway. I could hear her fumbling with her key ring, looking for the other key in the dark. Then she flicked her lighter on, and as the flame’s menacing shadows surrounded us, she found the key and the keyhole, opened the door, and walked into the apartment.
She turned to me as she switched the lights on. “Don’t be scared,” she said, smiling. “I’m old enough to be your mother.”
19
THAT NIGHT, I slept with a woman for the first time in my life. It was momentous, and it was miraculous. My perception of life, of women, and of myself all changed instantaneously. The Red-Haired Woman showed me who I was, and what happiness meant.
She was thirty-three, it turned out, so she had lived almost exactly twice as much as I had, but it could have been ten times as much. I didn’t think too hard, that day, about the age difference—a point that I was aware would be cause for much interest and admiration among my friends at school and around the neighborhood. But even as I was living those moments, I already knew that I would never share a full account of them with anyone. Even now, I will not delve too much into the details, which, even had I disclosed them then, my friends would have only dismissed as “lies.” Suffice it to say that the Red-Haired Woman’s body was better than anything I had imagined, and this, together with her uninhibited, fearless, perhaps even slightly brazen behavior that night, had turned the whole night into an extraordinary experience.
I had finished all of Turgay’s rakı and also drunk a last-minute glass of the cognac that belonged to the former Maoist (now a signmaker who worked out of his home), so by the time I left Öngören, well after midnight, I couldn’t walk straight and felt as if I were in a dream, watching every moment unfold from outside myself. Even my happiness seemed to be registered by an outside observer.
Once I started climbing the cemetery hill, however, I was gripped with fear of Master Mahmut. I felt I had to protect this blissful thing within me from his anger. He might even begrudge me such happiness. Once I’d passed the cemetery (where even the owl was asleep by now), I took a shortcut through someone else’s land, tripping over a mound of earth and landing gently on the grass, from where I noticed the heavens twinkling above me.
I could see, now, how wonderful the whole universe was. What was the rush? Why was I so scared of Master Mahmut? If what the Red-Haired Woman had told me was true, he himself had gone to see the show in the yellow tent, which still made me inexplicably jealous. I couldn’t believe they’d spoken after the show, and I wanted to forget it had ever happened. At the same time, I knew it didn’t matter: sleeping with someone like the Red-Haired Woman had lifted my self-confidence to the point that I felt there was nothing I couldn’t do. There would never be any water in the well, but I would get my money anyway, go back home, enroll in cram school, ace the entrance exams, and go on to become a writer, living a life as resplendent as any of the stars I could see before me. It was clear that I was destined for something; I knew that now. Perhaps I would even write a novel about the Red-Haired Woman.
A star was falling. I felt with every bit of me that the world before my eyes coincided perfectly with the world inside my head, and I focused intently on the summer sky. If only I could decipher the language of the stars, their disposition would surely reveal all the secrets of my life. All things wonderful, all of them astral. That night I truly understood that I would become a writer. All you had to do was to look and see, to understand what you saw, and put it into words. I was full of gratitude to the Red-Haired Woman. Everything in the universe and in my mind had aligned for a single purpose.
Another star fell. Maybe I was the only one who’d seen it. I thought: I exist. It was a good feeling. I can count the stars, and I can count the chirp-chirp-chirping of the cicadas. I am here: 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31…
The grass tickled the back of my neck, and I remembered the Red-Haired Woman’s touch on my skin. We had made love on the couch in the living room, with some of the lights still on. I continued to picture her body, those ample breasts, the way the light hit her copper-hued skin, and as I remembered all the kisses that fell from her pretty lips, and the way she ran her hands all over my body, I wanted to make love to her all over again. But her husband, Turgay, would be back from Istanbul tomorrow, so of course that was impossible.
Turgay had been kind enough to befriend me during my lonely nights in Öngören. In return, I betrayed my friend by sleeping with his beautiful wife the night he was away. In my drunkenness, I racked my brain for ways to excuse my crime and prove to myself that I wasn’t a horrible, two-faced traitor: it was true that by the time I learned that Turgay was her husband, things had already gone too far. It wasn’t as if Turgay was my longtime friend, anyway—I’d only met him three or four times, I reasoned. Besides, these rootless theater migrants who danced so suggestively and told vulgar tales to entertain soldiers did not exactly subscribe to wholesome family values. Who knows, maybe Turgay himself cheated on his wife with other women. Maybe they entertained each other with tales from their extramarital adventures. Maybe tomorrow the Red-Haired Woman would tell Turgay about her night with me. Maybe she wouldn’t even do that much and forget all about me instead.
My mood soured, and I was overcome once again by the remorse I’d felt while watching the show in the tent. I still couldn’t work out how those scenes had stirred that feeling in me. At the same time, I couldn’t abide the thought that Master Mahmut had watched the same play. Had the Red-Haired Woman and Master Mahmut ever met again, apart from the time he came to the theater?
My footsteps on the dry grass approached our miserable little tent. The sky was so wide, the universe limitless, yet I still had to squeeze into that constricting place.
Master Mahmut was sleeping. I was quietly getting into bed when I heard him say: “Where were you?”
“I fell asleep.”
“You left me at the coffeehouse. Did you go to the theater?”
“No.”
“It’s four in the morning. How are you going to cope with the heat tomorrow if you haven’t even slept?”
“I was bored, they gave me rakı,” I said. “It was hot. I lay down to look at the stars on my way back and I must have drifted off. I’ve slept plenty, Master Mahmut.”
“Don’t lie to me, kid! Welldigging is no joke. You know we’re close to the water now.”
I didn’t respond. Master Mahmut s
tepped outside. I thought I would quickly forget this unpleasantness and fall asleep gazing at the stars through the tent flap, but I couldn’t get him out of my mind.
Why had he asked me if I’d gone to the theater? Was he jealous of me? Surely a sophisticated theater actress like the Red-Haired Woman would never give a hick like Master Mahmut the time of day. Though with her, there was no telling. That’s perhaps why I had fallen for her so fast.
I got out of the tent and went to look for Master Mahmut. Unbelievably, he seemed to be walking toward Öngören now, in the middle of the night. My insides churned with ungovernable rage and suspicion. In the everlasting night, under the glow of the stars, I could discern with difficulty the dark shadow that was Master Mahmut.
But then he left the road and headed for my walnut tree. I saw him sitting under it as he lit a cigarette. I lay on the grass for a long time waiting for him to finish his smoke. All I could see was the bright orange tip of his cigarette.
When I was sure he wasn’t going to Öngören after all, I returned to the tent before him and went to sleep. But the memory of having watched him from afar that night would stay with me for years. Sometimes in my dreams there was a third eye, and I would simultaneously watch Master Mahmut and observe my younger self watching him.
20
THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up, as usual, with the sun’s first rays piercing through the narrow gap in the tent like long, golden sabers. I couldn’t have slept for more than three hours, but I felt thoroughly rested, invigorated by my experience with the Red-Haired Woman the night before.
“Have you had enough sleep? Are you alert?” said Master Mahmut as he sipped his tea.
“I’m fine, Master, never been better.”
We didn’t mention how late I’d come back the night before. Master Mahmut descended into the well, as he’d been doing for the past five days, becoming a small, dark blur at the bottom, shoveling earth into an even-smaller bucket, shouting “Pullll!” at regular intervals.
