by Orhan Pamuk
The fruit-flavored alcohol they were serving made my head swim. I was missing Ayşe and Istanbul, when I found myself unexpectedly thinking about my evening walks to Öngören with Master Mahmut. An uncanny yearning, a furious feeling that I had somehow been orphaned, overcame me, and my mind was thrown into disarray.
I was sure it had something to do with the picture on the wall in front of me, a vaguely familiar image, though I couldn’t place or understand it. Part of me seemed to know the subject matter, while another part was anxious to forget it. The image, obviously taken from an old book and reproduced to decorate this calendar, was of a man crying as he cradled his son. It seemed based on a story like the one I’d seen enacted years ago in the yellow theater tent at Öngören. You could see the anguished father grieving, his son’s blood all over them both…
Our hostess, a perceptive old lady, came up to me as I stood transfixed by the calendar. I asked her what the image represented. She said it was the scene from the Shahnameh in which Rostam weeps over his son Sohrab, whom he has just killed. Her proud expression seemed to say, How could you not know? I mused that Iranians were not like us Turks who had become so Westernized that we’d forgotten our old poets and myths. They would never forget—especially not their poets.
“If you’re interested in this kind of thing, we’ll take you to the Golestan Palace tomorrow,” said my hostess, now feeling evident satisfaction. “That’s where this picture comes from, and you’ll find many other illuminated manuscripts and old books there.”
She never did take me to the Golestan Palace, but I went there with Murat during my last afternoon in Tehran. The extensive garden, lush with trees, was dotted with a number of minor mansions. We entered the palace gallery, the Negar Khaneh, which reminded me of the Ihlamur Palace near my father’s Life Pharmacy. It was a dimly lit building devoted to ancient Persian art, and apart from us, no one was there. The scowling guards eyed us suspiciously, as if to say, Why did you even come here?
We soon found more versions of the same man, either trying to save his wounded son or weeping over his dead body. The father was Rostam, hero of the Shahnameh, Iran’s national epic. Despite being a bibliophile, like most Turks I was unfamiliar with the Shahnameh and the tale of Rostam and Sohrab. Even so, when I looked at this image, what I saw resembled an idea of fatherhood that I carried deep in me.
There were no books or postcards in the museum shop; I couldn’t find any prints of the picture I’d seen or any other images of Rostam and Sohrab. I felt frustrated and uneasy, as if a fearful memory I refused to acknowledge consciously might suddenly well up and make me miserable. The image was like some wicked thought that keeps intruding on your mind no matter how much you yearn to be rid of it.
“Will you please tell me what’s so special about that picture?” said Murat.
I wouldn’t explain, but he finally promised to retrieve the illustration from the wall calendar in the house where we’d had dinner and send it to me in Istanbul.
As the plane descended on the trip home, I tried to spot Öngören from the window, but all I could see through the clouds was a vast continuous stretch of Istanbul. So it was then, after twenty years, that I began to feel an overpowering urge to return to Öngören and the place where I had last seen Master Mahmut.
27
BUT I RESISTED the temptation to go back. I spent subsequent weekends in Istanbul idling with my wife in front of the TV or at the cinema in Beyoğlu, trying to forget my worries. But could I call them that? I had no real concerns in life, apart from my inability to produce an heir. After countless days and months spent listening to doctors who judged the problem to be with Ayşe, not me, and gaining nothing by following their advice anyway, I decided that if we acted like it didn’t matter, then it wouldn’t matter.
It wasn’t easy to find a translation of Ferdowsi’s thousand-year-old epic in Istanbul. Most Ottoman intellectuals would have had a passing acquaintance with the Shahnameh or at least known some of its stories. But after two hundred years of striving to Westernize, no one in Turkey was interested any longer in this profusion of tales. A Turkish translation in free verse had been circulating since the 1940s and was published by the Ministry of Education ten years later, in four volumes. It was this edition of the poem, sporting the white livery of the World Classics series, the covers yellowed with age, that I finally tracked down and devoured.
The mixture of history and myth appealed to me, as did the way the book started off as an eerie fable before turning into a kind of morality tale about family and ethics. I was impressed that Ferdowsi had devoted his entire life to this national history, a full fifteen hundred pages in translation. The learned book-loving poet had read the histories, legends, and sagas of other nations; sought out books in Arabic, Avestan, and Pahlavi scripts; combined myths with heroic chronicles, religious parables with history and memory; and composed his own monumental epic.
The Shahnameh was a compendium of forgotten stories, the lives of kings, sultans, and heroes of the past. I felt as if I were simultaneously the hero and the author of some of these accounts. Ferdowsi had suffered the death of a child, and this imbued the passages about the father’s loss of his son with a particularly moving depth and honesty. I imagined myself telling Master Mahmut these stories in the dark midnight hours, and I remembered the Red-Haired Woman. Had I been a writer, I too would have liked to create something comparable to this eternal, all-encompassing masterpiece, which seemed to capture every detail of any subject, a book at once thrilling and distressing in its unerring depiction of humanity, one that overwhelmed me with surprise and wonder at every turn. My book, The Geology of Turkey, would also be epic and encyclopedic in scope. Through the judicious use of anecdote, I would describe the worlds beneath the oceans, the mountain ranges, and the layers and veins of subterranean rock.
The Shahnameh begins with creation myths and tales of giants, monsters, jinn, and demons, but its landscape becomes more recognizable once the narrative shifts to the adventures of mortal kings and brave warriors and stories of how people just like us wrestled with family, life—and the state. As I read, I kept remembering my father and reluctantly became more and more convinced that I’d probably killed Master Mahmut after all. This feeling intensified as I turned from Sohrab’s story to Afrasiab’s, until I was in such distress I considered not finishing the book. But I also believed that if I kept exploring this boundless sea of stories, I might eventually solve the riddle of my own life and finally land on peaceful shores.
There was one story that I read so often after my wife went to sleep that I knew I would remember it forever, like a nursery rhyme, a recurring nightmare, or some other indelible experience:
Once upon a time, there was a man named Rostam, one of Persia’s matchless heroes, an indefatigable warrior. Everyone knew and loved him. Rostam lost his way while he was out hunting one day, and when he went to sleep that night, he also lost his horse, Rakhsh. When he went looking for Rakhsh, he stumbled into the enemy territory of Turan. But as his good reputation preceded him, he was recognized and treated well. The shah of Turan showed his unexpected guest generous hospitality; he organized a banquet in his honor, and they drank together.
After dinner, Rostam had retreated to his room when someone knocked on the door. It was Tahmina, daughter of the shah of Turan; she’d spotted the handsome Rostam at the feast and had now come to declare her love. She wanted to bear the clever, famous hero’s child. The shah’s daughter, tall and slender, had shapely eyebrows, delicate lips, and luscious hair (in my mind, a beautiful shade of red). Rostam couldn’t bear to reject this intelligent, sensitive, charming beauty who’d gone to the trouble of coming all the way up to his room. And so they made love. In the morning, Rostam left a bracelet for the unborn child he knew they had conceived and returned to his own country.
Tahmina named her bastard son Sohrab. When he grew to discover that his father was the renowned Rostam, Sohrab declared: “I will go to Iran, I will depose the
cruel Shah Kay-Kavus and put my father in his place. Then I will return to Turan and depose Shah Afrasiab, who is as cruel as Kay-Kavus, and take his place on the throne. And so my father Rostam and I will bring together Iran and Turan, joining East and West, to rule justly over the whole of creation.”
That was honest, kindhearted Sohrab’s plan. But he had underestimated the slyness and cunning of his enemies. Afrasiab, the shah of Turan, knew of Sohrab’s intentions but supported him anyway in his war against Persia. He also planted spies in the army to make sure that Sohrab wouldn’t recognize his father, Rostam, when they finally came face-to-face. Behind their respective lines, father and son initially watched as the two armies clashed. Finally, a series of dirty tricks and ruses conspired with the vagaries of fate to bring the legendary warrior Rostam and his son Sohrab together on the battlefield. Of course they failed to recognize each other through their armor, just as Oedipus had failed to recognize his father. It was also Rostam’s habit to take pains to conceal his identity in battle, lest his renown motivate an opponent, whoever he might be, to give the fight his all. As for the unworldly Sohrab, he was so eager to see his father on the Persian throne that he didn’t even consider whom he was fighting. And so these two mighty, valorous warriors, father and son, drew swords and faced off, as the two armies looked on.
Ferdowsi describes at length how father and son grapple, their fight lasting for days, until finally the father slays the son. More than the inherent violence and pathos of the story, what unnerved me so was the feeling of reading something that had actually happened to me. It was at once unsettling and also a feeling I craved. As I leafed through those old volumes, immersing myself in the stories, I felt as if I were in the theater tent in Öngören. Whenever I read about Rostam and Sohrab, I felt as if I were reliving my own memories.
28
STEPPING BACK and examining the matter rationally, I could see what was so familiar about Sohrab and Rostam’s tale and its resemblance to the story of Oedipus. There were in fact surprising parallels between Oedipus’s life and Sohrab’s. But there was one fundamental difference, too: Oedipus murdered his father, while Sohrab was murdered by his father. One is a story of patricide, the other a story of filicide.
Yet this key distinction only accentuated the similarities. As in Oedipus’s story, the reader is repeatedly reminded that Sohrab does not know and has never met his father. One concludes that Sohrab is blameless, for he is not aware that the man he has set out to kill is his own father. But that fatal moment is continually delayed.
Just as Oedipus’s murder investigation takes a long while to bear fruit, so the Shahnameh’s protracted battle between father and son seems to go on forever. On the first day, Rostam and Sohrab fight with short spears, and when these break against their armor, they draw scimitars and resume the battle. Both armies can see the sparks that shower father and son every time their swords clash.
When the swords also shatter, they switch to maces. Their weapons and their shields buckle under the weight of the blows exchanged, and both their exhausted horses slow down. The sketch in the theater tent at Öngören had presented the final moments of this battle.
On the first day, Sohrab is able to wound his father in the shoulder with a blow of the mace, and on the second day, the fight reaches a swifter end. When I got to the part where young Sohrab grabs his father’s belt and throws him to the ground, I flinched. Sitting atop him, Sohrab draws a turquoise dagger and is just about to cut his father’s throat when Rostam, fighting for his life, tricks the young warrior.
“You cannot slay me now; you must overcome me a second time,” says Rostam to his son Sohrab. “Only then will you have earned the right to kill me. That is our tradition. If you respect it, you will be seen as a truly worthy warrior!”
Sohrab heeds the voice inside him telling him to spare his aging opponent this time. But that night, his comrades advise him that he has made a mistake and should not underestimate his enemies. The strong, youthful warrior does not, however, pay his friends much mind.
Then, not long into the third day of battle, Rostam suddenly overpowers his son and throws him to the ground. Before I even had the chance to grasp what had happened, Rostam swiftly thrust his sword into Sohrab’s chest and sliced him open, killing his son. I was stunned, just as I had been years ago in the theater tent at Öngören.
Oedipus killed his father—whom he also didn’t recognize—with equally surprising speed, and in a fit of mindless rage. In those moments, perhaps neither Oedipus nor Rostam was thinking clearly. It was as if God had driven these fathers and sons temporarily insane so that they would have no qualms slaying each other, thus fulfilling His divine will.
Since each acted in a fit of rage, could Oedipus, who had killed his father, and Rostam, who had killed his son, both be considered innocent? The ancient Greeks watching Sophocles’s play would have believed Oedipus’s chief crime to be not that he killed his father but that he tried to thwart the fate that God intended for him—just as Master Mahmut had suggested all those years ago. Similarly, Rostam’s real sin was not killing his own child but siring a son during a night of passion and then failing to fulfill his paternal duties.
Oedipus punished himself by putting out his own eyes in remorse. Ancient Greek audiences would have been satisfied by this outcome, as due punishment for refusing one’s God-given destiny. Likewise, logic dictates that Rostam should have had to pay some kind of price for killing his son. But there was no punishment at the end of this tale from the East—only the reader’s sorrow. Wasn’t anyone going to make the Eastern father pay?
Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and think about these things as my wife lay sleeping beside me. The neon lights from the street would shine through the half-drawn curtains and onto Ayşe’s elegant forehead and expressive lips, and I would think how happy we were even though we didn’t have children. I would get out of bed and stare out the window that gave onto the street, and I’d wonder why I kept having the same thoughts over and over again. Outside, it would be snowing or raining in the Istanbul night, the gutters of our old building would sigh, and a flustered police car would drive down the road, flashing its stuttering blue light. These were the years when factions that favored Turkey’s entry into the European Union clashed in the street with nationalists and Islamists. All sides deployed the national flag as both an ensign and a weapon, and so enormous Turkish flags billowed over military garrisons and all across Istanbul.
Some nights, the sound of an airplane passing would remind me of Master Mahmut. The whole city would be asleep, and I would have the impression that the plane cruising overhead was sending me a private message. Had I been on that early-morning flight, I would have looked out the window for Master’s well, though I probably couldn’t have spotted it. Istanbul had by now grown to the point of swallowing up Öngören; Master Mahmut and his well were lost somewhere in that metropolitan morass. I thought once again that if I wanted to know whether I was guilty or not, and at last banish my malaise, I would have to return to Öngören. But still I resisted, making do instead with rereading the Shahnameh and Oedipus the King and comparing Rostam and Sohrab’s tragedy with Oedipus’s and other tales.
29
AROUND THIS TIME, I started to develop what would be a lifelong compulsion to compare fathers and sons I met under ordinary circumstances with Oedipus and Rostam. The café manager loudly scolding his assistant as I walked distractedly home from work one evening was a far cry from Rostam, but I could see in his furious underling’s green eyes the fleeting desire to grab a kebab knife and gut his boss. On the way to Ayşe’s best friend’s house for her son’s birthday party, I considered whether her husband, a strict, intolerant father, might be comparable to foolish Rostam.
There was a period when I favored the kinds of newspapers that focused on scandals and murders and carried stories that reminded me of Oedipus and Rostam. In those days, two kinds of murder stories were particularly popular with readers i
n Istanbul and often featured in these tabloids. In the first kind, a father would bed his beautiful young daughter-in-law while his son was away on military service or in prison, after which the son, discovering the truth upon his return, would murder his father. The second kind, which occurred frequently with innumerable variations, was triggered by a sexually frustrated son forcing himself upon his mother in a fit of temporary insanity. When the father tried to stop or punish him, the son would end up killing the father. Such sons the public abhorred, refusing even to utter their names; people didn’t hate them so much because they’d murdered their own fathers as because they had violated their own mothers. In prison, some of these patricides would end up getting killed by gang bosses, thugs, or contract killers, someone trying to make a name for himself by eliminating such a degenerate. Nobody objected to these assassinations—not the state, not the prison administrators, certainly not the public.
More than twenty years after digging that well with Master Mahmut, I began to explain my interest in Oedipus and Sohrab to my wife, Ayşe. I never mentioned Master Mahmut, but she began to share my fascination with Sophocles’s play and with Ferdowsi’s epic as a kind of speculative exercise about the son we didn’t have. In private, we would categorize people as Rostam types or Oedipal types. Fathers who inspired fear in their sons despite loving and wanting the best for them reminded us of Rostam, though of course Rostam had abandoned his son. Perhaps sons who resented their fathers and rejected their authority were like Oedipus, but then the question arose: Where were all the abandoned Sohrabs? Sometimes we debated what we needed to do to ensure that a hypothetical son of ours didn’t develop an Oedipus or a Sohrab complex. Whenever we called on our friends, we’d be eager to discuss their children as soon as we got home. We had simplistic theories about oppressive fathers and rebellious sons and, conversely, of submissive sons and permissive fathers. By recasting the sorrow of our childlessness into something more profound, we thus strengthened our conjugal bond.
