Part 11 (1/2)

I kept those evenings to hold against days when my mind felt like a kerosene-soaked rag. Now I'll have these, too. The natural world saves me.

Everyone heads for the buses bound for the monastery where monks had to lower themselves in baskets from the sheer mountain. I get vertigo and claustrophobia just thinking of that, and Ed refuses to board a bus so soon after the long trek to Delphi. We are docked at Volos, close to where Jason and the Argonauts set sail. Dozens of cafes and fis.h.i.+ng boats line the harbor. One taverna displays fifty or so octopuses on a clothesline. Take your pick. At the dusty archaeological museum, we discover the grave stele with faint paintings revealing the faces of those long gone to more dust. And we see necklaces they wore, with wrought charms of inlaid sapphires, rubies, and etched-gold portraits. Back out in the heat, we decide to take a taxi to the village of (Makrynitsa), where thousand-year-old sycamore trees cast their immense shade over the plaza. They're as impressive as California redwoods. We visit the little Byzantine church. I'm used to lighting thin candles in churches by now, standing them up in sand. One for my aunt Mary, sick in Savannah. One, always, for my family. Protect them, please. One for all those I love, and one for the conviction I once had that red and yellow, black and white, Jesus loves all the little children of the world.

I buy a jar of pickled caper leaves, something I've never seen before. I'm tempted by dried foot-long stalks called ”tea of the mountain,” opaque dark honeys, dried mint, and oregano. Ed nudges me on. Working donkeys with men on sidesaddle plod up the hilly streets.

At a taverna under the trees, we skip the rabbit in sauce and the boiled goat, so heavy in the heat, and order instead spiced feta to spread on delicious rough bread, savory eggplant with tomatoes, and-because the platter at the next table lured us-fried potatoes, golden and light. A man at that table has finished his lunch, and his wife chats with people at adjacent tables. He takes out his komboloi and seems to go into another world. The plying of his gold beads sounds soft like water over rocks. He fingers his red ”G.o.d” stone, then each bead, rubs the red one all around, and starts over, looping the whole circle around in his hand before he starts again.

Leaving-we sail at five-we find no taxi. Oh no, we're told, taxis only come here; try the next village, only two miles. We set off in the heat and after-lunch torpor-easy to write, but we're walking down an oven-roasted paved road in August, temperature easily over a hundred degrees, with steam coming up off the asphalt. Hot wind in the aspens sounds like waterfalls, but the stony streams are dry. We're winding slowly downhill, thank Zeus, to another village-where there is no taxi. My sandals rub blisters across all my toes. My heel is bleeding. Finally we get on a bus and slowly inch down to Volos again, getting off near the harbor and walking another mile to the s.h.i.+p.

Here, at sea, I am breathing cooled h.e.l.lenic air again. The gossamer breeze makes me want to say the word aeolian. The Milky Way strews a path of grated diamonds. Off the port side the coast rises, mysterious in shadowy outlines against the sky, and on the starboard, only swells breaking against the s.h.i.+p, swells that almost break. Out there somewhere a sh.e.l.l rides the foam, bearing Aphrodite covering her b.r.e.a.s.t.s with a handful of seaweed. Tonight the sea resembles s.h.i.+ny obsidian, the calm water a mirror, the mirror into which Ed's father looked in his last week on earth and said, Who is that, and why isn't he saying anything?

Inside they're always dancing to music that goes way, way back: ”Night and day, you are the one,” I sing along. ”Listen to that, Eddie. You are the one.”

Since distances are not far, the s.h.i.+p zigzags to fill the allotted days. At Rhodes we hit the full tourist impact. Although we skip breakfast and disembark early, the streets are a human avalanche; you could be crushed. We decide to return to the s.h.i.+p and come back someday to Rhodes, perhaps some rainy February. As we retrace our steps, we see one of the gentlemen hosts sitting on the curb drinking a beer and looking dejected.

We cross to the Turkish coast and moor at Kusadasi. Back on a bus, we're en route to Ephesus, zooming past figs along the road, peach and orange orchards, and broken columns and carved blocks scattered along the way as though unremarkable. The messy nests of storks festoon chimney tops and electrical poles. If we were driving, we would stop for a basket of peaches, park under c.r.a.pe myrtles, and let the juices run over our fingers. Instead, I sip bottled water and pray that the sun does not turn us into pools of b.u.t.ter.

We make an unexpected stop at the House of the Virgin Mary. A Jewish friend told me he was unexpectedly moved by the house and the outside wall of Kleenex ex-votos, tied on for memory. I see, also, one knee-high stocking, a few rags, and scrawled notes on paper napkins, as though we are all unprepared when we want to give thanks. Inside the little house-it is almost surely only a wish that Mary lived here-the familiar candles in sand lift the gloom. The idea of Mary in her later life living in a small house near the ruins intrigues me. Maybe she had another child, a girl who climbed the dusty trees and played on the marble streets of Ephesus. As we board the bus, I hear a British tourist say, ”That was spot on.”

Ephesus-hallowed by Saint Paul and by Herac.l.i.tus. At the entrance an impish child sells thirty postcards for one American dollar. As we pa.s.s up that bargain, he says, ”You break my heart.”

”Jingle jangle,” the guide says. ”These stands are selling jingle jangle.”

Then we're walking those marble streets in a stream of other people. Several guides are lecturing in front of the famous library, after Alexandria and Pergamum the greatest in the ancient world. By now adverse to our guides, I walk around the groups, listening to s.n.a.t.c.hes of their guides' spiels. The statues are protections by Wisdom, Intelligence, Destiny, and Science, although another guide omits Science and says Love.

Medusa's blue eyes protected the Temple of Hadrian. Was this, as the guide claims, the origin of protection against the evil eye? That eye decorates the prows of boats and the doorways of houses. It is to Greece what the household shrine is to Italy. Protect this house.

Our guide lets us roam the amphitheatre after telling us in an accusing tone that Sting, in a high-decibel rock concert, cracked the theatre's foundation. ”Imagine, after all the centuries, the American causes this.” She grimaces and glares. We don't bother to tell her that Sting is English.

Where is Herac.l.i.tus' Maeander, the river you cannot step in twice? I can see only stone and tourists. For the water is already far downstream. But Herac.l.i.tus, it's not the water, it's the river, and I always step in the same river twice. The flow of the river is memory, just as the mitos, the white ball of thread Ariadne handed to Theseus as he entered the labyrinth, was the thread of memory.

The bus makes a stop at a center for rug making. A concept for tourists, but nevertheless we see that the colors of the wool are the colors of herbs and spices-saffron, bay, cinnamon, paprika, sage, turmeric. I like hearing that one coc.o.o.n yields one and a half miles of silk thread. My favorite art springs from folk tradition, and I've always loved the spontaneity of woven rugs-the little animal and human figures that interrupt a design, the abrupt changes of color when the thread runs out and the nomads have moved on to other locales with other colors available for dying the wool. I like the use of what's at hand, walnut sh.e.l.ls, rock-rose hips, oak bark, tobacco leaves, medlar. Even these bored women hired by the state to demonstrate weaving techniques must find a little magic emerging on the loom.

In the hour we have to roam in Kusadasi, we go into a couple of rug stores. One dealer says, ”I can take your money.”

At sea, tooling along the coast at night, the water looks blue, the darkest blue, a folded uniform at the bottom of a trunk. And the air in the dark-great tides of fresh sea air. The lights of fis.h.i.+ng boats blink in the distance, and I imagine the men on board playing cards, looking up at the white apparition of our s.h.i.+p pa.s.sing across their porthole. At sea, I get up early for the dawn colors reflected in the lovely, lovely water, bluer than thy first love's eyes. I could not have imagined the glancing of light on these waters. All I want to do is lean over and watch the petticoat flounces of white foam and the heaven-sent blue. The impulse to jump feels strong and not destructive but rather a joyous desire to join another element.

Bodrum, the next stop on the Turkish coast, is simply appalling. Not yet totally ruined by development, it soon will be. The streets pulse with holiday people in T-s.h.i.+rts, halters, and short shorts, drinking beer as they go. Ticky-tacky condos spread like a case of s.h.i.+ngles on the hills. I wonder why at this late date the town powers would allow such a rape of their sublime coast, the old city of Halicarna.s.sus. Isn't it obvious that development quickly reaches the point of diminis.h.i.+ng returns? Those previously drawn to the glorious place will go elsewhere. We trudge through the castle and have lunch in a waterside restaurant where garbage floats just under our table. ”Height of summer,” Ed says.

”Let's go back to the s.h.i.+p where it's cool. We can have a frozen daiquiri and go to the string quartet concert.”

”To h.e.l.l with Halicarna.s.sus.”

As we enter the Dardanelles, the color of the sea changes to green, and the green does not have the happiness of the blue. We're entering the territory of Dardano, our hometown boy. He was born in Cortona, according to legend. In his wanderings he founded Troy; then Aeneas left Troy to found Rome. Because of Dardano's circuitous history, he made Cortona the ”mother of Troy, grandmother of Rome.”

We wonder if the pillboxes along the sh.o.r.e are ”the tumbled towers of Ilium,” but no, we are pa.s.sing a more recent catastrophe in these historic waters, the site of the battle of Gallipoli. All the British pa.s.sengers move up to the bow and silently watch as we glide by. Their fathers, grandfathers, even great-grandfathers have perhaps breathed the word Gallipoli. As the captain recounts the action over the loudspeaker, the Germans stick to their novels and deck chairs and the Americans look puzzled: Gallipoli rings a bell but far away. We were not raised on stories of how the sea turned red with blood in 1915.

We awaken just in time to see the cut-out domes and minarets against the sky as the s.h.i.+p glides into the Istanbul harbor at dawn. This is the bookend to the evening sail out of Venice. The memory of arriving in Istanbul as the opaline colors spread across the sky and the city comes to life will always be worth the mobs of Rhodes and Bodrum. Our bags are by the door of our ”stateroom,” and we do not bother with breakfast. We disembark without a backward glance.

The Turkish poet n.a.z.im Hikmet was imprisoned for years in what is now our hotel. We arrive early, but our room is ready. In the dining room I see on the menu ”wine leaves,” ”clothed cream.” The gorgeous young woman server offers to read Ed's fortune in his coffee grounds. She looks at him with great solemnity and says, ”Your mother has died and she wants you to visit her grave.” We are silent. This comes out of nowhere. Since Ed's mother's death, he has not returned to his hometown.

In a magazine I read a recipe for Head Broth. It begins, scrub a sheep's head with salt and spices, rub with onion juice, wrap in parchment and roast. Undaunted, we are ready to taste Turkish food in the capital. On the first dinner menu we find soylenmez kebap-kebab that shall not be named. The waiter enlightens us; the kebab is made of ram t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es. I prefer bride's soup: red lentils and rice, with mint, tomatoes, and herbs. For dessert, gullac: sheets of pastry flavored with rose water. The waiter takes our credit card and smiles. ”I'll see you tomorrow.”

We sleep in the luxurious hotel in great comfort. Big bed, soft, and no sound of water sluicing below, threatening to rise and swamp us. Only the memory of the literary prisoner, who might have written his poems in this very room. I awaken to the call of the muezzin from a minaret. Mournful, innocent, shrill, otherworldly-a call of the wild-it stops my heart. If I were Muslim, I would prostrate myself immediately for prayer. The domes are rising suns, the minarets its rays.

On the way to Topkapi, we pa.s.s shops emitting smells of lacquer, spices, leather, straw, lanolin. Topkapi is still a wonder of the world! Those sultans! When they wanted someone executed, they stamped their feet. They sprinkled rose water on their hands. Their spoons were made of mother-of-pearl or horn, with handles inset with rubies and turquoise. The crests for their turbans were huge emeralds with plumes. I stare at the hand and occipital bone of Saint John the Baptist, a dagger with a carved emerald handle, wild dress-up clothes with crests of jewels startlingly large, water pitchers and rose-water sprinklers bedecked with pearl, lapis, and coral. The place itself is leafy and serene, with courtyards and pavilions and cool tiled fountains and delicate wall paintings. The architecture, perhaps inspired by a tent camp in the desert, feels harmonious and inviting and at the same time utterly strange and fascinating. In feeling, it reminds me of its opposite, a fine liberal arts college.

There's a long line waiting to go inside the Harem, which once was home sweet home to a thousand concubine slaves. Hardly anyone stirs in the rooms where the treasures are displayed, and I can imagine the sultan stepping into one of the lavish robes in the Royal Wardrobe and making his way to his prayer room.

This is our two-day tasting menu of Istanbul, a city that requires at least a month. Those mosques! Muslim men prostrate themselves in the courtyards, on the steps, and at the entrances to the mosques on Friday. They spill over into the street, among the parked cars. The Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia (built as a Christian church, mutated into a Muslim mosque, now a museum), the Tulip Mosque, the dozens of scattered mosques, all punctuated by the minarets, offer their domes to the sky, giving the city a soft aspect. How far back does this city travel across time? In 658 B.C. Byzas, a Greek, consulted the Delphic oracle. Where to go? he wanted to know. She advised him to settle on the banks of the Bosporus. His city became his namesake, Byzantium.

Istanbul! It is n.o.body's business but the Turks'-that is, the mysterious city does not open to the foreigner easily, though anyone will be struck by the architecture, the bazaars, the encounters with merchants and buskers who stroll around trying to la.s.so tourists into some shop. The old-quarter outdoor cafes look so inviting with low benches and tables covered with kelims. Little wheeled carts are laden with mesir, roasted corn. In the cobbled, narrow street behind Hagia Sophia, we find a row of wooden Ottoman houses built against the town walls, a quiet enclave of fountains and birdbaths, a place one could live.

Many women wear ankle-length coats of ugly gabardine over long sleeves, with gray long skirts, leggings. They must be boiling. I'd faint. This must be their choice, since many Turkish girls are in short skirts and sleeveless T-s.h.i.+rts, with bra straps showing. For the covered, only the feet are exposed. Ugly sandals, too. I bet they have on pink silk thongs and push-up lace bras. A few are masked but walk hand in hand with young children in shorts. The young wife of a rug merchant tells us, ”I like fas.h.i.+on and alcohol, and I don't want to cover myself. For what? I have Allah inside. That's what matters.”

The hawkers are aggressive. ”My brother lives in Seattle,” they call.

”Honeymoon?”

”Second honeymoon?”

”Do you want to be my first customer today?”

”I've seen you three times. We are already well acquainted.” We have to laugh at that and are then followed for blocks.

”You are going the wrong way,” one calls. They are lined up outside a shop near our hotel. Much of their banter is for their mutual amus.e.m.e.nt.

We ask our concierge for a recommendation. ”What kind of rug do you want?” he asks.

”Old, faded colors, like the one we're standing on.”

”Oh, that is for sale. The rugs we have are from a merchant we know. Go there.” And so I fall into the hands of an expert rug merchant.

We meet Guven Demer, speaker of eight languages, young and pa.s.sionate. We are no match for Istanbul rug dealers. They are performers and shrewd psychologists. They are relentless and should give lessons to international negotiators of foreign affairs. They could prevent wars. Guven, in business with four brothers and several cousins, has practiced his craft for two thousand years around the Mediterranean. After an hour he has the smell of the hunt about him. The rugs are flying through the air, the prices fly, combining with other prices, turning from Turkish billions into dollars and back again. The showroom is windowless, stacked with rugs that go back, in the heat, to the scents of camel. He begins to touch us, a tap on the shoulder, a hand on Ed's knee. Sweet tea is served, boxes of Turkish delight presented. The rugs are too bright for me, too new, and he asks for two hours, during which time he scours his contacts. When we return, the rug I had envisioned lies on the floor, and I nod and say ”Guven, it's beautiful.” It is a hundred-year-old Herez of faded blue and salmon and biscuit colors.

He turns around and around. He's a dervish. ”She likes it, praise to Allah,” and he dramatically falls to the floor in the prayer position. By the time we have bought the rug, plus two small ones and the one on the floor of the hotel, he is embracing us, inviting us home, inviting us for two days on the Asian side to see how real Turks live. He is coming to visit us in California. We walk out dazed; he had us in the palm of his hand.

”And therefore I have sailed the seas and come/to the holy city of Byzantium.” What a clunky rhyme, come /-tium, I suddenly notice. But I, too, finally have come to Byzantium, to the fabled Bosporus, to the Sea of Marmara. The word, mar, mar, has the breaking of waves in it, the oldest sound other than that of mama, mama.

Leaving Istanbul, the taxi careens along the Bosporus, hot wind blowing my hair behind my ears. We are not ”dewy,” as my southern relatives used to say, we are downright sweating. I flash on an image of Alain back on his terrace in Cortona sipping a gla.s.s of cold white wine. Then we enter the most state-of-the-art airport in the world, where we are cooled down to morgue temperature until we enter the sleeve of the plane, where it is again one hundred degrees. Everyone is emanating hot odors-oil, the wrung-out stink of lamb, rancid breaths, pungent underwear, a whiff of tea tannin, dirt. I've been to Greece and have grazed the edge of Turkey. Praise Allah. Praise Professor Hunter who called me a Maenad. Praise the Oracle. In the plane the fans blow away the smells.

Alitalia seems to take off with more confidence than other airlines. The pilot angles up as soon as the tires lift off the runway, accelerates, spirals up, and turns with brio. We are over Romania, Bulgaria. We are served our last tastes of Turkish food-little meat kebabs and fried pastries stuffed with vegetables, baklava. Then down into Fumicino and home to Bramasole, home to our green paradiso. Home to no electricity and a broken water line, a printer zapped by lightning. Rampant morning glories have vaulted onto the jasmine and across the terrace wall, the blooms, blue as the Aegean, trumpeting joy.

In a few weeks a package from the merchant in Istanbul arrives. On a small wooden loom we read, woven in a miniature rug of red and tan wool, our names and below: In Love, Guven.

Bulls, Poets, Archangels Crete and