by Linda Rogers
Güzel and I have opted against guides and headsets. We are seeing Ephesus at our own pace.
“My father managed a theatre called the Odeon,” I say, standing in front of the small concert hall. I close my eyes and read his luminous sign, ODEON THEATRE.
“This one was built two centuries after the death of Jesus,” Güzel tells me, as I recall details from home, the fake Corinthian columns and the slight rake of the seats.
“Can we sit here for a minute?”
The sun is merciless. We finish our water and marvel that neither of us is peeing more than once or twice a day. All the liquid is used up in the cooling of our bodies. What would a pig do in this climate? Do Jews and Muslims abhor them for their lack of sweat glands? Isn’t sweating what separates the hunter from his prey, the key to human supremacy?
“This is where we all come together,” Güzel explains. “Muslims, Christians, Jews. Mary came here with John after the Romans crucified Jesus. St. Paul argued with the Roman idolaters in this very city. Can you feel the presence?”
“I do.” Earlier, I heard a cab driver tell a woman with a child in a wheelchair that the taxi fare to Mary’s House, a short distance away, possibly only five hundred metres, was fifty dollars. When I commented on the high price of miracles, Güzel shrugged his shoulders and said, “Taxi drivers have to eat. Americans deserve to pay more.”
Beyond the ruins lie the mud flats that bred the mosquitoes that gave the Ephesians malaria and emptied the ancient town. “Do we have to thank the mosquitoes for the preservation of Ephesus?” I ask. “What would it look like now if people still lived here?” Now would be the time to tell him. The story stops here, or starts. Who would I be without plague and famine? How biblical! But this moment segues into the next. We are seamless.
“Who can say? Once the harbour was silted up, ships would have stopped coming.”
“Do you think Mary came by ship?”
“Probably. Apart from the Lydian farmers and merchants travelling overland, most outsiders traveled on boats in those days. Now everyone arrives in airplanes.”
“Not the American air force.”
“No, can you imagine what would have happened to my country if the Yankees had been given permission to strike at Iraq and probably Iran from bases here? All this antiquity would have been destroyed.”
“Wouldn’t the Axis of Freedom respect the ruin sites?”
“Did they respect them in Iraq? What about Nagasaki, Dresden and London? What is sacred to people who make war?”
“So that is why the taxi drivers charge fifty dollars to go to Mary’s House. They are putting a value on miracles.”
“The Muslims revere Mary too. She is mentioned in the Qur’an.”
“I’ll bet the hyper-Christian American right doesn’t know that.”
“They don’t know anything.”
“I hope they don’t think I am an American,” I say. “Someone is watching me.”
“Someone is watching over you, Madeleine,” Güzel laughs.
“So you know all about Jazz?”
“Of course I do. Jazz is my favourite.”
“Do you want to hear Sweet Papa Lowdown play in Izmir this evening?”
“Of course I do. You know jazz is female, improvisation being the mother of evolution.”
“Let’s keep moving, keep on keepin’ on,” he says. “We can’t sit still for long. It is too hot.”
Tourists or flocks of goats inhabit every shadow here. The tourists move from shade to shade with their guidebooks while the goats stand their ground, chewing the leaves from low-hanging branches.
At the Library of Celcus with its roof open to the sky, Güzel tells me there is a tunnel leading to the brothel on the other side of the marble street. “The men of Ephesus told their women they were going to the library; and then they disappeared under the ground.”
I think he expects me to be indignant on behalf of the wives. He looks surprised when I say, “I hope they were prepared to answer questions about the tablets they were reading.” I am familiar with lies and ruses. The proximity of mind and body pleases me. The library and brothel define the parameters of my life.
PAPER HORSES
My mother loved hot summer days and nights and her Keely Smith and Louis Prima recording of “Fever.” She’d get all dolled up in a sexy dress and high heels and lip-sync with the abused diva. She told me it drove my father crazy when she did that. By then, Louis Prima and Keeley Smith had broken up and the whole world knew he beat the stuffing out of her because she was more popular than he was, but that didn’t stop my mother from worshipping the singer. Sometimes, when she wasn’t playing Fred and Ginger, she called my poor dead dad “Louis.” “Me and Louis,” she would start saying and I would cover my ears and close my eyes. I saw fire licking my closed lids. The room was on fire. The house was on fire. Our yard was on fire. The whole damn neighbourhood was burning. The only good thing was the neighbourhood dogs howling in harmony with fire engines. Dogs are smart, at least when it comes to pitch.
Don’t get me wrong. I liked fire, but I disrespected firewater and all who sailed on her, especially my mother.
I don’t know if Coon discovered fire on his own, but he might have. Who would have shown a wild boy who had lost his mother in a crosswalk how to make sparks? Maybe he stole matches, but I never saw any. Coon’s fire was the only light in his boy cave, with its shelves filled with cans and jars, found table and chairs, and his bed made in a rock shelf with cedar boughs and blankets he ripped off clotheslines. He never let the embers go out, even in summer.
My dad used to say he had a fire in his belly. Coon’s fire was real, a pile of ash and live embers surrounded by rocks. There was lots of dead wood in the bushes around the cave, and I proved my usefulness by gathering and stacking broken branches in neat piles where we wouldn’t trip over them.
I’d learned a thing or two in my life on earth and I shared them with Coon. Before he went to spirit, my father showed me how to make saltpetre horse races by drawing lines with a solution of potassium nitrate on cardboard and lighting the tracks. He made me promise not to tell Stella. She would have busted a gut. We did it behind the garage because she hardly ever left the kitchen, except to go dancing, when he was alive.
It wasn’t hard getting the saltpetre. I went to the drugstore on Tillicum Road and explained I needed it for my horse. I looked like the kind of girl that might have been horse crazy. I would have if I had a real family. I’d spent a couple of summers hanging around the barns mucking out stalls and cleaning tack, waiting for rich kids saddled with unwanted ponies to let me ride them. The thing about rich kids is they haven’t the foggiest clue about sharing. To them, horses are just another inconvenience, like too many pairs of shoes. They don’t need them, but they resist sharing.
Coon had his paper horses and I had mine. We gave them outrageous names like The Drunk Mother from Hell and The Avenging Angel of Traffic Fatalities and watched them burn up the track. Whoever lost had to do dares. I showed Coon my tits and he ate red ants – that kind of thing. Coon did everything I asked him to do and I kept up as best I could on the dangerous dares, even though I was fatter than him and not as good at rambling.
We called our life in the woods “rambling.” I got to know every rock and tree and we must have marked most of them one time or another. The night rambles made me nervous and I pissed like a nervous puppy, leaving a trail of puddles behind me. If my mother had been a bloodhound and interested in my whereabouts in the middle of the night, when most kids were sound asleep in their beds, I would have been as easy to find in the forest as Hansel and Gretel’s pussy-whipped dad.
In a sense, I had to find myself. Short of turning myself into a human flare like those Buddhist nuns who doused themselves with gasoline during the Vietnam War, I could see no better way to light my way than setting off fireworks. Perhaps Stella, my imploded star, might even hear me explode across the firmament. At the very least, I could identify my ow
n shadow on the wall where my wild friend made his home.
I raided my father’s basement workshop. I stole SOS pads from under the kitchen sink. They made a wonderful blue light in the fire. I grazed for over-the-counter items in various stores, one thing here, and one thing there, so the dots wouldn’t be connected should I be apprehended for taking a five-finger discount. I made hydrogen balloons and watched them explode like the Hindenburg on that tragic day in New York. I lit bags of Cheesies on fire. They are pure petroleum. Boom!
At night, I wrote my mother’s name in the salt water in the Gorge, so some sentient being might read it – Earth calling Stella. Hello?
“Where have you been?” I heard her ask in the grey light cast from the electric eye beaming test patterns in our living room.
“Out.”
“Out?” She made the whole word, including the “t”, so there was the possibility she might have been sober.
“Yeah, out, walking, thinking, out.”
“You shouldn’t be Oh You Tee alone at night.”
“I was with my friend.”
“Your im-a-gin-ary friend?” She drew the word out.
“I told you, Stella; he’s real and his home is real.”
“And ours isn’t, Little Miss Critical?”
“How come you never call me by my name? I have a name, you know. I’ll bet you’ve forgotten it.”
“I am not going to dignify that with an answer.” My own dignity swooshed down the toilet. I was blubbering, just like she had the last time we’d argued about Coon. Snot bubbled out of my nose. The only thing I could do was go to my room and slam the door hard.
When I woke up the next morning, my room smelled different. The whole house smelled different. The radio was on. The TV was off. My mother was in the kitchen and she was actually making breakfast.
“Both sides or sunny side up?” she asked, holding the egg turner in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
“Whatever.” I slumped into a kitchen chair. Was I dreaming?
“Got any plans for today,” she asked, as if the question were as worn as an old piece of flannel.
“Yeah, rambling.”
“Into the woods, eh,” she said cheerfully. “I think I’ll have a nap. You kept me awake last night, young lady.”
I was in shock. Stella had risen from her Easyboy recliner like a ghost from the garbage-strewn muck in the Gorge estuary. If her resurrection was real and I wasn’t imagining it, then the new situation would take some getting used to.
“Sorry, Mum.” I tried the word and looked away, in case it spat back at me like mud from a passing bicycle.
She made me an egg in the hole. It’s almost impossible to ruin egg in the hole, but she did manage to break the yolk. I put it on a paper plate and left, closing the screen door gently, just in case she was real, and fed my breakfast to Frend as soon as I got past the garage. I had to tell Coon what had happened. Sometimes, good news is as hard to understand as bad. It helps to play it by someone else. You hear yourself talking. The bad ideas kind of surface like stones in the garden and you can toss them aside or make a wall out of them.
I talked my head off all day. When I got hungry, I opened a can of pork and beans we’d piked from the Safeway and we ate them cold. I like them that way. Maybe, I thought, Stella was a grown-up version of Snow White. She got poisoned by grief and had to sleep it off. Maybe it was time for her to wake up and be a mother. It was not quite too late. That was what I wanted, wasn’t it? That was why I walked like an elephant when she was sleeping and why I lit my signal fires. Maybe she heard one of my hydrogen balloons popping or saw her name reflected in the firmament when I wrote it in salt water.
When I finished talking, I was exhausted. I lay down on Coon’s little bed of cedar boughs and fell asleep smelling the wood and listening to the sparks from his fire. When I woke up, it was night and Coon was gone foraging. I felt fresh and new. Maybe my mother had put a candle in the window for me, like her Irish relatives who lit beacons for strangers and missing family. We both missed my dad. He had betrayed her by dying so young and so suddenly. It wasn’t fair to either of us. We both deserved to be babies again. Now it was my turn. Stella would morph back into Mum and take care of me. I deserved it. I felt as light as a fat girl can hurtling lickety-split down the hill toward home. I was ready. Stella was ready. We could start again.
The porch light was on. The television was off. Stella was waiting for me in her Easyboy, a half-finished tray of drinks beside her. “’Er ’ate,” she said. Stella had misplaced her consonants once again.
I landed hard. The voice that came out of the dark living room was as thick as a brick wall. “I’m not gonna tell you ’gain. There’s no fren’,” she slurred. “I saw you talkin’ to yourself. You made ’im up. You’re jus’ a big fat load of tweedy, Mudder.”
“I am not your mother,” I screamed. “I am not your fucking mother and you are nobody.”
“Don’t tell me ’bout nobody. You wrote that book.”
“I hate you,” I said under my breath, because I was deciding at that very moment to burn our house down.
Well, not exactly the house, although it did cross my mind to decorate the living room with the Christmas lights abandoned in the basement when my father died, and set fire to Stella’s blanket while she lay passed out in her Easyboy. That would have been something. The grey-blue light from the television, the Christmas lights, the burning chair. Her blanket already looked like Swiss cheese, there were so many cigarette burns in it. It would have been no stretch of the imagination to accept that Stella had fallen asleep once too often with a live cigarette in her hand.
But I didn’t do that. I loved my mother. I didn’t want her to die a horrible death. I wanted her to wake up from her terrible sleep and actually see me. I had made myself fat, noisy and whiney, an unavoidable obnoxious presence, but she still didn’t get it.
In India, they burn widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres. Otherwise, the poor women get their heads shaved and are abandoned by their families to beg in white saris. My mother, Stella, Dad’s little sun, had chosen to burn slowly. It was my duty to show her what she had done.
I made a hell of a pile on the front lawn. It took me from dawn until late morning, but Stella didn’t notice because she was sleeping the sleep of the damned. I dragged her mattress down the stairs and covered it with chairs, tables and books, anything that would burn. I covered the furniture with her pretty dresses. She didn’t need them any more. They were for him. Everything was for him. I collected his clothes. I took my two favourite girl dolls, Stella and Mother, wrapped them in shawls with sparkly threads and laid them on top of my dad’s desk, which I had covered with Stella’s muskrat coat. Then I poured gasoline over the whole works and went in the house to wake her up.
I slammed the front door. “Wake up, Stella,” I yelled, then went closer and bellowed in her ear. She reeked of sweat, smoke, booze, and vomit, the bilious kind that you burp up and swallow. I took her to the window.
“Wait here,” I said.
“Why? The sun’s in my eyes.” She blinked.
“Because when you look, you will see yourself.”
I ran out of the house and dropped a match into a waste-basket filled with old family photographs. I dumped its contents on the pile, which ignited with a terrible sound. “How much noise would it take to raise hell? I was about to find out that real hell was silent.”
“Wake up!” I screamed. “Wake up, Stella. Wake up, neighbourhood. The child city is burning. The child is burning. Anyone gonna save her?”
I ran back in the house. “Your house is on fire. Your child is burning. Are you just going to stand there? Do something, Stella.”
For once.
My mother thought if she stopped when my father died, then she could keep it all– the memories, the smell of his shoes in the closet, his half-finished bottles of whiskey. He would recognize the house, his wife and child, his dog, his flowers. He would know whe
n he passed over our house on his angel drive-by that nothing had changed. She thought she could sedate herself with whiskey and me with despair, but she hadn’t counted on me. Sooner or later, I was going to do something. It was death, and we were living. To live like that was an abomination.
If she was a star stuck in my father’s heaven, then I was his volatile ride. I would rather fling myself into the firmament than wait helpless on the sharp edge of the world. I grabbed her hair and pushed her face into the window. “Look!”
A fire engine came and put out the fire I had started. The fire chief came and gave me a lecture. Stella stopped speaking to me. Forever.
SHOOTING STARS
There is no one else sitting beside the moonlit pool. The hotel guests must be asleep in their air-conditioned rooms, or out promenading on the seawall alongside local families whose children are restless because of the heat. I have never seen so many kids up so late, eating the strange Turkish ice cream that tastes like marshmallow and sticks so well to the scoops that the ice cream vendors clown with it, turning the cones upside down and pretending to drop them. I wonder if the children dangling on balconies are also sticky. Is that why their mothers are nowhere in sight? They must trust gravity. Did my mother trust gravity? I doubt she gave it a thought.
If I’d had kids, they would have had strict bedtimes, even during heat waves. I don’t know why some parents can’t understand how important it is for children to have predictable lives – shelter and schedules, bedtimes and meals on time. I hated growing up without rules and schedules.
Once again, Güzel and I are lying on parallel sun cots, dipping watermelon in cloudy glasses of rakı and watching the night sky. I have trouble believing that I am the same person who, half a world and half a lifetime away, stole out of my house to lie beside an alleged imaginary boy under the same stars.
“Did you see that?” Güzel asks. It is his turn. This is our call and response.