You Are Always Safe With Me (3 page)

*

That evening, after Lilly and her mother came down to the lobby to meet the bus which would take them to the “House of Turkish Delight” (“They can’t poison us there, it would be bad for business,” Harriet reasoned), they were browsing in the gift shop when the walls began to shake. The chandeliers in the lobby swung and jangled, the girls at the desk screamed.

“Aftershock,” Lilly said, grasping her mother’s arm. “Don’t run, it shouldn’t last long.”

However, a panic ensued among the hotel workers. All the employees, bell boys and switchboard operators, all the waiters and maids converged and ran toward the doors to the street. When the shaking stopped, seconds later, Lilly and her mother walked outside. They could see the hotel workers at a bank of pay telephones, frantically trying to make calls.

“The must be desperate to know if their families are safe,” Harriet said. “What a pity they don’t build safer buildings here.”

All traffic had stopped, people on the street were poised as if frozen in time. But, after a moment, the world began to move again. No caverns opened under the street cars, no fires spit from the center of the earth.

“It’s really lucky,” Harriet said, “that at home we only have hurricanes.”

Lilly and her mother heard their names called by the driver of a large van who hurried them inside and then tore along the city streets from their hotel to another, where two people got on and to another, where a single person boarded. They were delivered to the “House of Turkish Delight” which promised an “extravaganza that promises you a peek into the heart of Turkey with folk music and authentic belly dance.” Lilly, who had studied belly dance for two years in a course at the local Y, looked forward to seeing the real thing. She had loved both the music and the movement of the dance and felt it had expressed some hidden aspect of her nature that had no outlet otherwise. She and the other women in the class, two of them grandmothers, had found themselves friends as well as classmates. All of them had been pleased to find an art form that appreciated their rounded bellies, and helped them express the gentle sensuousness that the music invited.

“The House of Turkish Delight”—once they got inside—looked to Lilly like a Las Vegas showroom, with narrow tables lined in vertical rows to meet the stage floor. She and her mother were asked their nationality by a waiter who placed in front of them a small American flag on a stand. A speedily dispatched dinner was also set before them short cycles, wine, appetizers, some sort of broiled meat, sauces Lilly could not identify, vegetables she had never seen before, breads and spreads to put on them. This dinner event was costing them seventy dollars each, which was why Harriet was sure the food would be safe to eat. However, once she had her fork in hand, she looked doubtful. “Do you think they leave the meat standing out for hours?” she whispered to Lilly. “Do you think they all wash their hands back there in the kitchen?”

In between courses, on the stage, a folk troupe dressed in Turkish costume played extremely loud music, tromped around the stage and banged on drums. When coffee and a sweet pastry dessert was served, the belly dancer came leaping into view…her enormous breasts nearly falling out of her spangled bra, her tassels shaking, her coins jangling, her beads ringing.

Lilly recoiled in the blast of noise and movement, and shuddered further when the woman stepped onto their table, between the flags of many nations, the coffee cups and the dessert dishes. She spun above them, a tornado of noise and color and thunderously shaking breasts.

The others at their long table, two couples from Japan, a couple from Australia, others from England, were laughing and yelling; (while Lilly and her mother were still each nursing her glass of wine, the others had apparently consumed several bottles.) The belly dancer continued her gyrations, using more of the movements, Lilly thought, of a stripper than a belly dancer. Then she leaped to the floor, and began to tease one of the men in the group, flinging her veil over his head, jiggling her breasts inches from his eyes and then stopping to pose, provocatively, while the nightclub’s hired photographer took a picture. Then she moved on to another man, posed for another picture.

“Oh my,” Harriet said. “I don’t want my picture taken.”

“Don’t worry, Mother, she isn’t going to pose with us. She’s already figured out who will buy the photos.”

At this point, a large jovial MC wearing a silly hat began giving belly dance “lessons” on the stage, exaggeratedly wiggling his hips and saying how simple it was, that “anyone can do it.” Then, carrying his microphone down to the main floor, he walked among the tables, and invited specific women, eight of them, to come up on stage and “try it, give your fellow-travelers a little thrill.” Lilly noted that he passed her right by and chose to invite only young and very pretty women, all of whom ran giggling up to the stage.

In five minutes, he had them all wiggling their hips lasciviously, inviting applause from the audience for each woman, more applause the more wildly she shook her body (he had the women turn their backs to the crowd so the audience could assess the movement of their behinds.) He awarded a prize to the woman who shook the hardest—a souvenir belly dance doll.

“Lilly,” her mother said to her, leaning across the table. “Didn’t you once take belly dance lessons? It seems to me you could do as well as any of those women, don’t you think?”

*

They were picked up in the morning by yet another tour company van and delivered to one of the great international hotels on the Bosphorus where they were to be met by their specific tour group for the day. From the lobby of this great hotel which looked out on the water, Lilly and her mother could see the majestic Queen Elizabeth Two waiting in the harbor. The glass and chrome of this hotel was ten times more luxurious than theirs, carpeted with thick Persian rugs and decorated with the most elegant of antiques. (“Foreign money,” Harriet whispered to Lilly. “The Turks don’t run hotels like this.”)

Their names were called and they were directed to a small van with four other tourists already seated in it—a couple from Australia and a mother and her grown son from India. They briefly introduced themselves, but without much enthusiasm. Apparently having to meet a schedule, the driver, who spoke no English, pulled into traffic, and the guide began his spiel.

They sped to the Aya Sophia museum and were marched dutifully through it as their guide, in broken English, pointed out the fame of its enormous dome and how it was supported, how it used to be lit by thousands of candles (also making it a lighthouse), but whose flames eventually destroyed the building as well as burned down most of the city. He pointed out mosaics of Christ, John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary.

Lilly craned her neck and began to feel the deadness which often set in when too much culture was thrown at her, when image overlaid image and became confused in the kaleidoscope of her brain. She was not disinterested in other cultures and their history, and not averse to learning about art and architecture. But this trip had been thrown upon her, against her will. She’d had no time to study and prepare for what she might see, and, now that she was here, in the midst of it, with facts and details tumbling down on her head like a small avalanche, she wished she were elsewhere.

She longed to go outside, sit quietly on a step and watch the people pass by, watch their faces, consider their lives. That every human being on earth had a special life, a unique story, a fate through which he or she was moving was what fascinated Lilly. Everyone, just as she did, must act one role and live another private one. This guide, who made his living intoning facts—what did he really think and feel, doing this, day after day? He was now showing them a large marble pillar which had a small hole in it.

“Legend has it,” he said, “that if you place your thumb in this hole, turn it round and make a wish, it will come true. It was also said that if you put your finger in the hole and rubbed your eye, it would cure eye disease. Or spread it!” he added, laughing the canned laugh of his script.

Even so, Lilly placed her thumb in the ancient hole to touch souls with the millions of visitors who had done so before her. She made a wish. She was in a fabled land, a place of genies and flying carpets. Why not wish to be transformed?

*

They had to surrender their shoes at the Blue Mosque and tiptoe over the patterned rugs lining the enormous cavern. The light came in eerily from the 260 windows above, and the famed Iznik tiles glowed blue as they had since the 1600s. The mosque’s six minarets had caused a scandal in the ancient world, since it boasted as many as the mosque in Mecca. “The Sultan,” said the guide,” had to donate an extra minaret to Mecca to make up for it.”

On and on they marched, from antiquity to antiquity, back into the van and onto the next site, which—as it turned out—was a shop that sold jewelry. This had not been in the brochure. The guide assured his group that the store was run by friends of his and had the best values in gold and diamonds in Istanbul. They would stay here only fifteen minutes so they could see the quality and beauty of the jewelry. The Indian woman already had several gold bracelets on each arm, but seemed interested to look at more of them in the display cases. Lilly’s mother said she would like to buy some gold earrings.

“It’s a trick, Mother,” Lilly whispered into Harriet’s ear. “We’re a captive audience, the guide is going to get kickbacks from the shopkeeper.”

“Well, I thought we’re here to spend money,” her mother said. “They have wonderful earrings in the window; why shouldn’t I help out these poor people?”

*

Though the Indian woman had new gold bracelets and Lilly’s mother new gold earrings when they left the shop, their modest gold purchases couldn’t compare with what they saw at their last stop of the day: the Topkapi Palace with its display of wealth so overwhelming that it seemed almost impossible to take seriously. They passed before an 86 carat diamond, a jeweled elephant music box, a gold tea service encrusted with diamonds, an emerald pendant big as a house, an enormous bejeweled throne and the world-famous emerald and diamond “Topkapi dagger.” The three enormous emeralds on the dagger’s sheath sparkled in the light illuminating it from above.

Yes, yes, Lilly thought. But these are from worlds past, these are gargantuan excesses, these are the obscenities of wealth. How many had been killed with that dagger (or the many other weapons exalted in the annals of Turkish history) in the name of something vain and heartless? She was weary and she wanted to go back to the hotel and rest before their next leg of the journey.

Still, when they entered the Sultan’s Harem she felt a surge of amazement. There were said to be three-hundred rooms of which only forty were still open to the public. Many were small cubicles for the less important concubines, but the Sultan’s favorites and legal wives (the Sultan was entitled to four) had magnificent and ornate private rooms. The guide informed them—as they passed through the brilliantly tiled and decorated rooms—that when the Sultan wanted to be with one of his women he sent his chief black eunuch to notify the girl who was then bathed, perfumed and dressed to service him. He sent a gift, and then presented himself at her chamber. Only the most favored ever entered his own quarters. And if a child was born from the union, the woman was elevated to a high status in the harem. It was recorded that one Sultan had had two hundred and eighty of his concubines drowned when he heard rumors of a harem plot.

The guide turned a page in his notebook: “This is what a 17
^th
century Sultan wrote to his beloved: ‘
I am your bound slave, beat me or kill me if you wish. I surrender myself utterly to you. Please come tonight I beg of you. I swear you will be the cause of my illness, perhaps even of my death. I beg you, wiping the soles of your feet with my face and eyes. I swear to God Almighty, I can no longer control myself.’”

He finished reading and looked right into Lilly’s eyes. “You like?” he asked her. “To be in a harem?”

“I don’t think so,” Lilly said. “I don’t like to wait in line.”

The schedule on the
Ozymandias
alternated between peaceful mornings in the coves while the guests chose to read and sun on the deck with periods of swimming in the turquoise pillowy waters, and days of organized outings when they all boarded a tour bus at the pier’s end and were taken to ruins and tombs and amphitheaters and churches high in the hills over the seashore villages.

Harrison, not having known that some of his mother’s elderly friends would be passengers on this cruise, had arranged outings that required strenuous climbs on rocky pathways, hours of driving over pitted dirt roads, and included activities in hours of such intense heat that they’d all be close to collapse by the time they got into the bus at the end of the day.

On one of these days—a trip to see Lycian tombs—during which they had struggled over slippery rocks, tripped on vines growing across the road, been nearly assaulted by a cloud of bees swarming past, and were limp with exhaustion on the return trip, Lilly noticed that Jack Cotton came up to whisper something to the bus driver. When the driver nodded, Jack stood at the front of the bus and said “Announcement! May I have your attention?” He told everyone that they would be stopping briefly in the village at a shop that sold spirits so he could buy a case of champagne for a party that night to honor his wife’s 50
^th
birthday. His wife, Jane, blushed charmingly, and murmured that he should not embarrass her. “Not only that,” he said looking quite cocky to Lilly, looking like a man who had too much money, “I’ve arranged for Morat to cook us a special dinner tonight, no expense spared.”

“And then,” called out Fiona’s son, Harrison, not one to be outdone, “Why don’t we continue our party tomorrow night in Kas? They have a famous belly dance café there. Izak has told me about the musicians—a superb drummer and fantastic oud player. So plan that for tomorrow night’s party. The treat’s on me!” Harrison sat down, satisfied to have wrested back some control over the events.