A Year in the World (41 page)

We don’t linger but instead drive over to St. Andrews. We stop first at a shop to buy a cloth-wrapped cheese from the Isle of Mull—nutty and golden—and several local pale cheddars and a blue similar to Roquefort. The produce looks better, though nothing compares with our secret garden’s tender lettuces. The day is so warm that we’re not attracted to the cashmere shops. The name of the town is most holy—St. Andrew, one of the apostles and the patron saint of Scotland. He, the venerable university, and the long history of golfing are the positive history. Much else seems to center on martyrdoms, sieges, reformations, and burnings at the stake. The notable local invention was the thumbscrew. All feels serene along the leafy streets and in the tidy shops. We walk the length of the bustling town and back, find a tearoom for lunch, then decide to go home.

The slack caused by my long absences from my friends seems taut again. I wonder if they assumed I had changed and now see that I did not, or if I did (and yes, I did), it’s okay. When everyone walks the same path and then one veers off in a different direction, balance goes out of kilter. We’ve all always been independent and ambitious. Our first bond was books. Susan, Kate, and I wrote poetry and Robin published a range of poets in her spare hours outside her college teaching job. Kate and I went to graduate school in creative writing together, commuting up to San Francisco and trading secrets along Highway 280. After I graduated, I began to teach in the same program. Susan and Kate, with their friend Jerry, then opened Printers Inc., a literary bookstore on California Street in Palo Alto. They installed a coffee bar/café, which was revolutionary. No other bookstore in California, or maybe the United States, had done that in 1978. We were sipping cappuccino and reading Merwin at Printers long before Starbucks ever pulled an espresso. The bookstore for its whole life was a fulcrum for the entire community and surroundings.
Meet me at Printers
. Eventually they expanded into an adjacent building for a larger café. The reading series was stellar. They opened a second store. We always were swapping books, talking books, reviewing books, publishing books. Kate began to study Chinese and travelled alone to China several times. Then she left to live in Vermont for a few years, and Susan and Jerry continued to run the stores. When she came back, she started her La Questa Press.

This afternoon we’re staying home, the women dozing on the sofas, reading without the need to talk. One of us suddenly giggles. “I just remembered.” (Discretion prevents identification of the speakers and person spoken to.)

“What?”

“The Valentine’s Day when Philip got to your office early and filled the whole room with balloons and roses and left that note,
If you’re free some evening stop by for breakfast.
”

“What a good memory you have.”

“Well, that affair with Philip raged for a year.”

“That note was the best. We all envied you.”

“Yes, more for the note than anything else!”

“He was divine. And so was that English guy
you
went off to St. Croix with.”

“We fell out of bed in a heap.”

“And that therapist who asked why you divorced your first husband, and you said ‘I don’t remember’?”

“What about that
student
?”

“Oh, come on, he was twenty-six. And had poetry on his lips.”

“That’s not all he had on his lips.”

“What about that watch left on the bedside table?”

A slew of rowdy memories ensues. If men only knew how women talk.

We
drive too far to a country inn for dinner. The wild salmon and game are delicious and the atmosphere clubby and cozy, a half-timbered room hung with copper, baronial tapestry chairs, and a long table set with crystal. I’m loving Scotland. This is my first time here. I want to go to the Hebrides and to the monks’ island of Iona, if they allow women.

On
our walk at midmorning Ed experiences a miracle in the shadow of the Golgotha cross. We’re crossing the fields and meadows talking about the lost phone. “The charge is probably dead,” Ed laments. At that instant we hear a ring in waist-high weeds next to the path. We both shout and begin parting the grasses. “Hey!” Ed shouts and holds up the wet phone. He answers, “
Pronto
.” Chiara is calling from Cortona, wanting to know how our trip is going. At the very instant we are passing by. Four ragged cows witness the miracle of the phone.

“Ed! This is fantastic—Santa Chiara is the patron saint of telecommunications.”

“Thank you, Jesus.” With the remaining flicker of charge, he calls Fulvio.

Our
favorite garden, probably because it seems within reach, is House of Pitmuies near Forfar. The felicitous and rambling house overlooks wide, blowsy borders blooming so overabundantly that as you walk between the paths, you’re brushed by blue, lavender, and pink flowers. What a glory. Stacked from front to back with ascending blooms, they have a “gay abandon about their dress.” Like a rigorously trained ballerina, the garden appears spontaneous, as though the flowers just
happened
, rather than having been carefully planted to bloom in height, sequence, and color shade vis-à-vis all the other plants in the border. The white lilies are not staked, but instead the gardener devised a taut string web for them to grow through. Each one’s square opening supports it nicely. In the kitchen garden their berries are netted but not as elaborately as in our secret garden. Small flowerpots top the low posts around the perimeter of the bed, and the net drapes over them without snagging on the posts or tearing. Very clever. We wish the lady of the house would invite us into her sunroom, pour a smoky oolong tea, and tell us her life story.

Violet
tells us to go to a field nearby for the Scottish games. We find the immense field, where men and boys are going at tug-of-war, vaulting, races, and wrestling with verve. We watch several bagpipe solo contests and follow a marching band of pipers around the field. Bagpipes make me smile. I can’t understand how they ever worked as the music of war. An advancing group of mad pipers should make the enemy jump up and jig rather than shoot or run in terror. Several people ask where we’re from and seem amused that we’re on vacation where they live. Most of the men wear kilts in their family plaids. They look gorgeous. We’re all glued to the Highland Fling and other traditional dance competitions performed by serious little girls in folk costumes. The sets begin with a group of eight or ten, and gradually the judges knock off one after the other until the winner is left performing alone. Only then does she usually break into a smile and miss her steps. The community has come together for this sunny afternoon of play. If we lived here, we’d be right where we are.

Having succumbed to sausage rolls at the games, we’re content to stir up a simple
risotto primavera
, using carrots, onion, beets, and celery from the garden. And of course, we gather a magnificent salad, the best salad in the world. Kate quickly assembles Violet’s toffee sauce recipe. She and Susan bake gingerbread, pouring the sauce onto the cake. Susan and Robin arrange a sublime bowl of roses for the table. Tonight we are launching into our summer-stock performance of
Macbeth
in the drawing room.
Lay on, Macduff
.

After
our morning yoga session, the men propose a hike. Not that they have not enjoyed the endless analysis of herbaceous borders. All of them garden, too. John’s guidebook describes a ten-mile coastal walk. Perfect for our last afternoon. Tomorrow we all will be folded into airline seats, except for Robin and John, who are spending another week farther north. We’re the only ones on the trail for most of the way. The few we pass greet us heartily. I’m sore from all the yoga contortions. They’ve taken twice-weekly classes for years, while the most exercise I’ve had has been on the computer keyboard and running for flights. The long motion of walking makes me breathe deeply. I imagine the sun warming every cell in my body. Everywhere the people have been effusively friendly, not just cordial. They’re more like the Australians than the reserved English. We find a ruined tower to explore and shining water to look at all the way. Lord, ten miles is long, and some of the paths cross loose sand. We’ve been only in this wee bit of Scotland, and yet I think we luckily found a core sample. I never came before because I thought it would not be exotic enough. I feared it would seem too familiar. I didn’t know how deeply refreshing the landscape could be. The place
does
seem familiar, perhaps at a genetic level, but in a nourishing way. Or maybe I’m just familiar with these friends, and when one is at home with friends, the surrounding world becomes friendly, too.

Aboard the
Cevri Hasan

Turkey’s
Lycian Coast

I’m inside the advancing light,

my hands are hungry, the world beautiful.

—N
AZIM
H
IKMET

Is the one I love
everywhere
?

—R
UMI

Bramasole exerts a magnetic force, never stronger than now—the gazebo covered in celestial-blue morning glories, dahlias finally adorning themselves with gay pink pompoms, the Rose Walk making a late August comeback, the fountain repaired and splashing a concerto to the night, dew-soaked grass at dawn, the variegated sage tall enough to brush my legs with scent, thousands of butterflies hovering around the lavender, the basil brought from Naples burgeoning onto the paths, wigwams of weighty ruby-dark tomatoes, and Beppe’s rows of lettuces that soon will bolt, the last of the sunflowers drooping their dry faces in shame on the upper terrace, the zucchini flowers blowing their loud yellow party horns. Why leave the last, deliciously heady days of summer?

We’re going. Already banging our duffels and carry-on bags down the steps and across the lawn, smearing them with grass stains.

Our friend Giorgio drops us at the Rome airport, where we meet Fulvio, Aurora, and their princely eleven-year-old son, Edoardo. We’ve seen each other only a few days ago but greet in the Turkish Air queue as though it has been months. We’ve been friends with the Di Rosa family, who live across the valley in Lucignano, for four years, but we have travelled together only once, when we rented an apartment on the Grand Canal in Venice to celebrate Ed’s fiftieth birthday. We experienced then Fulvio’s extraordinary energy as he showed us around the Biennale art exhibitions for hours, then led us in a walk all over Venice before we launched into cooking every crustacean we could find at the Rialto market and feasting in our apartment where the floors sloped precipitously toward the canal and dour family portraits looked down on us with remote and foreign gazes. Recently Fulvio has masterminded our restoration of a second property, a ruined twelfth-century hermitage in the mountains above Cortona. Because the house was built by followers of Saint Francis of Assisi, who roamed our hills, we constructed a shrine and had the artist paint Francis with his arms held out to welcome all creatures. The saint, however, has Fulvio’s face, since he was saintly himself during three years of restoration. Aurora, his elegant wife, always dresses in the
bella figura
Italian style. She has large blue eyes and the figure of a twenty-year-old girl. She likes jewelry. She’s impeccably put together. Her clothes make you wish you paid more attention when you shop. She is also thoughtful of the other person and a bit fierce when her own family’s interests are involved. Edoardo, their marvelous child, actually likes adults and, without losing any of his own childhood, relates to them in a natural way. He has his mother’s great azure gaze and thick ashen blond hair, his father’s wit and searing focus. Slender as a broom, he pokes Ed in the stomach, quite taut really, and says, “You’d better watch that.” We love them individually and as a family.

The five of us are embarking on a sailing and hiking expedition to the Mediterranean coast of southern Turkey, from Antalya up to Kusadasi, on a traditional Turkish
gulet
(the
t
is pronounced) with two other people I know and four strangers. This will be our first guided group trip, but the Di Rosas had a fine experience on a small tour in Morocco. First we will stop in Istanbul for two nights.

From Rome, I barely settle into my Turkish novel,
Mehed, My Hawk
, before the descent begins into mythic Constantinople. The other time I came here, the approach was by sea. From the deck I watched as rounded silhouettes of mosque domes appeared against the dawn sky, imprinting forever. From the perspective above, a giant has strewn cubical houses like a sack of dice. How vast the city, and how fortunately it cradles among the waters. Within three hours of leaving Fumicino, we’re checking into the Arena, a small hotel owned by a family in the historic quarter.

Walking
to a restaurant the hotel recommended for Aurora’s birthday, we pass an outdoor café where two whirling dervishes are spinning on a platform under the trees, their white gowns forming storted pyramids that break and re-form. Although I know these must not be the ecstatic mystical dancers of the Mevlana Sufis, they still astonish. Like figures in dreams they reel, right palm up to receive divine energy, left palm down to convey it into the ground, turning on their own axes with irrational control, a feat, a dancing trance on the threshold of Allah’s heaven.
Open your hands,/if you want to be held
, I remember from the poet Rumi. The lines always reminded me of the Beatles’ aphoristic lyric about the love you take being equal to the love you make. Born in 1207 in what is now Afghanistan, Rumi inspired the whirling dervish order. During his visit to the goldsmiths’ quarter, the dainty sounds of all the hammers falling hit him as music, and he began to dance. He danced and danced until he reached a mystical state. My students loved him, as translated by Coleman Barks.

How long can they continue this angelic swirling? I feel holy myself, just standing in the street across from the bazaar’s hawkers. At ballets, audiences break into applause when the dancer executes a few perfect spins. In comparison to these twirlers, that is no feat. The dervishes move like water toward the drain; beyond the motion, something magnetic pulls the psyche.

Our table is set right in the street. To extend the garden, the restaurant has simply blocked off an area, strung some lights, and let loose their accordion player. Of course, we ask him to play “Happy Birthday,” and the other diners join in singing, as they often do in Italy, as well as raising their glasses. There’s no menu and we don’t know a word of Turkish, so we just give ourselves over to the waiter. The wine list does exist, and I wish I could have one because the illustrated bottles pop up, as in a child’s book. Again, we point and ask with our eyes, and he selects a fragrant little white, suitable for more toasts. Soon we’re served various mezes—shrimp with arugula and lemon, grated and roasted zucchini with yogurt, several kinds of eggplant, fried calamari.
Meze
, which means “a good taste,” is quite inadequately translated as “hors d’oeuvre.” Meze, instead, can be hors d’oeuvres or can be like tapas.

Then he brings monkfish with tomatoes and peppers and more shrimp, these batter fried. We’re all high with excitement. We stroll back in the exotic night through the heart of the old city, looking in windows of rug stores, skirting the great corms of the Blue Mosque, the ellipse of the ancient Hippodrome, where chariots used to race and the condemned lost their heads, then by the outdoor cafés where people talk the evening away while sipping tea from glasses.

At
first light the call of the muezzin jerks me awake. The hotel is across the street from an intimately scaled mosque, whose loudspeakers must be aimed at room 306. The caller tunes up a moment,
e-ya eee ya ya
; like a cicada, before he launches into his wailing appeal to prayer. This call equals the church bells in Italy, marking time, sending out a summons that seems to unzip all the way down the spinal cord. I’m thrilled every time it happens. Ed rolls over and says, “Someone hit the wah-wah pedal.” We start laughing, and I look out the window at the small boats and silvery water. We have a whole day to play in Istanbul before we fly south tomorrow to board the boat.

First to the Grand Bazaar, where Fulvio reveals a talent for bargaining and Aurora and I acquire sage, apricot, black, taupe, and beige pashmina scarves for a fraction of their cost at home. Usually I hate bargaining and ask at the Arezzo antique market for a
prezzo buono
only because I know the dealers think you’re stupid if you don’t. Fulvio starts having fun, and I realize that the scarf man does, too. For the first time, I can see the process as a game rather than an annoyance.

We quickly want to leave the touristy shops and the pushy rug merchants. It must be said: the Grand Bazaar, all cleaned up, lacks atmosphere. We exit quickly into the light rain, walking downhill toward the Spice Bazaar, where we hope for more medina ambiance. That happens, I see quickly, actually
between
the two bazaars in the muddle of streets where most of the women are covered except for their eyes. Everything imaginable is for sale. We pass shop windows displaying those impossible gray and sand clothes the women wear, white circumcision outfits for boys, with fake (metaphoric?) swords at the waist, school uniforms, and whole clumps of closet-sized shops selling just collars or thread or buttons. Belly dancer costumes with fringed and spangled gold and silver trim—polar opposite to the gray and sand—zipper shops, plastic kitchenware, toilet seats, laundry baskets. Ah! No rugs! No tourists, either. A former mosque, stripped down, holds racks of cheap children’s clothing under its dome. This is what I imagined, a souk, a cramped labyrinth of tiny businesses with street food to sample—
köfte
(little spicy grilled meatballs), roasted corn, a cheese and phyllo pastry, kebabs, and dried figs stuffed with nuts. In the Spice Bazaar we buy garam masala and strawberry tea. Bins are heaped with dill, mint, pistachios, curry, hot paprika, black chili, turmeric, hot peppers—all the colors in the rugs. I don’t see fresh herbs at all and have a distrust of dried ones in open bins. The prized item seems to be Iranian saffron, but since it is a seasoning I don’t like, I am not tempted. We see mounds of various nuts, honeycombs dripping, heaps of dried apples, apricots, and figs—some look rather dusty.
Lokum
, Turkish delight, appears in many sugary pastels.

We decide to visit the New Mosque we glimpsed on the way here. One merchant calls out to Ed as we leave, “You, my friend, are very handsome.”

The
five of us don’t fit into a single taxi and so rendezvous at each juncture. We communicate by phone that we are lost, found, abandoned by the driver, or heading in the wrong direction. While we wait for the Di Rosas at the Galata tower, we duck out of the rain into a café where everyone is playing
okey
, tile rummy, and drinking tea. More tea must be consumed here than in England. Both teenagers and men are playing, the square chips clacking pleasantly and the wooden racks scraping the chips into piles around the table. When the Di Rosas arrive, we run across the little plaza to the tower. From the catwalk around the top, strangely accessed through a nightclub, we get a rainy 360-degree view of the city. The tower was built in the fourteenth century by the Genoese, who lined many a coast with towers. The area surrounding the tower thrived as a tight Italian enclave—is that why the five of us were drawn here? Noted especially for Florentine banks, the rich neighborhood also had Italian-style stone houses and piazzas. The Ottoman sultans feared the Venetians but valued the rest of the Italians. The Galata area represents so well the mix of cultures that was intermittently encouraged by the Ottomans. Jews, Greeks, Croatians—so many came together in the city and lived, more than in most, in mutual respect and harmony. The level of tolerance is inspiring, but sometimes the sultan simply stamped his foot, a signal to execute the bore.

I am devouring Philip Mansel’s
Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453–1924
. How talented you have to be to write the cramped and twisted history of Istanbul as a page-turner. This book captivates me night after night, building, subject by subject, a world like no other. Istanbul—the most multinational city, the quintessential crossroads of east and west, violent, poetic, melancholy, raucous, fleshy, austere, rapacious, sublime—this seems to me the most fascinating city on earth. The city’s saga through time not only crowds the brain with contradictory information, it challenges chronological development with disruptive acts and with backward and forward movements in time.

“The city is all about water,” Ed says. Yes, that’s true. We inch all the way around the tower, and Istanbul appears as a low abstracted gathering of domes with minarets piercing the sky. Only muted colors—no hint of harem wives killing off their innocent sons who might seek to rule over the other sons. No cast-off concubines stuffed into barrels and thrown into the Bosporus. A city the color of tinsel in the rain, the mysterious waters holding it aloft for our speculation.

The highlight of our day is the Suleyman Mosque and its cemetery, where the gravestones are tall slabs of curvaceous marble carved with floral and vegetal designs. No living figures were allowed. Fulvio interacts with those usually avoided so we have a long visit with a shoe shiner—Istanbul is full of fabulous shoe shiners with brass stands—who even manage to polish tennis shoes. Isn’t it a bit odd to have your shoes shined in a cemetery? Old trees shelter and cool the paths among the stones. The dead are the same everywhere, commanding an aura of peace and tranquillity. The mosque, too, seems especially peaceful. Outside, stools along the wall provide places to sit in front of a font and perform ritual cleansing if you are going inside to worship. Mosques are carpeted, often in the repeating pattern of a small prayer rug, which gives each worshiper his own space. Your shoes are left at the door, although at some mosques you are given a plastic bag so you can carry them. Just inside, a partitioned section behind a carved wooden screen designates where you pray if you are a woman. You may see, through a scrim, but not be seen. I find these erasures, even before Allah, hard to fathom. I suppose that women would, if free to prostrate themselves like the men, distract attention from worship. As tourists, Aurora and I cover our heads to enter mosques with the new scarves from the Grand Bazaar. The late afternoon call to prayer begins while we are on the mosque grounds and electrifies us as we comb the neighborhood of wooden Ottoman houses in search of a taxi. Soon we run out of pavement and find ourselves in a squalid neighborhood with many collapsed houses. I have never been in a city with so many houses that have simply fallen onto themselves. Near the hotel, near the Hippodrome in prime tourist territory, you see these Ottoman houses in piles. Our street is dwindling when finally we see downhill to the right a busy road.