You Are Always Safe With Me (2 page)

Izak stood behind Lilly’s chair and bent forward over her shoulder to lay down a platter of spinach-stuffed pastries. The hairs of his underarm were inches from her eyes. She registered an impulse (not even an impulse, a shadow of a thought) to lean her face against the inner skin of his upper arm, to rest her cheek against that muscle.

His arm brushed her shoulder as he moved behind her. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, losing herself to the endless rocking of the boat, the wheeling of birds in the sky, and the smell of the sweat of men.

When Lilly and her mother, Harriet, first landed in Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport, a driver arranged for by Fiona O’Hara met them and drove them into the city. Yellow and white plastic tents dotted the sides of the highway. Clothes lay drying on makeshift lines strung between trees and steam rose from pots cooking over wood fires. The driver who was taking them to their hotel said to them over his shoulder, “We live outside now. Too afraid to go in building. My brother-in-law, he still buried under his house.”

“Oh, the poor man, that’s horrible,” Harriet said. Lilly was silent, looking at the back of the driver’s head, at his full head of black hair, neatly cut, at his muscular shoulders, and at the vulnerable place at the back of his neck. A man as strong as this one could be killed by one violent quiver of the earth. Many already had been.

“My daughter and I are just not going to worry about earthquakes,” Harriet said, as if obliged to explain why they were in Istanbul. “In Florida we have hurricanes, but we just take them as they come.”

Lilly placed her hand gently on her mother’s leg to stop her from saying too much. She had a tendency to chirp away in the manner of many Southern women—a reflex of being chatty and friendly.

The Turkish driver was silent, watching the road, letting them look at the city they’d never seen or ever imagined they would see: a mixture of modern storefronts and ancient mosques. The smoke of cooking food on the edge of the highway rose skyward in thin spirals. Children played on the grass and threw balls to one another. These scenes were peaceful, almost bucolic despite the lanes of traffic speeding past the makeshift homes, but Lilly had seen the earthquake photos in the newspaper at home, more than 12,000 dead, crushed in the debris of badly built homes that were flattened by the 7.8 quake. Its aftershocks had set an oil refinery ablaze, flattened overpasses and caused collisions on the highway linking Istanbul with Ankara, the capital. Mosques and minarets had tumbled, fires had broken out, rescue teams had come to Turkey from all over the world.

Was it a
decent
thing to do, to come here to vacation? At first Lilly thought it would be impossible to consider taking a vacation here in the midst of the country’s tragedy, but when she discussed it with her mother, who had discussed it with Fiona O’Hara, she was partially convinced it was a good thing for the Turks. They needed tourist dollars if they were to survive at all. Fiona had convinced Harriet they should fill their pockets with Turkish lire—a million lire was worth only about three dollars. “We should spend millions in Turkey,” Fiona had said. “In fact, we must.”

*

Their room in
The Meritorious Sultan
, a four star hotel, was lush with brocade bedspreads, a thick, brightly patterned carpet, a radio built into the dresser. A gallon of bottled water waited for them on the bathroom sink. In the lobby below, where they had registered, Lilly noted that the reception desk was made of gilded marble. Crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling. Uniformed bellhops stood at their stations, yet the hotel seemed to be nearly empty of guests, its elegance a reminder of the hundreds in the city who were living in tents.

Once in their room, Lilly and her mother fell on their beds meaning to nap till dinnertime, but neither woke till morning when the call to prayer from the minarets of the mosque across the street startled them from their exhausted slumber. While her mother showered, Lilly watched out the window as men hurried toward the mosque from the busy street below.

The window of their hotel room overlooked the courtyard of the mosque where she could see the men bathing before prayer, taking off their shoes and washing their feet, their hands, their faces. To stop many times to pray during the business day was a fact of life to them, but seemed extraordinary to Lilly. Religion and its requirements were rituals that had never had a place in her life nor that of her parents. Somewhere along the way, for whatever reasons, her family had considered it an extraneous demand upon them and of little use. When Lilly was small, she had envied the local girls their Easter dresses, their hats with long ribbons down the back, their lacey dresses, their shiny black shoes. Seeing the Turkish men so eager to worship here made her wonder again what she might have missed in life, what comforts might have been denied her, what assurances of safety, eternal life, and of protection. Those who had faith seemed to move through life with more serenity than she could ever find in her heart.

*

When she and her mother were dressed, they descended in the glass elevator to have their breakfast. The dining room was divided by a waterfall cascading down marble stepping-stones. On long tables were set coldcuts of every type and dimension, surrounded by platters of melons, oranges, plums, pears. On yet another table: olives, cucumbers, tomatoes lusciously red, slices of cheese, platters of yogurt and bowls of jams and jellies.

The dining room began to buzz quite suddenly with what appeared to be the arrival of airline personnel. Women in neat blue suits and hats hurried to put food on their plates and take them to tables arranged along the steps near the waterfall. Men in crisp blue uniforms, perhaps the pilots themselves, were heaping their plates with coldcuts and fruits, cheeses and boiled eggs.

“None of that for us,” Lilly’s mother reminded to her. Their guidebook had warned unequivocally:
Eat no salads, no fruits, nothing raw and nothing not immediately cooked and steaming hot. Avoid all cold cuts, custards and fish. Never ever buy food from street vendors. Drink no water that isn’t boiled or bottled and sealed. Be sure your bottles are sealed or they might have been refilled. Only use straws still in their paper sleeves
.

Lilly and her mother each gingerly chose a seeded roll, some foil wrapped slices of butter, and went to sit at their table awaiting boiling water for tea.

“I’m really hungry,” Lilly said. “But do I dare?”

“Better not,” her mother advised. “Or we might be sorry.”

*

Walking later in the crowded streets near Ordu Caedssi, across the street from the great domed temple called the “
Tulip Mosque
,” Lilly joined the rhythm of the life teeming about her. On the street, Muslim women with scarves over their hair wore—even in the summer heat—long gray coats down to their ankles. Their dark-haired, black eyed babies clung to their coats or were cradled in their arms.

Lilly’s ever-present pang convulsed in her chest. Her time was surely past to hope for a child. Certain things she had once taken to be her birthright she now understood would most likely never be. She accepted these truths, these losses, and for the most part ignored them—but suddenly one would rush up against her and she would find herself undefended. She turned her attention to the shops they were passing. They had only two days in Istanbul and late tomorrow night they would fly to Antalya where they would board the
Ozymandias
for their cruise.

Many of the shops displayed elaborate clothing for a Russian winter—fur-trimmed long woolen dresses, heavily-padded, hooded coats, calf-high, fur-lined boots, hats with ear flaps. Lilly remembered from the map of Turkey that Russia was only a leap across the Black Sea from here.

But how many leaps away was she from her modern townhouse with its orderly closets, her neatly folded underwear, her spotless kitchen. Her whole life—from this distance—seemed immaculate and sterile to her: her academic work in folders, properly filed, her suits hanging in plastic from the cleaners (till she returned to teach), her books arranged by subject in her built-in shelves in the dining and living rooms. Could a woman’s life be nothing more than that? She had a sudden image of her home being vaporized in a sudden explosion, every last shred of clothing, every book, every academic paper, burned and rising in delicate ash funnels toward the sun. And she thought: “Would I miss any of it?”

She helped her mother down a curb and they turned a corner. On this narrow street were clothing shops—one after another. In front of them were tables at which men sat playing backgammon. They were handsome Turkish men with mustaches—young strong-looking men playing against much older men, each one sipping red apple tea from curved-rim glasses in metal filigree holders. Though they must all be waiting in front of their shops for business, business could wait if a man was studying the backgammon board. Only after the man made his move did a waiting customer dare to ask his question and then only reluctantly did the owner of the shop stand up, excuse himself, and go inside to quote prices, bargain, perhaps make a sale. His partner at the table would light up a cigarette, inhale, lean back and wait.

One older man, smoking, caught Lilly’s eye, stared at her with something like sexual appraisal in his eyes. Then, when his gaze took in the small, white-haired woman at her side, his expression changed, he smiled broadly, tipped his cup of red tea at both of them.

Lilly didn’t know why his action caused her heart to pound. His first look was sweetly lascivious, but suddenly changed to something like inclusion, like familial love. Perhaps he approved because she was taking care of her mother, holding her mother’s arm. What surprised her most was the ricocheting of her emotions here, how aware she felt of the smallest gestures, of tiny moments that opened seas of emotion.

She was touched by the energy evident in Turkey, the busy-ness of people in the streets, the insistence of those who lived here to take time to live, to enjoy life, even with the threat of the shifting earth below them.

They must be poor, these shop-owners, how could they not be? With fifteen stores just like their own on this one block? And all competing for the tourist dollars (which were not flowing now), or the Russian clothes-buyers who came from across the sea.

They passed a shop with a sign in English:
Come in! Welcome! We will make to order a piece of clothing for you in twenty minutes. BARGAIN PRICE!

In the window were mannequins wearing light summer clothes made of seersucker: sun dresses, shorts, skirts, pants and matching tops.

“Mother—I want to buy one of those outfits,” Lilly said. “I didn’t bring any long pants, and I’ll need something to cover my legs if we hike in the ruins.”

“Oh, darling, who knows what kind of quality you can get here.”

“But it doesn’t matter. Let’s give them some business. That’s what we came here to do, isn’t it?”

The shop was empty when they entered it, but a young woman came from behind a curtain and dipped her head at them in greeting.

“American?” she asked. “I thought—yes—American,” she said with a smile when they admitted they were. She proudly pointed to samples of the clothing in the window that she could sew in minutes. She showed Lilly bolts of fabric, and waited while Lilly pointed out the items she wanted: a simple shirt and pants with an elastic waist, both made of a lightweight seersucker. She chose a pink and yellow and green plaid—the fabric reminded her of the pajamas of her childhood.

Lilly rarely wore pants. She was not delicately built and didn’t look her best in them. But what did it matter here? She let the woman take her measurements, she paid her deposit. She would come back in a half hour.

Outside, the smell of roasting meat came to Lilly’s nose and she saw the source—a
dolma
stand, a round of lamb rotating on a spit, drops of fat sizzling down to the metal grate beneath. A mustached Turk was cutting off slivers of meat, and putting them in a long roll, scooping up the gravy from below. The meat shredded as he peeled it off with a carving knife—it looked pink and tender, delicious. Wrapping the sandwich in a napkin, he handed it to a young man, took his payment, began making the next one.

“I want one,” Lilly said to her mother.

“Absolutely not,” said Harriet. “There is no way I would allow it. A street vendor? With unwashed hands?”

“Oh, but I must have one,” Lilly said.

“We are not in Turkey to take foolish risks,” her mother told her.

“But why not?” Lilly said, reaching into her purse for one of the strange, astronomically numbered bills of Turkish lire. “The truth is, Mother,
why not
?” And when the man handed her the sandwich cradled in a square of opaque waxed paper, she bit into it without hesitation. The pungent juices of the broiled meat filled her mouth. The shock of how extraordinarily delicious it seemed to her brought tears to her eyes. Where was this hunger coming from? Even as she filled herself with the tender meat, the roll soaked in its gravy, she had a sense of her potent hunger. What she hungered for was not clear to her at the moment but she felt a need, hot and empty, like a hollow in her heart.

*

In the afternoon they signed up at their hotel for a tour to take them that evening to a “Bona Fide Turkish Dinner and Belly Dance Show” as well as one for the next morning to see—as the brochure said—
“Historical Istanbul: Hagia Sofia—the fifteen hundred year old Church of Holy Wisdom, the Blue Mosque with its six minarets and decorated with 20,000 blue tiles, and the Topkapi Palace, which is famous for its voluptuous and exquisite Harem, where the Sultan housed his many wives and concubines.”
They would be picked up at their hotel at eight in the morning—and be back in time for the night flight to Antalya.

“A pity we don’t have time to do it all,” Harriet said, consulting the brochure. “If we were here another day we could see the Whirling Dervishes and the Covered Bazaar and the Spice Market and the Turkish Baths and also take a boat tour of the Bosphorus. But let us at least squeeze in what we can. As your father proved to us, life is short.”