You Are Always Safe With Me

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  Lilly stood frozen, half afraid that if she moved the gun would go off in her hand. She was standing on one foot; the other could not bear her weight. In a moment she heard the sound of an outboard motor. She glanced at the water and saw the escaped man standing in a small boat, gunning the motor, taking off toward the cliffs.

  Her mother came to her side and gently unwound her fingers from the gun. She carried it to Izak who said, “Please—the cell phone,” pointing to the shelf under the helm. Harriet, efficient and calm—even as she looked frail and a helpless in her pajamas, with her hair in a white halo flying about her face—brought the phone to Izak, who, holding the gun pointed at the man, called a number which must have been the police.

  Barish had, at the sounds of the skirmish, come up from below and at Izak’s command opened one of the storage areas where rope was kept. Expertly, because he was practiced at tying the boat to the cliffs each night, he bound the man’s hands behind him.

  When Izak saw Harriet’s gold earrings where they had been flung under the table, he crawled on his knees to retrieve them for her. Calmly, gratefully, she put them back in her ears.

  “I bought these after much bargaining in Istanbul. It would have been a pity to have that man sell them on the black market or trade them for hashish.…”

  Lilly was still standing on one foot, feeling that if she moved the other to bear weight, her ankle would snap from her foot. Izak came to her side, put his arm around her shoulders and led her, holding her up, to a chair. She leaned her head against his side and felt herself trembling. His skin was hot against the clammy chill of her forehead. Izak placed his hand gently on her head and stroked her hair.

  “The man could have killed us.”

  “No problem, Lilly,” he said. “You are always safe with me.”

  “But you are only a man, flesh and blood.”

  “Not just a man, Lilly. I Ottoman.”

  *

  When the police boat appeared, its loud idling motor brought the others up from below to see what was happening. Marianne, roused from her stuporous night’s sleep after her hours of spinning, came stumbling from the forward deck, still in her Whirling Dervish clothes. The other guests stood, silent and amazed, as they observed the young man whose hands were tied, saw him lower his head and refuse to reply to the questions in Turkish the police were asking of him. They watched, finally, as the two policemen led the man off the boat and into their custody. When the police boat had pulled away from the Ozymandias, Harriet said, “We must all thank Izak for our lives. He is truly a hero. Pirates came aboard and he subdued them single-handedly.”

  Everyone burst out in applause. Embarrassed, Izak lowered his eyes, then looked up, unable to restrain a smile. Marianne pushed her way through the huddle of people surrounding Izak, rushed to him and threw her arms around him. “A kiss for the hero!” she cried, standing on tiptoes to raise her lips toward his face.

  He turned his head away and pushed her off. “Excuse,” he said brusquely. “I serve breakfast now.” He signaled to Barish, and they both went quickly down the steps to the galley.

  Lilly felt her mother pull on her arm. “Come downstairs with me. We’ll get dressed to face the day.”

  *

  Lilly hopped to the stairs, hung onto the walls. Five steps down to the galley, a turnaround, and five more to the cabins below. Her mother, it appeared, had not even noticed she was injured.

  “Lilly,” Harriet said, shutting the door behind them as they came into their tiny room, “You must not fall in love with this beautiful Izak. My darling girl, princely as he is, the man is only a Turkish sailor. There is no point to it, you understand. There is no future in it.” Harriet began choosing her day’s clothes from the cupboard.

  “Mother, please—”

  “I don’t usually interfere in your life choices, Lilly. You know that. You’re a grown woman. But everyone has seen what’s happening….”

  “Everyone? What have they seen? What is happening? Nothing is happening.” She let herself fall back on the foam mattress. She winced with pain. “I really can’t have this conversation. I don’t tell you what to think about Lance.”

  “Lance has become my good friend, Lilly. He’s just a pleasant, simple soul. He’s a single man. He likes me. My life is lonely since Daddy died. What’s wrong with our being friends? Lance is an American. Lance lives ten miles from my house. If we want to continue our friendship at home, it’s possible. But look at Izak! Look at his life and where he lives it. You don’t even speak the same language. Another few days on this boat, and you’ll never see him again.”

  “I know that all too well,” Lilly said. “There’s nothing to worry about. We all admire him. I admire him. That’s all.”

  “I’m sorry, Lilly. I just must warn you. The Ozymandias is like a magic city, an unreal place. Shipboard romances are famous for being based on a fantasy. I fear you may be losing sight of what you have in your real life.”

  “And what is that exactly?” Lilly asked. “What life do you mean? You know, Mother, try as I may, I can’t quite remember it just now.”

  *

  Lilly’s ankle, in the time it took her mother to dress, had become puffy and the skin over the bone seemed bluish. She cried out when she tried to stand.

  “What is it, darling?” Harriet asked. When Lilly showed her mother her ankle, Harriet paled. “When did this happen. You may need a doctor!”

  “I think just some ice, Mother. Will you ask one of the crew to bring me some, please?”

  While her mother was gone, she stared up at the unfinished wood of the upper bunk. She considered all the polished, gleaming teak where it showed on the boat. But—here—where people slept, where they experienced their dreams, where they opened their eyes to greet the new day, they saw ugly, splintery rough-hewn wood inches from their faces. As with the guests on this boat, the Ozymandias was full of hidden flaws, raw realities.

  She considered her ankle. She was done for, the rest of the trip ruined. How would she ever get up to breakfast, no less ever get off this boat, get onto a plane, get home to whatever life her mother believed was waiting for her?

  There was a brief knock and Izak entered the cabin.

  “Let me see your foot.”

  He held forth a frozen bottle of mineral water, the kind he had given Harrison and Gerta that day they had driven to the cliff tombs in the terrible heat. He sat on the mattress and examined her ankle. “No problem,” he said.

  “No problem?” She laughed, feeling somewhat hysterical. “I can’t walk.”

  “We will fix. I take you to Fethiye, into the town. We visit a doctor I know there. No problem.”

  “But I really can’t move,” she said.

  “So I carry you.” And he lifted her right off the bed, carried her, like a bride over the threshold, up the five steps to the galley, up five more to the deck, and placed her gently on a chair at the dining table. “You will have breakfast, for strength, and then I take you to the doctor.”

  *

  During breakfast Fiona opened her purse and handed Lilly a long white pill. “This is like magic for pain. I never go anywhere without it because you never know. It’s one of those amazing pills that floats you up into heavenly bliss.”

  “I’m not ready for heaven yet,” Lilly said.

  “You should take the pill,” Marianne said. “After all, it must really be hell to have to have Izak carry you around.”

  “Hey, Marianne,” Harrison said. “What’s going on with you? Didn’t all that spinning give you a kinder, sweeter vision of the world?”

  “Oh please,” she said. “Where do you come off giving advice? Your life belongs on a picture postcard, Harrison, along with your adorable little wife. What do you know about trouble?”

  “But why pick on Lilly? She’s got a painful injury there. She was on deck this morning when those nuts came on board—she’s had a bad day and it’s only nine in the morning.”

  “Oh for God’s
sake,” she said. “I’m off the edge lately. This magic carpet ride we’re all taking on this boat has knocked something loose in my head, some screw I can’t find to put myself back together.”

  “Honey,” Fiona said. “You used to be my analyst, for a few days, anyway, but maybe now you should come to me with your problems.”

  “Lilly,” said Marianne, looking across the table with intensely blue eyes, eyes incredibly piercing, “I do owe you an apology. I really am sorry. Being out here on the sea seems to concentrate everything I feel. All the stuff that dilutes my misery back home—my work, my clients and their troubles, paying bills, watching TV, shopping, cleaning house—none of that is here to distract me. All I have here is me, and it isn’t enough. The rest of you have some buddy, somebody to share with. And Lilly, for some reason, when I see Izak with you, the way he looks at you, talks to you, it just sends me up the wall.”

  Lilly said, “He and I hardly talk. We hardly speak each other’s language.”

  “It’s not a language of words, it’s something else.”

  “The have the same kind of soul,” Lance suggested.

  “And my soul,” Marianne said, “is petrified, like those cliffs out there.”

  “This is getting too heavy,” Gerta said.

  “Well, things in any family get heavy sometimes,” Fiona reminded her. “And all of us, we’re a family by now. Don’t you think?”

  *

  While Izak was steering the Ozymandias toward shore—he was going to bring the boat into the dock since getting Lilly into the Zodiac would be too difficult—Harrison set forth the plans for the next day’s outing.

  “I saved the best for last,” he said, “or almost last…since we only have a few days left in Turkey. Tomorrow we’re going to Saklikent Gorge.”

  “And what is Saklikent Gorge?” Jane asked.

  “It’s one of the wonders of the world.”

  “But you know Jack and I won’t be going with you. We’ve been looking at the map and as you know we plan to visit Greece. This is the place we’ll say goodbye to you. When we get to port in Fethiye, we’re going to take a ferry across to Rhodes. We can’t be in this part of the world without visiting Greece. From there, we’ll fly home. We’re really going to miss every one of you. We love you all. Fiona is right, we’re like a family now.”

  Lilly recoiled at the false tone in Jane’s voice, at how inauthentic this declaration sounded to her. She surely did not feel as if Jane and Jack Cotton were part of her family, this couple whom she knew only from the outside, by their style, their good humor, their trendy clothes, their reticence to reveal anything personal about themselves. Whenever Lilly found herself on deck next to Jane and tried to talk to her, she was always polite, but distant. Jack made it a point to keep his own counsel; he played backgammon with Lance, sometimes with Harrison, but beyond that, he was impenetrable. They, more than Harrison and Gerta, were the picture-postcard couple. They had no children, but did they regret it? They displayed no conflicts, didn’t complain, didn’t insert themselves in any noticeable way into discussions, made a point of being cooperative. But was this a real marriage, a real connection? To live within the forms was a fair substitution for intimacy, but what bonded them—if anything—was invisible to Lilly. How could she—or anyone—ever guess at what tied two people together?

  “The Saklikent Gorge,” Harrison was saying—“it’s a challenge to your strength and moral fiber. A buddy of mine went there last year and told me about it, he said not to miss it. The place was discovered about fifteen years ago by a goat shepherd who rented the site from the government for forty-nine years and now he runs the restaurant at the edge of the gorge. Try to imagine this place which is very narrow, between walls of stone hundreds of feet high. At it’s bottom is a freezing river cascading from a waterfall high above. There’s a little encampment where you can rent inner tubes and paddles and set off down the river for a forty-five minute wild ride to where the gorge and the river meet. Once you get there, you cross a precarious catwalk high above the river torrent. Let me read to you from a letter my friend wrote to me.” Harrison took a sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolded it.

  “The catwalk is nailed with steel, wire and wood to the canyon walls and is full of holes and patched boards. There are places where four or five planks are missing so you can fall through if you’re not careful. Helena and I rented water-shoes before we entered the gorge, which requires some bravery, since we had to wade through the turbulent pool created by two streams, one which belches violently from the earth and the other cascading in from the gorge itself. Since a four-legged animal is more stable then a human on merely two legs, we held hands very tightly and waded thigh deep through the deepest and most turbulent junction of the two streams. The riverbed is all rock—jagged rock and smooth pebbles. The sides of the gorge for about the first ten feet of perhaps a thousand are incredibly smooth—since it’s made of limestone that is polished by the rocks that thunder through here in winter and under such great pressure that it looks like marble—pale beige veined with white. Above it, the rock is gray and jagged with a few scrawny trees growing out of cracks in the surface. The sides slope in toward each other as they rise to a towering height. At the top you can see a thin line of blue sky. Initials of lovers are carved in the walls, in all languages. This place is treacherous and timeless…or seems that way until you pass a concession where a Turkish family is roasting ears of corn for sale, and then turn a corner and see tourists sitting at tables, drinking Cokes that have been kept ice cold in the waters of the gorge. Still, it’s isolated and dangerous if you go beyond the tourist civilization. If you ventured too far, they’d never find you again!”

  “That’s my kind of place!” Marianne said. “I’d love to go where they can never find me again.”

  Suddenly Harriet gasped. “Oh no, I won’t be able to go. With Lilly’s ankle injured, I’ll have to stay here and help her.”

  “I’ll be fine, Mother,” Lilly said. “You must go so you can take pictures and tell me about it. I’ll just relax and read and sunbathe here on the boat.”

  “I’m sure the crew will take good care of her,” Marianne said with an edge of sarcasm in her voice.

  “Two of our crew are going along,” Harrison said. “Barish and Morat will come with us to help us get safely across the most dangerous places.”

  “And the captain?” asked Marianne.

  “The captain always stays with his ship.”

  THE WORLD IN HIS HANDS

  No longer on her own feet, no longer in her own world, no longer the woman she had so long controlled, directed, and managed, Lilly gave herself up to the forces that spun the world on its end and had put her here, in Izak’s arms.

  Once he had moored the Ozymandias in the port of Fethiye, Izak carried her across the gangplank and onto the dock where a taxi he had called awaited them. He carried her easily; it was not for nothing that each day he climbed the steel wire, hand over hand, from the water up to the boat. Each day he executed some physical feat that showed his enormous strength and power. Every muscle in his body was toned and curved under his deeply browned skin.

  Lilly had a sudden vision of the bank building at home which had rented a floor to a fitness gym. Each day when she drove to work she passed their glass windows through which she could see dozens of men and women running endlessly on their treadmills, an army of bouncing heads, jerking arms, and pounding feet going noiselessly nowhere. Men and women dressed alike, in sweats and T-shirts, never looking at one another, expressionless, running, desperately running and staying in the same place. They seemed to be a clan of zombies, each one destined to run forever and find no destination.

  Yet here was Izak who—with his muscles that did real work—ran a small universe: raised the sails, carried provisions to the boat, hoisted crates of bottled water on his shoulder, heaved the kayaks into the water and dragged them up each day, dove into the sea at night and swam like Neptune himself through
the black waters, a spear in his hand with which to capture sea-creatures for food. She sensed no question in his soul about the way he lived or what meaning he found in it. Meaning and action were joined in a life that was totally authentic.

  From the window of the taxi, Lilly saw a fisherman untangling his nets, sitting patiently on the dock in the sun with a young boy who helped him. A barefoot man carried an enormous tray of seeded rolls on his shoulder, stopping to sell breakfast breads to the boat owners. The captains of pleasure boats were calling out to strolling tourists to come aboard, to sail to a cove, to snorkel and swim in the crystal sea.

  Izak gave an order to the taxi driver who sped away, the blue glass pendant of his evil eye charm swinging on a ribbon tied to his rear-view mirror. Izak neither looked at nor spoke to Lilly on this ride; his face was serious, he was careful not to touch her. He gave a few brief directions to the driver, pointing the way.

  Lilly sensed she was being transported in the bubble of a dream, traveling in a place she didn’t know, hearing words she could not understand, enclosed and imprisoned, moving yet unable to move.

  When the taxi stopped a few short blocks away, she was startled. She had almost forgotten this journey was to see a doctor about her turned ankle. After Izak paid the driver, he again lifted her up and carried her into a storefront office. A handsome Turk in a white jacket came from an inner room and welcomed them, speaking familiarly to Izak, who smiled and seemed happy to see him. He greeted Lilly in English, saying, “Now let us look at the problem.”

  Izak carried her into an examining room and set her on the table. The men spoke at some length, perhaps about what had transpired this morning on the boat. Lilly could understand nothing of Turkish and knew only two sentences she had copied on a little card from a phrase book: “I do not speak Turkish” was “Turkçe bilmiyorum.” The second sentence was “I love you very much.” Why she had written this down she did not know. But she had memorized it: “Seni çok seviyorum.” So many Turkish words seemed to have “z’s” in them, all too hard for her to say. Except for Izak.