Speaking with Strangers

by Mary Cantwell

  We ate fresh sturgeon on skewers, snatched, he said, “from under the noses of the Greeks,” then went to the “number one deluxe nightclub,” which was on top of the hotel. I doubt he could have afforded such a place if he hadn’t had to take me about, so I imagine he may have thrilled to the belly dancer, the four female violinists sizzling through “Play, Gypsy, Dance, Gypsy,” the four male Paraguayans singing Italian standards, and the black-satined blonde breathing “Mammy Blue.” But maybe not. Maybe he would have liked to be at home with his wife and children, assuming he had any, drinking raki and munching on pistachios. Or maybe he would have liked to be one of those men out on the dance floor, lean men with faces like hawks, dancing with women as plump and lush as overblown peonies. When the women, presumably their wives, returned to their tables, the men danced together, as I had seen Jewish men dance the hora, and it was then that I saw joy, only then that I saw love.

  From Izmir on I traveled with a young Turkish woman just out of university and reluctant to marry, because she worried about her freedom. As we drove toward a coastal resort named Marmaris, I would look from her, dressed in imitation Pucci and teetering in high-heeled pumps, to the women I saw in yashmaks, layers of sweaters, and billowy pantaloons, bent double under bundles of branches or the fat, shawled children they were piggybacking (the men meanwhile were sitting in tilted-back chairs in every café doorway, under every tree), and wonder which of us she was more like.

  I found out the afternoon we stopped at a camel fight we’d seen from the road. Past the veiled women standing on the walls surrounding the field we marched—she a monument to emancipation—straight to a pair of folding chairs some grinning men had set up for us in the front row. The camels were dressed to their long teeth in trappings shining with sequins, pearls, and gold embroidery, and blew bubbles through their fat pink lips. Their rear legs splayed, their stubby tails swinging, they seemed a peaceful lot until their keepers goaded them into halfhearted combat. Suddenly, one broke loose from its leading strings and chased me, the guide, and fifteen or twenty small boys from the field. Once, when I had longed for the Europe that Hemingway had known in the 1920s and whose footsteps B, like every junior-year-abroad student of the 1950s, had retraced, I thought that running the bulls at Pamplona would be it I never had, and now I would never have to. Running a camel was terrifying, and, better yet, I didn’t know anyone else who had done it.

  We were terrified that night, too, in a hotel where we were the only guests. A man had knocked at the guide’s door, saying he was the bellboy, and asked whether she had received her luggage. Since the hotel was empty, there was no possibility of confusion about the luggage, so she, unnerved, called the desk, only to get the same voice on the phone. This time, however, he said he was the night clerk.

  We were two miles from town, the man was prowling about outside her room, and she, crying, wanted to sleep in mine. I pushed a big chair against the door, got out my Swiss Army knife, decided I could, if necessary, shinny down the balcony—we were on the second floor—and go for help.

  For weeks, I, who had been a Cerberus to my children, had been responsible for no one but myself, for whom I was never brave (except at work) about mounting a defense. But now, with someone to protect, I was ready, even eager to test my guts. I sat up all night, my hands poised for violence, courageous because I was needed. Then morning came, and with it a covey of cleaning women, and we moved on.

  There was more horror to come, in a toilet in the town of Mugla, from which we both emerged pale and gasping. It was on the second floor of a restaurant—a man was posted at the foot of the stairs to hand out paper napkins—and served both men and women, though not, I prefer to think, together. The toilet was a big room with a slanted floor that had been segmented into narrow alleys down which water flowed. One squatted at the head of an alley to evacuate, then watched while whatever emerged floated to the foot, where presumably it dropped into some kind of sewer. Several turds in the adjoining alleys had been becalmed along the way, however, and the smell and sight were well beyond what I recalled from Girl Scout latrines. “How are we to have tourism if nothing is done about the toilets?” the guide moaned once we were outside, dousing ourselves from the bottle of lavender water she kept in the glove compartment of her car. We laughed, then, friends who had been in peril of prowlers, runaway camels, and marooned turds, and today I cannot remember her name or her face.

  Sometimes, however, I must have traveled alone, though never without a driver. With him, most of the time, I sat in silence, because I cannot remember anyone being with me in a small hotel in Bodrum except the five shawled women I used to sit with every night in the tiny lobby. It had a coal stove, on which a pot of marmalade was forever simmering, and we crowded around it—me reading, they knitting and chatting. We could not speak, but we smiled at one another often, free to do so because we were all female. I would never have smiled at a strange man in Turkey, and any upward curve of a Turkish woman’s lips was hidden outdoors by her yashmak. But in this tiny lobby, with its smell of coal and oranges, we shared a shelter that was less a matter of bricks and mortar or wood and nails than of mutual femininity. But no. Femininity is not the right word. Femaleness. We were creatures of our bodies in a way that men can never be, equally fearful of infertility, equally fearful of childbirth, equally fearful of the lump in the breast or the bloody flux. We knew one another without ever having to open our mouths.

  I was also alone when I went to Priene, a Greek ruin not far from Ephesus, set on a plateau above the Menderes River.

  The climb to the ruin, along a steep path, was lung-cracking, but not as difficult as Freya Stark’s route. In her time—I think it was the 1920s—there was no path to Priene, and one had to cross the Menderes and climb that side of the hill which faced it. Heavy rains had swelled the river, so she spent several days on the low-roofed second floor of a fisherman’s cottage before she could cross, speaking to no one, eating whatever the fisherman’s wife set before her. Purgatory and silence before Priene: I was envious.

  It was very quiet on the plateau, and, but for the quick green of licorice plants, the only color—of the sky, the grasses, the ruins—was a pale cool gray. I hopped from toppled stone to toppled stone, watching for the snakes I had been told lived among them, and listening to the dull thunk of a sheep’s bell in the distance. The stillness was crystalline, and I fantasized coming here again someday and sharing it with the balding man. So I picked up a small marble shard, assured myself that it was of no archaeological value whatever, and decided to bring it home to him. Now I should love to be able to run my fingers over that worn vestige of egg-and-dart molding, but at the time I could think only of how much more complete I would feel if I could once more give a present—apart from the necktie I chose every Christmas for my brother-in-law—to a man. For years I had pondered over what to give B for his birthday and Christmas, Valentine’s Day even, and his shirt size—16½—34—was written on my heart. But divorce meant an end to Brooks Brothers, an end to secondhand bookstores for old Joseph Mitchells and Berton Rouechés, an end to leaning toward a salesman as I would toward a priest in a confessional and saying, “My husband wears pajamas, but I was thinking a nightshirt might be fun.”

  Ephesus was near Priene, acres of white marble splintered by the light and, unlike most archaeological digs, accessible to the amateur’s eye. One could walk past the library, the temples, the priest’s house, the sailor’s brothel, the theater, with its two thousand-year-old seats, and actually see them. Paul, upon whom I was prone to pile half my problems with Catholicism and with sex, preached here; Saint John is buried here, under a sixth-century basilica; and not far away, it is claimed, is Mary.

  Mary’s house, or at least the foundations of somebody’s first-century shelter, was a little Lourdes, full of discarded crutches and framed prayers of thanks. Desperate as always to sniff the odor of sanctity, I breathed deeply of the room, waiting—as I had ever since the days when I knelt in the attic
in Bristol praying to my Aunt Margaret, who, since she had died at eleven, I believed must be a saint—to sense a presence. None came, any more than an answer came after I had scribbled a plea that my husband not go away and stuck the paper in Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall. So once more I lost my faith in prayer at the same time as, remembering a phallus-shaped stone in Bodrum and a nearby tree from which fluttered rags symbolizing cries to Allah from barren women, I retained my belief in magic.

  It was that faith in magic which had me photographing Mary’s house with my Brownie Starmite and eventually giving the pictures to the deeply religious Polish woman who often babysat for the children. She was very old, and tears came easily to her, so she cried when I gave them to her. “You make me so happy,” she said, her tongue thickened by her accent and her sobs. “Now I know I work in a good Catholic home.”

  I am, as I have said, proud of my memory, which lays tenacious monkey fingers on much I would rather forget. Still, it has the occasional hole out of which I can pull nothing, not even the slightest wisp of a meeting or a journey. So all I know of Ankara is waiting, with a mustachioed Kurdish driver, outside an apartment house that looked like mud huts set upon mud huts. From it emerged my interpreter, a young man immaculately suited and tied and faintly ashamed of my having seen where he lived.

  We drove east, toward the Valley of the Göreme, skirting a big salt lake to enter a landscape that was all beige and gray, occasionally spiked with black. A few more hours through naked, wrinkled hills, and we were in Nevşehir, a town of a desolation so complete, I was forever finding a reason to wander its scabbed streets. Dust flew up in our faces and hung in the air. The girls in the town brothel, the young man told me, made seventy cents a customer.

  We were in Nevşehir because it had the only hotel near the valley that was open in winter, and we were the only guests, apart from some prospective guides who were there for training.

  At sunset the air chilled, my radiator, a cheap English plug-in, didn’t work, and the manager, realizing that I was freezing in my room and longing for the moment when I could sit in the dining room beside the flaming spits, set in the wall, for doner kebab, would invite me to his stuffy, overheated office for a drink. We had pistachios and a bottle of Johnny Walker and listened to Turkish 45s played on a small portable, and, although I couldn’t speak to him, his wife, his three harum-scarum children, and the covey of guides, each of us falling over one another’s feet, it didn’t matter, because when you’re eating and drinking and listening to music, talk becomes redundant. Later, after dinner, I would crawl into one of my room’s twin beds, heap it with the blankets from the other, position the lamp with its forty-watt bulb on a pile of books, and open Edmund Wilson’s Classics and Commercials. Outside, dogs racketed in the desert. Inside, my toes wriggled ever deeper into the blankets and I thought of how seldom I was lonely in the country. There was nothing here but me and the dogs and the dust, all of us the same thing.

  My usual excuse for touring Nevşehir as to look at and maybe buy a couple of prayer rugs and some kilims, and here my interpreter, surely fifteen years my junior, took over and treated me like a toddler. While I sipped cup after cup of Turkish coffee, he haggled with the owner of whatever shop we were in until he got what he thought was a good price. Then he nodded, and off we would trot, my purchase rolled up and tied with twine. I liked the routine in a way, this giving myself over to a Big Daddy, but I was furious when he firmly forbade me to accept a dinner invitation for the two of us from the mayor of Nevşehir. I didn’t have the right clothes (I had packed only corduroy pants and heavy sweaters); I would disgrace him. There was no way I could convince him that the mayor would forgive me my wardrobe, no way I could budge his stubborn Turkish stance. That evening, in an effort to make up for the toddler’s disappointment, he took me to the weekly movie, where we sat on wooden benches and saw a double bill: a Turkish version of The Wizard of Oz and a costume drama, whose hero, he told me, was in jail more or less for life for possession of hashish. Every man, women, child, and infant in Nevşehir was at the movies that night, and when the voluptuous star of the costume drama, draped in roughly ten pounds of veiling, did a belly dance, the cheers were wild.

  I liked him again then, liked him especially the next day, when we went through one of the underground cities, built perhaps by the Hittites, in a place called Kaymakli. Sometimes the ceilings were high enough for us to walk upright; more often we slid along on our bellies; in each instance our misery was mutual.

  We emerged into a dusty, golden afternoon and the sight of a fat, bespectacled woman in a yashmak calling me to her house, the only one for miles and set in a sea of mud. Her name was Fatima; she had a son who was restringing a Moslem rosary and a husband kneeling on a prayer rug and facing Mecca. Neither acknowledged me while we sipped tea and talked in a language known only to women. True, we had no words but we had motherhood—she pointed to her son; I brought out a photograph of my daughters—and we had housekeeping. Her home had one room, whitewashed, carpeted with old pieces of linoleum, and lined with rug-covered banquettes, so there was little to tour but the walls. Pictures of Atatürk and Menderes, an executed premier, were pinned there, and postcards from tourists who, like me, had answered her wave. Somehow I made it clear that I had pictures on my wall, too, and together we mourned the difficulties of keeping a place clean and of raising children, and I don’t know how we did this, but we did. Later, she pulled me outdoors, swathed me in a yashmak, pulled my arm around her shoulder, and the interpreter, who, bored by all this woman talk, had been waiting outside, photographed us with my Brownie Starmite. Because we were both veiled to our eyes, the only way one can tell which of us is the Turk and which is not is by my sweater. It came from the Aran Islands.

  A few days later we drove to Konya, Turkey’s holiest city, to the Mevlana Medresi, a museum and shrine to the thirteenth-century founder of the dervishes. Shoeless, I walked through kneeling, praying Moslems to see Mevlana’s clothes and prayer rugs and Korans, the beard of the Prophet in an elaborate coffer, and Mevlana’s tomb, hung with golden trappings. Then I, whose only God has been my father and, after his death, my husband, read what Mevlana said about being consumed with love for the God I could not find outside humanity. “I was raw,” he wrote. “I am now cooked and burnt.”

  One of the small rugs I bought in Nevşehir disintegrated at the dry cleaners, and the other is stored in the basement. The kilims, I had made into pillows, and they are stored in a closet. A door knocker shaped like the hand of Fatima is stuck in the brick of my living room wall, and my blue worry beads disappeared a long time ago. So did a necklace with tiny blue stones and the presents I bought for the children. All but one. For Snow White I had bought a ring with the same tiny blue stones as were in my necklace, and it showed up not long ago, twisted now and tarnished. No matter how glorious one’s children are in adulthood, it is painful to look at reminders of their childhood. The children who drank from those silver baby cups and carried those Flintstones lunchboxes will never again love as cleanly and as purely as they did then. Time will have darkened them.

  “But what,” you may ask, “happened to Snow White while you were in Turkey and she was at her father’s country house?” I do not know. I suppose she went sledding and saw movies and, because she was getting interested in clothes, took to hanging around the area’s quaint little shops. At night she probably popped popcorn and watched television, and, once put to bed, spent hours under the blankets reading by flashlight.

  I do not know, however, what was going on in her head, or what it was that turned her into someone I had never before met. “Adolescents,” a social worker told me once, “are walking time bombs.”

  I don’t think I was. Neither was my sister. Or maybe we were and lacked only the fuse to set us off. But there were no fuses in a house in which two grandparents, two parents, and a maiden aunt built for us an armature that would last us all our lives. Perhaps those two weeks in the country marked the time that na
ture—can I call it nature?—stripped Snow White of those protections (I think of them as the immunities passed along in mother’s milk) afforded by innocence. Oh, God, I am only speculating, fruitlessly as usual. Because if I, and all those parents who have seen their children turn into strangers overnight, knew the answers, we would no longer be asking ourselves—as we are always asking ourselves—“But what did I do?”

  Five

  Number 83 was beginning to fill up. The Turkish rugs spilled color onto the bare floors, and two brown velvet couches arrived in the living room. “But Daddy’s just bought the same couches!” the children said when the furniture was delivered. Having formed our tastes together, B and I, all unknowing, were constructing parallel universes. If they differed in any respect, it was probably in what we hung on our respective walls. During our marriage I had never entered an art gallery without him. Now I was hanging around Fifty-seventh Street, making choices that I knew would not have been his. Finally, I had broken with B’s esthetic, and all it took was opening my mouth to say, “I’d like that collage, please,” and a $25 deposit. The gallery owner would then root around in the coat closet for an old shopping bag, and off I would go to the bus, feeling like a Medici and clutching a purchase that, short of clothing, was the first in many years that was truly mine.