Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions

by Cami Ostman

  The main problem is it’s Halloween and I have no party to go to. I’m drunk and crying and I hate my husband and Conan hasn’t called and, anyway, where’s the party at?

  I call my other ex-boyfriend Dave, I tell him I’m bored because it’s Halloween and I’m all dressed up like a Maneki Neko but my husband isn’t paying any attention to me, seeing as how he is in Maine. So Dave comes to pick me up. I wrap bandages around my arm so the blood doesn’t seep into my white sweater. I am disappointed it isn’t bleeding very much. I didn’t cut deeply enough.

  Dave picks me up with a brand-new bottle of whiskey in the car. It is ten at night, which seems impossibly late, and I am sure everything will be closed. All the clubs will be shut down by now. We drive through Lexington, through a sleepy Colonial town, with everything shut up tight and dripping with very expensive Halloween decorations. “We’ll find some club or party,” he tells me. But we find only driveways.

  After about two hours of going nowhere, we pull to the side of the road and I put his dick in my mouth. My red cat bell jingles as he comes in my mouth.

  So we talk about how great things are, and how different things are now. I say I am so happy in my new apartment, now that I’m not a Jehovah’s Witness anymore. I like that we broke up but we can still be friends, still have sex.

  Things can only get better, I tell him. I’m finally free to live life however I choose. I can make all my own decisions now, and I never was allowed to make any decisions before in my entire life. What more could you ask for? How could anything possibly go wrong when you can finally make all your own decisions?

  The Church of the Snake

  Carolyn Briggs

  It was in an elevator in Istanbul that God made His first move. I had hoped the small freight elevator at the back of the international terminal would take me to the domestic terminal where I would catch a connecting flight to Ankara. I entered it alone with two suitcases and my overstuffed carry-on. Two books fell from my bag as the door slid closed. I picked them up and then tried to make sense of the buttons on the wall—none with numerals. I decided the bottom button was the most likely and was about to push it when the lights went out.

  I gasped and slammed my hand against the concrete doors, calling for help. No doubt I had probably ignored signs in Turkish that said the elevator was out of commission. I thought instantly of my ex-husband, his loving-kindness, his eagerness to fix my problems, to kneel in prayer with me, to take me before the Lord in supplication. But he wasn’t here and would never be here again. I was just about to reap what I had sown when I had turned my back on God and left both Him and my devastated husband behind. For twenty years I had toed the line, and then, one day, I stepped over.

  So this was it: my long-deserved demise, a slow suffocation in a dark corner of a foreign country. Why hadn’t I followed other people to the correct elevator? Why had I struck out on my own?

  But following other people is what got me into this mess in the first place. I had been a follower all my life, taking my cues from parents, preachers, deacons, elders, and my husband, and I followed them right into a place as small and confined as this elevator. I swore and slammed my hand down, pressing all the buttons. The elevator hummed and jerked into motion. When the doors opened, I lunged into the terminal and reached back in to pull out my luggage. After I took a deep breath, smoothed my hair, and retied shoes that did not need tying, I merged with the other passengers.

  I asked strangers questions in English, waved ten-dollar bills, and finally a taxi sped me to what I hoped was the domestic terminal. Then I gratefully sank into my seat on the Turkish airliner headed for Ankara, the capital city deep in the heart of Turkey. I accepted a piece of bread and a small greenish orange from the flight attendant who wore a hat like a 1950s Pan Am stewardess. The man beside me pulled out a cigarette and lit up. I listened to the announcements from the pilot and the flight attendants and assumed they were saying basically the same things such people always said. “We’re happy you’re flying with us today. Fasten your seatbelt. Your cushion is also a flotation device. We hope you’re not running from God because our Allah doesn’t suffer fools gladly.”

  The other passengers smoked and read the paper while I looked out the window, closed my eyes, and pleaded with God to not kill me before I saw Thom one more time. I loved how this man was dramatically different from my ex-husband and all the men I had known in the church. I met Thom at the university where we were both graduate students in a writing program. I was newly single and scared about a lot of things, but Thom, a handsome Irishman, was an older man of the world, a man of drink and irreverence and literature, and I sought refuge in all those things, especially him. And I was a novelty to him, a woman who had slept with only one man in her entire life, a woman in love with poetry and literature, an almost-virgin in the shark tank of graduate school. He was fascinated with me and my reinvention and regretted my youth in a religious community far more than I did. While I loved his nonconformity, I was taken aback when he defended his thesis and promptly accepted a job in Turkey. His breezy willingness to leave me behind had been one more reminder that he was not the kind of man I had always known: devoted, committed, trustworthy. No, Thom was mysterious and exciting. Sexy. His last email was a steamy anticipation of our being reunited after three months apart. I had to shift in my seat thinking about it.

  And the anticipation only built until two hours later when I was starring in my own romantic movie, sprinting when I saw him—actually parting people in my path. Thom was taller than everyone around him, so regal, so erect in his trench coat, and his gray-green eyes burned like I had never seen them before. We kissed deeply, an island of passion in the midst of shorter and duller people. I felt sorry for them and so glad to have left ordinariness behind.

  “There’s a dolmus out front. Let’s hurry,” he said, pulling me out to a shuttle bus. The van was filled with people shoulder to shoulder; I leaned against his chest.

  “This is the happiest day of my life,” Thom said, stroking my upper arm and kissing my hair. I didn’t say anything, stunned to be in Turkey, to be driving past red-tile-roofed houses built on the sides of hills. Rebar everywhere I looked. Construction, cars, a haze of petrol vapors.

  “Tomorrow, I’ll show you the city proper. You are not going to believe your eyes, darling. We’ll go to Kocatepe,” Thom said into my hair.

  “Caught-cha what?” I asked.

  He laughed. “It’s the largest mosque in Ankara. Oh, God, can the driver go faster?”

  Thom’s university was as modern as any I had ever seen, an oasis in the landscape of rusted steel and hovels. Carefully groomed gardens, an artificial waterfall, marbled pillars. And the brand-new faculty condos were pristine, white stone and sparkling windows, vines with pink flowers and swept paths leading to the campus. Thom’s apartment was bare, with plastered white walls, ceramic-tiled floors, a large window in the living room that I tried to look out of as he swept me toward the bedroom. My luggage never made it past the threshold of the apartment. I didn’t see the bathroom or the kitchen or anything else. He undressed me in the hallway, and we sank to the cold floor.

  That next morning when I woke I realized the light was different in Turkey. The source was still the sun, but it was an older sun, indifferent to me. I lay in bed after Thom had left to teach his class. I stretched in his bed, feeling damp and sore, but I didn’t care. Sometime in the long night, we had made our way to his bed. I had pulled the coverlet to my chin and suddenly thought of my mother on the other side of the world. About that time, Mom would be spreading raspberry preserves on her toast, brewing coffee, and making a grocery list for later that morning. I saw it clearly, that pensive way she had about her, the sorrowing self-righteousness I had always felt heir to. Not now. Not in Thom’s arms, not thousands of miles away from that coffee-scented Iowa kitchen. I didn’t want my mother’s life. I never had, but then I found myself living it, year after year after year.

  I WANTED TO
SEE everything and all at once. Thom took me to downtown Ankara right away. Walking was dangerous with the uneven sidewalks with twelve-inch curbs, streets a rubble of potholes and gravel. The traffic was unrelenting, constant, honking. Beggars with missing limbs and women wearing tight jeans and boots strode between women covered from head to foot. A woman in a dark green chador wept as she held out a black-and-white photograph of a man in uniform and told me something in Turkish. Only her eyes showed, and they were dark with sorrow.

  There was street food everywhere. Ears of corn boiled in pots and chestnuts roasted over blue jets of gas, kebobs of lamb sizzled on grill pans, and white paper bags of simet, a pretzel-like bread covered with sesame seeds, were stacked in precariously tall piles. We bought fresh figs and doner kebabs of spicy meat shaved off a giant whirling side of beef, stuffed into warm yeasty rolls. It was a dervish of gluttony. I was famished and kept reaching for lira, more lira.

  Kocatepe was a wedding cake rising with tier upon tier of narrow stained glass windows. I unfolded the scarf I had brought for this purpose and tied it under my chin. We slipped off our shoes and placed them in the massive parking lot of footwear. The mosque was empty of furniture, no pews, no pulpit that I could see, only acres of rugs spread side by side. Far above stretched a series of domes tiled in blue and red where a huge chandelier hung, a crystal ball with tiny lights so bright in the dark interior it had the brilliance of a swallowed sun. Men prayed with their faces pressed into the carpet. I stayed back from them, nervous and uneasy. Light wavered through the tiny windows, making them glow red and blue in the late afternoon, and this thin illumination suddenly exhausted me. I wanted to sit down. I tugged Thom’s sleeve and nodded toward the door.

  Thom told me that he had students who struggled with Islam; one had dared to write about it in his composition class.

  “He finally rejected his Islamic faith, the whole code, the dress, the patriarchy, the praying five times a day, washing up and all that nonsense. His family took him to a holy man who told him it was the Evil One who made him question holy things,” Thom said slowly.

  “What happened?”

  “He left Islam anyway, turned his back on the whole lot of them, but he says it’s hard to no longer belong to something bigger than himself. Rather like you.”

  “Yes. Like me,” I said. “I don’t know where the hell I belong.”

  “Do you feel lost?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “Not this minute.”

  “I hate those motherfuckers who kept you scared and small.”

  “I was born scared,” I said. “I just took the first way out I came to, I guess.”

  “We should put some of your Bible indoctrination to good use—we could go to Cappadocia—there’s a valley there with cave churches. It’s ancient as hell. Saint Paul and all those guys escaped there once when Rome started to hunt them down.”

  “Really? Is it a long way away?”

  “A morning’s drive. It’s secluded, but you like a retreat, don’t you? To remove yourself from the world?” he smiled while he said this, but I heard the subtext. I had navigated the world with the crutch of faith for a very long time, a cowardly thing for an educated person to do, according to Thom.

  He thought he knew everything about me and my history, even the history of my faith, but there was much that had escaped him. I valued the things he overlooked—this was perhaps the biggest difference between us and why we could never spend a lifetime together. He was enamored with literature and writers but clueless about people like me who had resigned ourselves to our factories and fields, to white clapboard churches where we sorted clothing to ship to the missionaries. Sometimes I saw his distaste for me and my faith—it would flit across his face until he composed his features into benign tolerance. Taking me to the Ihlara Valley would be a concession, a nod to my primitive nature, a token gesture Thom was willing to dispense.

  I SPENT A LOT of time alone in Thom’s whitewashed apartment, and I began to think it was the emptiest place I had ever been in. The deep blue prayer rug I had bought to take home was the only bit of color in the neutral rooms. There wasn’t even a picture of me, despite the fact that I had framed two and given them to Thom for a going-away present. I opened a few drawers to try to find the pictures, but was scared I’d find something I didn’t want to find: pornography, a picture of his ex-wife, newspaper clippings of a hit-and-run accident, still unsolved. My heart could be broken in a thousand well-deserved ways. Each afternoon I sat on the sofa with my hands folded on the pile of books Thom recommended, but I didn’t move, didn’t read. I just watched the clock until he came back home.

  The first weekend, we took the Blue Train to Istanbul where I hired a guide to show us Tokapi Palace. The gentleman wore a long double-breasted coat and horn-rimmed glasses. Even though it was I who handed him the lira, he had kept his eyes on Thom. “Secretary?” he asked and nodded toward me. He smiled broadly.

  “Friend,” Thom said.

  “Yes, secretary,” the man said and winked. “Not wife.”

  I walked ahead. I had questions to ask the sexist guide and I intended to ask them. I knew what I was worth in his eyes: forty-one million lira, or about twenty-five bucks for a half-hour tour of a sultan’s palace. I walked through the harem quarters and saw the golden cage where concubines were once enclosed high above the rest of the room. I knew what that was like, the feeling of being a captive, the angst of knowing life continued below. We drank fresh-squeezed orange juice at a sidewalk café. When I finished I asked for another, and Thom laughed at my greediness.

  A few days later, we were on the bus to Cappadocia and beginning to pass strange rock formations, conical rocks stretched twenty feet into the air. Some of the cones and towers had carved windows and doorways, hobbit houses. It could have been created in Hollywood, a strange valley of volcanic deposits with the occasional fairy chimney, a cap of hard rock on top of a rock cone.

  Thom said, “There’s historical evidence that Saint Paul visited here. Actually some biblical reference to this area—surely you know it?”

  “No,” I said. “I know about Ephesus. That’s in Turkey, too, I think.”

  “It is. A pity we won’t be going there. But the chapels I want you to see are a bit later—they’ve dated the frescos from the ninth and tenth centuries. They built monasteries in the face of a cliff. Looks like a wasp nest cut of stone. And then you’ll see over thirty of these rock chapels or cave churches, rustic but magnificent.”

  The bus pulled into a village and parked and became the only noticeable marker of the modern century. Hay and muck littered the pathways, no sidewalks to speak of, no yards, no fences. Chickens wandered in and out of living areas. A goat munched on the grass roof of a house. I smiled at the women who wove cloth in their front yards and at the children who rode burros. The men in the village gathered around outdoor tables drinking cups of chai. One young woman jumped up with a scarf of muslin she had beaded with tiny drops of amber and draped it over my hair. The beads glistened in the Hittite sun as we faced each other, only our eyes and lips showing. “Beautiful,” she said.

  I bought the scarf, digging out wads of lira and pressing them into her hand. I joined Thom, who was studying some bit of a Roman ruin.

  “Pretty,” he said. “How much?”

  “Twenty million,” I said.

  “You got robbed.”

  “I like it,” I said. I folded it and carefully put it in the bottom of my backpack. I pulled out the brochure the guide on the bus had passed out. It was a map of the valley with the churches labeled. Kokar Kilise, the church of the sweet smell. Sumbullu Kilise, the hyacinth church. Agacalti Kilise, the church under the tree.

  The Melindiz Suyu ran through the valley, gray-blue, crystal clear. As we began walking, the cliff faces stretched on both sides with doorways and windows carved at all heights. Tall, thin poplars, silent forests with fluttering silver and green leaves. The guide picked small golden berries and handed them to us. We at
e the cherrylike fruit and tongued the pits into our palms as we walked deep into the valley.

  The first cave was covered with frescos, the paintings remarkably preserved, especially on the ceilings and upper walls where tourists weren’t able to rub or chip. Angels brandishing crosses. Saints lined up like judges looked down at the scruffy tourists, who stared back with wide eyes and flashing cameras. Christ was everywhere and as primitive as I had ever seen Him. No gentle Jesus meek and mild here; this angular Byzantine glared.

  The colors were amazing, centuries old but vibrant gold and azure and red. The artists must have worked on these for years—the detail, the flowers, rosettes, checkerboard patterns, everything layered and ornate, on stone, in a cave with windows chiseled for light. The Garden of Eden. The Red Sea. Daniel in the lions’ den. Everywhere I looked was another story and another truth and I had believed them all. God made a way in the wilderness if you were his true daughter. But impostors were struck with boils and lightning and turned to salt. I felt dizzy. Centuries ago my forefathers had lived and worshipped here and were now buried beneath me. The very air condemned me. I was breathing their bones. These dead saints had persevered, unlike me. I suddenly remembered the winter mornings my sisters and I would meet before light in the morning. We’d leave our warm beds to start reluctant cars and wade through drifts of snow for prayer before our husbands and children woke for the day. Our faces were bare, still creased with sleep, as we held each other’s cold hands and sought the face of God. I was willing to sacrifice sleep, time, comfort, anything that would keep me from being in His presence.

  “Are you all right?” Thom asked.

  “No,” I said after a pause and suddenly I wanted to go back to the bus. “May I have some of your water?”

  I took a long swallow from his bottle and handed it back to him. I led the way out of the cave and stood, uncertain, at the door.