Book Read Free

A Year in the World

Page 35

by Frances Mayes


  Then he brings monkfish with tomatoes and peppers and more shrimp, these batter fried. We’re all high with excitement. We stroll back in the exotic night through the heart of the old city, looking in windows of rug stores, skirting the great corms of the Blue Mosque, the ellipse of the ancient Hippodrome, where chariots used to race and the condemned lost their heads, then by the outdoor cafés where people talk the evening away while sipping tea from glasses.

  At first light the call of the muezzin jerks me awake. The hotel is across the street from an intimately scaled mosque, whose loudspeakers must be aimed at room 306. The caller tunes up a moment, e-ya eee ya ya; like a cicada, before he launches into his wailing appeal to prayer. This call equals the church bells in Italy, marking time, sending out a summons that seems to unzip all the way down the spinal cord. I’m thrilled every time it happens. Ed rolls over and says, “Someone hit the wah-wah pedal.” We start laughing, and I look out the window at the small boats and silvery water. We have a whole day to play in Istanbul before we fly south tomorrow to board the boat.

  First to the Grand Bazaar, where Fulvio reveals a talent for bargaining and Aurora and I acquire sage, apricot, black, taupe, and beige pashmina scarves for a fraction of their cost at home. Usually I hate bargaining and ask at the Arezzo antique market for a prezzo buono only because I know the dealers think you’re stupid if you don’t. Fulvio starts having fun, and I realize that the scarf man does, too. For the first time, I can see the process as a game rather than an annoyance.

  We quickly want to leave the touristy shops and the pushy rug merchants. It must be said: the Grand Bazaar, all cleaned up, lacks atmosphere. We exit quickly into the light rain, walking downhill toward the Spice Bazaar, where we hope for more medina ambiance. That happens, I see quickly, actually between the two bazaars in the muddle of streets where most of the women are covered except for their eyes. Everything imaginable is for sale. We pass shop windows displaying those impossible gray and sand clothes the women wear, white circumcision outfits for boys, with fake (metaphoric?) swords at the waist, school uniforms, and whole clumps of closet-sized shops selling just collars or thread or buttons. Belly dancer costumes with fringed and spangled gold and silver trim—polar opposite to the gray and sand—zipper shops, plastic kitchenware, toilet seats, laundry baskets. Ah! No rugs! No tourists, either. A former mosque, stripped down, holds racks of cheap children’s clothing under its dome. This is what I imagined, a souk, a cramped labyrinth of tiny businesses with street food to sample—köfte (little spicy grilled meatballs), roasted corn, a cheese and phyllo pastry, kebabs, and dried figs stuffed with nuts. In the Spice Bazaar we buy garam masala and strawberry tea. Bins are heaped with dill, mint, pistachios, curry, hot paprika, black chili, turmeric, hot peppers—all the colors in the rugs. I don’t see fresh herbs at all and have a distrust of dried ones in open bins. The prized item seems to be Iranian saffron, but since it is a seasoning I don’t like, I am not tempted. We see mounds of various nuts, honeycombs dripping, heaps of dried apples, apricots, and figs—some look rather dusty. Lokum, Turkish delight, appears in many sugary pastels.

  We decide to visit the New Mosque we glimpsed on the way here. One merchant calls out to Ed as we leave, “You, my friend, are very handsome.”

  The five of us don’t fit into a single taxi and so rendezvous at each juncture. We communicate by phone that we are lost, found, abandoned by the driver, or heading in the wrong direction. While we wait for the Di Rosas at the Galata tower, we duck out of the rain into a café where everyone is playing okey, tile rummy, and drinking tea. More tea must be consumed here than in England. Both teenagers and men are playing, the square chips clacking pleasantly and the wooden racks scraping the chips into piles around the table. When the Di Rosas arrive, we run across the little plaza to the tower. From the catwalk around the top, strangely accessed through a nightclub, we get a rainy 360-degree view of the city. The tower was built in the fourteenth century by the Genoese, who lined many a coast with towers. The area surrounding the tower thrived as a tight Italian enclave—is that why the five of us were drawn here? Noted especially for Florentine banks, the rich neighborhood also had Italian-style stone houses and piazzas. The Ottoman sultans feared the Venetians but valued the rest of the Italians. The Galata area represents so well the mix of cultures that was intermittently encouraged by the Ottomans. Jews, Greeks, Croatians—so many came together in the city and lived, more than in most, in mutual respect and harmony. The level of tolerance is inspiring, but sometimes the sultan simply stamped his foot, a signal to execute the bore.

  I am devouring Philip Mansel’s Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453–1924. How talented you have to be to write the cramped and twisted history of Istanbul as a page-turner. This book captivates me night after night, building, subject by subject, a world like no other. Istanbul—the most multinational city, the quintessential crossroads of east and west, violent, poetic, melancholy, raucous, fleshy, austere, rapacious, sublime—this seems to me the most fascinating city on earth. The city’s saga through time not only crowds the brain with contradictory information, it challenges chronological development with disruptive acts and with backward and forward movements in time.

  “The city is all about water,” Ed says. Yes, that’s true. We inch all the way around the tower, and Istanbul appears as a low abstracted gathering of domes with minarets piercing the sky. Only muted colors—no hint of harem wives killing off their innocent sons who might seek to rule over the other sons. No cast-off concubines stuffed into barrels and thrown into the Bosporus. A city the color of tinsel in the rain, the mysterious waters holding it aloft for our speculation.

  The highlight of our day is the Suleyman Mosque and its cemetery, where the gravestones are tall slabs of curvaceous marble carved with floral and vegetal designs. No living figures were allowed. Fulvio interacts with those usually avoided so we have a long visit with a shoe shiner—Istanbul is full of fabulous shoe shiners with brass stands—who even manage to polish tennis shoes. Isn’t it a bit odd to have your shoes shined in a cemetery? Old trees shelter and cool the paths among the stones. The dead are the same everywhere, commanding an aura of peace and tranquillity. The mosque, too, seems especially peaceful. Outside, stools along the wall provide places to sit in front of a font and perform ritual cleansing if you are going inside to worship. Mosques are carpeted, often in the repeating pattern of a small prayer rug, which gives each worshiper his own space. Your shoes are left at the door, although at some mosques you are given a plastic bag so you can carry them. Just inside, a partitioned section behind a carved wooden screen designates where you pray if you are a woman. You may see, through a scrim, but not be seen. I find these erasures, even before Allah, hard to fathom. I suppose that women would, if free to prostrate themselves like the men, distract attention from worship. As tourists, Aurora and I cover our heads to enter mosques with the new scarves from the Grand Bazaar. The late afternoon call to prayer begins while we are on the mosque grounds and electrifies us as we comb the neighborhood of wooden Ottoman houses in search of a taxi. Soon we run out of pavement and find ourselves in a squalid neighborhood with many collapsed houses. I have never been in a city with so many houses that have simply fallen onto themselves. Near the hotel, near the Hippodrome in prime tourist territory, you see these Ottoman houses in piles. Our street is dwindling when finally we see downhill to the right a busy road.

  At dusk we meet Bernice and Armand from Baltimore, who have just arrived. Ed and I met Bernice on another sailing trip around the boot of Italy two years ago, and we have seen each other since in Reston, during the Washington sniper days, when I was giving a talk and Bernice and Armand bravely came to see me. Armand, tall and scholarly, looks as though he should be a senator. I love the way Bernice pays attention to everything. She doesn’t talk a lot but you wait to hear what she will say when she does. We had such fun exploring the boot of Italy on the other sailing voyage that I e-mailed Bernice immediately
when we decided to go on this trip, “Are you ready for Turkey? Almost every day we will moor and hike to a different archaeological site.” She responded within the hour saying that they would love to join us. They have a farm in Virginia where they garden and raise exotic chickens. She and I have corresponded over the past two years about roses. We meet in the lobby just as the hotel waiter wheels in a cart with a birthday cake for Aurora, somehow forgotten yesterday, and fruit drinks in goblets.

  After an endless taxi ride, our increased band of merry pranksters arrives at Marina Restaurant, perched over the waters of the Bosporus, miles from everywhere. We choose fish from a tilted marble slab as we go inside. Large open windows, varnished as on a boat, let in the scent of the night and the water. Soon we are ravished by sole on skewers threaded with lemon and bay leaves, and by grilled scorpion fish steamed in broth with potatoes and tomatoes and sprinkled with oregano and red pepper. En route home in the taxi, I glimpse along a wall photographs of Atatürk. The taxi driver says we are passing the palace where he died. You see this great reformer in Istanbul the way you see the Virgin Mary in Italy, a prevalent presiding presence in banks, restaurants, hotels, everywhere. I wish we had an Atatürk in America now. He had force and vision and a deeply familial love of his country. He’s most known for banning the fez and discouraging women from the veils, but his most sweeping change was the adaptation of Latin characters for the alphabet. Imagine our president decreeing that henceforth we will use Cyrillic or Greek letters. I’ve found it hard to take kilometers and the metric system. But Turkey did forsake Arabic, and that change brought them into the western European neighborhood, enabling him to create a secular Turkish nation. I like his jaw and his eyes that look as though they see what you don’t see.

  Our flower-filled room must be the bridal suite. Although they are fake, I like the impulse. The bed draped with curtains looks romantic, and the cloth petals scattered across the floor stick to my feet. From the entrance you pass into the bedroom through filmy gauze curtains. Bedside lamps with the lowest wattage possible do not encourage me to read my guidebooks, and since we are too exhausted for a honeymoon night, I lie awake. The phrase when Mother married Atatürk keeps floating across my mind, as though a memory would be uncovered. But he was married in 1923 and divorced by 1925, too early for my mother. His true wife and family were Turkey. Rare for a strong-arm president, he had the interests of the people at heart.

  We depart at six for a short flight south to the sprawling city of Antalya along the sharply delineated blue Mediterranean. We’re met by our guide, Enver Lucas, a Turkish American who strides up to us in T-shirt and shorts, a backpack slung over his shoulder. He’s forthright and friendly. He looks like someone you want to hug. His legs, I notice, are muscular enough to hike to any location. We meet Cheryl and Karl, a couple from San Francisco, and Ian and Sara, a Canadian who recamped to New Orleans and his fifteen-year-old granddaughter. Ian took this same trip with Enver years ago and wants his granddaughter to experience his memories. Enver escorts us out of the airport, into humidity and heat and onto a bus in minutes. “There is a lot to do today, folks,” he announces, and somehow I have a feeling we will be hearing this every day. He wastes no time in heading to Perge.

  I’m unprepared for the first ruins. I expected a piece of amphitheatre, a few fallen columns, and some stone foundations. But Perge extends as far as I can see. The city axis, a long colonnaded street with cuts from chariot wheels, ends at a fountain, where the water source from the hill above poured over a statue of a river god, then entered the city. No water now, only weeds. I lean to pinch leaves for their scents of thyme, oregano, and mint. The heat bears down harder than history. We stand in clumps of shadow while Enver tells us of the Greeks who settled here in the aftermath of the Trojan War. The baths must have been Las Vegas–spectacular. Walking the ledge around a deep pool, I see traces of the green marble that once faced the surfaces. The raised floor of the columned caldarium, the hot bath, still exists enough to see how they channeled steam to heat the floor, and how part of the heat was shunted to the tepidarium. We are the only visitors at first; then we see three others. The smell of crushed herbs and dust must be somehow the smell of time. I have the sense that I am actually discovering the site. No ropes, no signs, we’re free to amble, scramble over blocks of carved stone to see the others behind them—portions of friezes and porticos, bases of columns, keystones. Some are carved with nine, ten layers of egg and dart, acanthus, denti (tooth pattern), and vegetal motifs. One, lying in the dirt, is exquisite: a border of Etruscan wave design with clusters of grapes between. When I push aside weeds with my foot, a Medusa face stares back at me. How many standing columns are there? I lose count.

  We then drive to the huge theatre at Aspendos, still used for performances. I start to learn the names of some of the features of these ancient theatres:

  diazoma: horizontal aisle in the cavea

  cavea: the auditorium, from the act of digging it out like a cave

  parodos: the area between the cavea and the stage

  And a vomitorium is not what I’d always heard but a covered exit from a theatre. How little stadiums have changed really, except to close the oval: the same seats with someone’s knees in your back, the same narrow access aisle at a steep pitch. Of course, everyone claps to hear how fine the acoustics are.

  Half a day, and we’ve already seen two stupendous remnants of history. I hope that the scrapes and battles of the Persians, Lycians, Greeks, Romans, and various others who set sail toward this coast will at last reach some kind of coherence during our travels. Alexander swept by and had an enormous impact, killing and conquering, but I’m not too clear on his itinerary. Right now I’m content to slip into a state of awe.

  In the late afternoon the curator of the Antalya Museum shows us the statues archaeologists found at Perge. Such finds usually get carted off to the capital, but the museum has managed to keep them. The beauty of the statues makes me wander away from the group, double back, and visit them alone. How eloquent those early people were. Perge was a wonder of a city, with extensive carved facades and fountains. What happened to town planning in the modern era?

  We park the bus one more time at the outdoor market. At the strictly local scene I get to see hundreds of Turks shopping for dinner and visiting with friends. One gnarly man with a single tooth has picked all the apples from one tree and sits cross-legged behind a mound. We smell, then see a whole area where fishmongers display the catch of the day. The local women all wear “harem” pants in dark prints, capacious to permit bending or squatting. Barkers sound as if they’re about to commit murder but only are extolling the virtues of their garlic braids, peppers, fantastic melons, and tomatoes that we call heirloom at home but are simply tomatoes here.

  All these stops are a long buildup to boarding the boat, our home for eleven days. And at last we meander out to the marina where the Cevri Hasan is docked. Enver decided to use a marina outside the hubbub of town, and he does not say but I imagine he was influenced by last week’s bomb in the Antalya marina. A small incident, but to wary travellers four hundred miles from the raging Iraq war, possibly a source of worry. Mustapha, the captain, welcomes us along with Ali, the chef, and two shy young men who will crew. The gulet, about ninety feet long, is spacious, with a long dining table and inviting tangerine-colored cushioned lounging areas on deck both fore and aft. The galley kitchen has marble counters. Under the window Ali grows pots of basil and oregano. What a fun place to cook. A bookcase of paperbacks abandoned by previous voyagers tempts me immediately. For bad weather, a comfortable salon/dining area adjoins the kitchen. The cabins below are small, each with a minute bathroom. If you were obese, you would get stuck. We have twin bunks, hard as pavement, probably like beds in jails. Not that I expected a stateroom—but this is challenging. There’s nowhere to put anything, except for a small shelf and a foot-wide closet. We stuff everything in, and I resign myself to mingled heaps of mine and Ed’s clean and dirty cl
othes. I am the sort of person who has my drawers arranged by color—all light T-shirts in one drawer, medium and dark colors in the next two, all sweaters in plastic bags, socks paired, my underwear folded a particular way, my nightgowns very, very tidy. I will not be spending leisure time in our cabin. Also it is hot as the hinges of hell down below. We stow everything we can and burst back upstairs for air. Soon Ali is passing champagne, and we’re on deck in the slight breeze; then we have our first dinner on board with Turkish white wine flowing and Ali presenting a variety of mezes and roast chicken. Enver barely gets to eat because everyone has questions for him.

  Tomorrow I will start my ship’s log. I loved reading Colombus’s account of his voyages. The idea of a captain writing at his desk each day, gimbaled lantern overhead and a draught of rum near the inkwell, appeals to me. Although this trip is a bit minor in comparison to those crossings of unknown seas, all trips are voyages within as well as without. A log: “the record of a ship’s speed, progress, and shipboard events of navigational importance,” according to the dictionary. I will keep one, although I won’t know speed and navigational information. I will simply record what becomes important to me as we progress along the edge of the Mediterranean.

 

‹ Prev