Read an extract from The Red-Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk

orhan pamuk The Red-Haired Woman Translated from the Turkish by Ekin Oklap

EXC LUSI V E C H A PTER SA M PLER

Chapter 9 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.

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“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

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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

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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.

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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.

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“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 that 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.”

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“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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Chapter 10 During our evenings in town, Master Mahmut and I always did things in a particular order. First we bought my master’s cigarettes from the bespectacled tobacconist or from the grocer whose TV was always on. Then we visited the ironmonger, whose shop stayed open late, or the carpenter from Samsun. Master Mahmut had befriended him and sometimes sat down for a smoke on the chair outside his shop. I’d take the opportunity to slip away for a quick run by the Station Square. When the carpenter’s shop was closed, Master Mahmut would say, “Come on, I’ll get you a cup of tea,” and we’d sit at one of the empty tables outside the double doors of the Rumelian Coffeehouse, on the street that led to the Station Square. You could see the square from there, but not the building where the RedHaired Woman lived. Every now and then I’d make an excuse to get up and walk until I could see the windows of the building, and when I saw that the lights were out, I would come back to the table.

In that half hour we spent drinking tea outside the Rumelian Coffeehouse, Master Mahmut invariably offered a quick assessment of how far we’d dug that day and our progress generally. “That rock is very hard, but don’t worry, I’ll get the better of it,” he said on the first night.

“An apprentice must learn to trust his master!” he said on the second night, when he saw me getting impatient. “It

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would be a lot easier if we could use dynamite the way we used to do before the military coup,” he said on the third night. “But the army has banned it.”

He took me to the Sun Cinema one night, like a doting father; we watched the film sitting on the lower stretch of the cinema wall with all the children. When we got back to our tent, he said: “Call your mother tomorrow and tell her not to worry, I’ll find water in a week.”

But the rock wouldn’t break.

One evening when Master Mahmut didn’t accompany me to town, I went up to the theater tent to read the posters and the banners stretched across the entrance: the revenge of the poet, rostam and sohrab, farhad the mountainbreaker. adventures never seen on tv. I was most curious about the parts that hadn’t been on television.

Tickets cost about a fifth of the daily wages Master Mahmut paid me; there was no indication of a discount for kids and students. The biggest poster of all read extra discounts for soldiers, saturdays and sundays, 13:30 and 15:00.

I knew that I wanted to go to the Theater of Morality Tales exactly because Master Mahmut had criticized it.

Whenever we went down to Öngören, whether he was with me or not, I made it a point to pass by there, finding any excuse to catch a glimpse of the warm yellow tent.

While Master Mahmut sat nursing his tea one evening, I walked over to the Station Square to take another look at the windows that seemed always to be dark. Later, as I wandered up and down Diners’ Lane to pass the time, I saw the young man I thought was the Red-Haired Woman’s brother emerging from the Liberation Restaurant. I started to follow him.

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When he reached the Station Square and slipped into the building whose windows I always stared at, my heart raced. Which floor would light up? Was the Red-Haired Woman in? When the lights on the top floor came on, my excitement grew unbearable. But right at that moment, the Red-Haired Woman’s younger brother emerged from the building again and started walking in my direction. This puzzled me; he couldn’t have been turning the lights on upstairs and walking out the door at the same time.

He was coming straight at me. Perhaps he’d realized I’d been following him, or even that I was obsessed with his sister. Panicking, I ducked into the station building and sat on a bench in a corner. It was cool and quiet inside.

But rather than the train station, the Red-Haired Woman’s brother made for the street where the Rumelian Coffeehouse was. If I followed him now, Master Mahmut, who was still drinking his tea, would see me, so instead I rushed up a parallel street and stood waiting behind a plane tree at the top. When the Red-Haired Woman’s brother ambled past me, lost in thought, I tagged along. We walked down the carpenter’s street, behind the Sun Cinema, and past the blacksmith’s horse cart. I saw the late-night grocery, the barbershop windows, and the post office I called my mother from, and I realized that in just two weeks of wandering Öngören, I’d already walked down every street in town.

When I saw the Red-Haired Woman’s brother walk into the beaming yellow theater tent just outside town, I ran straight back to Master Mahmut.

“What took you so long?”

“I thought I’d give my mother a call.”

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“You miss her, then?”

“Yes, I do.”

“What did she say? Did you tell her that we’ll find water as soon as we’ve dealt with this rock, and you’ll be back home in a week at most?”

“I did.”

I would call my mother from the post office that stayed open until nine every evening, reversing the charges. The girl on the switchboard would ask for my mother’s name, and then she would say: “Mrs. Asuman Çelik? Cem Çelik is calling you from Öngören, do you accept the charges?”

“I accept!” my mother’s eager voice would confirm.

The presence of the girl on the switchboard and the surcharge for calling collect meant that neither of us could ever act quite naturally. We would run through the usual small talk before falling silent.

The same tight-lipped distance that had crept into my relationship with my mother came between me and Master Mahmut on our way home that night. We gazed at the stars while walking up our hill and didn’t talk at all. It was as if a crime had been committed, and since the countless stars and crickets around us had all witnessed it, we lowered our gaze and kept quiet. The cemetery owl greeted us from the black cypress.

Master Mahmut lit one last cigarette before retiring to the tent for the night. “Remember that fable you told last night about the prince?” he said by way of introduction. “I’ve been thinking about that today. I know a story like it about fate.”

At first I didn’t realize he was talking about the Oedipus myth. But I said immediately: “Please tell me, Master Mahmut.”

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“A long time ago, there was a prince just like yours,” he began.

The prince was his father the king’s favorite and firstborn. The king doted on this son and granted his every wish, throwing banquets and feasts in his honor. One day, during one of these feasts, the prince saw a man with a black beard and dark countenance standing by his father and recognized him as Azrael, the angel of death. The prince’s and Azrael’s gazes crossed, and they looked at each other in astonishment. After the feast, the worried prince told his father that Azrael had been among the guests, and that he was surely after him: the prince could tell from the angel’s mien.

The king was afraid: “Go straight to Persia, don’t tell anyone, but hide in the palace in Tabriz,” he told his son.

“The shah of Tabriz is our friend, these days; he won’t let anyone get you.”

So the prince was sent off to Persia immediately.

Afterward, the king threw another feast and invited the dark-faced Azrael again, as if nothing had happened.

“My king, I see that your son isn’t here tonight,” said Azrael with a look of concern.

“My son is in the prime of his youth,” said the king. “He will live a long life, God willing. Why do you ask about him?”

“Three days ago, God commanded me to go to the palace of the shah of Tabriz in Persia and take your son, the prince!” said Azrael. “That’s why I was so surprised, and so pleased, when I saw him yesterday, right here in Istanbul.

Your son saw the way I looked at him, and I think he knew what it meant.”

Without further delay, Azrael left the palace.

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