by Linda Rogers
The next day, by a strange coincidence, I got an answer from the mayor.
Dear Mother Superior,
Thank you for drawing the eel situation to my attention. Heretofore, we hadn’t considered them a problem. Have you considered that you might be experiencing a religious crisis? Since the eel migration is an act of God, I would respectfully suggest that you pray for a solution to your difficulty. Consider swimming with eels an act of faith, Mother. Perhaps in a perfect world, nuns and eels will reconcile and once again co-habit the ocean. I am one of those who believe that all life comes from the sea. It could be the eels, or the idea of eels, are inviting you to communion.
If my reply is unsatisfactory to you, please contact the Department of Fisheries.
Yours, etc.
Mayor Thomas Barton.
What the hell did that mean? Is that how the mayor got rid of problems he didn’t want to deal with, by passing them off as hallucinations? I saw the eels. Perhaps he was put off by my threatening tone. Maybe he was raised by nuns and had a grudge. I’ve had lots of clients who’ve been abused by Sisters of the Child Jesus. I’ve heard stories of paddlings, sexual touching, withholding of food, forced feeding of lumpy potatoes and standing in the rain in pajamas. Sadly, their former victims often out-nun the nuns when it comes to perverse adult behaviour. That’s when I get them for unholy healing.
Coon and I learned to live with the eels. I even went so far as to eat one to prove my courage to him. We made a fire on the beach and I caught a hideous creature with a net I’d made with a coat hanger and one of Stella’s dance dresses. The eel wasn’t that bad. I’ve heard that they are sacred in parts of Italy. I washed it down with a half bottle of sherry I found in the liquor cupboard. Stella didn’t drink sherry. My dad must have had the bottle around for church ladies and priests, and they didn’t come any more. Coon just watched.
I moved all my candy to the cave. Lying on my back, watching the Northern Lights and shooting stars with an Oh Henry in my hand was my personal heaven. I started by licking off the chocolate and then eating one nut at a time until I got to the caramel centre. Coon demolished the bars. I’m surprised he removed the wrappers. Once, when I took him a bunch of bananas he ate them skin and all. Coon ate the skins on everything – fish, potatoes, apples and bananas – all of it.
I trusted Coon with my candy stash because his cave was my cave, as my father used to say in his adopted second language. Building up provisions was the first step to moving out. Even though I knew I couldn’t really leave Stella, it felt good to have a place of my own. What if she let a cigarette fall down the crack in her chair, or if it caught in a curtain or the carpet or in her bed, and the house burned down? Then we would have had no place to go but the cave. I could take her there and Coon and I could look after her. When the fire was lit, she could watch shadows flare on the wall instead of the TV set.
When I got home the night I’d carried the last load of provisions to the cave, Stella was watching You Were Never Lovelier, with Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth. Instead of lying back in the Easyboy, she was leaning forward, singing along, with her arms raised up as if she had them around Fred. I remembered sneaking out of bed to watch her dancing in the living room with Daddy, her body molded to his, her mouth next to his ear whispering the words to “Paper Doll” or “Unchained Melody.” She was still doing it, only Fred was Daddy and Rita was her.
“Tell me about Rita,” I said, snuggling in beside her.
“Shhhh,” Stella whispered. It was almost over.
When Fred and Rita disappeared in a soft focus of glitter and net, she ran her fingers through my hair. I loved it when she did that. Stella could put me to sleep by just scratching my back or rubbing my temples. I haven’t been able to find anyone else who will do that and, prior to my recent windfall, couldn’t afford to hire my own masseur.
“Tell me,” I insisted. It was the middle of the night and my eyelids were dropping.
“Rita was a husky little girl, just like you, but she could dance. Boy, could she dance.”
“And she danced off all her jiggly bits, right?”
“It wasn’t bits, Mother. It was baby fat.”
“Whatever,” I said and yawned, and the ceramic panther on top of the television set blinked his green glass eye. He winked at me. Stella was full of crap and he knew it.
“Her name wasn’t Rita then. She changed it when she became a movie star. What will we call you when you grow up?”
“Anything but ‘Mother.’”
“That was your daddy’s idea.”
“I know.”
“Rita got into the movies because she could dance. She dyed her brown hair red. See, you don’t even have to do that. Your hair is already the right colour.”
That was an exaggeration. My hair has red highlights, and that is nowhere near flaming red like Rita Hayworth’s.
“Some day you will be famous. You will fly off to Hollywood or New York City on a magic carpet and you’ll take your old mum with you, because you’re a good kid. When you have your own children, I’ll take care of them so you can go off and walk the red carpet with guys like Cary Grant and Fred Astaire. Just make sure you say goodnight to your old mother when you’re on television, just like Carol Burnett.”
“Carol is saying good night to her grandmother, Stella. Her mum is a drunk.”
I didn’t believe her fairy tales for one minute, but I still liked hearing them. Red carpets, ha. More likely, I’d be taking a hike into the woods and meeting up with a wicked old witch who would throw me straight into her oven, because I was already chunky enough to make a great Wiccan dinner.
“Rita has it all. She’s a star. She married an Arab prince and has two beautiful daughters. The world is her oyster.”
“Do Arabs eat oysters, Stella? Do oysters grow in the desert?”
“Of course, they do. King Farouk died when he ate too many. His stomach exploded right thorough his dress shirt.”
“Well, maybe they shouldn’t then.” Stella didn’t know everything but there were times when she thought she did. I was in no danger of believing her, any more than I believed my father came back to dance with her.
“People used to mistake your daddy and me for Fred and Ginger. He was a wonderful dancer. When I was a kid on the farm, I watched eagles teach their babies to fly. The trick was to catch an updraught of air and ride on it. Hot air rises, Mother. Your daddy was my hot air balloon.”
“Like pretending to be an Arab prince, you mean?”
I remembered him singing “The Sheik of Araby.”
“Your father was not an Arab.” She said A-rab. “He was a Tuscan Turk, descended from the Etruscans. He was a big talker, and lots of it was fairy tale, but he sure could dance. Maybe one day, you’ll find some hot air to ride on.”
In my mind, I still rode my father’s feet to bed every night while he sang to me. “Relax your mind,” he used to say. “Let your body hear the music.” Stella had no proverbs to give me, but she did blow on my face so I could breath in the smell of smoke and gin and the lovely feelings like flowers planted deep inside her. I was almost asleep and she was still petting my head.
“I love you, little Mother. I wish I could be happier for you.”
“I wish you could too,” I said, and I meant it with all my heart.
In a movie magazine, I read that Fred said Ginger stepped on his feet.
BYZANTINE LATRINE
I can’t help obsessing about the women in hajibs. At night I lie in bed and imagine what it would feel like to be wearing a shroud in summer. Well, I said to myself, they’re oven-ready. Just pop them in the ground when they expire of grief or the heat. This got me thinking about Pamuk’s headscarf girls.
I know that among those who believe it is instinctive to cover our heads before God – even the monkeys do it, making hats with their hands – but would God want us to suffer in this way? I doubt it – not a god that fits any definition I can find or think up myself.
What would I die for? It is easy to say I would jump in front of a car to push a child out of the way. Or would I? Isn’t the first reaction to impending tragedy a kind of paralysis? We move as if in dreams toward a foregone conclusion.
Is this entire country paralyzed when it hears that young Anatolian women are hanging themselves rather than bringing shame to their families and their religion by going bareheaded or falling in love with infidels? Why are these people burying their children? What a waste of a mother’s love. Practically speaking, what a waste of food.
If the rumours coming out of Kurdistan are true, these girls are not true suicides. It is their fathers and brothers who are encouraging them to tie ropes around their necks or jump off bridges. Perhaps their loving family members kick away the chairs or help them over the rails in their cumbersome attire.
And what about their mothers? Do the mothers close their eyes to all this? I close my eyes and see the hand of an African mother holding the razor she will use to circumcise her daughter, causing her a lifetime of suffering and perhaps even death. I see Chinese mothers breaking the tiny bones in their daughters’ feet to deform them for the sake of some cursed standard of beauty; golden lilies, my ass.
Does our deranged species deserve to inherit the Earth?
Who in their right mind would send a kid off to war and throw away time spent walking the floor with a crying infant, telling her stories, teaching her to read and write, or to swim? Twenty-odd years of careful nurturing down the toilet; just like that. It is unthinkable.
Is that why Pamuk’s God is as silent as snow, because he or she is aghast, speechless before the desecration of human life, the interruption of bees?
I have to admit I have a thing about draperies and suffocation. Every time I walked into my mother’s house with its closed curtains and the smells of gin and cigarettes, I saw death. I see death on the streets of Istanbul, those women and girls with their curtains drawn. They are the living dead. No wonder Turkey is in quiet turmoil. No wonder the Earth is dizzy on its axis of evil.
What keeps me moving is knowing that Iman’s mother fought back, defending her daughter on television. She is the real Arab Spring.
I wonder how Turks endure the heat, as we drive east from Izmir, ancient Smyra. Everywhere I look, there are people working like the mad dogs and Englishmen in that Noel Coward song my father played until the grooves on the record wore out. Farmers are actually burning their fields, reducing the stubble from harvested crops to ashes so they can plant again. The effort must be excruciating in the summer heat. There must be a point where human blood actually does boil. I must find out what that would be.
When we arrive at Sardis, a truck filled with bottles of water pulls up at the same time as a tourist bus. I wonder what parched Romans did on a day like this when they were constructing these buildings? At the moment we are fighting more wars over oil, but what is oil compared to water? We will get back to that battle. I am sure I will see the day when American troops march into Canada to take over our water supplies. Why wouldn’t they? It’s entirely in character. Our weapons of mass destruction are the comedians who see through their puerile logic. Hopefully, fully armed Americans practicing ultimate population control, will kill each other off before the day comes when we become the butt of the joke.
Because I wanted to stay in the moment and remember only what my memory selected today, I left my camera in Izmir. Now I wish I had at least brought a sketchbook to record the textures in the buildings, the exquisite tiles and mosaics that pre-date the artisanship in which the Muslims take such pride. I am astonished by the presence of a synagogue in this Roman community of polytheists. When did people become so exclusive, and why?
Perhaps I will make a Turkish garden, with a grape arbor and a mosaic floor. I am getting old enough to take gardening seriously. Maybe I followed my father here just to hear Voltaire.
“It is beautiful,” I say, standing on what remains of a mosaic floor.
“This is the meaning of life,” my companion asserts. “Broken pieces side by side, making a whole picture.”
“You are a poet, Güzel.”
“We are all poets if we allow ourselves. It is in our nature to select and arrange.”
Güzel draws my attention to a sign in English over what appears to be a horizontal stone bench with indentations. The notice says BYZANTINE LATRINE. It must be a joke. I am astonished. I can hardly say toilet words in public and I thought the Turks were modest to the extreme. Hasn’t Güzel been warning me at every opportunity to cover up and turn down the volume?
“It’s not about sexuality. It’s about cleanliness,” he says, as we cross the road to an outdoor restaurant snuggling in an oasis of trees and running water. There is a stream beside the truck stop café, which has been diverted into a waterfall where drivers can pass through and wash the dust off their cars.
“Yes, I know. The Romans had lovely toilets. The Turks have beautiful tuvalets.”
While Güzel attends to nature, I sink down on a carpet-covered bench with soft cushions, order çay and hold up two fingers for the Kurdish woman rolling huge pancakes on a large, slightly rounded stone, which she then fills with cheese and bakes in a stone oven. We would like two. She looks surprised.
“I want to speak into the tape recorder,” I tell Güzel when he comes to the low table and sits across from me.
“Of course.”
“I am a typical mid-twentieth-century North American,” I begin, “and I have no roots. I came to Turkey because the people in this country, even if they don’t know where they are going, know where they come from. They know how to dress and what is healthy to eat. They are what they are and understand how they should behave.” I pause when the pancakes arrive; they are delicious.
“In my country, we place a lot of importance on pedigree. People spend a lot of money, for example, acquiring purebred dogs, as if that meant something. I haven’t seen a single purebred dog in Turkey. They all seem to be mongrels. Dogs and cats appear to be the street people of Turkey.
“That’s not what I want to talk about, though. I want to talk about toilets. Before I came to this country I was advised to bring my own toilet paper, tuvalet kağıdı yok. I like the way that sounds, the consonants cresting like waves in water music, or flushes. There is no toilet paper. Here is the difference between my country and yours. In my country, people joke about using the pages from books for tuvalet kağıdı. Can you imagine anyone wiping their asses on sacred text in Turkey?
“I filled my luggage with paper, books to read, tissues to wipe my bottom and blow my nose. It was unnecessary. Even though English books are expensive and hard to find, there is so much else to engage the eye; and the toilets are so beautifully appointed. I want to commend you on your toilets, especially the little device.
“At first I didn’t understand what the device was for. It terrified me. Was it some sort of nannycam for the bum, a sneaky surveillance device stashed in the least likely of hiding places? I was afraid to use the toilet when I first arrived here for fear of insulting Turkishness, desecrating the device with my body waste or, at the very least, electrocuting myself by creating an electron path between myself and it, whatever ‘it’ is.
“Now I understand. The device is meant for washing the derrière. I have found that those cunning little taps on the wall activate the device, which then gives forth a pleasant stream of water. How evolved. North America has a long way to go before it begins to approach such ingenuity.
“Even the old-fashioned toilets with footprints and holes in the floor have devices. I was fooling with one just yesterday, at the mosque in the Konak market. I was properly dressed, shirt, shoes, skirt, borrowed coat, scarf. It was quite a business doing my business. How do Muslim women have sex and babies and go the bathroom without occasionally “compromising” their clothing. I’m not sure I could do it.
“While I squatted, holding up my skirts, enjoying the sound of my stream on an unbearably hot day, I mus
ed on such things. What if my father’s family had stayed in Turkey and converted to Islam in, say, the seventh or eighth century? Would I now be wandering around in three layers of clothing, wondering what humiliation might visit me in a public toilet?
“Just as I broke off a modest piece of tuvalet kağıdı, a brilliant circle of light came rolling over the tiles toward me. Was it enlightenment, some fragment of divinity? Cautiously, I reached out and touched the object when it had stopped spinning. I picked it up. It was a diamond ring.
“What a strange thing to befall me, albeit in a mosque, where miracles are just as much a possibility as they would be in a synagogue or a cathedral. I immediately thought of my mother’s lost ring. Were the chicken gods returning it to me in a Turkish toilet? I put it on.”
“Are you finished?”
“Yes,” I say, turn off the recorder and stand up. I suppose I could have spoken directly to him.
“Can you tell the difference between Kurdish Christian women and Muslim women?” he asks.
“No.”
“It’s how they wear headscarves, the only difference.”
The water in the car shower is beyond relief. I raise my arms and turn myself around and around. I don’t care if the Turkish truck drivers lounging in the shade are surprised or amused. I don’t care if my nipples show through my wet dress. The ring on my left hand sparkles in the sunlight. I know it. Iman is a married woman. Safe?
“What did you do with the alleged diamond?” he inquires, as if it might have been imaginary or fake.
“I found its owner,” I answer.
COON’S BOTTLE TREE
The world is full of beautiful bottles. My mother chose the square-shouldered lady filled with forgetfulness, but I don’t want to forget. I like the blue bottles best. My African client, Mr. Magawe, told me that blue glass is lucky. Blue bottles sing like the sea. When I listen to them, I hear dolphins searching the ocean for relatives, waves rhyming on the beach, and slaves rowing in unison. “How is that lucky?” I asked Mr. Magawe, and because he answers questions with questions, he asked, “Why not?” Doesn’t luck change?