A Year in the World (36 page)

The
Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet was imprisoned for years in what is now our hotel. We arrive early, but our room is ready. In the dining room I see on the menu “wine leaves,” “clothed cream.” The gorgeous young woman server offers to read Ed’s fortune in his coffee grounds. She looks at him with great solemnity and says, “Your mother has died and she wants you to visit her grave.” We are silent. This comes out of nowhere. Since Ed’s mother’s death, he has not returned to his hometown.

In a magazine I read a recipe for Head Broth. It begins, scrub a sheep’s head with salt and spices, rub with onion juice, wrap in parchment and roast. Undaunted, we are ready to taste Turkish food in the capital. On the first dinner menu we find
söylenmez kebap
—kebab that shall not be named. The waiter enlightens us; the kebab is made of ram testicles. I prefer bride’s soup: red lentils and rice, with mint, tomatoes, and herbs. For dessert,
güllac
: sheets of pastry flavored with rose water. The waiter takes our credit card and smiles. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

We sleep in the luxurious hotel in great comfort. Big bed, soft, and no sound of water sluicing below, threatening to rise and swamp us. Only the memory of the literary prisoner, who might have written his poems in this very room. I awaken to the call of the muezzin from a minaret. Mournful, innocent, shrill, otherworldly—a call of the wild—it stops my heart. If I were Muslim, I would prostrate myself immediately for prayer. The domes are rising suns, the minarets its rays.

On the way to Topkapi, we pass shops emitting smells of lacquer, spices, leather, straw, lanolin. Topkapi is still a wonder of the world! Those sultans! When they wanted someone executed, they stamped their feet. They sprinkled rose water on their hands. Their spoons were made of mother-of-pearl or horn, with handles inset with rubies and turquoise. The crests for their turbans were huge emeralds with plumes. I stare at the hand and occipital bone of Saint John the Baptist, a dagger with a carved emerald handle, wild dress-up clothes with crests of jewels startlingly large, water pitchers and rose-water sprinklers bedecked with pearl, lapis, and coral. The place itself is leafy and serene, with courtyards and pavilions and cool tiled fountains and delicate wall paintings. The architecture, perhaps inspired by a tent camp in the desert, feels harmonious and inviting and at the same time utterly strange and fascinating. In feeling, it reminds me of its opposite, a fine liberal arts college.

There’s a long line waiting to go inside the Harem, which once was home sweet home to a thousand concubine slaves. Hardly anyone stirs in the rooms where the treasures are displayed, and I can imagine the sultan stepping into one of the lavish robes in the Royal Wardrobe and making his way to his prayer room.

This is our two-day tasting menu of Istanbul, a city that requires at least a month. Those mosques! Muslim men prostrate themselves in the courtyards, on the steps, and at the entrances to the mosques on Friday. They spill over into the street, among the parked cars. The Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia (built as a Christian church, mutated into a Muslim mosque, now a museum), the Tulip Mosque, the dozens of scattered mosques, all punctuated by the minarets, offer their domes to the sky, giving the city a soft aspect. How far back does this city travel across time? In 658
B.C.
Byzas, a Greek, consulted the Delphic oracle. Where to go? he wanted to know. She advised him to settle on the banks of the Bosporus. His city became his namesake, Byzantium.

Istanbul! It
is
nobody’s business but the Turks’—that is, the mysterious city does not open to the foreigner easily, though anyone will be struck by the architecture, the bazaars, the encounters with merchants and buskers who stroll around trying to lasso tourists into some shop. The old-quarter outdoor cafés look so inviting with low benches and tables covered with kelims. Little wheeled carts are laden with
mesir
, roasted corn. In the cobbled, narrow street behind Hagia Sophia, we find a row of wooden Ottoman houses built against the town walls, a quiet enclave of fountains and birdbaths, a place one could live.

Many women wear ankle-length coats of ugly gabardine over long sleeves, with gray long skirts, leggings. They must be boiling. I’d faint. This must be their choice, since many Turkish girls are in short skirts and sleeveless T-shirts, with bra straps showing. For the covered, only the feet are exposed. Ugly sandals, too. I bet they have on pink silk thongs and push-up lace bras. A few are masked but walk hand in hand with young children in shorts. The young wife of a rug merchant tells us, “I like fashion and alcohol, and I don’t want to cover myself. For what? I have Allah inside. That’s what matters.”

The hawkers are aggressive. “My brother lives in Seattle,” they call.

“Honeymoon?”

“Second honeymoon?”

“Do you want to be my first customer today?”

“I’ve seen you three times. We are already well acquainted.” We have to laugh at that and are then followed for blocks.

“You are going the wrong way,” one calls. They are lined up outside a shop near our hotel. Much of their banter is for their mutual amusement.

We
ask our concierge for a recommendation. “What kind of rug do you want?” he asks.

“Old, faded colors, like the one we’re standing on.”

“Oh, that is for sale. The rugs we have are from a merchant we know. Go there.” And so I fall into the hands of an expert rug merchant.

We meet Guven Demer, speaker of eight languages, young and passionate. We are no match for Istanbul rug dealers. They are performers and shrewd psychologists. They are relentless and should give lessons to international negotiators of foreign affairs. They could prevent wars. Guven, in business with four brothers and several cousins, has practiced his craft for two thousand years around the Mediterranean. After an hour he has the smell of the hunt about him. The rugs are flying through the air, the prices fly, combining with other prices, turning from Turkish billions into dollars and back again. The showroom is windowless, stacked with rugs that go back, in the heat, to the scents of camel. He begins to touch us, a tap on the shoulder, a hand on Ed’s knee. Sweet tea is served, boxes of Turkish delight presented. The rugs are too bright for me, too new, and he asks for two hours, during which time he scours his contacts. When we return, the rug I had envisioned lies on the floor, and I nod and say “Guven, it’s beautiful.” It is a hundred-year-old Herez of faded blue and salmon and biscuit colors.

He turns around and around. He’s a dervish. “She likes it, praise to Allah,” and he dramatically falls to the floor in the prayer position. By the time we have bought the rug, plus two small ones and the one on the floor of the hotel, he is embracing us, inviting us home, inviting us for two days on the Asian side to see how real Turks live. He is coming to visit us in California. We walk out dazed; he had us in the palm of his hand.

“And
therefore I have sailed the seas and come/to the holy city of Byzantium.” What a clunky rhyme,
come /-tium
, I suddenly notice. But I, too, finally have come to Byzantium, to the fabled Bosporus, to the Sea of Marmara. The word,
mar, mar
, has the breaking of waves in it, the oldest sound other than that of mama, mama.

Leaving Istanbul, the taxi careens along the Bosporus, hot wind blowing my hair behind my ears. We are not “dewy,” as my southern relatives used to say, we are downright sweating. I flash on an image of Alain back on his terrace in Cortona sipping a glass of cold white wine. Then we enter the most state-of-the-art airport in the world, where we are cooled down to morgue temperature until we enter the sleeve of the plane, where it is again one hundred degrees. Everyone is emanating hot odors—oil, the wrung-out stink of lamb, rancid breaths, pungent underwear, a whiff of tea tannin, dirt. I’ve been to Greece and have grazed the edge of Turkey. Praise Allah. Praise Professor Hunter who called me a Maenad. Praise the Oracle. In the plane the fans blow away the smells.

Alitalia seems to take off with more confidence than other airlines. The pilot angles up as soon as the tires lift off the runway, accelerates, spirals up, and turns with brio. We are over Romania, Bulgaria. We are served our last tastes of Turkish food—little meat kebabs and fried pastries stuffed with vegetables, baklava. Then down into Fumicino and home to Bramasole, home to our green
paradiso
. Home to no electricity and a broken water line, a printer zapped by lightning. Rampant morning glories have vaulted onto the jasmine and across the terrace wall, the blooms, blue as the Aegean, trumpeting joy.

In
a few weeks a package from the merchant in Istanbul arrives. On a small wooden loom we read, woven in a miniature rug of red and tan wool, our names and below:

In Love, Guven.

Bulls, Poets, Archangels

Crete and
Mani

You heard your voice saying
thanks

. . . you were certain now:

a large piece of eternity belonged to you.

—Y
ANNIS
R
ITSOS

We have come to Greece for the baptism of Constantine Demetrios Mavromihalis at the Church of the Archangels, Ayion Taxiarchon, in Areopolis, ancestral home of the fierce Mavromihalis clan, deep in the Mani.

First we light in western Crete, near Chaniá. On our cruise through the Greek islands, the stop at Knossos and Heraklion seemed more frustrating than not seeing the places at all. The deadly heat, the crowds, the limited time, and the head ’em up, move ’em out aspects skewed our experience of the island. We vowed to return. Even inside those blighted circumstances, I glimpsed, in a hand flipping a rag at a window, in the rotten sweet scent of fallen apricots that even the bees had left to the ants, in the philosophical goats among the dusty tamarisks, the elemental nature of Crete.

We have rented a house in Chaniá, where watercolored Venetian buildings line the C-shaped harbor, the scene nicely accented by a domed Arab mosque and a lively quay of tavernas with outdoor tables. The town, long swamped by tourism, yields charms at night. Around the bend from the crowds, you can have dinner right beside the water and, looking through your glass of local white wine, imagine the din and activity of the trading port as successive conquerors arrived and took over for a century or two. A sloe-eyed Gypsy girl jangles with bracelets and anklets as she offers her roses for sale. Four old women, who surely would have worn heavy black a few decades ago, sit down next to us, order tall lime daiquiris, and settle in to talk. We dine to the music of their laughter, the occasional clomp of the horse-drawn carriages, and the slap of small waves against the mole.

Our house, on a scruffy hillside overlooking the bay, calms me just to be inside the four rooms. The two bedrooms and kitchen—all small—jog off a large main room, with French doors opening to spacious outside terraces that drop abruptly to citrus trees and shrubs. Night wanderers beware. The utter simplicity of the architecture corresponds to the plain furniture, comfortable enough, with chairs draped in bright cotton cloth. The coolness of white marble floors promotes serenity. A white shoebox of a house, but petals of plumbago and bougainvillea blow in the windows and doors, filling the bottom of the bathtub and gathering in pools in the hall. One covered terrace with chairs around a low table becomes my favorite place to read. Ed takes his notebooks to the second bedroom and closes the shutter. He likes to work in semidarkness.

Because our other trip was go, go, go, this time we are going nowhere for at least a week, except on short drives and down to a family beach nearby. We play in the water of a clear cove, sit in the sand, and throw back the kids’ ball when it falls near us. Olive trees grow to the edge of the beach, giving the landscape a timeless appeal. Frothy aqua water, golden sand, a little drink stand under the trees—we stay for hours, floating on rafts out into the horseshoe cove and drifting. The pleasure feels so simple. I can visualize the ventricles of my heart filling with salt and sunlight.

At Irini’s in Horifaki, not far from another beach where much of Kazanzakis’s book
Zorba the Greek
was filmed, the lamb has been roasted a long time and slakes off the bone in meltingly tender hunks. The waitress takes us back in the kitchen to select what we will eat, and there’s Irini, wrapped in a white apron, rosy cheeks, and a big greeting. She’s yanking huge pans of moussaka out of the oven. We choose lamb, baked chicory stuffed tomatoes, and the ubiquitous Greek salad, which they serve not with crumbled feta but with a thick slab. First she brings rough bread with olive paste and sesame on top. A menu exists, but everyone is taken to the kitchen.
Lamb
has been translated as “lamp,” which she offers as “lamp with fricassee bad,” whatever that might mean. Also listed: humburger and fish soap (soup). “Well, her English is better than my Greek,” Ed says.

Irini’s becomes our favorite. Every visit there’s a new big cheese pie,
pikilia
, seafood tidbits with orange avocado salad, or
ofto
, lamb on skewers grilled upright in the fire and brought to us on pasta mixed with creamy cheese and broth. Platters of crisp roasted potatoes, which benefit from the drippings from chickens, are plunked down on every table.

On our third day we’ve settled into a routine. Read. Beach. Irini’s for lunch. Nap. Walk. Shop for food in town. Cook something utterly simple. The potatoes are wonderful, fresh and earthy. We make dinners of Greek salad and steamed potatoes and bread. At night we lie out on the terrace watching the stars. We see no neighbors, only swaying lights on boats.

We vary on the fourth day and visit the Chaniá museum in the morning. They’ve rescued a patchy mosaic of Dionysus on a panther with a companion satyr. That’s what passed for a floor covering in Chaniá in the third century
A.D.
Another of Poseidon also shows two roosters trying to peck the same cherry. Such whimsy! Poseidon was worshiped around here not as a sea god but as a fertility deity. The museum displays cases of votive oxen and bulls from a rural sanctuary active from the fourth century
B.C.
to the second century
A.D.
The pots look like the first things you’d throw in beginning ceramics, but the jewelry! Exquisite. Gold hair spirals, a rock crystal and gold ring, and the most fabulous earrings from the eighth century
B.C.
Could I reach in and snatch the necklace inlaid with lapis and medallions with raised heads? The artists were playful, too—a clay censer shaped like a hedgehog from 1800
B.C.
makes me smile, as does the drinking cup with eyes on it to protect the drinker from the evil eye. The ancient
pithoi
, terra-cotta storage jars, are taller than I am. Most mysterious are the coins for Charon, made to go in the mouths of the dead. I guess they came from long-gone-to-dust skulls, the fare uncollected. I first thought a clay ship from 1900 to 1650
B.C.
was a child’s toy, but with the honeycomb inside, this must be another object to speed the dead on their way. Honey, so essential to the Greeks. Glaukos, son of legendary king Minos, fell into a
pitho
of honey and drowned. Some bodies, according to Herodotus, were buried in honey.

At the covered market, a short walk away, piles of lambs’ heads, eyes open, regard us as we enter, and bunnies, with white fur only on their feet like little bedroom shoes, line up on ice. Vats of yogurts and fruits and nuts in syrup, and dried fruits, especially figs, give a totally Mediterranean cast to our shopping. The herbs mostly come in packages convenient for tourists to tuck into their bags. But they look stale to me. When I see the cheeses—so fresh—I know that my attempts at home to reproduce the luscious dill-scented pies we’re eating everywhere will not be the same. We taste the specialty of the area,
pyktogalo
, a soft, slightly spicy cheese, and
malaka
, also a Chaniá cheese, similar to Gruyère.
Anthotyro
, a cream cheese, and
staka
, a big pale mound in the market case, both go in my notebook, along with
cheirokasi
, and
stakovoutyro
—what is that? How wonderful—everything is so unfamiliar. Ah, -
kasi
—that must mean cheese. Big wreaths of bread for a wedding are decorated with bread roses. An organ grinder pumps away. We walk out with fennel, yogurt, and cheeses—but who knows which is which—and a bunch of dill.

Such activity. We don’t get to the beach until late afternoon, when the sun angles across the water and the children are gone. We have twilight to ourselves, splashing like the gods.

From
a crack in the house, two yellow beaks open and the mother sparrow flits over our heads, to and fro from the grove. Her angry chirp warns us that she might dive-bomb our reclining forms. A visiting gray cat stretches on the warm stone terrace, purring at her reflection in the door. She ignores the sparrow. Under my pulled-down hat, I begin to think of old attachments, friends, those I have failed, those who failed me. The elemental nature of Greece, I suppose. Or sometimes travel just unlocks Pandora’s box. What I’ve put off considering in my quotidian life rushes forward when the body and mind achieve a quiet level of receptivity. What has been lost comes looking. Problems overly suppressed can erupt as a full-blown crisis. I start with the drifty thought,
Mother would love this
, followed by the petulant, childish (but true) thought,
She failed me, no?
Then an old friendship I bluntly broke off. My mind jumps to Bill D.
Oh, he let you down, big time
, then the tidal rush of how he would have loved Greece, how funny he was, and what a good poet. Drunk, he lurches over the hors d’oeuvres table, I reach to catch him, but he crashes into the bowls and plates. Hardest to understand, the friends who recede, become vague, their names in the address book but their numbers forgotten. Friends from college stay fixed. I pick up with Anne and Rena immediately, out of such long connections. As an adult, I moved six times, and for the most part the intense friendships of each place gradually faded, replaced by the next set. And yet I still care about Ralph and Mitra and Gabby and Hunter and Alan and, and, and. That conference when I shared a room with Karen and we talked late. In the dark, her voice sounded so familiar, a little sister whispering from the other twin bed, kicking off the quilt. We lost touch. I always mean to
go back
, pick up the dropped stitch, continue the round hem. But the present grounds me—I first wrote
grinds me
—so firmly. A tidal wash of losses, all under the big energy sun. I gather Ed’s shirt, dried over a chairback in the sun, the blue cotton warming my hands.

At
a little monastery on the sea, the caretaker shakes his head sadly at Ed in shorts. He points to a rack inside the door with various pairs of jogging pants and beach wraps for visitors to cover their shameful bodies. “Am I okay?” I ask. He regards my white linen Capri pants and short-sleeved T-shirt and concedes that I am. Determined to break through his officious manner, I start asking him about the fountain outside the monastery, which looks distinctly Arab to me, but he doesn’t know.

“Could be anything,” he shrugs. His friend rounds the corner of the building with a handful of sprigs. Ah, the universal language. Ed, now in navy pants, asks what he’s picked. He holds up a handful.

“Origano dictamnus.”
We later recognize this oregano growing in the maquis that covers the coastal hillsides. “This one is very good if you cut yourself, and for the ladies, it helps in birth.”

“And for cooking,” the caretaker adds. An Italian would launch into recipes right now, but they are more interested in the other herb. They both begin to explain at once that this is a special plant, used to make tea.
“Fascomilo,”
the friend says. He writes the name in Greek on our guidebook and gives us a few branches that perfume our car with a sage and dust scent. “Smells like marijuana. Throw it out.” Ed fans his face. But I slip the leaves inside my guidebook to scent the pages with the smell of the countryside.

The deep country monasteries deeply stir me. Triada seems holy, holy, and someone is chanting in one of the monastery rooms. He has a loud and terrible voice, accompanied by the rattle of pots and dishes. Women are cleaning up after a wedding lunch. The priest in stone gray robes sits against a stone wall under the arched entrance, cooling off after his duties. Inside, the floor is scattered with crumbled bay leaves, as in the Middle Ages when santolina was piled on the floors of cathedrals to keep down the stench of the unwashed. At the entrance a man fills an enormous basket with leftover slices of bread. I can’t get enough of the Byzantine icons and altars, the heady scents of incense, and the elaborate iconostases. The Orthodox churches feel very close to the bone, as if they tap into those same archetypal openings where myth comes from. So many are smaller than the Italian and French neighborhood churches. The domes are blue and covered with stars, a motif I adore. The top section of the cross-shaped churches always are closed off by a curtain, suggesting mystery.

At the Holy Monastery of Hyperaghia, Lady of Goniá, in Kolymbari, another visitor gives us the Φασκόμηλο, the
fascomilo
again. Must be the day for gathering—his basket is piled high. This monastery sits above the Chaniá bay. An icon of Mary is completely covered with ex-votos—rings, watches, metal eyes, and tiny crosses. The wooden crucifix, with two side panels held by carved gold dragons, looks as though it landed from the Far East. But the three domes of immense blue covered with stars and the incense burning bring us back to Greece. We are not able to see the famed icon collection in a small building across the courtyard. The caretaker must have been out picking
fascomilo
. We take a path to the earlier ruins of the monastery, another outpost of peace.

En
route to Rethymnon, we see a wreck. In the driver’s seat a young man with black hair, trickles of blood running down his face—his seriously dead face. He sits upright inside his crushed car. How impossible to come upon. The visceral desire rises to rerun the moment, have him swerve from the truck, right himself, and speed on home to the dinner his mother probably is preparing at this moment. The shiny Japanese compact, brand new, now smushed like a stepped-on Coke can.
Get up
, we want to say, but he is gone, someone’s love, someone’s boy, someone. Just before we left Cortona, two American tourists’ car struck a college student’s Vespa. He jumped up and went in the bar across the road and had a glass of water. The drivers must have been immensely relieved. But when the ambulance came, he was weak, and he died—punctured lungs filled with blood. Why seek danger? It may be on the loose for you.