You Are Always Safe With Me

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  “What about our tea? It’s getting cold,” said Fiona. “I hate to have my breakfast ruined. If they want to search my cabin for drugs, they can be my guests. I need my tea hot.”

  But the Coast Guard officers were not yet done with the papers on the table. The crepes in the galley turned cold, the cheese hardened within them. Wasps set themselves to work on the food at the table.

  When finally the business matters were over and no one had been arrested or detained, the officers came to where the guests were clustered together. They handed each person a card with a bright Turkish flag emblem at the top, the white sickle moon and the white star on a red background. The card said in English and in five other languages: “THIS CONTROL HAS BEEN DOING TO ENSURE YOUR LIFE AND PROPERTY. THANK YOU FOR YOUR HELP. HAVE A NICE VACATION.”

  THE MAGIC CARPET

  At breakfast Harrison said, “Are any of you interested in going to a carpet-weaving collective high up in the mountains? This one is entirely optional but if we want to go, I’ll have Izak call the tour people who’ll send a bus.” He consulted his information sheet. “It says here they’ll ‘show you demonstrations of special techniques in the weaving and dying of kilims, sumaks and cicims’—whatever they are.”

  The men—Jack Cotton and Lance—spoke out almost in one voice—they were not much interested in seeing rugs made. The women—Marianne, Jane Cotton, Fiona, Gerta and Lilly’s mother—said they definitely wanted to learn about Turkish carpet-making. Gerta said she wanted to buy a rug, or a few, and have them sent home. Lilly—had she a choice—would have preferred to stay on the Ozymandias where Izak would be visible to her but could find no good reason to stay aboard.

  The various factions came to a compromise: they would skip the weaving demonstrations and go instead by Zodiac to the small shore town where there was—as in every Turkish town—a carpet shop or two. The men could buy drinks at a café or perhaps find a Turkish bath and the women could—“as women must,” Harrison pointed out “shop.”

  Gerta giggled. Harrison, his voice muffled as he kissed her in the crook of her neck, said loudly, “We all know women must shop!” Lilly looked away. Fiona sighed loudly. “Oh, I wish I were twenty again. Even fifty again! I sure could use some of that.” She adjusted her sun hat, which jiggled with plastic red cherries.

  “Me too,” Lilly’s mother said and she giggled also. Harrison released Gerta, came around the table and bent down and kissed Lilly’s mother on the cheek. “You are as beautiful as a summer’s day,” he said to Harriet.

  “What about me?” Jane Cotton said. Her husband, who was sitting beside her, leaned over and kissed her nose. “And you are as beautiful as a Turkish moon.”

  “What about me?” Marianne said. She looked around and saw Izak whose head was just emerging from the galley area. “I wouldn’t mind a kiss from him,” she said to the others, “maybe I’ll ask.” She adjusted the straps of her swim suit.

  Izak approached the table, shirtless, as always, in his swim shorts, bringing some fresh figs on a platter. He laid the fruit in front of the guests.

  “How about it, Izak?” Marianne said, looking up into his face.

  “Yes?” he said, in his polite, respectful tone. He looked puzzled.

  “A kiss, I need a kiss,” Marianne said, half standing up in her chair, her face rising to his. “Would you be kind enough to perform this service?”

  “No problem,” he said, which is what he said to every guest’s request. But stood awkwardly, refusing to understand. “Yogurt? You would like more yogurt?” he said finally.

  Lance remarked, breaking a sugar cube between his fingers, “Ignore her, Izak. I think Marianne had vodka in her orange juice this morning.”

  “I don’t want yogurt, Izak. Do you understand the word kiss?” She made kissing sounds with her lips. “Just one teeny little kiss.”

  “Stop it,” Fiona said. “You’ll embarrass the boy.”

  “He’s no boy,” Marianne said. “He’s a grown man and he’s been stuck on this boat too long with all of us gorgeous women. He has needs! We all have needs.”

  Lilly’s face was burning. She took a fig from the tray, a black and lustrous fig. She bit it hard so that a burst of seeds, sweet and gritty, fell onto her tongue.

  Izak picked up several of the empty breakfast plates and began to carry them back toward the galley steps.

  “Izak!” Marianne called after him. “What about a massage this afternoon? I’ll pay you.” He kept walking and did not reply.

  Lilly raised her head and found Marianne staring at her. “Lillly, you don’t have to pay him, I’ll bet,” she said. She stood suddenly, kicked off her sandals and pulled her bathing cap from one of the side benches. “I better cool myself off.” She stuffed her hair into the cap and climbed awkwardly onto the rail. Her legs looked thick and ugly to Lilly. In an instant they heard her splash as she dove into the water.

  They sat, all of them, silent at the table. Lilly’s mother was rolling bits of bread into balls. Gerta lifted the tray of figs and passed them around. Lilly took two more, one in each hand, and bit into them—first one, and then the other. Both were ripe and sweet, their dark, rough-skinned pouches satisfying to her mouth. Her teeth ground the seeds to syrup.

  Harrison said, “We’re all getting a little stir-crazy, I think. Let’s go look at Turkish carpets this afternoon. Something innocuous and touristy…we can satisfy our needs by shopping.”

  *

  When Izak helped them into the Zodiac after lunch, Marianne was not present. Reluctantly, Lilly climbed the shaky ladder down to the rubber boat, let Izak take her by the hands, seat her on the air-filled edge. She did not meet his eyes, but stared down at some muddy water at her feet. The days of this sailing trip were beginning to wear on her, days too long, too repetitive, too dangerous. How much longer was this vacation? Another week to go? Could she bear to stay here one minute longer? Could she bear to leave when it was over?

  *

  The carpet dealer’s shop was an oasis of quiet. Cooled by a strong air-conditioner—with carpets hanging on the walls and rolls of them piled on the floor, with padded benches all around the edges of the room—it seemed a refuge, more peaceful than the Blue Mosque or the Hagia Sofia. The owner, a mustached Turk with piercing black eyes, invited them to sit on the benches, then called out a directive and shortly a much younger man arrived with iced Coca-Colas for the women. The owner tactfully pointed out the WC should they need to use a toilet.

  He waited while they sipped their colas and stared around the room. Against the backdrop of the brilliant woven designs, Lilly saw the absence of Marianne’s face, saw her not here, but still on the Ozymandias with Izak.

  She could barely pay attention as the owner of the shop described the many qualities of fine rugs, those of pure wool, or wool and cotton, or wool and silk. He spoke of how many knots there were per inch, and how the fibers were dyed and how many years went into the making of each rug.

  “Some are colored with tobacco dyes, some with henna,” he said. “Let us show you.” He called his assistant to perform: “Meti, the wedding rug.”

  The young man lifted a rolled carpet from a pile against the wall and flung it forth with a “whoosh”—so that it unfurled before them like a peacock’s fan. Their eyes were dazzled with swirling geometric designs, lush colors, squares and zig-zags, flowers and entwined vines, the shapes of tassels and wine vessels.

  “Another!” called the magician, and his assistant threw forth another woven rug. It exploded over the first, with new and dizzying designs. “This one took five years to make! Now another!” Soon the room was covered in rugs, four and five layers high, their knotted fringes peeping out, one from under another. Each rug called to them “Buy me! Ride me! I’m the Magic Carpet that will take you to the promised land, to the land of your dreams.” The sun, coming in the shop’s windows, lit up the colors like fireworks.

  Lilly lay her head back against the wall, caught up in the spectacle of the s
how.

  “For the last rug, we will show you the silk,” said the proprietor, and she watched the young man unroll one more rug which was snapped at them like the cape of a bullfighter. It spread itself on the floor before them in tones of cobalt blue, red, orange, green, its pattern the most intricate of all. “Now rotate” said the magician, and, with another flip of his two hands, the assistant rotated the rug a quarter turn and now it appeared as a brilliant pastel, pink and sky-blue, shimmering with light. It seemed as if it could be swum in, so deep and fluid were its blues.

  “Only silk can do this. It is truly magic when the light strikes. You turn it another way, then another, and you have three, no, four rugs in one.”

  “How much is it?” called Gerta, breaking the spell. ‘How much?”

  “Eight thousand,” said the magician, now losing his magic. “Only eight thousand dollars.”

  “I want to buy that one,” Gerta said. “And also the wedding rug.”

  “Leave some for the rest of us,” joked Fiona.

  But Lilly wanted none for herself. She wanted the magic to stay here, in the land of olive trees and goats and corrugated tin roofs and bulgar wheat and spices and herbs. She thought of the women on their knees before their looms, plying their threads, making their knots, twisting their yarns for years on end. She wanted to be one of them, living in this land of mustached men and beautiful babies.

  *

  When they came outside into the heat and light, Lilly blinked as if she were leaving a dark movie theater. She needed a moment to adjust to reality, to the brightness of the sky, to the calls of the tradesmen selling bottles with odd metallic work, jugs of honey, pickled peppers, ceramics, junky tourist plates, jewelry, wooden spoons, calabash gourds.

  The women walked together, idly looking about for their men in the small town. Gerta wanted to tell Harrison about the rugs she had ordered and Harriet wanted to find Lance and see if he had taken a Turkish bath. Jane intended to bring Jack back to the rug shop to show him a rug she was taken by.

  Fiona seemed to have hatched a sudden plan. When Gerta left the group to look in the window of a jewelry shop, Fiona gathered the other women around. “Here’s my idea. Let’s give Gerta a baby shower tonight. While we’re in town, let’s look for a place where we might buy something for a baby—a wall hanging, a toy, anything. We can all meet later at the shore where Izak let us off. He said he’d be back to get us at four.”

  Then she told Gerta, who was coming back toward them, “Sweetie—we just decided we’re all going to do some of our own shopping and meet at the beach at four. You can probably find Harrison in the café on the main street. See you all later!”

  *

  Lilly wandered the street, smelling fish being grilled in the open, watching the backgammon games being played outside the shops, seeing in her mind the Ozymandias with Marianne and Izak on it, alone, without the rest of them. (Morat and Barish always went ashore to replenish their supplies of cheese, bread, olives, tomatoes, cucumbers. They must be somewhere on these streets and shopping in these markets.)

  The small houses, which clustered together back from the road, had red peppers spread out on their tile roofs to dry. The road through the town was unpaved, covered with crushed white rock, and the olive trees along the road were coated with white dust, looking like ghost trees standing in empty gray fields. After the colors and brightness of the Turkish carpet shop, the town itself seemed muted and colorless.

  Her life, likewise, had seemed to change in just the last hours from a sunlit photograph to a colorless and empty canvas. Marianne and Izak together on the Ozymandias. Izak leaning over her, crouching over her, giving her a massage.

  This was the jealous fantasy of a teenager, she had to shake herself out of it. She noticed a shop that sold women’s clothing and went inside. “Would you have something for a new baby?” she asked the woman who parted a curtain of hanging beads at the back. “Is it possible you have anything like that?”

  “It’s not usual what I sell, but wait, please.” The woman went back behind the curtain and came forth holding a soft flannel baby bunting, beautifully hand made, yellow with embroidered flowers on the soft cloth.

  Lilly held it to her cheek. “It’s quite beautiful,” Lilly said. “I’d like to buy it.”

  “For your baby?” the woman said.

  “I wish,” Lilly said.

  “This from my baby,” the woman told her. “Big girl now, in school.”

  “Are you sure you want to sell it?’

  “Oh yes. If I have more babies, I make more for them.”

  *

  On the beach where Izak had dropped them off, a man with a camel stood at the water’s edge. A pleasure boat had anchored in the cove and a group of tourists was coming toward shore in a dinghy. Much further out in the cove, Lilly could see the shape of the Ozymandias, its blue and white sides handsome against the cliffs, its sails furled tightly.

  She sat down on the sand in the shade of a tree and watched as children climbed from the dinghy and ran toward the camel. In a moment the man was commanding the camel to kneel, placing a child on its back, and proudly smiling for a photograph as the father of one of the children snapped a picture of owner, camel and its rider. Money was exchanged. Another child climbed on the camel’s back.

  The camel’s owner happily posed for pictures for the next twenty minutes as Lilly watched. She inhaled a sweet evocative scent from the open bag in which the baby bunting lay, and, as she breathed again, she recognized it as baby powder, as if the child’s scent were still imbued in the fabric of the cloth.

  She lay back in the sand, bunching the baby bunting in its paper bag under her head, and closed her eyes. She felt the warm breeze on her face, heard the lapping of the water on the pebbles and shells of the shore. The sand conformed to the shape of her body; she knew she was falling asleep and she gave herself over to it. What a relief it was, to enter darkness and gain peace from the dancing of her mind. Stillness overtook her.

  *

  “Lilly.” A voice in her ear. “Lilly.”

  “I’m coming,” she said. When she opened her eyes she saw Izak kneeling over her, his face above hers.

  “Is it time to go already? Where are the others? Did you just come in the Zodiac?”

  “The others are not here yet. I have been to the Turkish bath.”

  “You have been there?”

  “Yes, an hour ago.”

  “You weren’t on the boat?”

  “No,” he said. “I have been here in the town to buy new blankets for the boat, and two pillows Harrison wanted for his bed. Down, from the farmer’s goose feathers.”

  “Who is on the boat?”

  “Morat stayed. Barish stayed.”

  “And Marianne?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see.”

  Lilly bowed her head. She put her fingers in the sand.

  “Marianne not kind to you, not kind to me,” Izak said.

  “No, not kind,” Lilly echoed his words.

  “We don’t worry,” he said. “No problem for us.”

  “No,” Lilly said. “Not for us.”

  “Our problem,” said Izak, “is big ocean between our countries.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Between our worlds.”

  “What is there to do?” Izak said. “I think about this.”

  “I think also,” Lilly said.

  He sat beside her on the sand and put his hand between them where she was letting the smooth grains run between her fingers. He stopped her from doing this by closing her fingers under his strong hand.

  “We both think about this,” he said. “And no answers come.”

  WHIRLING DERVISH

  As Barish helped Lilly up the ladder from the Zodiac to the solid wooden deck of the Ozymandias, a strange vision met her eyes. On the foredeck, Marianne, dressed in the garb of a Whirling Dervish (the white bell-like skirt, the long-sleeved white shirt, the conical hat with the squared top) was spinning sl
owly in a counter-clockwise direction. She held one palm downward and one facing upward toward the sky. Music came from a tape player balanced on one of the kayaks, plugged by a long cord into an outlet under the wheel of the boat.

  Though Marianne must have heard the Zodiac arriving, heard the high-pitched voice of Gerta, the hearty laugh of Harrison, she gave no sign of recognition of their arrival, but continued to spin to a low, rhythmic chant accompanied by the hypnotic music of zither, flute and drums. Her eyes were half-closed; she seemed oblivious to all sounds and movements. She did not appear dizzy, nor did she alter the rhythm of her spinning.

  “Don’t interrupt her, she’s communing with God,” Fiona warned, as she stepped off the ladder and took in the scene. “I read about this after we saw the Whirling Dervishes in Istanbul. They dance around like that in a state of meditation, to become one with the universe and to submit oneself to God. See that tall hat? It’s supposed to signify the tombstone of her ego. The skirt represents her shroud. See how she’s holding one hand up and one down? One hand receives God’s grace, and the other hand brings it down to earth.”

  “I don’t think Marianne is a woman who submits herself to anyone,” Harrison said under his breath.

  “You’re just jealous she can swim further and better than you,” Gerta told him.

  “I think she’s a woman in pain,” Lance observed. “You can see her pain in her eyes.”

  Lilly’s mother patted Lance’s shoulder. “You’re a very sensitive, kind man,” she said to him. “That’s why I admire you. You know when people are hurting.”

  “I think we’re all in pain,” Fiona said. “Especially after we walked so many hours this afternoon. God, my feet are killing me.” She sank down in one of the deck chairs. “Listen children, I have just the thing to dull all our pains. I propose we have some wine—my treat—before dinner. But first let me go downstairs and take a shower.”

  *

  When the sun had hid itself under the darkening waters leaving a faint, fiery spray of brilliance in the sky, when the heat had relented just a bit, after all the guests had swum or showered, when Gerta and Harrison had surfaced after a nap, Fiona brought forth a bottle of Turkish wine she had bought in the village that afternoon. She produced a corkscrew and began to work on the cork.