The Red-Haired Woman

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The Red-Haired Woman

Orhan Pamuk 

 


I had wanted to be a writer. But after the events I am about to describe, I studied engineering geology and became a building contractor. 

 

I felt as if every star was a thought, a moment, a fact, a memory of mine. You could see them together, but it was impossible to conceive of them all at once. It was the same way the words in my head couldn't keep up with my dreams. My emotions moved too far for words to do them justice. 

 

Emotions, then, were more like pictures, like the gleaming sky before me. I could feel the whole of creation, but it was harder to think about. That was why I wanted to be a writer. I would contemplate all the images and emotions I couldn't express and finally put them into words. 

 

Sometime after midnight I woke up with a start. Master Mahmut wasn't in the tent. I walked warily into the black night. It seemed the whole world was empty, and I was the last living thing left in the universe. The thought made me shiver, as did an impalpable wind. Yet everything also seemed imbued with an enchanted beauty. I felt the stars drawing closer above my head, and I sensed that I had a very happy life ahead of me. 

 

Oedipus punished himself by putting out his own eyes in remorse. Ancient Greek audience would have been satisfied by this outcome, as sure 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 not punishment at the end of this tale from the East - only the reader's sorrow. 

 

Is the need for a father always there, or do we feel it only when we are confused, or anguished, when our world is falling apart? 

 

Like some of its tragic heroes, this book has spent its entire existence in foreign exile. 

 

My eyes roamed over the skin on his neck. One day when I was seven, my parents took me to the beach on Heybeli Island. They wanted to teach me how to swim: my mother would lower me belly-first into the water, and I would flail and splash about trying to reach my father standing three steps away. Every time I came close, he would take another step back so that I'd have to swim just a bit farther. But in my desperation to grasp him, I'd yell, "Daddy, don't go!" I'd scream so much and become so agitated that he couldn't help smiling as he raised his sturdy arms to lift me out of the water like a kitten, nestling my head against his chest or in the crook of his neck, the very spot I was looking at now, which even at the seaside retained his unique scent of biscuits and floral soap. Every single time, he'd furrow his brows and say:  

"There's nothing to be afraid of, Son. I'm here, all right?" 

"All right," I'd gasp, basking in the joy and comfort of his arms. 

 

but my mind was irretrievably in the past. 

 

our character is forged not just by our freedoms, but also by the forces of history and memory.

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