*
When she and her mother were dressed, they descended in the glass elevator to have their breakfast. The dining room was divided by a waterfall cascading down marble stepping-stones. On long tables were set coldcuts of every type and dimension, surrounded by platters of melons, oranges, plums, pears. On yet another table: olives, cucumbers, tomatoes lusciously red, slices of cheese, platters of yogurt and bowls of jams and jellies.
The dining room began to buzz quite suddenly with what appeared to be the arrival of airline personnel. Women in neat blue suits and hats hurried to put food on their plates and take them to tables arranged along the steps near the waterfall. Men in crisp blue uniforms, perhaps the pilots themselves, were heaping their plates with coldcuts and fruits, cheeses and boiled eggs.
“None of that for us,” Lilly’s mother reminded to her. Their guidebook had warned unequivocally: Eat no salads, no fruits, nothing raw and nothing not immediately cooked and steaming hot. Avoid all cold cuts, custards and fish. Never ever buy food from street vendors. Drink no water that isn’t boiled or bottled and sealed. Be sure your bottles are sealed or they might have been refilled. Only use straws still in their paper sleeves.
Lilly and her mother each gingerly chose a seeded roll, some foil wrapped slices of butter, and went to sit at their table awaiting boiling water for tea.
“I’m really hungry,” Lilly said. “But do I dare?”
“Better not,” her mother advised. “Or we might be sorry.”
*
Walking later in the crowded streets near Ordu Caedssi, across the street from the great domed temple called the “Tulip Mosque,” Lilly joined the rhythm of the life teeming about her. On the street, Muslim women with scarves over their hair wore—even in the summer heat—long gray coats down to their ankles. Their dark-haired, black eyed babies clung to their coats or were cradled in their arms.
Lilly’s ever-present pang convulsed in her chest. Her time was surely past to hope for a child. Certain things she had once taken to be her birthright she now understood would most likely never be. She accepted these truths, these losses, and for the most part ignored them—but suddenly one would rush up against her and she would find herself undefended. She turned her attention to the shops they were passing. They had only two days in Istanbul and late tomorrow night they would fly to Antalya where they would board the Ozymandias for their cruise.
Many of the shops displayed elaborate clothing for a Russian winter—fur-trimmed long woolen dresses, heavily-padded, hooded coats, calf-high, fur-lined boots, hats with ear flaps. Lilly remembered from the map of Turkey that Russia was only a leap across the Black Sea from here.
But how many leaps away was she from her modern townhouse with its orderly closets, her neatly folded underwear, her spotless kitchen. Her whole life—from this distance—seemed immaculate and sterile to her: her academic work in folders, properly filed, her suits hanging in plastic from the cleaners (till she returned to teach), her books arranged by subject in her built-in shelves in the dining and living rooms. Could a woman’s life be nothing more than that? She had a sudden image of her home being vaporized in a sudden explosion, every last shred of clothing, every book, every academic paper, burned and rising in delicate ash funnels toward the sun. And she thought: “Would I miss any of it?”
She helped her mother down a curb and they turned a corner. On this narrow street were clothing shops—one after another. In front of them were tables at which men sat playing backgammon. They were handsome Turkish men with mustaches—young strong-looking men playing against much older men, each one sipping red apple tea from curved-rim glasses in metal filigree holders. Though they must all be waiting in front of their shops for business, business could wait if a man was studying the backgammon board. Only after the man made his move did a waiting customer dare to ask his question and then only reluctantly did the owner of the shop stand up, excuse himself, and go inside to quote prices, bargain, perhaps make a sale. His partner at the table would light up a cigarette, inhale, lean back and wait.
One older man, smoking, caught Lilly’s eye, stared at her with something like sexual appraisal in his eyes. Then, when his gaze took in the small, white-haired woman at her side, his expression changed, he smiled broadly, tipped his cup of red tea at both of them.
Lilly didn’t know why his action caused her heart to pound. His first look was sweetly lascivious, but suddenly changed to something like inclusion, like familial love. Perhaps he approved because she was taking care of her mother, holding her mother’s arm. What surprised her most was the ricocheting of her emotions here, how aware she felt of the smallest gestures, of tiny moments that opened seas of emotion.
She was touched by the energy evident in Turkey, the busy-ness of people in the streets, the insistence of those who lived here to take time to live, to enjoy life, even with the threat of the shifting earth below them.
They must be poor, these shop-owners, how could they not be? With fifteen stores just like their own on this one block? And all competing for the tourist dollars (which were not flowing now), or the Russian clothes-buyers who came from across the sea.
They passed a shop with a sign in English: Come in! Welcome! We will make to order a piece of clothing for you in twenty minutes. BARGAIN PRICE!
In the window were mannequins wearing light summer clothes made of seersucker: sun dresses, shorts, skirts, pants and matching tops.
“Mother—I want to buy one of those outfits,” Lilly said. “I didn’t bring any long pants, and I’ll need something to cover my legs if we hike in the ruins.”
“Oh, darling, who knows what kind of quality you can get here.”
“But it doesn’t matter. Let’s give them some business. That’s what we came here to do, isn’t it?”
The shop was empty when they entered it, but a young woman came from behind a curtain and dipped her head at them in greeting.
“American?” she asked. “I thought—yes—American,” she said with a smile when they admitted they were. She proudly pointed to samples of the clothing in the window that she could sew in minutes. She showed Lilly bolts of fabric, and waited while Lilly pointed out the items she wanted: a simple shirt and pants with an elastic waist, both made of a lightweight seersucker. She chose a pink and yellow and green plaid—the fabric reminded her of the pajamas of her childhood.
Lilly rarely wore pants. She was not delicately built and didn’t look her best in them. But what did it matter here? She let the woman take her measurements, she paid her deposit. She would come back in a half hour.
Outside, the smell of roasting meat came to Lilly’s nose and she saw the source—a dolma stand, a round of lamb rotating on a spit, drops of fat sizzling down to the metal grate beneath. A mustached Turk was cutting off slivers of meat, and putting them in a long roll, scooping up the gravy from below. The meat shredded as he peeled it off with a carving knife—it looked pink and tender, delicious. Wrapping the sandwich in a napkin, he handed it to a young man, took his payment, began making the next one.
“I want one,” Lilly said to her mother.
“Absolutely not,” said Harriet. “There is no way I would allow it. A street vendor? With unwashed hands?”
“Oh, but I must have one,” Lilly said.
“We are not in Turkey to take foolish risks,” her mother told her.
“But why not?” Lilly said, reaching into her purse for one of the strange, astronomically numbered bills of Turkish lire. “The truth is, Mother, why not?” And when the man handed her the sandwich cradled in a square of opaque waxed paper, she bit into it without hesitation. The pungent juices of the broiled meat filled her mouth. The shock of how extraordinarily delicious it seemed to her brought tears to her eyes. Where was this hunger coming from? Even as she filled herself with the tender meat, the roll soaked in its gravy, she had a sense of her potent hunger. What she hungered for was not clear to her at the moment but she felt a need, hot and empty, like a hollow in her hea
rt.
*
In the afternoon they signed up at their hotel for a tour to take them that evening to a “Bona Fide Turkish Dinner and Belly Dance Show” as well as one for the next morning to see—as the brochure said—“Historical Istanbul: Hagia Sofia—the fifteen hundred year old Church of Holy Wisdom, the Blue Mosque with its six minarets and decorated with 20,000 blue tiles, and the Topkapi Palace, which is famous for its voluptuous and exquisite Harem, where the Sultan housed his many wives and concubines.” They would be picked up at their hotel at eight in the morning—and be back in time for the night flight to Antalya.
“A pity we don’t have time to do it all,” Harriet said, consulting the brochure. “If we were here another day we could see the Whirling Dervishes and the Covered Bazaar and the Spice Market and the Turkish Baths and also take a boat tour of the Bosphorus. But let us at least squeeze in what we can. As your father proved to us, life is short.”
*
That evening, after Lilly and her mother came down to the lobby to meet the bus which would take them to the “House of Turkish Delight” (“They can’t poison us there, it would be bad for business,” Harriet reasoned), they were browsing in the gift shop when the walls began to shake. The chandeliers in the lobby swung and jangled, the girls at the desk screamed.
“Aftershock,” Lilly said, grasping her mother’s arm. “Don’t run, it shouldn’t last long.”
However, a panic ensued among the hotel workers. All the employees, bell boys and switchboard operators, all the waiters and maids converged and ran toward the doors to the street. When the shaking stopped, seconds later, Lilly and her mother walked outside. They could see the hotel workers at a bank of pay telephones, frantically trying to make calls.
“The must be desperate to know if their families are safe,” Harriet said. “What a pity they don’t build safer buildings here.”
All traffic had stopped, people on the street were poised as if frozen in time. But, after a moment, the world began to move again. No caverns opened under the street cars, no fires spit from the center of the earth.
“It’s really lucky,” Harriet said, “that at home we only have hurricanes.”
HOUSE OF TURKISH DELIGHT
Lilly and her mother heard their names called by the driver of a large van who hurried them inside and then tore along the city streets from their hotel to another, where two people got on and to another, where a single person boarded. They were delivered to the “House of Turkish Delight” which promised an “extravaganza that promises you a peek into the heart of Turkey with folk music and authentic belly dance.” Lilly, who had studied belly dance for two years in a course at the local Y, looked forward to seeing the real thing. She had loved both the music and the movement of the dance and felt it had expressed some hidden aspect of her nature that had no outlet otherwise. She and the other women in the class, two of them grandmothers, had found themselves friends as well as classmates. All of them had been pleased to find an art form that appreciated their rounded bellies, and helped them express the gentle sensuousness that the music invited.
“The House of Turkish Delight”—once they got inside—looked to Lilly like a Las Vegas showroom, with narrow tables lined in vertical rows to meet the stage floor. She and her mother were asked their nationality by a waiter who placed in front of them a small American flag on a stand. A speedily dispatched dinner was also set before them short cycles, wine, appetizers, some sort of broiled meat, sauces Lilly could not identify, vegetables she had never seen before, breads and spreads to put on them. This dinner event was costing them seventy dollars each, which was why Harriet was sure the food would be safe to eat. However, once she had her fork in hand, she looked doubtful. “Do you think they leave the meat standing out for hours?” she whispered to Lilly. “Do you think they all wash their hands back there in the kitchen?”
In between courses, on the stage, a folk troupe dressed in Turkish costume played extremely loud music, tromped around the stage and banged on drums. When coffee and a sweet pastry dessert was served, the belly dancer came leaping into view…her enormous breasts nearly falling out of her spangled bra, her tassels shaking, her coins jangling, her beads ringing.
Lilly recoiled in the blast of noise and movement, and shuddered further when the woman stepped onto their table, between the flags of many nations, the coffee cups and the dessert dishes. She spun above them, a tornado of noise and color and thunderously shaking breasts.
The others at their long table, two couples from Japan, a couple from Australia, others from England, were laughing and yelling; (while Lilly and her mother were still each nursing her glass of wine, the others had apparently consumed several bottles.) The belly dancer continued her gyrations, using more of the movements, Lilly thought, of a stripper than a belly dancer. Then she leaped to the floor, and began to tease one of the men in the group, flinging her veil over his head, jiggling her breasts inches from his eyes and then stopping to pose, provocatively, while the nightclub’s hired photographer took a picture. Then she moved on to another man, posed for another picture.
“Oh my,” Harriet said. “I don’t want my picture taken.”
“Don’t worry, Mother, she isn’t going to pose with us. She’s already figured out who will buy the photos.”
At this point, a large jovial MC wearing a silly hat began giving belly dance “lessons” on the stage, exaggeratedly wiggling his hips and saying how simple it was, that “anyone can do it.” Then, carrying his microphone down to the main floor, he walked among the tables, and invited specific women, eight of them, to come up on stage and “try it, give your fellow-travelers a little thrill.” Lilly noted that he passed her right by and chose to invite only young and very pretty women, all of whom ran giggling up to the stage.
In five minutes, he had them all wiggling their hips lasciviously, inviting applause from the audience for each woman, more applause the more wildly she shook her body (he had the women turn their backs to the crowd so the audience could assess the movement of their behinds.) He awarded a prize to the woman who shook the hardest—a souvenir belly dance doll.
“Lilly,” her mother said to her, leaning across the table. “Didn’t you once take belly dance lessons? It seems to me you could do as well as any of those women, don’t you think?”
*
They were picked up in the morning by yet another tour company van and delivered to one of the great international hotels on the Bosphorus where they were to be met by their specific tour group for the day. From the lobby of this great hotel which looked out on the water, Lilly and her mother could see the majestic Queen Elizabeth Two waiting in the harbor. The glass and chrome of this hotel was ten times more luxurious than theirs, carpeted with thick Persian rugs and decorated with the most elegant of antiques. (“Foreign money,” Harriet whispered to Lilly. “The Turks don’t run hotels like this.”)
Their names were called and they were directed to a small van with four other tourists already seated in it—a couple from Australia and a mother and her grown son from India. They briefly introduced themselves, but without much enthusiasm. Apparently having to meet a schedule, the driver, who spoke no English, pulled into traffic, and the guide began his spiel.
They sped to the Aya Sophia museum and were marched dutifully through it as their guide, in broken English, pointed out the fame of its enormous dome and how it was supported, how it used to be lit by thousands of candles (also making it a lighthouse), but whose flames eventually destroyed the building as well as burned down most of the city. He pointed out mosaics of Christ, John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary.
Lilly craned her neck and began to feel the deadness which often set in when too much culture was thrown at her, when image overlaid image and became confused in the kaleidoscope of her brain. She was not disinterested in other cultures and their history, and not averse to learning about art and architecture. But this trip had been thrown upon her, against her will. She’d had no time to stud
y and prepare for what she might see, and, now that she was here, in the midst of it, with facts and details tumbling down on her head like a small avalanche, she wished she were elsewhere.
She longed to go outside, sit quietly on a step and watch the people pass by, watch their faces, consider their lives. That every human being on earth had a special life, a unique story, a fate through which he or she was moving was what fascinated Lilly. Everyone, just as she did, must act one role and live another private one. This guide, who made his living intoning facts—what did he really think and feel, doing this, day after day? He was now showing them a large marble pillar which had a small hole in it.
“Legend has it,” he said, “that if you place your thumb in this hole, turn it round and make a wish, it will come true. It was also said that if you put your finger in the hole and rubbed your eye, it would cure eye disease. Or spread it!” he added, laughing the canned laugh of his script.
Even so, Lilly placed her thumb in the ancient hole to touch souls with the millions of visitors who had done so before her. She made a wish. She was in a fabled land, a place of genies and flying carpets. Why not wish to be transformed?
*
They had to surrender their shoes at the Blue Mosque and tiptoe over the patterned rugs lining the enormous cavern. The light came in eerily from the 260 windows above, and the famed Iznik tiles glowed blue as they had since the 1600s. The mosque’s six minarets had caused a scandal in the ancient world, since it boasted as many as the mosque in Mecca. “The Sultan,” said the guide,” had to donate an extra minaret to Mecca to make up for it.”
On and on they marched, from antiquity to antiquity, back into the van and onto the next site, which—as it turned out—was a shop that sold jewelry. This had not been in the brochure. The guide assured his group that the store was run by friends of his and had the best values in gold and diamonds in Istanbul. They would stay here only fifteen minutes so they could see the quality and beauty of the jewelry. The Indian woman already had several gold bracelets on each arm, but seemed interested to look at more of them in the display cases. Lilly’s mother said she would like to buy some gold earrings.
You Are Always Safe With Me Page 2