by Moris Farhi
The entrance, its most discreet feature, is a small wrought-iron door located at the middle of a high wall like those that protect girls’ colleges.
The foyer is lush. Its dark purple drapes immediately promise exquisite sensual treats. (Is my memory playing tricks? Did those purple drapes belong to the maisons de rendezvous I used to frequent in Istanbul years later?)
To the right of the foyer there is a low platform with a kiosk. Here sits the manageress, Teyze Hanιm, or ‘Lady Aunt’, whose girth may well have coined the Turkish idiom, ‘built like a government’. She collects the entrance fees and hires out such items as soap, towels, bowls and the traditional Turkish clogs, nalιns. (Sofi, for one who was so stoic about the vagaries of life, was fanatically fastidious about hygiene and always made sure we brought our own washing materials.)
At the far end of the foyer, a door leads into the spacious communal dressing-room. As if to prolong the anticipation, this is simply trimmed: whitewashed walls, wooden benches to sit on and large wicker baskets for stacking clothes.
Another door opens into a passageway with slatted boards on the floor. Here, as you walk, the clogs beat an exciting rhythm. Ahead is the arch that leads into the baths’ marbled haven.
The next moment you feel as if you are witnessing a transfiguration. The mixture of heat and steam have created a diaphanous air; the constant sound of running water is felicitous; and the white nebulous shapes that seemingly float in space profile kaleidoscopic fantasies in your mind. This might be a prospect from the beginning of days – or from the last. In any case, if you adore women and long to entwine with every one of them, it’s a vision that will stay imprinted in your eyes for the rest of your life.
Thereafter, slowly, you begin to register details.
You note that the sanctuary is round (oval, actually). You’re glad. Because had it been rectangular, as some are, it would have emanated a masculine air.
You note the large marble slab that serves as a centrepiece. This is the göbek taşι, the ‘belly stone’, where the bather sits to sweat. The size of the belly stone determines the reputation of the particular establishment; a large one, such as that in the women’s hamam, where neighbours or family groups can sit and talk – even picnic – guarantees great popularity.
You note the washing areas around the belly stone. Each is delineated by a marble tub – called kurna – wherein hot and cold water, served from two separate taps, are mixed. You note that the space around each kurna accommodates several people, invariably members of a family or a group of neighbours. These patrons sit on stocky seats, also of marble, which look like pieces of modern sculpture – Brancusi’s Table of Silence comes to mind – and wash themselves by filling their bowls from the kurna and splashing the water on to their bodies. Sometimes, those who wish to have a satisfactory scrub avail themselves, for a good baksheesh, of the services of one of the attendants.
You note that, beyond the inner sanctum, there are a number of chambers which, being closer to the furnace, are warmer. These are known as halvet, a word that implies ‘solitude’, and are reserved for those who wish to bathe alone or to have a massage. For the elite customer, the latter is performed by the Lady Aunt.
This being one of the best baths in town, there are two further chambers. The first is the Sedir, or ‘Retreat’, which, as its name suggests, offers, particularly to those who come for the day, a respite from the main hamam. The other, the Soğukluk, or ‘Temperate Room’, serves to cool down those who have had too much heat. You note, with relief, that except for some of the older patrons, few indulge in that particular kind of masochism.
But, of course, above all, you note the bathing women, the cornucopia of breasts of every shape and size. Those for whom modesty is a virtue at all times wear peştamals, transparent aprons which, rather than veil the glories of their flesh, emphasize them saliently. The rest are completely naked, except for bracelets and earrings, and look as if they have been sprinkled with gold. Tall or short, young or old, they are invariably Rubenesque. Even the thin ones appear voluptuous. Covered with heavy perfumes and henna, they carry themselves boldly, at ease with their firm, soft child-bearing bodies. They are, you realize, proud of their femininity even though – or perhaps because – they live in a society where the male rules absolutely. But if they see or think someone is looking at them, they are overcome with shyness and cover their pudenda with their washing-bowls. You note little girls, too, but if you’re a little boy like Selim and me, you’re not interested in them. You have already seen their budding treasures in such outworn games as ‘mothers and fathers’, ‘doctors and patients’. (Here, briefly, the gospel according to Eleftheria: the human body, at every age and in every shape and size, even in deformity, is comely. The most beautiful cock she had ever known belonged to a man with a withered arm.)
I feel I have related our entry to paradise as if it were a commonplace occurrence, as if, in the Turkey of the forties, little boys were exempt from all gender considerations. Well, that’s only partly true. Certainly, over the years, I have come across many men of my generation – and from different parts of Turkey – who, as boys, had been taken to the women’s baths either by their maids or nannies or grannies or other elderly female relatives – though never by their mothers; that taboo appears to have remained inviolate.
In effect, there were no concrete rules on boys’ admission into women’s hamams. The decision rested on a number of considerations: the reputation of the establishment, the status of its clientele, the regularity of a person’s – or a group’s – patronage, the size of the baksheesh to the personnel and, not least, the discretion of its Lady Aunt.
In our case it was the last consideration that tipped the scales in our favour. We were allowed in because the Lady Aunt who ran the establishment was well-versed in matters of puberty. She had ascertained that our testicles had not yet dropped and would convey this information to her patrons when necessary. The latter, always tittering cruelly, accepted her word. (Mercifully, dear Sofi, incensed by this artless trespass on her charges’ intimate parts, would lay her hands over our ears and hustle us away.)
Selim and I, needless to say, were greatly relieved that our testicles were intact. But the prospect that they would drop off at some future date – must drop off – also plunged us into great anxiety. Thus, for a while, we would inspect each other’s groins every day and reassure ourselves that our manhoods were not only still in place, but also felt as good as when we had last played with them that morning, on waking up. We would also scour the streets, even while in the company of our parents, in the hope of finding the odd fallen testicle. If we could collect a number of spare testicles, we reasoned, we might just be able to replace our own when calamity struck. The fact that, in the past, we had never seen any testicles lying around did not deter us; we simply assumed that other boys, grappling with the same predicament, had gathered them up. Eventually, our failure to find even a single testicle bred the conviction that these organs were securely attached to the body and would never fall off – surely God had made certain of that! And we decided that this macabre ‘lie’ had been disseminated by women who had taken exception to our precociousness in order to frighten us.
And precocious we were. We had had good teachers.
Selim and I lived near the Bomonti Brewery, on the outskirts of Ankara, in a new district of concrete apartment blocks designated as the precursors of future prosperity. Beyond, stretched the southern plains, dotted here and there with Gypsy encampments.
Gypsies, needless to say, have an unenviable life wherever they happen to live. Historic prejudices disbar them from most employment. The same conditions prevailed in Ankara. Jobs, in so far as the men were concerned, were limited to seasonal fruit-picking, the husbandry of horses, road digging and the porterage of huge loads. (I once saw three men balance a grand piano on their humped backs and transport it a distance of some four kilometres.) Gypsy women fared better: they were often in demand as fortune-tellers, herbalist
s and faith healers; and they always took their daughters along in order to teach them, at an early age, the intricacies of divination. The occasional plenitude the Gypsies enjoyed was provided by the boys who begged at such busy centres as the market, the bus and railway stations, the stadium and the brothels.
The last was the best pitch of all. Situated in the old town, at the base of the castle, the brothels consisted of some sixty ramshackle dwellings piled on each other in a maze of narrow streets. Each house had a small window in its door for customers to look in and appraise the ladies on offer. Here, on the well-worn pavements, the beggars set up shop. They knew that, after being with a prostitute, a man, particularly if he were married, would feel unclean or sinful; and so they offered him instant redemption by urging him to drop a few kuruş into their palms and thus show Allah that, as the faith expected of him, he was a generous alms-giver.
Some of these wise Gypsy boys became our friends. Whenever we could – whenever, that is, they weren’t out begging or hawking – we met up with them. They always welcomed us – I think, as city boys, we intrigued them – and invited us to their tents. Alas, we could never return their hospitality; our parents had forbidden us from fraternizing with ‘riff-raff’.
They taught us a great deal, these friends.
Above all, relating all the intimations they had overheard from punters and prostitutes, they taught us about the strange mechanics of sex: the peculiar, not to say, funny, positions; the vagaries of the principal organs; and the countless quirks that either made little sense to anyone or remained a mystery for many years.
And this priceless knowledge served as the foundation for further research in the hamam.
Breasts, buttocks and pubic hair – or, as was often the case with the last, the lack of it – became the first subjects for study. Not a hard task, you will agree. Since these parts were visible to everybody, we did not have to enact the surreptitious looks so favoured by the spy films of those times; nor, mercifully, did we have to perform double-jointed contortions so as not to appear to stare.
Our Gypsy friends had instructed us that breasts determined a woman’s sexuality. The aureole was the indicator for passion. Those women with large aureoles were insatiable; those with what looked like tiny birthmarks were best left alone as they would be frigid. (What, I now wonder, did frigidity mean to us in those days?) We held these myths as inalienable truths – maybe, deep down, we still do – and dismissed outright any evidence to the contrary. For the record, the woman with the largest aureoles we ever saw was, without doubt, the epitome of lethargy; nicknamed ‘the milkman’s horse’ by Lady Aunt, she always appeared to be nodding off to sleep, even when walking. By contrast, the liveliest woman we ever observed – a widow who not only allowed us generous and lengthy views of her vagina, but also appeared to enjoy her exhibitionism – had practically no aureoles at all, just tiny, cuspidal breasts and stubby, pointed nipples like the stalks of button mushrooms.
And buttocks, we had learned, were reflectors of character. They were expressive, like faces. Stern buttocks could be recognized immediately: lean cheeks with a division thin like a strand of hair on a bald man’s head signified people who had forsaken pleasure. Happy buttocks always smiled; or, as if convulsed by hysterical laughter, wobbled. Sad buttocks, even if they were shaped like heavenly orbs, looked abandoned, lonely, despairing. And there were buttocks that so loved life that they swayed like tamarind jelly and made one’s mouth water.
Buttocks also farted; and the shape and tenor of the broken wind were equally indicative of character. Round, loud, odourless farts proclaimed happy extroverts; those that peeled in surprise and were shaped like question marks belonged to sensitive, insecure lovers; the screechy ones defined mean, ungenerous people.
Regarding pubic hair, there was, as I indicated above, little of it on view. In Turkey, as in most Muslim countries, the ancient bedouin tradition whereby women, upon marriage, shave their pubic hair had almost acquired the dimensions of a hygienic commandment. Since most of the women in the baths were married, the only pubic hair on view belonged to the few teenage girls or to those old women who either no longer cared for precepts or could not be bothered with the rigmarole of having to shave regularly when, but for a few thin tufts, they had shed most of their hair anyway.
Our research into pubic hair, in addition to its inherent joys, proved to be a lesson in sociology. A shaven pudendum not only declared the marital status of the particular woman, but also indicated her position in society. To wit, women who were clean-shaven all the time were women wealthy enough to have leisure – and the handmaids to assist them – therefore, they were either old aristocracy or nouveaux riches. Women who carried some stubble betrayed their more modest backgrounds: children or household chores or careers curtailed their time for depilation. And women who went unshaven during menstruation were often of devout background.
To our amazement – as if the chore proved less of an inconvenience if performed in company – there was a great deal of shaving going on in the baths. Eventually we found out the reason: for a small baksheesh, a woman could get an attendant to do a much better job, thus freeing herself to gossip with friends or relatives. (When Selim and I first witnessed a woman shaving herself – a clumsy effort which caused several nicks – we decided that, on our next visit, we would bring some alum and, by offering it to those who drew blood, get closer to them. We abandoned the idea after our Gypsy friends pointed out that such a move would disclose our interest in female genitalia and the ensuing complaints would prompt Lady Aunt to refuse us entry. Good advice.)
Our main study – eventually, our raison d’être for going to the baths – centred on the labia and the clitoris. Both these wonders, too, possessed mythologies. Our Gypsy friends apprised us.
The myths concerning the labia centred on their prominence and pensility. Broad ones, reputedly resembling the lips of African peoples, were certain to be, like all black races, uninhibited and passionate. (What did those adjectives mean to us? And what did we know of black races?) Lean labia, because they would have to be prized open, indicated thin hearts. Pendulous ones represented motherhood; Gypsy midwives, we were assured, could tell the number of children a woman had had simply by noting the labia’s suspension. Those women who were childless but did possess hanging labia were to be pitied: for they found men, in general, so irresistibly attractive that they could never restrict their affections to one individual; consequently, to help them remain chaste, Allah had endowed them with labia that could be sewn together.
The perfect labia were those that not only rippled down languorously, but also tapered to a point at the centre, thus looking very much like delicate buckles. These labia had magical powers: he who could wrap his tongue with them would be able to see our twin world which lies on the other side of the sun and where life is the opposite of life here – where instead of constant war there is constant peace.
As for clitorises, it is common knowledge that, like penises, they vary in size. It is also common knowledge that the Turks, influenced by the fifth volume of Aristotle’s famous opus, The Parts of Animals, have classified them into three distinct sizes, naming each category after a popular food. (According to Eleftheria, who was also a classicist, Aristotle’s said work has only four volumes. Nevertheless, she conceded the possibilities that, one: the sage might have loaned the manuscript of the fifth to Alexander the Great so that the latter, in pursuit of his dream of marrying the East to the West, could prepare his soldiers to take to wife the women of the Hindu Kush; and two: that the manuscript might then have got lost somewhere in the Middle East and eventually been found by the Turks.)
The categories were as follows: susam, ‘sesame’, for small clitorises; mercimek, ‘lentils’ (in Turkey, these would be brown lentils), for the medium-sized ones, which, since they constituted ninety percent of the clitorises, were considered normal; and nohut, ‘chick-peas’, for those of large calibre.
Women in possession of se
sames were invariably sullen. Attributing the smallness of their clitorises to a deficiency in their femininity – even though they were perfectly capable of enjoying sex – they ended up doubting their maternal feelings. Tormented by such a terrible sense of inferiority, they rebuffed children, particularly those who were admitted to the baths. Women blessed with lentils bore the characteristics of their namesake, a staple food in Turkey. Hence the ‘lentilled’ women’s perfect roundness was not only aesthetically pleasing, but also extremely nourishing; in effect, they offered everything a man sought from a wife: love, passion, obedience and the gift of cooking. Those endowed with chick-peas were destined to ration their amorous activities since the abnormal size of their clitorises induced such intense pleasure that regular sex invariably damaged their hearts; restricted to conjoining only for purposes of conception, these women were to find solace in a spiritual life. And they would attain such heights of piety that, during labour, they would gently notch, with their chick-peas, a prayer-dent on their babies’ foreheads, thus marking them for important religious duties.
Now, some of you might have begun pulling faces. (Eleftheria did when I first recounted these things to her. ‘Pig’, she shouted, ‘clitorises have hoods. Even if you find a clitoris the size of an Easter egg, you’ll have a tough time seeing it! You’ve got to, one: be lucky enough to have your face across your lover; two: know how to peek past the hood; three: have the sang-froid to keep your eyes open; and four: seduce the bean or the hazel nut or whatever you call it into believing that, for you, she is the only reality in life and everything else is an illusion.’)
So, let me confess before you take me for a liar that, in all likelihood, neither Selim nor I ever saw a single clitoris. We just believed we did. Not only the odd one but, by that unique luck that favours curs, hundreds of them. And the more we believed, the more we contorted ourselves into weird positions, peeked and squinted from crazy angles, moved hither and thither to fetch this and that for one matron or another. We behaved, in effect, like bear cubs around a honey pot.
