You Are Always Safe With Me (8 page)

Such amazing images to have looming above one’s simple, almost primitive home, the operatic backdrop to the little ice cream wagon, the stage setting for two young girls edging dishtowels for their mother.

“Thank you for showing me these towels,” Lilly told the girls. “Your lace is very beautiful.” Before she crossed the road to the tombs, she bought an ice cream pop for a million Turkish lire.

*

She didn’t think her mother would try to make the climb, but Lance pulled Lilly’s mother up steep drops, offered support as she stepped from rock to slippery rock, congratulated her on her good choice of walking shoes, and pushed her up from behind when she didn’t have the strength to lift her own weight on one foot and then another.

Again, everyone was in partnership, Marianne helping Fiona, Jack helping Jane, Harrison helping Gerta. Bravely, Lilly clambered up the narrow paths and over rocks, her own hand-holds her only support, the treads on her tennis shoes her only security. She was high above the road. Below she could see the corrugated tin roof over the ice cream stand, the white top of the van that had driven them to the site, the little signs advertising beer and Coke flapping slightly on their hinges.

The others had gone ahead of her, around a bend. She stopped in front of a tomb, felt the hot wind coming from below, saw the yawning open door before her, and stepped inside. It was cooler here, smelling of rock and burned coals, empty of the bodies that had once reposed within, but full of the sense of whomever they had been, their human lives and human deaths. She recalled an engraving she had once seen on a tombstone in a New England cemetery:

Tearful again, but hidden from the others allowing herself her emotion without censure, she touched the wall with her bare hand, tried to link her soul with the souls who had passed by here, to make contact, to be part of some vast movement of life through time. More than anything, she did not want to be so alone. Why should she be, at this time of her life, alone, so irrevocably alone?

Curled asleep under her blanket, Lilly sensed a violent motion beneath her body, a bucking of her pillow beneath her head. Waves were heaving themselves against the
Ozymandias
. She lifted her head and saw that the cliffs of the Turquoise Coast were behind them and the prow of the boat was heading toward open water.

Cold spray splashed upward and dampened Lilly’s face and hair where she lay, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, on the foam pad of the deck. She could see her mother was still asleep on the narrow bench. Izak stood at the helm. As always, he was barefoot, bare-chested and wearing shorts; he seemed not to notice the early morning chill and dampness.

The sails on the masts had been unfurled and were billowing huge and white, catching the wind, driving the vessel forward. Other than the hard slap of water against the sides of the
Ozymandias
, it was quiet. The thrumming motors, to which Lilly had become accustomed, were stilled, leaving only the sound of nature’s forces.

Wrapping herself in the blanket she had slept under, she rose and walked to the helm where Izak, his eyes intense, was guiding the boat into choppy waters. She stood beside him without speaking, watching the waves, feeling the rise and fall of her own body over them with only the thin intervention of boat hull and deck between herself and the sea.

Izak glanced sideways at her. “We go to Russia, Lilly,” he whispered.

“To Russia?”

“Yes, you drive us.” He reached sideways and drew Lilly in front of the wheel, the blanket still over her shoulders. Standing behind her, he positioned her hands on the helm. With the wide wooden wheel under her hands, she felt the vibrations of the waves beating below and had a sense of the power Izak must feel when controlling the boat against the forces of wind and sea. The blanket slipped from her shoulders and Izak retrieved it, wrapping it around her again, this time holding it in place with his body as he leaned forward, placing his hands over hers on the wheel. “Just hold steady,” he said.

She glanced sideways. Her mother was still asleep, her head turned away from them.

“We go to the Black Sea,” Izak whispered in her ear. “We run away to Russia, you and me. Not such a bad plan, yes?”

*

When the sun rose, coming over the horizon like a pink flower, Lilly pulled herself away from the heated space between Izak’s arms where she’d leaned back against him in that strange, silent embrace at the wheel. She went below to her cabin, flung herself across the lower bunk and heard her blood pounding in her ears. What a state she was in; confusion, elation, pleasure, joy, insanity. Was this
not
insane, to be in love with a Turkish sailor? Surely she knew better. She must have been hopelessly drugged by the beauty of this land, made victim to a tale from the Arabian nights, flung senseless by a ride on a flying carpet.

She made herself get up, wash her face, change her clothes, comb her hair. But she was trembling and lost to a force which had penetrated her good sense, her grown-up life, her security. Where could this possibly lead, but to embarrassment and grief? Like a schoolgirl, she was overwhelmed by such a scorching attraction to Izak that she could not think. Her face, in fact, in the mirror on the bathroom wall, was flushed with color. She heard her mother come into the cabin to get dressed for the day. She would need to use the bathroom.

Lilly opened the bathroom door. Her mother said, “I couldn’t believe how seasick I was feeling, but Harrison insisted that Izak test out the sails to be sure they’re working properly. We’ll be turning back toward the coves in a few minutes. But really—I don’t think anyone will be able to have breakfast this morning, Lilly! Do you?”

*

On her way back to the upper deck, Lilly stopped at the galley to watch Morat slicing tomatoes and cucumbers. The boat was still heaving—and he had a sharp knife in his hand. “Be careful,” Lilly said to him, and he smiled, cutting faster than ever. “I teach you cook Turkish,” he said.

“I teach you cook American,” she replied, laughing.

“We have only stale bread this day,” Morat said sadly, holding up a loaf of bread, pressing it to show how hard it was.

“Why don’t you make French toast? I’ll show you how. It’s quite wonderful, almost as good as crepes.”

“I don’t know this meal.”

“Do you want me to teach you? It’s simple.”

He bowed gallantly, invited her behind the counter, made a show of turning the tiny kitchen over to her control. She told him what she would need: “Eggs, oil, milk, a big pan. As he hunted for the ingredients, holding up several wrong items, they burst into silly laughter. Izak passed by them and her heart curled into a tight knot—she was ashamed, she was pained, she was horrified. What if he thought she was engaging in some flirtation with Morat?

But Izak merely paused, interested to see what dish she was preparing. He watched as she beat eggs and milk in a bowl, asked Morat to slice the stale bread and heat the oil in a pan. Soon the fragrant aroma of French toast frying wafted up to the deck. Lance peered into the galley and said he couldn’t wait to taste it, Marianne came down the steps and said what she needed with French toast was some good old American coffee. Jack Cotton said he had a surprise, that at the last village he had bought a real American drip coffee maker and would bring it up from his cabin and they could have coffee that didn’t stand one’s hair on end.

There was no maple syrup for the French toast, only green fig jam, and sugar cubes they could crush with their spoons. But as the
Ozymandias
headed back to port, now with Barish at the helm, everyone congratulated Lilly for the great breakfast.

*

They were sailing back to reach a port where some supplies were required for the boat. The names of the towns where they had been and where they were going, Antalya, Kas, Kalkan, Patara, Letoon, Fethiye, Oludeniz, Tlos, faded in and out of Lilly’s mind. She saw all of their precious and remarkable ruins as one great mural painted on the ceiling of her mind. In all of the towns they’d visited, guides led them to climb on jagged rocks, sit in great amphitheaters, examine mosaics, exclaim over Roman baths. Sometimes they would sit on the rocks of an ancient city overlooking a great valley, with no sound but the wind in the high grasses. The lack of other tourists was one of the great pleasures of being here, in the quiet, having the peace to explore at their own pace.

Local children often followed them, offering sprigs of mint for sale, saying “Buy, please, please, will you buy?” begging Lilly to smell the leaves, and to—please, please buy. Lilly had no coins in her pocket, only the million lire notes, whose worth confused her. The children were, every one, exquisite: dark luminous-eyed, olive-skinned beauties.

She saw children herding goats, one child and three or four brown or gray animals with shaggy beards. Bells rang around the animals necks as they climbed among the rocks and grazed. She had fantasies of seeking out the parents of such a child, begging to borrow him, to be allowed to take him home, to educate him, raise him in comfort, in
shoes!
She would return him, of course, but much later, after he’d forgotten the mosaics, the sprigs of mint, the sounds of goat bells.

She had not been vulnerable to such imaginings for so many years! She was surprised at the images that filled her mind here. The space in her head that was so often rigid with schedules, papers to grade, appointments to keep, projects to finish, was open now to unexpected longings. At home, when she had leisure time, she’d fill it with concerts, movies, programs on the educational TV channel. Sometimes she’d indulge herself in front of the TV with a pizza or a take-out dinner of shrimp and honey walnuts from the Chinese restaurant. She’d felt safe in front of her television until one day she’d accidentally come across a program called “Baby Story” in which a couple was filmed in the days before their baby’s birth. The camera followed them through a trip to shop for baby furniture, to the baby shower, to the workshop teaching baby-massage, to the class rehearsing the steps of labor and what to expect in its various stages. In the last ten minutes of the half hour show, the woman was shown in a hospital bed, her legs apart, a baby descending in her birth canal, a nurse yelling “Push, push, push!” and her husband whispering encouragement into her ear.

Lilly could still recall her astonishment, to have come upon this private moment of someone’s life on the TV in her own living room. She was transfixed by the childbirth scene which—in movies of the past—was always depicted by women rushing into a room with towels and pots of hot water, by men sitting dejectedly outside the room while a woman’s screams could be heard throughout the house. Then there would be the good news or the bad: “She’s gone, it’s all over, I’m sorry,” or “It’s a beautiful baby boy. Or girl.”

This program hid nothing (although the camera angle was mostly modest and shielded the woman’s genitals from view.) The baby’s head was shown emerging, the woman’s face, screwed up to push the baby out, was displayed in its extreme contortions, and her grunts and screams (“Get it out, get the baby out!”) were recorded without flinching from the truth. The baby, finally ejected in a rush of bloody fluid, was laid by a nurse on the mother’s breast, and the woman’s face was transformed instantly into an expression of calm, madonna-like ecstasy as she touched the wrinkled forehead of her newborn. Tears flowed down her cheeks, her husband kissed her with tears in his eyes. The baby’s rosebud lips moved, its eyes opened to take in the world. Then it cried, a piercing desperate comment on its new state of life.

On that day, Lilly had shut off the television and fallen on the couch, sobbing violently, without constraint, making as much noise as the woman in labor, not caring whom she might offend or how she might frighten herself into seeing how deep was the cauldron of loss and pain in which she swam.

*

For most of the day, the
Ozymandias
—after its ocean sailing—was moored in another of the sparkling coves that dotted the southern coast of Turkey. After the morning’s rough trip, the guests were happy enough to sunbathe, swim, sit around the table and talk. There was an underwater ruin called “Cleopatra’s Baths” to which some of the guests swam. The guidebook suggested that when Cleopatra visited the Anatolian coast, her friends built her these baths as a present. The locals liked to claim that her great beauty was due to the minerals found in their water. “At the bottom of the sea, where the ruins are, before the winds pick up, you can see the sand moving which means hot springs are still coming up today.”

Marianne wanted to swim in the baths, and even Lilly’s mother was willing to go, accompanied by Lance who gallantly swam beside her all the way. On her return she reported that there was almost no effort required for her to stand still in the water and rest; no treading, no paddling. Just being a buoyant human being was flotation enough. Lance remarked that Harriet was “twice as beautiful” now that she had swum in Cleopatra’s Baths.

Lilly didn’t swim, though. She sat with Gerta at the long wooden table on the deck and looked through the box of scarves Gerta had bought from the last group of children who had clambered aboard the boat, selling their family’s wares.

“This one is for my mother, this one is for my aunt. And this one,” she said, holding up a pink and gauzy cloth, “is for the woman having my baby.”

“You must be very excited,” Lilly said. “To know your baby’s birth is so soon.”

Gerta bowed her head and blinked her long lashes. “I don’t know,” she whispered, looking around for Harrison.

“You don’t know what?”

“If I’m excited. It doesn’t feel as if it’s really going to be my baby.”

“But it will be. Of course it will be. Isn’t it your egg and Harrison’s sperm? That’s what he told us all.”