Dervishes

by Beth Helms

  MY FATHER had been in bed nearly a week, receiving his daily calls from Ali, when my mother and Simone and Catherine and I took a trip together to the baths. In the taxi to the Old City Catherine had the window and I was pressed unhappily between the two women, their thighs tight against mine, the fabric of their respective dresses cool and hot against my bare legs. Simone, so close, with her cakey, creamy smell, wore cotton; my mother had on some slithery synthetic that trapped humidity and made me itch. Every time I slid my hand between our too-close legs to scratch myself, she cut her eyes at me and wriggled a millimeter away. On the far side of the car, Catherine stared out the window. Simone argued furiously with the taxi driver about the route he was taking—in a fumbling patois of Turkish, French and English. Finally, he gave up fighting her and took the road she pointed out, and immediately we were trapped in traffic that seemed unlikely to move again, ever. The noise was earsplitting.

  “He should have known there was construction. He should have said so.” Simone adjusted her body in the seat, her hips pushed against me; she extracted her arm from her side and reached into her handbag.

  “He did, I think,” my mother said, but with no discernible note of victory. The cab was steamy with our breath, the mingled chemistry of our bodies, even though the windows were rolled down. The air outside was motionless.

  Simone handed a tissue to Catherine and told her to blow her nose. Catherine took the tissue, studied its weave, then bunched it up and held it tightly in her fist.

  “This is crazy,” said Simone. “It’s a hundred and fifty degrees. I’m melting into a puddle.” And yet it was like sitting next to a penguin, she was so cool and smart and immaculate.

  We were meeting some of the Turkish ladies at the baths; it was their monthly pilgrimage and we’d been invited. The previous night at a function, Simone and my mother had discovered their mutual plans—accidentally, unhappily—and so, for economy’s sake, we were sharing a cab.

  Simone blew her nose with a kitten-sniff; my mother stared out her window and fingered her bracelets.

  “You know, Grace,” Simone said suddenly. “Marjorie didn’t know anything about Rand’s trip. So unexpected. And he must still be recovering from that fall. I asked Marjorie and she was mystified.”

  Marjorie was the Canadian ambassador’s wife. They’d been to a party the night before at the Canadian Residence—all blond wood and oriental furnishings, exotic flower arrangements and food wrapped in seaweed. It made my mother nervous to step foot in there—she felt, I think, a mixture of longing and infidelity. She’d given up her citizenship to marry my father and had never stopped reminding him of it. But she also envied Simone’s relationship with Marjorie; I could tell because she called it “sickening” and “shamelessly self-serving.”

  “Well, why would she?” said my mother. “I can’t imagine why she would.” She was examining the view outside her window and craned her neck to watch a heated argument taking place nearby over a fender bender.

  Simone zipped her patent leather handbag closed. “Oh, Grace,” she said with something like a sigh. “Marjorie knows everything. She’s completely on the inside. You know it as well as I do.”

  My mother turned her head and looked across me at Simone. Her face was pink and her nostrils flared slightly.

  “Honestly, Simone, I can’t imagine what all the interest is. Rand is fine; it was barely a scratch. Besides, men go; they come back. I’ve never known anyone to notice particularly.”

  I didn’t look at my mother, staring instead at the back of the cabbie’s head, where a jagged scar showed beneath the bristly hairs at the nape of his neck.

  “Certainly,” said Simone, without any certainty at all. “I just don’t recall anyone mentioning a trip.” She looked at me. “Didn’t I ask after him the other day?”

  “I forgot,” I said. I scratched myself more furiously. My mother lifted her warm polyester hip and edged it away.

  On the other side of Simone, Catherine didn’t flinch, though Simone was pinching her quite hard, because she had not yet blown her nose. She was studying her shoes, her elbows propped on her knees. What had I told her of all this? For a moment I honestly couldn’t remember. I was ashamed of my father’s fall at the pool, the same hot shame I would have felt had I myself taken a public spill and scraped my knees. I was embarrassed by his clumsiness, his drunkenness, the bandages and bruises, by his lumbering gait through the apartment on his way to the bathroom. I was not advertising anything about him these days.

  How in the world had my mother thought to slip something like this by Simone, with her hound nose for intrigue and deception, her hatred of being excluded? Had she really thought Simone wouldn’t follow up? After all, she’d seen the fall with her own eyes, had tended my father while I was closed up in the chlorinated changing room, clutching John’s candies in my clammy hands, stuffing them into my mouth like a junkie, the slick of the tile slimy and cold beneath my bare feet. I could hear the adults beyond the thin walls; they were so incompetent, dithering around, half drunk themselves, useless in a crisis.

  John had put his sleek head in at one point, while people milled outside; his collar was open, his features obscured by the dim of the changing room. He stared at me for a few long moments. Please, I thought, please. He looked slowly around the room, as though someone else might have been concealed there. When I looked at him, he withdrew his face from the doorway without apology. He had come for Catherine, of course. Not even a calamity, not even my father, his head cracked open, possibly dead, could make him think of me.

  When I saw Catherine next—I’d been hustled home by some well-meaning adult, mostly asleep, cried out, exhausted—we both pretended that nothing terrible had happened.

  We arrived late at the baths and the women were already in the marble chambers, splayed and naked on low stone slabs; they looked like volunteers for ritual sacrifice. I saw Bahar and Ben Gul and other women I recognized but couldn’t name. Everything moved at a crawl and the room was cavernous, the air thick and swampy. Even walking through it felt like an enormous effort, as if we were moving upright against living water. Dark, leathery women edged along the vast perimeter, their limbs stringy, their movements cautious. In shallow marble pools, others hunched in the steam, their slack bellies and arms draped over doughy knees as they worked to locate themselves, all their crevices and hollows, with rough scraps of washcloths. Lining the room were little stone cubicles where you could have a modest amount of privacy, where both hot and cold water spurted forcefully from faucets set deep in the marble walls.

  Catherine and I lay cautiously down on the marble slabs. Suddenly, breasts—slick and damp and heavy, entirely unlike the cool, powdered flesh I was familiar with—swung unapologetically against my bare back. A woman began scrubbing me. The sponges felt like steel wool, like the ones Firdis used to scour the kitchen sink. I heard my mother speaking to Bahar in low tones in the pool behind me. I rubbed my own dead skin between my fingers, the grimy, fascinating little balls that came off with the rough sponges.

  Bahar was telling my mother about a restaurant she’d recently been to and my mother said she’d like to try it, perhaps when my father returned from his trip.

  Bahar laughed. “Very well,” she said. “When he returns. But remember please, you already went there with me. Last week, if anyone asks.”

  Catherine said, “What does she mean by all that?”

  I turned my face on the marble and we were eye-to-eye.

  “By what?”

  We were whispering. Above us, the huge Turkish women talked between the tables in sharp bursts. All the sounds of voices ricocheting around the chamber and hissing steam and running water made it almost impossible to tell who was saying what to whom.

  “Your father went away? You never said.”

  “I thought I did.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “No?”

  “No.” Catherine breathed heavily and reached her arms down to brush aga
inst the floor. I saw her pale flesh ripple under the force of the scrubbing. “You said he was home in bed indefinitely. You said he was all banged up.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “I do. I remember it specifically.”

  “Look,” I said, and I heard in my voice the heavy, affected exhaustion of a lie. “He went on a trip. I forgot.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “I really don’t care. But, still.”

  She turned her face away and her breathing became even and calm. I thought she’d fallen asleep.

  Then she said, “You should say if we aren’t going to tell things. You should just say that we’re not saying.”

  My skin tensed over my bones. “You don’t tell me every last thing.”

  “Oh, but I have,” she said. “Until now.”

  I turned my face away on my own bed of marble and closed my eyes. Though I didn’t quite believe her, I heard a finality—new, adult, implacable—in her tone. When the women were finished with us and we rose, shaky on our legs, and made for the cubicles to rinse off, we didn’t speak. Usually we went together and fought over the cold water, but this time Catherine closed herself into a single stall and left me standing in the steam, my hand outstretched for the door she had just shut behind her.

  Simone, wrapped in a towel, sat on the edge of a pool nearby. Her hair, usually so perfect, lacquered and arranged, was pasted stiffly around her pale face. My mother and Bahar were naked, languid and soaking, their big breasts floating on the misty surface like pastries at the bakery.

  My mother tilted her head back and looked up at me from that angle, her hair on the marble, her arms outstretched along the edge. Her nipples broke the surface; the water was milky, frothing like foam.

  “Lovely, isn’t it?” she said, in a drunken tone that seemed to me stagy and put on, overly suggestive.

  I went into another stall and closed the door. The pounding water revived me somewhat and I left the suffocating baths and went to the lockers for my clothes. I pulled on my shorts, my dumb shirt, my stupid shoes and went to sit in the lobby. The steaming walls dripped, and everything—my clothes and hair and body—smelled of this water and the dank underground labyrinth of the hamam. Groups of women came out, paid the crone behind the counter and left through the dark tunnel that led to the street. I was parched, my skin flayed and red, my muscles turned to taffy. I drank four tiny glasses of thick, sweet juice that someone would have to pay for and sat there, staring at the slimy floor, waiting for them to emerge.

  When they came out—laughing, damp and glowing, scrubbed of makeup and superfluous skin—it didn’t seem they had missed me at all. Outside, in the equally airless afternoon, we wilted into separate taxis and dozed home through the choked streets. What an odd recreation, on such a day. We must have looked as we felt: raw and scoured, tired, for the moment, beyond politeness, beyond questions or recriminations.

  August 1975

  4

  IN THE LIVING ROOM WHERE BAHAR AND GRACE SIT THE LIGHT IS dimming. Grace’s fingers itch for a lamp but the ornate clock on the wall tells her it’s too soon. Beside her, Bahar is blond and beautiful—a new shade, the blond, and against her dusky complexion the contrast is stark. Grace sits in silence and inhales the scent that rises from her friend—stale flowers and warm, tanned skin, frequently touched.

  In the hallway Firdis is readying for home. Grace hears her taking her things from the closet, moving surreptitiously, like a thief in the house, stealing away.

  “Güle güle,” Bahar calls. “Çok mersi.”

  Grace opens her mouth and then shuts it: she is uncomfortable using Bahar’s own language in front of her. It makes her feel thick-tongued, strangely vulnerable. She gets to her feet.

  “Drink?” she says, instead.

  Bahar sighs and checks her wrist, though the time is all around them, ticking, moving too slowly. She half rises and then sits down again.

  “Scotch?” she says. “Do you have the good kind?”

  “I’m sure we do.” Grace crosses to the liquor cabinet, turns the key and finds the bottle. She dislikes scotch but pours them each a glowing glass. She sits back down.

  Bahar raises her glass and drinks. She sighs with pleasure; a breath of sweet air escapes her mouth, lingers and then dissipates. “This stuff you Americans have is much better than the shit we find here. And on the black market it is ridiculously expensive. You cannot imagine.

  “So,” says Bahar, after a pause, “I have a favor to ask of you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Go ahead. Ask.” Grace props her legs on the coffee table and shoves an ashtray aside with her foot. “What is it?”

  “I was thinking that while Rand is here, while he is recovering, you might help me out someway.” Bahar takes a long drink that seems barely to stir the surface of her glass. She sets it down. “Where’s the girl?”

  “The girl is with her friend, I expect. They run around in the streets like wild Indians. Sometimes I wonder if I should worry.”

  Bahar nods absently. “That’s good,” she says. “That’s fine.” She settles back into the couch and lifts her slender feet next to Grace’s.

  “Why?”

  “No reason. I want to talk to you. You are my good friend. We have had so little time lately. I miss you.”

  Bahar draws her knees to her chest. She is wearing slim pants and a flowing blouse; the silk gathers around her updrawn knees, floats onto the surface of the sofa. She sighs.

  “Here it is, as you say. Ali is here very much now, yes? This is helpful to you, I think. To not have the embarrassment of the American doctors. People asking questions that might be difficult.”

  Grace senses the stillness of the apartment—Rand is drugged half to death in the other room. A broken rib that punctured a lung, a significant concussion. The American medical facility was closed when he fell; he’d spent the night in the Turkish hospital and then had come home to be cared for by Ali, after some frantic calls to Bahar. It seemed wiser, in those early hours after the accident, to keep his drunken tumble off the radar screens of his superiors. Paige, who had been there that night, had strenuously agreed. It had been her idea to say he’d been called away on business.

  “I’m very grateful,” she says.

  “That’s good,” says Bahar. “And it’s a pleasure to help you. These things are neat in this way, aren’t they? I help you, you help me.”

  “Yes,” says Grace. “I was helping before, remember?”

  For some little time Grace had been doing favors for Bahar. Her life was distant enough from Bahar’s that a real intersection between them was not possible. She was that American woman Bahar played cards with, the one who had asked Ali for a referral to a pediatrician. Just then Bahar was having an affair with her riding teacher, out at the stables in Balgat, a man considerably older than she was, with a rugged and lined face and a wide and smiling mouth. He was charming, with the bandy legs of a lifelong horseman. Grace had met him once at an exhibition at the cavalry grounds where they’d gone as families: Bahar’s hooligan boys, Ali, Grace and Rand and Canada. Sitting in crowded bleachers—it was a holiday, some national celebration or commemoration—Bahar rose suddenly from her seat and threaded down through the crush, her bright hair a thing you could follow with your eyes, her big stylish sunglasses propped on her head. She had returned with a man in tow, an upright figure in a uniform, his hair fully white, his posture casual but erect. A man clearly comfortable anywhere, in any situation. Hands were shaken all around.

  “Ahmet bey,” Bahar had said, by way of introduction.

  “Efendi,” said Ali and then Rand, each rising slightly from his seat.

  The man bowed a little over Grace’s hand. Chatting, his eyes strayed to the field, where horses were moving in formation. His gaze was professional, evaluating. Flags snapped in the wind. The day was brilliant, blue and hot. Around them, families opened picnics on their laps, mothers passed food, b
right orange soft drinks in bottles.

  Bahar’s hand rested on the man’s forearm; she leaned back against the rail, her summer dress filmy and clinging to her legs. He lit her cigarette, the lighter coming from nowhere, vanishing again into a pocket. A little wreath of smoke circled their heads; Bahar was several inches taller in her heels. The band struck up something stirring.

  In the bleachers, Ali turned back to the boys, lifting them by their belts as they scrambled away, up to mischief as always, and bent close to whisper some halfhearted threat or admonishment. Bahar and her friend spoke in Turkish for a few moments. Grace caught only a word here or there; it was still too fast for her.

  Turning to her with a quick laugh, the man said, “But we are being rude.” He then directed to her some question about the city, and she fumbled for a reply. There was some quality about this man that undid her a little.

  Searching for something, she heard herself say, “My daughter, Canada, loves horses. She’s always wanted to ride.”

  “Is it so?” Ahmet said and he swung back to Bahar. “You must bring the girl to the stable with you sometime. Perhaps it is a good distraction for everyone.”

  Bahar had been looking out over the field; she said without turning, “Yes, I will. What a nice idea.”

  Grace was suddenly aware of the heat of the day on her shoulders and cheekbones, the warmth of sun through the fabric of her dress, like the sudden flush of a sunburn you hadn’t known you had. She’d turned her eyes to the husbands, Ali and Rand, by then engaged in some conversation of their own, Ali pointing to some distant place in the stadium, Rand following his finger. Canada had wandered off somewhere. It astonished her that anyone could miss this—this electricity, the shocking radiance of Bahar’s smile, the coy tilt of her head. The angle of this man’s slim, uniformed body toward hers. To Grace, their studied nonchalance screamed of intimacies.