You Are Always Safe With Me

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  “What?” Lilly said, surprised.

  “Have any massages lately?” Marianne asked. Lilly turned her face into the wind, feeling the spray of water on her face as Izak revved up the outboard and headed toward shore. She did not reply.

  *

  They took a bus that afternoon to see the cliff tombs of Myra. The small hired van was driven by an older Turk who looked to Lilly remarkably like Sean Connery. Tied to his rearview mirror was a charm Lilly had seen all over Turkey, a single dark blue disc with a light blue “eye” in its center. “For luck,” a shopkeeper had told her when she asked its significance. “To ward off the evil eye. If one wishes evil to you and looks at it, it will shatter in many pieces.” In a gift shop Lilly had seen dozens of the glass eyes on sale “Ten For a Dollar.” She had bought thirty of them. Each had a pinhole in the charm, so that it could be worn on a chain or ribbon. After she bought them she felt foolish, yet she tucked them in a corner of her suitcase to take home.

  The bus driver—when they had all boarded—indicated the air-conditioning vents and said “Cold enough? Yes?”

  It was always too hot, everywhere in Turkey—on the boat, on buses, in cafes, in shops: Lilly had simply stopped comparing her comfort level here to that at home. The temperature in the bus was suffocating.

  Harrison and Gerta raised their liter bottles of water toward the driver, to show they were well-prepared. The water in them was visibly half-frozen. “Izak gave us these from the freezer, to keep us cool,” he said proudly, to assert his special rights and privileges. He held his bottle to his cheek, and Gerta, sitting with him across the aisle from Lilly, pressed hers between her thighs.

  Lilly—again astonished to feel tears rise behind her eyes (she cried so easily in this country, she seemed to have no control over her emotions)—looked away. She was the only person sitting alone on the small bus—her mother was beside Lance, with his wild gray hair and pale face, Jane and Jack Cotton were, as always, together, Fiona O’Hara and Marianne were sitting together toward the back of the little bus and Harrison and Gerta were rolling their ice water bottles around one another’s thighs to cool themselves and each other. Harrison could not keep his hands off Gerta. Today she wore a red elastic tank top and black leather shorts. Lilly, by contrast, wore her handmade Turkish seersucker “pajamas,” which promised to be light, but also to protect her legs from the rough terrain if she wanted to climb the mountain to explore the cliff tombs.

  Izak never came on these “tourist trips”—always having something to do on the boat, or in the town, or perhaps he used the time off to swim or sleep, to have some respite from his duties. But Lilly now felt his absence keenly. He could have given her a little bottle of frozen water had he wanted to. She always took her own bottle of lukewarm water—her sun hat and water bottle were required for every trip off the boat—but that Izak had specially given Gerta and Harrison iced bottles, and not her, made her so foolishly cry.

  Weren’t those two lucky enough already? Rich, beautiful, and about to have a baby? Amazed at her petty, adolescent jealousy, Lilly, sitting behind the driver, watched his evil-eye charm sway as the little van climbed the narrow mountain road. Each time he came to a hairpin turn, he pumped his horn in warning. Along the edge of the road were greenhouses covered with plastic sheeting, and inside were tomatoes, turning red in the sun alternating with columns of green cucumbers.

  The few houses they passed looked mainly unfinished, made of cement block, as if a child had begun to build them and got bored. Now and then a woman would appear, her head covered, carrying an infant or holding a child by the hand, followed by a goat or two, as they walked along the side of the road.

  Lilly leaned her head against the window and stared out, thinking of the lives of others, wondering at their simplicity, their complexity, their mystery. She felt herself to be hollow, without a life, without anything back home to which she might return. This feeling deepened, engulfed her without warning, so that the fields were blurred by her tears, the mountains made crooked and unreal. She was careful to turn her head away from the aisle so the others would not see her, but suddenly she realized that the driver had a clear view of her face in his side-view mirror. She knew this because he very quietly offered her a box of tissues behind his back, low to the floor, offering it with his left hand.

  She took the box; she murmured “Thank you,” and she pressed her forehead to the window. She had witnessed a sensitivity in Turkish men she had not ever known elsewhere. (She had no contact with the women here—they were all in the background, their heads covered, their duties not so much in the shops or the streets or having to do with the tourist business.) One day in a port city, when her mother had wanted to spend time in a jewelry store and Lilly had wanted to look into a bakery, they’d agreed to meet on the corner in a half hour. When Lilly got there first and had been standing on the curb in the sun for ten minutes, a man hurried out of a rug shop carrying a folding chair and an umbrella and opened them both for her, insisting that she wait in comfort.

  *

  After a hard, bumpy ascent along a snaking road, the bus driver pulled up in front of a drink and ice cream stand on the mountainside—a slab of concrete, a few white plastic chairs, a post card stand, an ice cream freezer on wheels and a splintery picnic table. Across the road from the tourist stop advertising Coca-Cola, rising toward the sky, were the ruins of cliff tombs.

  Marianne, always hungry, rushed from the bus to order an ice cream pop. They followed her and others gave their orders. Lance bought Lilly’s mother an orange soda. The driver of the bus came to sit in the shade and talk with the owner of the small business. They seemed to know one another well. After the business transactions were over, the owner went inside the building and brought out a backgammon set. The two men settled down to a game.

  It was then that Lilly spotted two teenage girls sitting on the porch of their little house, just behind the ice cream stand. They were both crocheting something lacy. Both girls were startlingly pretty: long-haired, long lashed, lovely-featured young women.

  Lilly had seen similarly pretty Turkish girls pull up to the Ozymandias just as the crepe boat had done: they climbed the ladder offering trays of scarves embellished with lace or fringes of colored thread, they proffered brightly colored bracelets of oddly shaped beads, “Only one million, please buy, only one million.”

  Unable to resist, Lilly had bought a few scarves and bracelets, for whom she was not sure, but tucked them away in her suitcase with the “lucky” glass eyes. Now she said to the girls, “You make these to sell?”

  “No for sell,” said the older girl. “Wait,” and she got up from her chair, went into the house, and came back holding a pink dishcloth with lace around its edges. “For us,” she said. “For Mama. For our house.” She took up her crotchet needle from where she had set it down on the chair, sat down, and resumed her handiwork.

  From this simple wooden porch, Lilly could see the view the girls had as they sat on their porch looking across the road: the magnificent Lycian cliff tombs perched on one another, carved into the side of the mountain. It looked as if palaces had been hacked out of the granite, each tomb a house-shaped room, rich with scenes of family life, each boasting an intricate relief to indicate the activities that had gone on before the death which had taken place.

  Such amazing images to have looming above one’s simple, almost primitive home, the operatic backdrop to the little ice cream wagon, the stage setting for two young girls edging dishtowels for their mother.

  “Thank you for showing me these towels,” Lilly told the girls. “Your lace is very beautiful.” Before she crossed the road to the tombs, she bought an ice cream pop for a million Turkish lire.

  *

  She didn’t think her mother would try to make the climb, but Lance pulled Lilly’s mother up steep drops, offered support as she stepped from rock to slippery rock, congratulated her on her good choice of walking shoes, and pushed her up from behind when she didn’t
have the strength to lift her own weight on one foot and then another.

  Again, everyone was in partnership, Marianne helping Fiona, Jack helping Jane, Harrison helping Gerta. Bravely, Lilly clambered up the narrow paths and over rocks, her own hand-holds her only support, the treads on her tennis shoes her only security. She was high above the road. Below she could see the corrugated tin roof over the ice cream stand, the white top of the van that had driven them to the site, the little signs advertising beer and Coke flapping slightly on their hinges.

  The others had gone ahead of her, around a bend. She stopped in front of a tomb, felt the hot wind coming from below, saw the yawning open door before her, and stepped inside. It was cooler here, smelling of rock and burned coals, empty of the bodies that had once reposed within, but full of the sense of whomever they had been, their human lives and human deaths. She recalled an engraving she had once seen on a tombstone in a New England cemetery:

  Stop Here, My Friend

  As You Pass By

  As You Are Now

  So Once Was I,

  As I Am Now

  So You Will Be,

  Prepare For Death

  And Follow Me.

  Tearful again, but hidden from the others allowing herself her emotion without censure, she touched the wall with her bare hand, tried to link her soul with the souls who had passed by here, to make contact, to be part of some vast movement of life through time. More than anything, she did not want to be so alone. Why should she be, at this time of her life, alone, so irrevocably alone?

  AT THE HELM

  Curled asleep under her blanket, Lilly sensed a violent motion beneath her body, a bucking of her pillow beneath her head. Waves were heaving themselves against the Ozymandias. She lifted her head and saw that the cliffs of the Turquoise Coast were behind them and the prow of the boat was heading toward open water.

  Cold spray splashed upward and dampened Lilly’s face and hair where she lay, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, on the foam pad of the deck. She could see her mother was still asleep on the narrow bench. Izak stood at the helm. As always, he was barefoot, bare-chested and wearing shorts; he seemed not to notice the early morning chill and dampness.

  The sails on the masts had been unfurled and were billowing huge and white, catching the wind, driving the vessel forward. Other than the hard slap of water against the sides of the Ozymandias, it was quiet. The thrumming motors, to which Lilly had become accustomed, were stilled, leaving only the sound of nature’s forces.

  Wrapping herself in the blanket she had slept under, she rose and walked to the helm where Izak, his eyes intense, was guiding the boat into choppy waters. She stood beside him without speaking, watching the waves, feeling the rise and fall of her own body over them with only the thin intervention of boat hull and deck between herself and the sea.

  Izak glanced sideways at her. “We go to Russia, Lilly,” he whispered.

  “To Russia?”

  “Yes, you drive us.” He reached sideways and drew Lilly in front of the wheel, the blanket still over her shoulders. Standing behind her, he positioned her hands on the helm. With the wide wooden wheel under her hands, she felt the vibrations of the waves beating below and had a sense of the power Izak must feel when controlling the boat against the forces of wind and sea. The blanket slipped from her shoulders and Izak retrieved it, wrapping it around her again, this time holding it in place with his body as he leaned forward, placing his hands over hers on the wheel. “Just hold steady,” he said.

  She glanced sideways. Her mother was still asleep, her head turned away from them.

  “We go to the Black Sea,” Izak whispered in her ear. “We run away to Russia, you and me. Not such a bad plan, yes?”

  *

  When the sun rose, coming over the horizon like a pink flower, Lilly pulled herself away from the heated space between Izak’s arms where she’d leaned back against him in that strange, silent embrace at the wheel. She went below to her cabin, flung herself across the lower bunk and heard her blood pounding in her ears. What a state she was in; confusion, elation, pleasure, joy, insanity. Was this not insane, to be in love with a Turkish sailor? Surely she knew better. She must have been hopelessly drugged by the beauty of this land, made victim to a tale from the Arabian nights, flung senseless by a ride on a flying carpet.

  She made herself get up, wash her face, change her clothes, comb her hair. But she was trembling and lost to a force which had penetrated her good sense, her grown-up life, her security. Where could this possibly lead, but to embarrassment and grief? Like a schoolgirl, she was overwhelmed by such a scorching attraction to Izak that she could not think. Her face, in fact, in the mirror on the bathroom wall, was flushed with color. She heard her mother come into the cabin to get dressed for the day. She would need to use the bathroom.

  Lilly opened the bathroom door. Her mother said, “I couldn’t believe how seasick I was feeling, but Harrison insisted that Izak test out the sails to be sure they’re working properly. We’ll be turning back toward the coves in a few minutes. But really—I don’t think anyone will be able to have breakfast this morning, Lilly! Do you?”

  *

  On her way back to the upper deck, Lilly stopped at the galley to watch Morat slicing tomatoes and cucumbers. The boat was still heaving—and he had a sharp knife in his hand. “Be careful,” Lilly said to him, and he smiled, cutting faster than ever. “I teach you cook Turkish,” he said.

  “I teach you cook American,” she replied, laughing.

  “We have only stale bread this day,” Morat said sadly, holding up a loaf of bread, pressing it to show how hard it was.

  “Why don’t you make French toast? I’ll show you how. It’s quite wonderful, almost as good as crepes.”

  “I don’t know this meal.”

  “Do you want me to teach you? It’s simple.”

  He bowed gallantly, invited her behind the counter, made a show of turning the tiny kitchen over to her control. She told him what she would need: “Eggs, oil, milk, a big pan. As he hunted for the ingredients, holding up several wrong items, they burst into silly laughter. Izak passed by them and her heart curled into a tight knot—she was ashamed, she was pained, she was horrified. What if he thought she was engaging in some flirtation with Morat?

  But Izak merely paused, interested to see what dish she was preparing. He watched as she beat eggs and milk in a bowl, asked Morat to slice the stale bread and heat the oil in a pan. Soon the fragrant aroma of French toast frying wafted up to the deck. Lance peered into the galley and said he couldn’t wait to taste it, Marianne came down the steps and said what she needed with French toast was some good old American coffee. Jack Cotton said he had a surprise, that at the last village he had bought a real American drip coffee maker and would bring it up from his cabin and they could have coffee that didn’t stand one’s hair on end.

  There was no maple syrup for the French toast, only green fig jam, and sugar cubes they could crush with their spoons. But as the Ozymandias headed back to port, now with Barish at the helm, everyone congratulated Lilly for the great breakfast.

  *

  They were sailing back to reach a port where some supplies were required for the boat. The names of the towns where they had been and where they were going, Antalya, Kas, Kalkan, Patara, Letoon, Fethiye, Oludeniz, Tlos, faded in and out of Lilly’s mind. She saw all of their precious and remarkable ruins as one great mural painted on the ceiling of her mind. In all of the towns they’d visited, guides led them to climb on jagged rocks, sit in great amphitheaters, examine mosaics, exclaim over Roman baths. Sometimes they would sit on the rocks of an ancient city overlooking a great valley, with no sound but the wind in the high grasses. The lack of other tourists was one of the great pleasures of being here, in the quiet, having the peace to explore at their own pace.

  Local children often followed them, offering sprigs of mint for sale, saying “Buy, please, please, will you buy?” begging Lilly to smell the leaves, and to�
�please, please buy. Lilly had no coins in her pocket, only the million lire notes, whose worth confused her. The children were, every one, exquisite: dark luminous-eyed, olive-skinned beauties.

  She saw children herding goats, one child and three or four brown or gray animals with shaggy beards. Bells rang around the animals necks as they climbed among the rocks and grazed. She had fantasies of seeking out the parents of such a child, begging to borrow him, to be allowed to take him home, to educate him, raise him in comfort, in shoes! She would return him, of course, but much later, after he’d forgotten the mosaics, the sprigs of mint, the sounds of goat bells.

  She had not been vulnerable to such imaginings for so many years! She was surprised at the images that filled her mind here. The space in her head that was so often rigid with schedules, papers to grade, appointments to keep, projects to finish, was open now to unexpected longings. At home, when she had leisure time, she’d fill it with concerts, movies, programs on the educational TV channel. Sometimes she’d indulge herself in front of the TV with a pizza or a take-out dinner of shrimp and honey walnuts from the Chinese restaurant. She’d felt safe in front of her television until one day she’d accidentally come across a program called “Baby Story” in which a couple was filmed in the days before their baby’s birth. The camera followed them through a trip to shop for baby furniture, to the baby shower, to the workshop teaching baby-massage, to the class rehearsing the steps of labor and what to expect in its various stages. In the last ten minutes of the half hour show, the woman was shown in a hospital bed, her legs apart, a baby descending in her birth canal, a nurse yelling “Push, push, push!” and her husband whispering encouragement into her ear.

  Lilly could still recall her astonishment, to have come upon this private moment of someone’s life on the TV in her own living room. She was transfixed by the childbirth scene which—in movies of the past—was always depicted by women rushing into a room with towels and pots of hot water, by men sitting dejectedly outside the room while a woman’s screams could be heard throughout the house. Then there would be the good news or the bad: “She’s gone, it’s all over, I’m sorry,” or “It’s a beautiful baby boy. Or girl.”