by Linda Rogers
“I’m roasting,” Hannah complains.
“Exactly.”
Naomi gives her camera to the shop girl who good-humouredly takes some photos, and seems happy when we purchase our scarves.
“She smiled,” Hannah says as we leave. I guess I will be buying lunch.
“What,” I ask, attacking my tavuk sis with a fork, “would these toe-tapping Muslim ladies do if they knew what the lyrics in Papa’s blues songs really meant? Would they smile at ‘jelly roll’ or ‘big banana’ or would they have their husbands cut off the musicians’ heads in the public square?”
“Everyone likes jelly roll,” wise Hannah remarks, even though she has never tried it. I will ask Güzel. He might even offer me some.
While we ate, sunbathed and slept in the cabana this afternoon, Güzel and I traded stories. I told him that my father had assumed an Italian identity after serving in Sicily during World War Two. Apparently he had enjoyed being a sex tourist at war. My father’s family was from Tuscany. Maybe there was genetic recognition in his attraction to Mediterranean women, especially the film stars of the Fifties and Sixties. I am only one degree removed from the soldier who hungered in the killing fields of Calabria.
Now there is evidence that the Etruscans immigrated to Italy from Smyrna during a terrible famine in pre-Christian times. The population was forced to draw lots. Half of them had to leave or they would all starve. My mother said she knew he was a Turk. I have no idea whether this is true or not.
“I am from Izmir,” Güzel says, while we are sweating in the Cesme hamam. In spite of the hot weather, I was determined to have a Turkish bath. Mind over matter; it is a test to see if I can take what I dish out, hands on. I have never had a massage. We are the only ones here. In this hamam there is no separation of men and women. I pick up a towel and a sarong in the common changing room. Despite the fact that I want Güzel to see me naked, I am careful changing into my cotton wrap.
“Maybe we are related,” I say, turning so that I am lying on my stomach on the sweating platform in the centre of the steam bath.
Güzel laughs and I wonder about the incest taboos in Islam but do not say anything because that would presume intimacy.
The slab is marble and, since there is nothing to grab onto, my fingers slip on the damp surface.
“I am nervous,” I say. “I am not used to being touched.”
“But you touch people all the time.”
“It’s not the same thing. I give the healing touch. No one touches me. My father used to tickle me. It made me nervous.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Yes, I’m trying to get over it. I have lots of phobias. I like to take pictures, but I’m shy about being photographed.”
“Is it about power?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I do know there is a missing piece.”
“I hope you will find it.”
“I will. Meanwhile, I do get a lot of satisfaction from my job.”
“Do you find it hard to work with old people?” he asks, his voice choking on the steam.
“Why?”
“It must be sad. I understand it is the North American custom to abandon elders. Surely, they are unhappy.”
“That’s true, but my vocation is to give them back their joy.”
“How do you do that?”
“I play music. I read to them. I make beautiful food.” I hesitate. “I give them a massage.”
“Relax and enjoy it,” he says as Mahmoud, the masseur, begins to scrub my legs with a loofah and I feel the dead skin sloughing off.
“Yes. Sometimes the healer needs to heal herself. I just lost a very special client.” I don’t say that he left me the money that allowed me to take time off for travel. He might think I am a grifter.
“My patient married a younger woman in Las Vegas without telling his family. As soon as the ink was dry on the deed to her new house, she put him out. Even though he had just bought her a car, she made him take a bus to the airport. After that, he was depressed, wouldn’t wear his glasses, his false teeth or his hearing aid. My client shut down, but he never gave up hoping that she would come and get him. He said she promised him sex in exchange for her house and the marriage, but she didn’t keep her end of the bargain.
“My client’s grief was heartbreaking. I couldn’t bear the look of anticipation on his face when her letters demanding money arrived. He asked me to read them to him. I left out the abusive parts. Perhaps I shouldn’t have because, even though she never visited him, he named her as his executor and as next of kin on his hospital admission papers. He put off dying so he could see her one last time. But she didn’t come until it was time for the reading of his will. When he died, his real family couldn’t claim his body and give him a respectful burial. She left him rotting in the morgue for two weeks while she ransacked his house and took off with his financial papers.”
“That would never happen in my country.”
“God bless your country, Güzel.”
The masseur lightly slaps my shoulder and tells me to turn over. He has dipped what looks like a long pillowcase in soapy water and blown into it. Now he is covering my body with suds. It is the gentlest of massages. I close my eyes and enjoy the intimacy. Even though massage is my work, and I am used to the emotional reaction to touch, I am surprised by the feelings that surface. I think I am going to weep, for myself, for my father, for the poor old man who was weak enough to fall in love with a woman who didn’t deserve him.
Ahhh. Mahmoud has discovered my vulnerable place. I have weak ankles. My feet are so happy I think they will sing. Someone speaks in my ear. I open my eyes and see the masseur with his face next to mine, his grin filled with gold while he also massages my feet and lower legs, a little Turkish joke I think. Güzel is lying on the other side of the platform, his face turned away from me.
“You have long arms, Mahmoud.” I go along with the joke, whatever it is, as he pretends to be confused.
Mahmoud delivers me to the sinks, gives me a copper hamam bowl and leaves me to bathe myself in cool water.
“I feel clean,” I say. “Even my brain.”
When my friend joins me, we lie side by side, scrubbed, massaged, fresh as newborn babies. I ache to take his hand and wonder if he feels the same.
“Our friend, the comedian, didn’t massage my chest and shoulders,” I say.
“Turkish men are respectful.”
Güzel and I carefully peel off the platform. We are modest. I put on my slippers and arrive at the door first.
“Güzel! It’s locked!”
UNHOLY MATRIMONY
Brother, friend, or lover, I don’t know why I needed Coon so badly the summer I turned the corner on adolescence. He was the only one who came close in every category. I talked to him, looked after him and adored him. I wanted to be a little wife, Mrs. Mother, to do the things my own mother had forgotten when she let herself drown in grief. At home, I kept my own room tidy and struggled with the rest of the house, but Coon’s cave was whole, manageable, a house. Ours. I made a broom out of a cedar branch and dusted with the red polka dot handkerchief I’d used to cover my face when I robbed banks after breaking into neighbourhood games of cowboys and Indians.
One day, a hummingbird flew into our kitchen window and stunned itself. I picked it up and carried it to the cave where I cared for it tenderly, fed it sugar water through the dropper in a used-up medicine bottle. Within days, we had a mouse, a kitten, several tree frogs and a snake. They were all family – my second family, and Coon’s only one.
There were times when I believed I would grow up and get married like the brides and grooms who rode in the back seats of cars covered with crepe paper streamers and horns honking every Saturday in summer. I went uninvited to church weddings and cried when the groom kissed the bride. I threw confetti. I cut their faces out of the photos in the free newspaper and replaced them with drawings of my own. These brides were tiny and happy. I kept growing taller.
> My size is an advantage in my work. I can bear down on my clients, who like it when my big hands squeeze out the sadness they store in their bodies like tubes of toothpaste. It isn’t just a one-way street. When I give pleasure, I feel it. Sure, some of them are demanding and cranky, some are filled up with flagrant ingratitude. Others laugh or cry when I find the places where memories sleep. Then they are grateful. Those feelings creep up my arms and find their way to my heart. I like my job.
These days, I have no desire to get married. I could give myself to a man and end up like Stella. What possible good would that do? I’d rather get used to loneliness than be assaulted by loss when I least expected or needed it. Most marriages end in divorce. In the ones that stay together, somebody dies first. Marriage is like having a dog or a canary. A person spends all that time and money on food and vet bills and tidying up, and ends up staring into a hole in the ground. Not me. I’m not taking any risks. I have a mortgage-free house. I get to eat what I want when I want, go to movies and buy a round-trip ticket to Seattle on the Victoria Clipper once a year.
I’ve lived by myself ever since checking Stella into a rest home on her seventieth birthday. I had to; the booze pickled her brain. She’d left water running in the bathtub and, after a window in her dementia allowed her to rediscover her love of cookery, forgot to turn off the stove. Every pot was ruined. She didn’t even recognize me at the end. Her brain had drowned in ninety-proof.
When I took her out for walks in her wheelchair – the fresh air alternative to watching television – we visited shops. I knew from her rhapsodic descriptions of my daddy moving rocks and plants in the garden that she missed watching people at work. We spent hours standing in front of the counter at McDonald’s watching the workers punch numbers, slap burgers into buns and scoop up fries. She liked watching barbers give haircuts and clerks pack groceries. Stella and I had quite an entertainment system worked out.
One afternoon I pushed her to the flower shop on Esquimalt Road to take her mind off a permanent wave in progress. The ladies who worked there were new Chinese immigrants and didn’t speak much English. The florists ran about the shop, fussing with arrangements, while silent Stella made a surprisingly articulate speech about plants and Daddy and how she never had to buy flowers because he had something nice in the garden twelve months a year.
I didn’t get it together to fix up his garden. By the time I’d survived childhood, I was working full time and caring for her. Gardening was the last thing on my list of things to do, but I knew Stella liked flowers. Once a week I bought her a bouquet at Jung’s market, and she put them in the window just in case the neighbours had the idea that we didn’t care about beautiful things. Those bouquets were Stella’s vases of normalcy, like the big bunches of chrysanthemums and gladiolas that came with sympathy cards after Daddy died. Now she is gone, I could care less about the property. I pay a kid to come round and mow the lawn once a month, while I sit on the porch and make sure he goes back over the parts he missed. That’s good enough.
“Choose whatever you like, Stella, and we’ll take it home.” The flower shop was overflowing with colour and scent.
Stella wouldn’t speak to me but she was good at hand control. Do this. Do that. She had me park her in front of a huge funeral wreath that had a ribbon covered in Chinese characters, and fixated on the florist filling the last holes in the Styrofoam with white lilies and carnations.
She pointed to the grisly wreath.
“No, Stella,” I said firmly. I generally handled those situations with tough love – “No, you can’t have another drink.” “No, you can’t have a chocolate bar. ” “No, I won’t turn up the heat.” – and she usually reacted with the rage of a two-year-old, teeth gritted and fists clenched by her sides. “That wreath belongs to a dead person. You are not dead yet.” I spun her wheelchair into a bank of glorious orchids. “Choose.”
Stella chose a hundred and eighty-seven dollars’ worth of calla lilies and white hydrangeas, and I let her. It was her money, after all. She had her pension and the insurance cheques. The florist wrapped her huge bouquet in layers of tissue, tied them with a wide pink ribbon and put them in her lap.
It was a warm summer morning. My mother was quite a sight flying down the street, past lawns filled with sprinkler rainbows and starlings hunting for leatherjackets, in her bib and curlers with an outrageous bunch of expensive blooms in her lap and me running behind, wondering if what was left of her hair would fall. We were both laughing; both of us loving speed, having sex feelings.
I swear she was humming, “Get me to the church on time.”
EPHESUS
On the other side of the door, Mahmoud apologized for the stuck door. “It so warm, both sides, door bigger,” he said, perspiration beading on his forehead. “Don’t worry. I turn off heat.”
I admit that in the few minutes he took to rescue us from the steam bath I had visions of cooking alive or having a heart attack or a stroke in the hamam.
“Not a bad way to off somebody in Turkey,” I said to Güzel, who appeared more embarrassed than worried. “Is this the door to Hell?”
“Other direction,” he answered. “Be patient.”
While we waited for Mahmoud, he began a parable.
“Am I in it?” I asked, as he began his breathless explanation to the slosh of what I assumed was cold water against the other side of the hamam door.
“Yes.”
“Go ahead then. We like to watch the movies of our lives when death is imminent.”
“Do you remember when we were in the spice market in Istanbul?”
“Yes.”
“The spice-seller offered you an aphrodisiac.”
“Yes, lokum.”
“Was he offering romance or candy?”
“Both?” I say, confused. “Either?”
“Good answers.”
The door came unstuck and we gathered our things while Mahmoud made a thousand apologies.
“All’s well that ends well,” I said.
We went back to the hotel and drank rakı beside the pool. The night sky was beautiful. “You should be the one writing stories,” he said, when I told him once again how frightened I had been in the bath.
“Wasn’t a newspaper editor in Ankara recently shot for his views? Wasn’t my room searched?”
“Yes. Maybe,” he answered. “Still, it sounds like you’ve been reading too much detective fiction.”
“What is it they say about the truth being stranger than fiction?” I asked.
“In Turkey, we don’t live our lives worrying about what might happen. We improvise with what has happened.”
“So, I have just had one of my Turkish lessons?”
“That’s right.” He laughed and his laughter dissipated my lust. I watched it scatter in the heavens.
“What was that?” he asked.
“A falling star.”
I think these feelings must have fallen in the pool. There was a splash followed by incandescent ripples. Something electric swooned in the water.
“Do you see it?” I asked. It looked like tinfoil burning in the fireplace.
“Yes, “ he said. “That is wet brain.”
“Do I understand Turkey now?”
“You’re off to a good start.” I notice his accent has disappeared.
Last night, while I lay awake in bed, waiting for god knows what – Güzel or the intruder who smells like orange blossoms – I heard a noise like a mouse tiptoeing through the crack of light under my door. When I got up, I saw that it was a note. I opened the door to see who had brought it, but there was no one in the hall.
The note said, “Ağrı Dağı.” That was all.
I assumed it was from Güzel. I know he types because I have heard the soft click of his computer keys over the phone, and, by the way, I hate it when people do that. They think I can’t hear, but I do. I think it is rude to type and talk.
Despite not sleeping last night, I woke up early and drove Güzel to
Ephesus in the rented car. He insisted that we get to the ruins before noon, and he was right. At 8 a.m., the heat was already unbearable.
“I got a note last night,” I said, as I snapped my seatbelt shut. “Was it from you?”
“Did I sign it?” Güzel asked enigmatically.
“Of course not. If you had, I wouldn’t have asked.”
“Then it wasn’t me. What did it say, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Ağrı Dağı.”
“That is Mount Ararat.”
“I know. I looked it up on the hotel computer. What do you suppose it means?”
“Perhaps it’s a tourist promotion. Greenpeace has built an ark near the mountain to draw attention to climate change.”
“Why wouldn’t it say so? I subscribe to Greenpeace. They don’t send out cryptic bulletins. They give general information and ask for donations.”
“It could have been meant for another hotel guest, or did you ask anyone else where you might find snow in the middle of summer?”
“No.”
“It does answer your question. If you want to hear the silence of God, Mount Ararat would be the right place. Some scholars say the real Noah’s Ark is there. They have seen its skeleton in satellite photos.”
Because I don’t want to offend Turkishness, I refrain from saying, “What if I went to Mount Ararat and all I heard was the sound of gunfire, Turks shooting Armenians?” But I do think it.
“God is fierce and these are fierce times,” he says; and I am not sure if he has read my mind or if he is referring to floods and other disasters or the Arab Spring.
“Ararat is melting like ice cream,” I say. “That is why they were able to see the remains of the ark.”
“Ararat means Fire Mountain in my language. It is a volcano.”
It is already fifty degrees in the shade and the sun is still low in the sky. Yet, the air-conditioned tour buses disgorge hundreds of intrepid red-faced tourists with water bottles. They are all dressed as if for a safari, in khaki with the hats I’ve seen advertised in the back pages of the New Yorker magazine. In their drabs, they look like wilted salad.