by Alexia Brue
Our only possible communication was through pantomime and pointing. Tonight, I promised myself, I will study Turkish phrases at Kemal's. (Nasilsiniz? How are you? Iyiyim tessukur ederim. I am fine, thank you.) She grabbed the black mitt and started to rub my legs. She scoured me like a pot with stubborn burn marks. She pointed down at my legs. Little black balls of dirt gathered like a strange rash. She nodded approvingly, wanting me to acknowledge the efficacy of her treatment or just how dirty I had been. I bowed my bead appreciatively and said a tea-sugar thank-you. (Kemal told me that if you say 'tea-sugar' really fast, it comes out sounding like Turkish for 'thank you': tesekkür.) My amateur effort produced an amused look of comprehension.
It's a strange relationship between hamam lady and her client. I was not a regular and I didn't speak her language, so we couldn't swap baklava recipes or beauty secrets. Her large, deep-set eyes reminded me of green olives. The stretch marks on her stomach told the story of a large family. The scouring continued up my body. She took my right hand, and in order to stretch out my arm for easier scrubbing, she placed my hand on the top of her left breast with as little ceremony as if handing me a towel. What if I squeezed her breast by accident? How embarrassing.
She marched over to the kurna and refilled her bowl, returning to soap me with long, deep strokes of the washcloth. It no longer seemed strange that she scrubbed and massaged me under my armpits, behind my ears, between my breasts, and everywhere you'd think only to wash yourself in a windowless room. Turkish women, I'd heard from other travelers, think nothing of performing the most intimate ablutions in public, whereas Turkish men never even remove their pestamals inside the stcakhk. Nermin tapped me twice on the hip - hamam sign language for turn over - and she scrubbed my backside with similar devotion.
'Marina, this is all clean, right?' I asked, lifting my head off the marble. 'They change washcloths after every person?'
'You can't think about that,' said Marina. 'When you eat at a restaurant, do you think about what's going on back in the kitchen?' Actually, I did.
I kept my eyes shut and gave myself over to the sensation of being soapy and slippery on warm marble. This is how pastry dough must feel as the rolling pin stretches it out on the baker's marble surface.
Nermin took my hand and guided me over to a kurna. She desudsed me with bucket after bucket of water. Then she shampooed my hair. She massaged my scalp, she pressed on my temples. I was melting. When she finally succeeded in removing all of the soap from my hair, she put her fingers on my eyes and pushed away the water so I could see. 'Rest now,' she said, and left me to find her next client.
'Tesekkür ederim/ I yelled weakly and gratefully after her. The göbektasiwas too crowded to take up our own post, so Marina and I returned to the kurna and leaned our rosy, scoured bodies against the wall.
'How long did that last?' I wondered.
'I don't know, maybe ten minutes, maybe half an hour. I feel rubbery and relaxed.'
'It's so different from an American spa, where something happens to you for a prescribed amount of time. That kese scrub and being in this dreamy, surreal room feels like . . . an unfolding process . . . like an experience that gets richer the longer you let it work on you. Not to mention the theatrics,' I said, thinking of the ongoing yells between the hamam ladies and the aggressive apple tea lady pushing her wares.
'I love the theatrics,' agreed Marina. 'Our hamam should be like a Fellini movie, a constantly changing cast of characters; show up on any given day and you might find a cellist playing Stravinsky in the steamroom or someone pushing through a tray of raspberry sherbet.'
'That's a brilliant idea. We could play silent movies along the walls one day, offer henna treatments the next. No two days at our hamam will ever be the same,' I said with a sudden burst of optimism that faded instantly. One minute the world seemed like our own tray of oysters on the half-shell, and the next moment our dreams seemed fenced off by insurmountable boundaries called money, connections, experience. 'Marina, what are we going to do with our lives? I feel like we're back in college, sitting on your bed and plotting our futures. Remember how sorted we thought we'd be by the time we hit thirty?'
'I know. Everything seemed so uncomplicated at twenty-one.' Then, out of the blue, Marina observed, 'You don't seem ready to go home.'
'I'm not, I'm only just starting to get this. I mean, of course I miss Charles, but what's another two weeks. He'll understand.'
'Maybe the baths of the world need your energies more than Charles right now.'
I wanted to change the subject. 'Marina, how are things with Colin?' Marina, unlike most women, did not like to talk about her boyfriend, and the moment, naked and relaxed, seemed opportune for prying.
'Same old, same old,' she said dismissively. 'I think our hamam should be alabaster instead of marble.'
'Fight, break up, decide you can't live without each other?' I surmised from 'same old, same old.'
'Exactly, the co-dependency continues. Three years of calling each other seven times a day.'
Marina would be the first to admit her relationship was dysfunctional. She envied the stability and honesty that Charles and I maintained effortlessly. I envied the passion that she and Colin had —they would fight, make up, then disappear for hours. While I accepted the universal rule always to side with your girlfriend, I knew Marina well, and I knew she was extraordinarily high-maintenance. I had been on the receiving end of some of her tirades. So I did have some sympathy with Colin's tribulations, though I would accept at face value any story that depicted him as an insensitive scoundrel bent on ignoring Marina's wishes. Marina's wishes, however, were many and very specific. Compromise to Marina meant meeting you one-eighth of the way. But she was a lovable bully.
We stayed at the kurna, staring up at the dome's darkening skylights that reminded me of Kemal's portholes. Both were windows that admitted light but offered no view of the outside world, nor did they provide the outside world a view into this intimate sanctum. It was getting late, soon we would have to leave this world.
'Are you hungry?' I asked.
'Famished. Let's get cheese borek,' Marina said. Cheese borek, a noodle pastry lined with filo, goat's cheese, and parsley, was her favorite Turkish food, second only to baklava.
'We had that for breakfast. Please let's have grilled fish,' I suggested. A fish restaurant wouldn't serve cheese borek and vice versa.
Marina adopted her open-eyed, beseeching look. Her eyebrows went up and her head tilted toward me. 'Oh, but I'm only here for three days. After I'm gone you can have fish every night.'
'Okay, fine. But we're supposed to meet Baksim for dinner. What if he doesn't want cheese borek?'
'I'm sure he won't mind.' Poor Colin.
Back in the camekân, our pestamals exchanged for jeans and sweaters, Rusen brought over two orange juices and inquired after our bath. We were too deliciously spent for conversation. 'It's like a narcotic,' I said. 'I'm too messed up to say anything, and I'll be back tomorrow for more.'
We said good-bye to Rusen, who again invited us to visit his thermal hamam in Bodrum and to stay in his house there. Bodrum is about six hours south of Istanbul and located on top of geothermal springs. Rusen's Bodrum hamam is more spa than public bath. Because the waters are thermal, the Turks are allowed to soak despite the normal Islamic interdiction against soaking in still waters. For a Muslim to soak in a body of water, it must be continually flowing and replenishing itself. Otherwise it is considered unclean.
Rusen's offer was kind and tempting, but it seemed much more friendly and forward than anything I was used to, and the suspicious New Yorker in me didn't quite know what to make of his generosity. I hadn't yet learned to recognize a good adventure from a bad, and I still regret that I didn't take Rusen up on his well-intentioned offer.
Marina and I got busy. For the next three days, Marina put her textile obsession on hold and we racked up the baths, visiting ten different hamams. Sometimes we just stopped to peek in, like
wine connoisseurs who just swirl and spit but won't taste a wine that doesn't meet their standards.
• Çemberlita?. The best, most authentic of the big 'tourist' hamams, owned and run by a man who gets misty-eyed when he talks about hamam culture.
• Caalolu. Designed in the Baroque style in 1741, so it's interesting for connoisseurs of hamam architecture. The bathing experience, however, will leave you desiring nothing so much as a hot shower and a bar of soap, since I think the place is dirty and neglected. Guidebooks that suggest this as a good first stop for the uninitiated are woefully out-of-date. It appears that the owners stopped caring about this place years ago.
• Galatasaray. One of the most famous 'tourist' hamams near Istiklal Caddesi. While the men's side is charming, an original from 1481, the women's side was a second thought built in 1963, and some of the women who work here are better at cleaning wallets than bodies.
• Tarabya. An excellent and faithful modern re-creation of a hamam in the Tarabya Hotel, an establishment favored by rich Arab businessmen. Though it requires a long taxi ride north along the Bosphorus, past Bebek and Etiler, it's worth the trip if you're looking for a mixed-gender bath - bathing suits required - and American levels of hygiene.
• Bosphorus Princess Hotel. A kitsch hotel bath. Small, clean, boring, architecturally flat. Might as well be in an American gym steamroom.
• Baths of Roxelana. Now a carpet store and the ideal place to see a Mimar Sinan—designed hamam without taking off your clothes.
• Dolmabahçe Palace. The most beautiful hamam in the world, adorned with honey-colored alabaster delicately carved so as to give the impression of snowflakes masquerading as lace. To see the sultans' former hamam, you must take the Dolmabahçe Palace tour while wearing surgical slippers over your shoes.
• Beylerbeyi. We peeked into this stunning gem of a neighborhood hamam on the Asian side, just next door the Beylerbeyi Sarayi (palace). It was about to close for the day.
• Çinili in Üsküdar. Marina and I arrived during the men's hours and were given a tour and invited to bathe. We declined, recognizing this as the 'bad' kind of adventure. This old-school hamam is a rare find, though. They have several styles of pestamals depending on whether you're bathing or resting.
• Kalig Ali Pasa in Tophane. We managed also to hit this old Mimar Sinan—designed hamam during men's hours and were invited to tour the stcakhk. Immeasurably grand and sorrowfully neglected, this is the only hamam in which I saw a cockroach.
Marina and I had taken the measurements. Caalolu had the best architecture, Çemberlita? the best management and a close second in ambiance, Tarabya the nicest changing area and camekân. Galatasaray was everything we didn't want to be (apple tea pushers and baksheesh seekers), and the neighborhood hamams all had sweet hamam ladies who acted like adoptive mothers.
Despite our action-packed three days, I felt that my work was just beginning, my interest growing rather than satisfied. Getting a handle on the hamam's architecture and accoutrements only raised more questions. Where did the hamam tradition come from? Surely from the Roman baths. The hamam, after all, was an Islamic interpretation of the Roman bath. And where might I find an enduring bath culture? A place where a visit to the baths might serve the same social function as meeting at a restaurant for dinner. In Turkey, the hamam no longer played the coffeehouse role, but perhaps the Russians, Finns, and Japanese were still bathing with frolicsome abandon. I needed to find out.
Midway through my stay in Istanbul, I was still looking for the historic neighborhood baths I had read about.
Now and then, usually about once in a week, my grandmother had a sociable turn of mind and when these moods came upon her she invariably went to the Hamam. Hamams, or the Turkish Baths, were hot-beds of gossip and scandal-mongering, snobbery in its most inverted form and the excuse for every woman in the district to have a day out. Nobody ever dreamed of taking a bath in anything under seven or eight hours. The young girls went to show off their pink-and-white bodies to the older women. Usually the mothers of eligible sons were in their minds for this purpose for these would, it was to be hoped, take the first opportunity of detailing to their sons the finer points of So-and-so's naked body. Marriages based on such hearsay quite frequently took place, but whether or not they were successful few of us had any means of knowing.
- Irfan Orga, Portrait of a Turkish Family
Where was this bath described by Irfan Orga? After Marina left I was determined to find it. The closest I came was my favorite neighborhood hamam, where once, no doubt, a crop of eligible women paraded for the mothers of eligible sons. A longtime resident of Istanbul whom I'd met at the rug bazaar told me about the Aga hamam, describing it as an authentic old-school hamam with unpredictable, sometimes unorthodox activity, the kind of place rarely stumbled upon by travelers. Perfect, it was surrounded by a virtual velvet rope of anonymity. It was in an obvious enough spot, but it called no attention to itself and was the retiring younger sister of the evil, pushy Galatasaray hamam up the street. The hamam was on a small, tangled side street called Turnacibasi Sokaga, just south of Istiklal Caddesi, a buzzing pedestrian shopping arcade, where once all the foreign embassies were located until Atatürk's made Ankara Turkey's capital (Istanbul had too much emotional baggage).
When I first showed up at the Aga hamam, the hammaci, the lady who takes your money at the entrance, examined me curiously. 'Hamami?' she probed.
'Evet hamami,' I confirmed, and I pulled out my own hamam tasi and kese mitt that I'd acquired at the Grand Bazaar's Hamam Store. She looked impressed - she obviously had thought I'd entered the wrong door — and called over some of the other hamam ladies. They nodded appreciatively that I'd amassed my own tools of the trade.
After my fourth visit, they stopped treating me like a lost animal but instead welcomed me with, 'Merhaba Alexia.' Every visit, the same hamam lady would scrub me (her name was Neuron; at least that was how it sounded), and she liked to point out that we had the same color blue eyes. I'd even managed to make a friend, a Chinese film editor who had lived in Istanbul for two years. She invited me to a film screening. Perhaps hamam society was still alive.
One afternoon I invited Kelly to join me at the hamam; she was a thirty-year-old American dance teacher living in Istanbul whom I'd recently been introduced to. I had told Kelly how proprietorial the hamam ladies were, how if a man stumbled into the reception area during the women's hours, he was booted out the door, literally sent running down the street to the bakery where they make simits, a cross between a sesame bagel and a pretzel. I'm convinced this is why so many old, leather-skinned guys sat on chairs outside along the sidewalk. Watching the world walk by, sure, but also waiting for the latest installment of A?a hamam drama.
I expected Kelly to be totally at ease with the nudity and physical license inside the hamam; she was a dancer after all. Luckily, she was a dancer who believed in regular meals, so getting naked together wasn't a skin-and-bones reminder of why I'd quit ballet at twelve. But despite her comfort with her own body, Kelly's jaw still dropped in shock when we entered the small, stunning stcakhk. Nude splashing bodies, old withered breasts, mounds of flesh, friendly shouting, a woman sitting on her haunches scrubbing her undergarments, everything so carnal and so raw. It was a parade of humanity that you'd never be able to assemble. But here it happened every day.
A mother and her young daughter bathed together on this afternoon. There was nothing unusual about this. Kelly and I were lying next to each other on the small intimate bellystone, and the cries of the two-year-old daughter with long corkscrew curls grew louder and louder. Soap must have gotten in her eyes. The screams went on for longer than they should have. Kelly and I commented, 'Oh the poor little girl,' when what we were really thinking was, Get that little girl out of here. Just as we were having these wicked thoughts, a huge tall figure in a thick pink terrycloth robe burst through the door with a small terrier dog in tow. I didn't know which was stranger - the presence of the mo
nstrously large woman or the dog. From my vertical vantage point on the göbekta?i, I looked directly at her hands - large knuckles, thick boxy fingers, and chipped coral fingernail polish. Unmistakably the hands of a man. 'Kelly, I think she's a man.'
The pink-robed figure raised her baritone voice and started scolding the young mother to hush her child. The child, scared or fascinated by the presence of the dog, was instantly quiet. The baritone's hair was in a turban, and as soon as the child stopped crying she turned on her heels and left the hamam, depriving us of a good look at her chiseled face.
The Aga hamam, more than any other bath I visited, made me think of the greatest bath movie ever made, Steam: The Turkish Bath. In this Italian movie, a young, career-obsessed Italian interior designer arrives in Istanbul to settle the estate of his estranged aunt. He is embraced by the Turkish family his aunt lived with, and he sees the hamam that his aunt used to operate. Slowly, as he is seduced by the pace of Turkish culture, he begins to understand the peculiar magic of his aunt's life in Istanbul, the charm of Turkish people, and he discovers a calmer, more sensual part of himself during visits to the hamam. He decides not to sell the hamam, but rather to stay in Istanbul to restore it and possibly to reopen it. Every feeling in that movie resonated with me. The seduction of Turkish life, the desire to wake up every morning to the sound of a muezzin's call to prayer and walk, across the domed skyline, to work at a twenty-first-century hamam.
Kemal regarded all the time I spent in hamams with a blend of curiosity and suspicion. He used to drop by the house fairly often to pick up his mail or collect a book. Sometimes it seemed, or I flattered myself, that he dropped by more often than was necessary. Once he stopped by at 10:00 P.M. while I was out. He left a note: 'What goes on in these hamams at this hour? I must know . . .' I called him at his house in Tuzla to tell him about the drag queen, and he invited me to a record release party the next night at a club called, of all things, Hamam. The party reminded me of all that I wasn't homesick for. 'The DJ is from New York,' the crowd murmured with excitement, 'and Junior Vasquez is coming next week.' Everyone seemed perfectly happy that Hamam was no longer a place where people washed one another's backs. I would trade Junior Vasquez and the dreadlocked DJ for the fat hamam ladies in a New York minute.