by Orhan Pamuk
But never mind the question of whether I counted as a killer; I wasn’t even sure that a murder had taken place. I had no intention of being a murderer, or of being murdered by my own son. Master Mahmut could certainly have emerged from the well and returned to normal life. Wouldn’t the police be banging on my door otherwise? I had better forget any of it had even happened; only then would I, too, be able to live like everyone else.
24
FOR A LONG TIME I told myself, Nothing did happen, anyway. I strolled down the corridors of the university, which smelled of damp dust and cheap cleaner; I went to the cinema with my classmates who used the ongoing political unrest and their clashes with the police as excuses to skip metallurgy classes; I glanced indifferently at serials on the dormitory TV; and I comforted myself to think that I had finally contrived to be like everyone else. Soccer matches on TV, the art films beginning to circulate on newfangled videotapes, ships crossing the Bosphorus: I casually watched them all. I checked out the new home appliances displayed in shop windows, I mixed with the crowds in Beyoğlu, and on Sunday evenings I thought glumly that another weekend was over.
There weren’t many female students matriculated at Istanbul Technical University’s faculty of engineering, housed in the former armory. What few were there were courted by the entire male student body. I knew of very few women my age in the whole university. So my interest was piqued when, one weekend in Gebze, my mother mentioned that my aunt’s husband had a relative whose daughter had been admitted to study pharmacy; she was going to stay in the dormitories but found the city and its crowds intimidating, so my aunt’s husband would appreciate it if I showed her the ropes.
Ayşe’s hair was light brown, but something about her was nevertheless reminiscent of the Red-Haired Woman, particularly the curve of her upper lip and her dainty chin. I knew on the day we met that I would fall in love with her, wanting so much to fall in love with someone, and I sensed that she would reciprocate my feelings. On Saturday afternoons we went to the cinema or saw Chekhov and Shakespeare plays at the Municipal Theater or took the bus to Emirgan for a cup of tea. Going out with a girl who could be deemed suitable and reasonably attractive—“dating” her, as some of my friends called it—made life seem so glorious that I believed I had finally moved on from Master Mahmut and the well.
In order to carry on with this life, I applied for a postgraduate degree in engineering geology, and being among the top students in my class, I was accepted. During our second year together, we progressed to holding hands and even kissing in cinemas, parks, and deserted streets, but from the earliest days of our relationship, I had already surmised that Ayşe, who came from a conservative family, would not sleep with me until we were married.
A friend in Beşiktaş, a bit of a lothario who regularly patronized brothels and believed wholeheartedly that any girl could eventually be seduced, arranged for me to spend an afternoon with Ayşe in a small private apartment, but the whole thing was a disaster. I tried to get her to join me in a glass of rakı, as if it were something we did every day, and after about two hours of steadfastly rebuffing my advances, she finally left the apartment in tears. For a long time thereafter, she wouldn’t even come to the phone when I called her dormitory. I thus entered a phase of fantasies about seeking out the Red-Haired Woman, during which I masturbated to the memory of our night together.
But eventually I made up with Ayşe; we got back together and decided to get engaged. I savored those Saturday afternoons after the engagement party (for which my mother and her seamstress made a dress together) when Ayşe would come to collect me at the Deniz Bookstore, and I had the pleasure of hearing the boss and the young clerks comment on how pretty the “girl from Gördes” was. I liked to talk to her about books I was reading, the history of geology, and my mostly commonplace views on politics and soccer. When I went to the towns of Kozlu and Soma on summer jobs, I wrote her impassioned letters about the plight of the coal miners there, and it thrilled me to learn that Ayşe kept those letters and read them again from time to time. I kept her letters, too.
But even in the midst of this serenity, a minor development could unexpectedly unveil the darkness still in my soul. During a summer of drought and water shortages in Istanbul, when the minister for agriculture seemed on the verge of proposing rain dances, I found myself sinking into a protracted silence at my fiancée’s suggestion that wells should immediately be dug in every garden. (I had never told her about my month as a welldigger’s apprentice, years ago.) When I read in the newspaper that the refrigerator factory the prime minister had inaugurated near Öngören was the biggest of its kind in the Balkans and the Middle East, I recalled Master Mahmut and the religious parables he used to tell me. Once, I thought I’d pick up a new translation of The Brothers Karamazov as a birthday gift for my fiancée, but when I saw that the introduction was by Freud, a text on Dostoyevsky and patricide, and touching upon Oedipus the King and Hamlet, I decided, after reading the unsettling essay on the spot, to buy her a copy of The Idiot instead—at least its protagonist is naïve and innocent.
Some nights I saw Master Mahmut in my dreams. He was still digging away, somewhere up in space on a colossal bluish sphere spinning slowly among the stars. That must mean he wasn’t dead and that I need not feel so guilty. But it still hurt if I looked too closely at the planet he stood on.
I wanted to tell my fiancée that Master Mahmut was the reason I’d decided to study geology, but I always held back. The compulsion to confess was strongest whenever I bonded with Ayşe over books. But instead I would tell her about the secrets and singularities of the geological sciences: for instance, how the mystery of seashells, fish heads, and mussels being in the cracks, crevasses, and hollows atop the highest mountains was solved in the eleventh century by a Chinese polymath named Shen Kuo. One hundred and fifty years after Sophocles, Theophrastus wrote a book called On Stones, and the theories he’d outlined about minerals remained undisputed for thousands of years. I may have failed to become a novelist, but I wouldn’t have minded writing a book as widely trusted as that! I imagined penning a volume entitled The Geology of Turkey, covering everything from the height of the Taurus mountain range to the secrets of the loamy, fine-grained soils of Thrace, where we’d dug our well, to the tectonic formations in the south of the country and the distribution of national oil and gas deposits.
25
I KNEW THAT MY FATHER was somewhere in Istanbul. I resented him for not calling me, but I didn’t try to call him, either. I would finally see him again after marrying Ayşe, just before leaving for my military service. We arranged to meet at a restaurant in a new hotel in Taksim Square one night after the wedding. I was taken aback by how happy I was to see him. “You found a girl just like your mother,” he told me in private. He quickly established a rapport with Ayşe, and they even started ganging up on me over dinner, teasing me for being an engineering nerd who seemed to memorize numbers automatically.
My father had aged, but he looked good. I sensed his embarrassment about being well-off now and about the new life he’d made for himself. It left me feeling self-conscious about my fascination with stories of patricide. But it was by growing up without him all these years, toiling on my own, that I had become “myself.”
Back when I still had him by my side, I had struggled to be myself, even though he had never meddled in my life and had always encouraged me. It was standing up to Master Mahmut, despite having spent only a month with him, that made me the person I now was. Was it right to think that way? I wasn’t sure, but I knew my own feelings. I still craved my father’s approval and wanted to believe I was leading the honorable life he would have expected of me, but I was also furious at him.
“You’re very lucky, she’s a wonderful girl,” he said, looking at Ayşe as we parted. “I couldn’t have left you in better hands.”
As I headed home with my wife, walking from Taksim to Pangaltı under the tall chestnut trees, I was relieved to be done with my father. We li
ved in a cheap one-room apartment on a slope that went from Feriköy down to Dolapdere. As newlyweds, we made love most days for hours at a time; we laughed and talked a lot; I was happy. Sometimes I thought of Master Mahmut and wondered what had become of him. But I knew that probing an old crime, as Oedipus had done, could afford me nothing but further remorse.
After my military service, I found a job as a government clerk at the Istanbul bureau of the National Mineral Exploration Program. My university friends used to joke that in Turkey an engineering geology postgraduate’s only way to make a living was to work in construction or else open a kebab shop. So I should be grateful to have even this low-paying position.
A number of Turkish construction firms had meanwhile begun building dams and bridges abroad in Arab nations, the Ukraine, and Romania and were looking for geologists and engineers to send on inspections. Eventually I found a more lucrative job which involved a posting in Libya, meaning we’d have to live there for at least six months a year. By this time, however, Ayşe and I had begun to grow concerned about still not having had a baby. Deciding it would be better to be near the doctors we already knew and trusted, we returned to Istanbul.
In 1997, I joined a company with projects closer to home, in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. I would spend the next fifteen years flying out from Istanbul to neighboring countries and began at last to earn a better living.
We moved to a nicer apartment in Pangaltı. On weekends when I wasn’t away on business, we would go to shopping malls to watch films and have a bite to eat. In the evenings, we would have our dinner with state dignitaries and military men making their blustery declarations on TV. In between we might consider whether we should consult the eccentric professor reported to have developed a miraculous new fertility formula, or that brilliant doctor just come back to Istanbul from America. There would ensue long talks about not letting childlessness poison our harmonious marriage and destroy our zest for life.
Occasionally, I still went down to Beşiktaş to visit the Deniz Bookstore. Having finally accepted that I was not to be a writer, Mr. Deniz was now offering me a stake in the business. All in all, my life was just like everyone else’s—perhaps even slightly better than average. Every now and then it would occur to me how successfully I was managing to pretend nothing had happened. I still thought about Master Mahmut and my crime, most often on airplane journeys. Sometimes I even wondered whether my true motive for taking all these trips to Benghazi, Astana, and Baku was for the chance to remember. As I looked out the window of the plane, I would think of him and brood over the children I didn’t have.
Shortly after takeoff from the Atatürk Airport in Yeşilköy, the planes would all turn their noses westward like the flocks of migratory birds that overflew the city every year, and when I looked out I would invariably see the town of Öngören below. It wasn’t too far from the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, from the beaches and the new summer resorts along the coast, and from the oil and gasoline silos that looked so huge even from the air. But cut off from the trees and the lush vegetation near the sea, and isolated from the rich golden-reddish fields nearby, it was as ever surrounded by pale arid tracts and conjoined to the old military garrison.
The view would disappear in an instant as the plane turned again, rolling gently on its axis or passing through a cloud formation, but even then, I could sense the lay of the land beneath.
We were getting older, we still had no children, and meanwhile the farmlands between Öngören and Istanbul were filling up with industrial plants, warehouses, and factories, all of them dull and black as coal from the air. Some companies had emblazoned their names on the roofs of their factories and depots in huge bright letters, for the apparent benefit of airline passengers. These structures were surrounded by smaller workshops, obscure firms that dealt in manufacturing supplies, and shabby, nondescript buildings. As the plane gained altitude, the illegal residential neighborhoods sprawling around these establishments would also become visible. The little towns and villages near Istanbul were expanding as disconcertingly fast as the city itself. With every trip I took, I could see its tentacles reaching farther into the remotest recesses, and hundreds of thousands of vehicles advancing unerringly over ever-widening roads like so many patient ants, and I reflected that the pace of technological progress must long have rendered Master Mahmut’s skills obsolete.
After the mid-1980s, the ancient traditional methods of welldigging with spade and pickax, of slow excavation by the bucketful on a wooden windlass, of lining the walls meter by meter with concrete, had all become extinct in Istanbul. During a summer holiday Ayşe and I spent with my mother in Gebze, I witnessed some of the first efforts at drilling artesian wells on various plots surrounding the land my aunt’s husband owned. The early drills, still operated manually, like screwdrivers, would later be superseded by more powerful mechanized ones, noisy machines resembling oil derricks, hauled in on the backs of mud-spattered, big-wheeled pickups. They could bore fifty meters in a single day, laying pipes that would then pump water up from the depths of the earth in no time and at negligible cost, all on the very same land Master Mahmut and two apprentices would previously have toiled on for weeks.
From the early 1990s, these technical advances led for a time to an abundant supply of water in the greener neighborhoods of Istanbul, but soon the underground lakes and aquifers closest to the surface were depleted. By the early 2000s, the only groundwater left in many parts of the city was more than seventy meters below the surface, and it would have been practically impossible to get to it simply by digging with two apprentices in people’s gardens, a meter a day, as Master Mahmut used to do. Istanbul and the soil it stood on had been denatured and defiled.
26
TWENTY YEARS after my Öngören days, a classmate from Istanbul Technical University invited me to meet with an oil firm in Tehran. A few minutes after takeoff, as the plane began to tilt away from the west and toward the southeast, I noticed that Öngören and Istanbul had grown toward each other to the point of having effectively merged. They now composed a single sea of streets, houses, rooftops, mosques, and factories. The future generations of Öngören would describe themselves as living in Istanbul.
How important is it for people to know what their city is called and remind themselves of where they live? More than twenty-five years after Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution, Iran had become an inward-looking nation. My friend Murat was confident that it could present plenty of lucrative business opportunities for a Turkish company, an optimism I understood without sharing.
Murat said he would bid for construction contracts in oil-rich Iran, and that we could sell them drilling equipment, taking advantage of the war of words they were waging with the West. Perhaps he was right, but I suspected that if we followed other Turkish companies in breaking the West’s embargo on Iran, we’d soon be contending with the CIA and their ilk. Murat, who came from a conservative family in the city of Malatya, who still reveled in duplicity and minor chicanery as he had at school, was unperturbed by such complications. He was also nowhere nearly as unnerved as I was by the fact that women in Tehran had to cover their heads to go out in public.
It was a time when Western newspapers debated the merits of bombing Iran, and Istanbul’s secular, nationalist newspapers asked, “Will Turkey become like Iran?” I cut our political discussion short, concluding very quickly that we could not have dealings with Tehran.
Yet I was mesmerized by how much alike Iranians and Turks were. So I delayed my return to Istanbul, intrigued by the shopping arcades, the bookstores (translations of Nietzsche everywhere!), and much else I saw as I rambled along the pavements of Tehran. The men’s hand gestures, their facial expressions, body language, the way they lingered in doorways to let one another pass, how they stood around doing nothing in particular and whiled away the hours smoking cigarettes in coffeehouses, reminded me uncannily of Turkish habits. The traffic, moreover, was just as bad as in Istanbul. In Turkey, we’d forgotten al
l about Iran as soon as we’d turned toward the West. I browsed the bookstores on Enqelab Street, the road renamed after the Islamic Revolution, and marveled at the variety on display.
I discovered the existence of an angry class of modern, secular Iranians forced to lead their lives indoors. Murat took me to house parties where men and women mingled and drank freely. The women at these parties did not cover their heads. The alcohol was home-brewed. In Turkey, secularism had existed for some time, even if it had had to be propped up by the army, and was perceived as a value to be preserved at all costs; but in Iran, secularism seemed not to exist at all, which made it an even more fundamental need.
I went to another gathering one evening in a house full of children that resounded with the conversations and raucous laughter of extended families, women, and businessmen. Everyone was very gracious and kind when they found out I was Turkish. They loved Istanbul and often went there for some shopping and sightseeing. They asked me to say things in Turkish and smiled instinctively when I did, as if I’d done something amusing. One of the families at the party invited us to their summerhouse on the Caspian Sea. Murat, who’d had a lot more to drink than I had, accepted the invitation without a second thought.
As I looked out the window at the lights of Tehran under the dark, deep-blue sky, I had a nagging suspicion that my old friend’s determination to strengthen ties between Iran and Turkey went beyond personal enrichment, that he was, perhaps, on a secret mission. I couldn’t work out whether he was a spy working to pry Turkey away from NATO and the West, or to rescue Iran from its isolation. Maybe he was only in it to profit from breaking the embargo, but I couldn’t be sure.
