A Year in the World (44 page)

We come upon two young archaeologists surveying an area for possible excavation. They look rather befuddled in all the vegetation. Where to begin? At least there are no mosquitoes.

Stone columns lie everywhere in the mud. Enver knows where delicate mosaics lie secluded in the broken buildings. He points out Byzantine overlays that came long after the Roman temple and theatre. A bit of low aqueduct remains. We’re crawling through arches under a canopy of trees and vines. One doorway has a flat keystone.

12:30. Sailing along the uninhabited coast. Ali is making stuffed eggplant. I’m reading
The Lycian Shore
by one of my favorite travel writers, Freya Stark, who made this journey with a friend in a small boat in the 1950s. I turn to my word list, which begins with short strong nouns:
ada
, island,
daĝ
, mountain,
dere
, river,
göl
, lake,
köy
, village,
su
, water,
yol
, road.

Late in the day we are driven to Arycanda, a Lycian city from the fifth century, built dramatically like Delphi on a steep incline, with an even more dramatic setting. The site has a feeling of peace because, spread along the hill, it fans open to the view. The pines give their blue tint to the air. Splendid, splendid. These places knock the breath out of you. Empty, lonely, remote, beautiful, more than beautiful, a tantalizing atavism that displaces all my assumptions, all my prosaic everyday expectations. And in each ruin unforgettable designs or carvings. One floor has a clever mosaic floor in a fish scale pattern.

Here’s the pure stony evidence of layer upon layer of nationalities, each imprinting itself in a unique form on the site. Each recycling the previous stones, using them casually and for their own purposes. In Greece and the South of Italy and here, that moves me most. Without regard for the Greek language, a Roman builder might incorporate an engraved stone in a wall and place it upside down. Who cares what it says—it holds up the column. We’re scrambling like goats all over this stupendous site—three high baths with windows framing the view, an enormous cistern (water was always precious in these sere Mediterranean lands), then the theatre like a poem in a tight Ω (omega) shape. I scuff through piles of terra-cotta shards.

Oops,
I dropped the snorkel mask. Mustapha, formerly a sponge diver, goes down and down, but waving algae cover the floor of the sea here. He looks as natural as a seal as he breaks the surface of the water. How does he hold his breath for so long?

I am loving the water as I did when I was a child. The freedom Mustapha must feel in his strong body comes back to me. At some embryonic state the fetus has gill slits, a reminder of when we were finny and water flowed through us. I can
relax
in these old Mediterranean waters, feel at one. The resistance I usually carry, the reluctance to
get wet
, fears of being held under in baptism, the tension against water going into my lungs, all that has vanished. Play returns. To swim—a joy, as when the mothers, lined up (smoking) in hard candy-colored enamel chairs, watched while the children swam. I remember the poised attention at the edge of the high dive in my woolly suit, slender as a fish, my disdain at the boys’ cannonballing. Then the release of swanning in the air and the cut into the water, scissors through silk, down to the rough concrete bottom of Bowen’s Mill Pool. Touch the drain (you must), then flutter kick, breaking out of the cold spring water, a little otter. Then the mothers through the screen in their summer sundresses. Is my mother watching?

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 2: KEKOVA

Günaydin
, good morning in Turkish: phonetically
gun eye’den
. It means “bright day,” and these days are. The fresh sea invites me as soon as I’m awake. The salty water makes us buoyant. Floating is effortless. On a Styrofoam “noodle” I can really drift and dream. Fulvio, always more purposeful, splashes in with his snorkel every possible moment. He’s rewarded with a crusty pot found at about ten meters, just offshore. He shows it to me briefly—a small pumpkin shape—and takes it to his cabin without telling anyone else. Surely he does not intend to take it home to Italy.

Yes, Enver says, this is the typical Turkish breakfast—breads, honey, yogurt, olives, eggs, fruit, cheeses. Ed and I usually don’t eat breakfast, but now even the Italians rush to the table. I’m taking a scoop of scrambled eggs, bread spread with fig jam, a luscious peach. What a great word for bread:
ekmek
.

At Myra we see the high lavish Lycian tombs carved in the rocks. Heatstroke time—it must be 110 degrees. We look straight up at the columned houselike tombs. A cat in the shade of a carob tree has a good idea. I am thankful that visitors are prohibited to climb the rocks. Enver would be on his way up. Instead, we investigate the low tombs with rare Lycian script—Greek with the addition of several letters and embellishments.

In the town of Myra we dutifully visit the Church of St. Nicolas, packed with Turkish tourists. His life story doesn’t sound much like the jolly old Saint Nick we know at all. His church is stripped, but the choir feels very early Christian, and the remaining mosaics have been polished to a shine by feet. Feathery colors of fresco remain. I feel that I’ve been here before. In a dream? In an art history class slide lecture?

Joy,
the joy we were born with, is the sea in serene twilight, the encircling coves scented with pine. The water is Coca-Cola-bottle green or limpid turquoise, clear to the bottom where fissured light ripples across the sand. No one can wait to get back to the boat, don the masks, plunge in. I’ve read that the broken patterns of light reflected on the sea bottom are the same as the designs on a giraffe’s back, the same as cracks in dried mud. Nature limits her design possibilities. Sun glances off the water, reflecting the gray and white rock as lavender, the lichen-spotted, rain-streaked darker rock as wine-dark.

We moor late at Kekova, island of submerged harbors, tombs, and buildings. Some of us go by dinghy into the village of Kale. We’re besieged by girls, aged four to twenty-four, who sell scarves and beads along the paths and among the ruins of the Crusader castle crowning the hill above their village. No road leads into the village; hence, no cars. The poor, improvised houses all face the water. Blue morning glories scramble over fences and roofs. The harbor’s open-air restaurants (one advertises “fresh sea frood”) are festooned with impatiens, four o’clocks, and geraniums planted in big olive oil cans. Enameled blue wooden tables with red-checked cloths are arranged on docks right along the water. Flags hanging from the rafters add more primary color. A lone sarcophagus rises from the water. Ed remarks that the etymology of
sarcophagus
goes back to roots meaning “flesh-eater.” Off to the side of each structure is a makeshift covered porch with Turkish rugs and pillows around a crude table, often holding a water pipe. All news comes by boat. The girls wear the traditional loose, dark-flowered pants, but most of them top those with T-shirts printed with American university names (Boport University?) or English phrases. Each carries a basket filled with thin cotton scarves their mothers have trimmed with beads against the evil eye, or with pearls or shells. “What’s your name? You’re mine,” says one of the older girls, who starts to walk with me. Gülgün, with light green eyes and an earthy aroma, announces loudly, “She’s mine.” Other girls claim each member of our group, and I see that Ed has been chosen by a tiny girl, Nazika, with the brown eyes of a colt. He will be buying scarves. Fatima, latched onto Fulvio, says, “Americans love to shop.”

“But I’m Italian,” he says. Nonetheless he buys several for Aurora, who has stayed on board. We zigzag up the village path to the castle with its 360-degree view. Ed falls into conversation with a young Turkish doctor and his gorgeous wife. We exchange addresses, and it is nice to think we might sometime meet again. I love these moments of connection in travel.
We might be good friends
. They go with us down the back way into a field scattered with stone sarcophagi and twisted olive trees that must be a thousand years old. There the village girls await us for final reckoning. We sit down with them among the tombs and look through scarves we don’t need but buy anyway because we don’t want to disappoint them. Several mothers and grandmothers are sewing as the girls unfold their aqua, pink, and salmon scarves. Ed throws me a
help
look; he’s having an impossible time resisting little Nazika. Gülgün ties a white, pearl-edged scarf around my head in a turban, and I suddenly feel quite exotic. The girls are persistent but genuinely friendly and fun, too, like the rug merchants.

The
Cevri Hasan
sleeps at anchor in the harbor. The village, by ten, is almost totally dark, and the Milky Way, like one of the pearl-edged white scarves flung, offers once more the sacrament of beauty. I lie on deck, letting the shooting stars fall through my mind. How small the village, how big the night. All winter Gülgün must look out at the wide sea and wider sky, and her green, green eyes have taken some of the mystery of both.

Hot, hot, not a slap of wave against the bow. I won’t sleep tonight. But finally I dream and am awakened before light by aggressive roosters on shore heralding the day. They seem to be calling,
Atatürk, Atatürk
.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 3: KAS

Seher
—“dawn” in Turkish. The
seher
-sea. I need a Turkish word because the sea light I swim through before breakfast transcends my English. The light unto itself. Green eyes of my first love, iridescent green of a Roman vial, green of the emerald in the sultan’s turban. To part the radiant green waters with my own body, green moving deeper to malachite, only clear. In other coves the water is liquefied sapphire. The water—where I so easily flip and kick, scurry down with the side-to-side motion of a dolphin, and burst back into air.

Kas.
A little seaside village with pierced wooden balconies hidden by mixed pink and white bougainvillea. A large sarcophagus remains at a street juncture where a street musician leans, playing his guitar. I stop in a rug shop, how fatal for me, and exit with seven rugs—six small for bedside or bath, one about four feet square in stripes. All tribal, which I’ve slowly collected since my twenties for the humane, earthy soft colors and the spontaneity of design. These, so inexpensive I couldn’t
not
. Fulvio also found a striped tribal rug and two saddlebags. One skill of the rug merchants is folding rugs so that they take no more space than a towel.

Ali serves a fish soup with mint and lemon, the bream and grouper Enver bought in Kekova yesterday. And as always, we’re into the water, fishes ourselves.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4: KALKAN

Another village seemingly given over to tourism but pleasant and low key, flowery, with many more sleeping cats than tourists. We looked for rugs again! Irresistible. Fulvio found a Kurdish weaving that reminded me of a Paul Klee painting gone wild—dramatic, a live piece of art woven, the Kurdish dealer said, for a wedding bed. The two panels were joined together when the marriage took place. The weaving can be major art on a large wall, always exciting to look at. I love the “folk” tradition. When I held up a garment covered with shells, bells, metal flowers, and beads, Fulvio insisted on buying it for me. Enver complimented us and identified it as a circumcision garment, a Yürük piece about eighty or so years old. Bernice and Armand found a bright rug for their farm, and Cheryl and Karl picked out a runner. Fifteen-year-old Sara bought armfuls of bracelets. All our cabins are even more crowded.

Late in the morning we wind our way into the mountains to our van driver Mehmet’s home. He’s also the school bus driver, a postman, and formerly a tailor, but his village had too many. We come to no town, in terms of shops, but are let off on a dirt road with scattered houses. The buildings all seem improvised—slapped together and abandoned as easily. The fences are constructed of whatever boards and sticks could be found. Shaded by grapevine pergolas, the outdoor living areas are covered with rugs (sometimes a rug-stamped design on woven plastic) and multipatterned cotton cushions. The abundant grapes dangle so low you could take a bite. At a cleared area under spreading sycamores, a dozen men play cards and tile rummy. There’s a new mosque with stools around a fountain for washing away a layer or two before entering the mosque.

Mehmet’s house reminds me of the black people’s houses I knew back in the stone age in Georgia. Dishes, few, they store in an unpainted wooden open cabinet. On the walls six photographs, an embroidered cloth hanging from the mantel—so little, but what they have seems iconographic. His wife, Fatoş, sweet round face and intelligence sparkling in her eyes, and his mother, Ayşe, a soft walking rag doll, invite us to sit around the fireplace. With long thin rolling pins, they’re making
gözleme
, a flatbread to fill, fold over, and cook quickly on the griddle. They’re quick and skillful! They use a low round board (it doubles as a table) expressly made for the purpose. From a wooden bowl of dough, they take handfuls and form little flattened balls about the size of a tennis ball. The younger woman rolls, makes a quick one-eighth or so turn, rolls again. In an aluminum pan she’s mixed beet leaves, parsley, mint, and scallions. She sprinkles this over half of the big white circle of dough, then sprinkles on some feta and red pepper, folds it over, and crimps down the edges. With her rolling pin she scoops it up and unrolls it on a metal disk in the fire. Again, just the right size. Her mother-in-law brushes on olive oil and tends to the grilling. She rolls some slightly thicker, spreads the dough with tahini and a little sugar, pulls a hole in the center out to four edges, bunches up a section, and begins to turn the dough, as in a cinnamon roll. When it’s wound around, she rolls it again. This—crisp and hot—we dip into a mixture of boiled-to-syrup grape juice mixed with tahini.