The Red-Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk

Author:Orhan Pamuk
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

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.

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