“You don’t dance,” she said, looking like a benevolent schoolteacher again. “You wouldn’t know.”
“So you feel exactly the same with every partner?”
“No. Sometimes there’s more of a connection than other times.”
“Connection? Please. Does your boyfriend know you’re out with me tonight?”
Daphne pulled her hair over one shoulder and twisted it around her hand like a rope. “I told him I went dancing with one of my aunt’s friends. He didn’t care.”
“Because you wouldn’t let him dance with other women if you couldn’t dance with other men.”
“It’s called trust.” She turned her face toward the Bosporus. “He’s a fantastic dancer. I’m not. He’s needs to dance with women of his own level.”
“You looked good to me.”
“That’s kind of you to say, but you don’t dance, so you really can’t tell. I’m not good enough for Paul. With me he’s limited. Besides, he needs to dance with women his own height.”
“It’s seems to me that the dance should be more about the woman you’re with than her skill or height. And just how do his partners dress, anyway?”
“In evening wear, skirts, dresses. Quite a few have les seins à l’air, as the French say. Breasts in the open air.”
Kosmas clicked his tongue. “Wake up, Daphne. Gunpowder and fire don’t sit together for long.”
Daphne grabbed a napkin from the dispenser. “Can we talk about something else?”
Suddenly he understood why she had turned her face toward the water. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“Forget about it.” She pressed the corners of her eyes with the napkin.
“That’s a lovely dress.”
Daphne laughed through her tears. “This old thing? It’s my aunt’s. She got mad at me because I was so caught up in studying that I forgot you were coming.”
So she hadn’t spent an hour primping, as Gavriela had said, and she hadn’t dressed for him, as Mr. Spyros had conjectured. But they were still together. That was what really mattered.
“You look beautiful in it,” he said.
Daphne lifted her heavy lids and pressed her mouth into a sad and unbecoming attempt at a smile. “My aunt and I are going to Antigone Island on Sunday. Would you and your mother like to come?”
Kosmas glanced toward the water. The motor launch was nearly still. The Bosporus, undisturbed by ship wakes, lapped gently against the sea wall. “Of course,” he said. “I mean, sure. I think we can make it.”
11
Ablutions
Emotionally exhausted, fanis returned home from Murat Aydın’s house on Friday evening and fell asleep on the couch. He didn’t awake until the sunset call to prayer ascended the hill from Kılıç Ali Paşa Mosque. A few seconds later, the muezzin of Karabaş Mustafa Ağa Mosque began his call to prayer, and then the loudspeaker of Tomtom Kaptan picked up the chant and finished it, leaving the distant hum from some other mosque, farther away, to carry on the relay. Fanis rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling until the last traces of the call to prayer had faded and he could hear nothing but street noise and seagulls squawking.
The phone rang. He was so disoriented that he picked up and said hello.
A sinister voice asked, “Who’s there?”
Fanis hung up and took the phone off the hook: that was the only way to deal with such callers, unless you wanted to risk involving the police. He turned off the hallway light, sat down in the outward-facing armchair of the oriel, lifted a corner of the heavy velvet curtain, and peered out.
Across the street was a stately, gray–mauve apartment building with new window boxes that had already become coffins for unwatered geraniums. Through the side pane of the first floor glowed a red lamp. The gallery windows of the ground floor were circled by holiday garlands. It was still lit at half past nine in the evening. Suddenly Fanis felt short of breath—not because he suspected that the telephone voice inhabited that house, which was too gentrified and expensive to harbor common criminals but because of a certain fortuity: the lit windows coincided exactly with those of the street’s few Muslim apartments on the fateful night of the riots, just as he had seen them when he peered out of his darkened living room. As naïve as the other Rums, he had considered it wise to let the storm pass in darkness. The others, however, had been better informed: they’d been told to leave their lights on so that the pogromists would know that the houses were Muslim.
Fanis poured himself a shot of sour-cherry liqueur and returned to his perch. The next apartment building had a modern, two-tone design of light and dark paint like the braids of candy ribbons. Half a century ago, the ground-floor shop had been occupied by a quiltmaker. On the night of the riots, a watchman had passed through Faik Paşa Street before the mob. He had written tamam on the building’s door in chalk. Tamam: okay. The mob had passed the quiltmaker’s shop as if it hadn’t even existed.
Fanis heard a loud cry from somewhere nearby. In European or American cities, the noise might have passed without much more than a few raised heads. People might not have interrupted their viewing of the evening news, their phone calls to place dinner takeout orders, or their internet surfing. But in Çukurcuma, curtains were drawn from the side panes of almost every oriel. Fanis dropped his. He thought: everyone had seen; everything had been seen.
Another shout—gâvur—resounded not from the street, but from his memory. Tamam was the word for some. Gâvur, infidel, was the word for others. Fanis fumbled for the lights. He wondered whether that caller kept bothering him because he was old and alone, or because they considered him a gâvur. Fanis had cantored in Rum Orthodox churches for decades. While doing his military service, he had prayed in the mosques of Erzurum, where there were no open churches. He wondered if God existed at all and if there would be a hereafter waiting for him when he no longer had the strength to struggle with this life, but, God or no God, he would always be gâvur.
He was about to close the curtain when he noticed that the rental sign had been removed from the gray–mauve building’s garret window. There was both light and movement inside. Through the fluttering curtains Fanis spied the silhouette of a solid woman with curly dark hair. Could it be?
A few minutes later, the wind blew the curtains high once again, and Fanis imagined that he saw Selin. “Dr. Aydemir was right,” he said out loud. “I’m a deluded old man who sees whatever he wants, wherever he wants.”
He went to the bedroom and groped through the nightstand drawer. Somewhere there had to be a few remaining sleeping pills, even if they were expired. He knew he shouldn’t take them after drinking, but he had to shut out his hallucinations at any cost. He found a half-pill that had loosened from its bubble pack and nestled into a corner of the drawer. He swallowed it with the water that he always kept by the bed, double-checked that the windows and doors were properly locked, then turned on the balcony light and all the lamps in the living room, kitchen, and his late mother’s bedroom. He didn’t even remember lying down before a drug-induced coma overtook him.
Fanis awoke groggy on Saturday morning. He sat up, rubbed his disheveled head, and restored the phone to operation. Three seconds later, it rang.
“Fanis,” said the high-pitched voice. “Fanis, is that you? It’s me, Gavriela. I’ve been trying to reach you all morning. Are you all right?”
“Fine, fine. I was just out running errands.”
“Get a mobile phone, will you? Listen, the whole gang’s going to Antigone tomorrow. Aliki invited us to her cottage for lunch. We’d like you to come, but I suppose you have to cantor?”
“I can have somebody fill in for me.”
“Perfect. Be at the quay, outside the ticket office, at a quarter past eleven.”
After uttering the usual string of salutations—“Ciao-ciao-yeia-yeia-bye-bye”—Fanis hung up and threw himself directly into the shower, but he couldn’t wash off the haze caused by longing, sour-cherry liqueur, and the sleeping pill. H
is transformation back into the mature gentleman known throughout Pera for his dapper appearance would require more than just a shower.
Although Fanis hadn’t visited his neighborhood hammam since it raised its prices to the tourist levels of the Old City, he knew that its attendants were some of the only people who could improve his desperate situation. So, he readied a kit of towels, flip-flops, and a boar-bristle exfoliation mitt and left the apartment.
As soon as he was out in the street, he spotted the sixty-something matron who owned the top three apartments of the blue mansion opposite his building. “Good morning, Madame Duygu,” he said. “You seem rather busy.”
She looked up from the dossier she had been perusing. “Mr. Fanis, what a lovely surprise!”
“You are the lovely surprise. Did I see that you rented the garret?”
“Yes, finally. An ‘artist’ took it, but who cares what they call themselves as long as they pay the rent and don’t disturb anyone? Moving in today. That’s why I’m here.”
Fanis wanted to ask further questions, but it would probably take the fun out of the evening’s window-watching, so he plodded up the road to the Galatasaray Hamam, a monument built in 1481, just twenty-eight years after the fall of the City to Mehmet the Conqueror. Fanis paid in the wainscoted entryway and asked the pot-bellied male receptionist if he could have Hüseyin as his attendant.
“Hüseyin?” said the receptionist. “He retired a decade ago and moved to Ankara to live with his daughter.”
Fanis grumbled. Now that he had already paid the fee listed in euros, which was exorbitant, despite the significant “local” discount for which he had haggled, he wouldn’t even have his old tellak to scrub him down. “What about Isa?”
“Today’s your lucky day, Uncle. Isa only works on Saturdays.”
“Nothing’s like it used to be,” said Fanis. Then he shocked himself by uttering a vulgar expression: “Everything’s gone to shit.”
Fanis left his shoes in the vestibule with instructions that they should be polished to a shine while he bathed. He put on his flip-flops with the receptionist’s help and took a key to one of the ground-floor cubicles, where he removed his clothing and wrapped his lower half in a woven towel. Then he caught his reflection in the mirror: he looked like one of the swarthy, bulging, wrinkly Rum gnomes who had filled the baths half a century before. It had been at least twenty years since Fanis had been to the hammam. He wondered what he had been thinking when he decided to return. Sleeping pills: they impaired one’s judgment.
Fanis took his toiletries in hand, stepped into the cold room, and seated himself on one of the high-backed chairs arranged around the central fountain. Presently a man with an even bigger belly than the receptionist’s entered through the heavy wooden bath door. His triangular breasts were as large as a woman’s, and his double chin sagged in folds like the rest of him. His chest was covered with gorilla-like hair, but Fanis could see, when he raised his hand to salute, that his underarms were shaved.
“Isa?” said Fanis. “Is that you?”
“Unfortunately so,” said a gruff voice that Fanis would have recognized anywhere.
The two men cheek-kissed and laughed at each other’s bodies. Fanis patted Isa’s belly. Isa rubbed Fanis’s balding head.
“I can’t believe it,” said Isa. “Fanis Paleologos, the comfort of every woman in Pera with an absentee husband. Still getting some?”
“You know I never talk about women. And you?”
“Not for a long, long time, Captain. Sad, isn’t it?” Isa offered his arm and led Fanis into the white marble antechamber. “Did you want to do the first rinse-down yourself?”
“No, Isa. I’m not taking any risks with slipping. I have a new—never mind. I’d appreciate it if you’d do it.”
“A new pistachio?”
“Please. You know I would never insult a woman by referring to her as a pistachio.”
Isa filled the bronze dish and repeatedly doused Fanis as if he were a small child. Fanis surrendered to the warm water and to the carroty scent of the hammam’s soap. Sometimes his young acquaintances wondered why anyone would go to a bathhouse. They couldn’t understand the pleasure of having one’s back, hair, and even the insides of one’s ears washed by another human being. Neither could they appreciate the relaxation brought by the maternal care of another, even if that other was a fat and hairy man.
“Well, whatever kind of nut she is,” said Isa, “at least you’ve got her.”
“Not yet. That’s partly why I’m here. I need to freshen up. The other reason is that I’m confused.”
Just then a familiar-looking old man passed through the antechamber on his way to the warm room, followed by two younger men quacking away like ducks. They had to be Americans. The older man greeted Isa in Turkish. That voice, thought Fanis. That wobbly gait, so familiar . . . could he possibly be . . . the husband of Sophia Papadopoulou, the nursery-school teacher who, forty-three years prior, had proven the truth of the Turkish saying “gündüz öğretmen, gece fahişe,” teacher by day, whore by night? People said that Polyvios Papadopoulos, Fanis’s former classmate, had flown into a violent rage when he found out about his wife’s affair. Luckily for Fanis, the disclosure had occurred in faraway Chicago, and Papadopoulos had been unable to carry out his threat of revenge.
Fanis took a better look at the man through the open door: bump in the back, skinny legs, flaccid dead-chicken skin, disgusting body hair. Did Polyvios have a bump in his back? Fanis thought back to his school days. He remembered Polyvios hunching over his desk and Miss Evyenidou coaxing him to sit up straight. Good God. Fanis’s heart was now beating dangerously fast. Would Polyvios attack him? And would Fanis, unable to endure the stress, have the ischemic stroke now, in the hammam, all because of his past sins with Sophia Papadopoulou?
“Go attend to those fellows,” Fanis said to Isa. “I’d like to have a good sweat in the hot room. Alone, if you can manage it.”
“Sure thing, Captain.”
Fanis covered his head with a towel, tiptoed through the warm room to the cubicle-like hot room, and lay down on the marble bench. Sweat poured from his forehead, armpits, chest, thighs, and groin. He began to feel dangerously drowsy, but he knew that Isa would fetch him if he stayed too long. He drifted into sleep and felt Sophia Papadopoulou’s long black hair, which she hadn’t cut after she married. It tickled his face and shoulders. Before their affair began, he had fantasized about how her hair would cover him when they made love. Once things got going, however, Sophia’s tresses made Fanis uncomfortably hot. While making love he often had to shout, as he did then in his dream, “Tie it up!”
He swatted at her hair with such energy that he emerged through the layers of sleep and realized that Isa was telling him that it was time for his scrubbing.
“Are they gone?” Fanis asked.
“Taking cold showers before they come in here,” Isa replied.
Fanis sat up. “Let’s go quickly, then.”
“A husband?”
“Probably. What’s his name?”
“Poly-something.”
“Definitely a husband.” They passed into the warm room. “Keep my face covered while you work, will you, Isa? I don’t need a thrashing today.”
“As you wish, Captain.”
Fanis stretched out on the heated platform in the center of the room. He listened to the splashing and running of water, the metal clank of dishes on basins, and the music of the foreign languages spoken by the tourist bathers. He reveled in the boar-bristle-mitt scrubbing of his thighs and back, but when Isa arrived at the right shoulder blade, Fanis squealed.
“Sorry,” said Isa. “That side was always numb.”
“Things change,” said Fanis.
After the scrub down, Isa wrapped Fanis’s waist in a dry woven towel, draped a fluffy white towel over his shoulders, and wrapped another around his head.
“Where are they now?” Fanis asked.
“Still in the hot ro
om. Fat Mehmet will take care of them. Let’s go have our tea.”
Fanis and Isa returned to the cold room. Isa turned two chairs inward toward the fountain.
“Still in the same place?” Fanis asked, easing himself into the chair.
“No. Can’t afford Pera anymore. Now I’m living further up, but who knows? They’re building there, too. Soon I may have to go somewhere else.”
“You’re as restless as the Rums. We were driven out of Anatolia. We left the Old City. Soon we’ll disappear from the earth altogether. Tell me, Isa, after your wife passed, may she rest in brightness—”
“Amen.”
“—did you find another woman?”
“To sleep with, yes. To marry, no. You?”
“The same, but now I want to marry. I’m sick of being alone.”
“Got one in mind?”
“That’s just the thing.” Fanis and Isa took their teas from the attendant’s tray and stirred in their sugar cubes. “I’m pursuing a stunning Rum woman who has just come back to the City from America. Pretty, intelligent. A good soul. There’s another fellow after her, nice enough, but hardly competition for an old pro like me. My suit is going swimmingly, but a complication has presented itself.”
“A complication?”
“A feisty violinist. The problem is that she’s not Rum, and please don’t misunderstand me, but I was set on finding one of my own. Yesterday, however, she gave me her phone number.”
“Good-looking, I assume?”
“Fetching.”
“Nice quinces?”
“An entire balcony.”
“Age?”
“Forties. Older than I’d like, but—”
“Maybe that’s why the feeling’s returning to your back. Love healed you.”
“No,” said Fanis. “That’s something else. If I tell you, you’ll think I’ve gone mad or, worse yet, senile. And I’ve already broken my vow never to discuss women, which shows that I’m not as sharp as I used to be.”
“I’ve always thought you were crazy, so it won’t make much of a difference. Tell me.”
A Recipe for Daphne Page 14
