11

Ablutions

Emotionally exhausted, fanis returned home from Murat Aydın’s house on Friday evening and fell asleep on the couch. He didn’t awake until the sunset call to prayer ascended the hill from Kılıç Ali Paşa Mosque. A few seconds later, the muezzin of Karabaş Mustafa Ağa Mosque began his call to prayer, and then the loudspeaker of Tomtom Kaptan picked up the chant and finished it, leaving the distant hum from some other mosque, farther away, to carry on the relay. Fanis rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling until the last traces of the call to prayer had faded and he could hear nothing but street noise and seagulls squawking.

The phone rang. He was so disoriented that he picked up and said hello.

A sinister voice asked, “Who’s there?”

Fanis hung up and took the phone off the hook: that was the only way to deal with such callers, unless you wanted to risk involving the police. He turned off the hallway light, sat down in the outward-facing armchair of the oriel, lifted a corner of the heavy velvet curtain, and peered out.

Across the street was a stately, gray–mauve apartment building with new window boxes that had already become coffins for unwatered geraniums. Through the side pane of the first floor glowed a red lamp. The gallery windows of the ground floor were circled by holiday garlands. It was still lit at half past nine in the evening. Suddenly Fanis felt short of breath—not because he suspected that the telephone voice inhabited that house, which was too gentrified and expensive to harbor common criminals but because of a certain fortuity: the lit windows coincided exactly with those of the street’s few Muslim apartments on the fateful night of the riots, just as he had seen them when he peered out of his darkened living room. As naïve as the other Rums, he had considered it wise to let the storm pass in darkness. The others, however, had been better informed: they’d been told to leave their lights on so that the pogromists would know that the houses were Muslim.

Fanis poured himself a shot of sour-cherry liqueur and returned to his perch. The next apartment building had a modern, two-tone design of light and dark paint like the braids of candy ribbons. Half a century ago, the ground-floor shop had been occupied by a quiltmaker. On the night of the riots, a watchman had passed through Faik Paşa Street before the mob. He had written tamam on the building’s door in chalk. Tamam: okay. The mob had passed the quiltmaker’s shop as if it hadn’t even existed.

Fanis heard a loud cry from somewhere nearby. In European or American cities, the noise might have passed without much more than a few raised heads. People might not have interrupted their viewing of the evening news, their phone calls to place dinner takeout orders, or their internet surfing. But in Çukurcuma, curtains were drawn from the side panes of almost every oriel. Fanis dropped his. He thought: everyone had seen; everything had been seen.

Another shout—gâvur—resounded not from the street, but from his memory. Tamam was the word for some. Gâvur, infidel, was the word for others. Fanis fumbled for the lights. He wondered whether that caller kept bothering him because he was old and alone, or because they considered him a gâvur. Fanis had cantored in Rum Orthodox churches for decades. While doing his military service, he had prayed in the mosques of Erzurum, where there were no open churches. He wondered if God existed at all and if there would be a hereafter waiting for him when he no longer had the strength to struggle with this life, but, God or no God, he would always be gâvur.

He was about to close the curtain when he noticed that the rental sign had been removed from the gray–mauve building’s garret window. There was both light and movement inside. Through the fluttering curtains Fanis spied the silhouette of a solid woman with curly dark hair. Could it be?

A few minutes later, the wind blew the curtains high once again, and Fanis imagined that he saw Selin. “Dr. Aydemir was right,” he said out loud. “I’m a deluded old man who sees whatever he wants, wherever he wants.”

He went to the bedroom and groped through the nightstand drawer. Somewhere there had to be a few remaining sleeping pills, even if they were expired. He knew he shouldn’t take them after drinking, but he had to shut out his hallucinations at any cost. He found a half-pill that had loosened from its bubble pack and nestled into a corner of the drawer. He swallowed it with the water that he always kept by the bed, double-checked that the windows and doors were properly locked, then turned on the balcony light and all the lamps in the living room, kitchen, and his late mother’s bedroom. He didn’t even remember lying down before a drug-induced coma overtook him.

Fanis awoke groggy on Saturday morning. He sat up, rubbed his disheveled head, and restored the phone to operation. Three seconds later, it rang.

“Fanis,” said the high-pitched voice. “Fanis, is that you? It’s me, Gavriela. I’ve been trying to reach you all morning. Are you all right?”

“Fine, fine. I was just out running errands.”

“Get a mobile phone, will you? Listen, the whole gang’s going to Antigone tomorrow. Aliki invited us to her cottage for lunch. We’d like you to come, but I suppose you have to cantor?”

“I can have somebody fill in for me.”

“Perfect. Be at the quay, outside the ticket office, at a quarter past eleven.”

After uttering the usual string of salutations—“Ciao-ciao-yeia-yeia-bye-bye”—Fanis hung up and threw himself directly into the shower, but he couldn’t wash off the haze caused by longing, sour-cherry liqueur, and the sleeping pill. His transformation back into the mature gentleman known throughout Pera for his dapper appearance would require more than just a shower.

Although Fanis hadn’t visited his neighborhood hammam since it raised its prices to the tourist levels of the Old City, he knew that its attendants were some of the only people who could improve his desperate situation. So, he readied a kit of towels, flip-flops, and a boar-bristle exfoliation mitt and left the apartment.

As soon as he was out in the street, he spotted the sixty-something matron who owned the top three apartments of the blue mansion opposite his building. “Good morning, Madame Duygu,” he said. “You seem rather busy.”

She looked up from the dossier she had been perusing. “Mr. Fanis, what a lovely surprise!”

“You are the lovely surprise. Did I see that you rented the garret?”

“Yes, finally. An ‘artist’ took it, but who cares what they call themselves as long as they pay the rent and don’t disturb anyone? Moving in today. That’s why I’m here.”

Fanis wanted to ask further questions, but it would probably take the fun out of the evening’s window-watching, so he plodded up the road to the Galatasaray Hamam, a monument built in 1481, just twenty-eight years after the fall of the City to Mehmet the Conqueror. Fanis paid in the wainscoted entryway and asked the pot-bellied male receptionist if he could have Hüseyin as his attendant.

“Hüseyin?” said the receptionist. “He retired a decade ago and moved to Ankara to live with his daughter.”

Fanis grumbled. Now that he had already paid the fee listed in euros, which was exorbitant, despite the significant “local” discount for which he had haggled, he wouldn’t even have his old tellak to scrub him down. “What about Isa?”

“Today’s your lucky day, Uncle. Isa only works on Saturdays.”

“Nothing’s like it used to be,” said Fanis. Then he shocked himself by uttering a vulgar expression: “Everything’s gone to shit.”

Fanis left his shoes in the vestibule with instructions that they should be polished to a shine while he bathed. He put on his flip-flops with the receptionist’s help and took a key to one of the ground-floor cubicles, where he removed his clothing and wrapped his lower half in a woven towel. Then he caught his reflection in the mirror: he looked like one of the swarthy, bulging, wrinkly Rum gnomes who had filled the baths half a century before. It had been at least twenty years since Fanis had been to the hammam. He wondered what he had been thinking when he decided to return. Sleeping pills: they impaired one’s judgment.

Fanis took his toiletries in hand, stepped into the cold room, and seated himself on one of the high-backed chairs arranged around the central fountain. Presently a man with an even bigger belly than the receptionist’s entered through the heavy wooden bath door. His triangular breasts were as large as a woman’s, and his double chin sagged in folds like the rest of him. His chest was covered with gorilla-like hair, but Fanis could see, when he raised his hand to salute, that his underarms were shaved.

“Isa?” said Fanis. “Is that you?”

“Unfortunately so,” said a gruff voice that Fanis would have recognized anywhere.

The two men cheek-kissed and laughed at each other’s bodies. Fanis patted Isa’s belly. Isa rubbed Fanis’s balding head.

“I can’t believe it,” said Isa. “Fanis Paleologos, the comfort of every woman in Pera with an absentee husband. Still getting some?”

“You know I never talk about women. And you?”

“Not for a long, long time, Captain. Sad, isn’t it?” Isa offered his arm and led Fanis into the white marble antechamber. “Did you want to do the first rinse-down yourself?”

“No, Isa. I’m not taking any risks with slipping. I have a new—never mind. I’d appreciate it if you’d do it.”

“A new pistachio?”

“Please. You know I would never insult a woman by referring to her as a pistachio.”

Isa filled the bronze dish and repeatedly doused Fanis as if he were a small child. Fanis surrendered to the warm water and to the carroty scent of the hammam’s soap. Sometimes his young acquaintances wondered why anyone would go to a bathhouse. They couldn’t understand the pleasure of having one’s back, hair, and even the insides of one’s ears washed by another human being. Neither could they appreciate the relaxation brought by the maternal care of another, even if that other was a fat and hairy man.

“Well, whatever kind of nut she is,” said Isa, “at least you’ve got her.”

“Not yet. That’s partly why I’m here. I need to freshen up. The other reason is that I’m confused.”

Just then a familiar-looking old man passed through the antechamber on his way to the warm room, followed by two younger men quacking away like ducks. They had to be Americans. The older man greeted Isa in Turkish. That voice, thought Fanis. That wobbly gait, so familiar . . . could he possibly be . . . the husband of Sophia Papadopoulou, the nursery-school teacher who, forty-three years prior, had proven the truth of the Turkish saying “gündüz öğretmen, gece fahişe,” teacher by day, whore by night? People said that Polyvios Papadopoulos, Fanis’s former classmate, had flown into a violent rage when he found out about his wife’s affair. Luckily for Fanis, the disclosure had occurred in faraway Chicago, and Papadopoulos had been unable to carry out his threat of revenge.

Fanis took a better look at the man through the open door: bump in the back, skinny legs, flaccid dead-chicken skin, disgusting body hair. Did Polyvios have a bump in his back? Fanis thought back to his school days. He remembered Polyvios hunching over his desk and Miss Evyenidou coaxing him to sit up straight. Good God. Fanis’s heart was now beating dangerously fast. Would Polyvios attack him? And would Fanis, unable to endure the stress, have the ischemic stroke now, in the hammam, all because of his past sins with Sophia Papadopoulou?

“Go attend to those fellows,” Fanis said to Isa. “I’d like to have a good sweat in the hot room. Alone, if you can manage it.”

“Sure thing, Captain.”

Fanis covered his head with a towel, tiptoed through the warm room to the cubicle-like hot room, and lay down on the marble bench. Sweat poured from his forehead, armpits, chest, thighs, and groin. He began to feel dangerously drowsy, but he knew that Isa would fetch him if he stayed too long. He drifted into sleep and felt Sophia Papadopoulou’s long black hair, which she hadn’t cut after she married. It tickled his face and shoulders. Before their affair began, he had fantasized about how her hair would cover him when they made love. Once things got going, however, Sophia’s tresses made Fanis uncomfortably hot. While making love he often had to shout, as he did then in his dream, “Tie it up!”

He swatted at her hair with such energy that he emerged through the layers of sleep and realized that Isa was telling him that it was time for his scrubbing.

“Are they gone?” Fanis asked.

“Taking cold showers before they come in here,” Isa replied.

Fanis sat up. “Let’s go quickly, then.”

“A husband?”

“Probably. What’s his name?”

“Poly-something.”

“Definitely a husband.” They passed into the warm room. “Keep my face covered while you work, will you, Isa? I don’t need a thrashing today.”

“As you wish, Captain.”

Fanis stretched out on the heated platform in the center of the room. He listened to the splashing and running of water, the metal clank of dishes on basins, and the music of the foreign languages spoken by the tourist bathers. He reveled in the boar-bristle-mitt scrubbing of his thighs and back, but when Isa arrived at the right shoulder blade, Fanis squealed.

“Sorry,” said Isa. “That side was always numb.”

“Things change,” said Fanis.

After the scrub down, Isa wrapped Fanis’s waist in a dry woven towel, draped a fluffy white towel over his shoulders, and wrapped another around his head.

“Where are they now?” Fanis asked.

“Still in the hot room. Fat Mehmet will take care of them. Let’s go have our tea.”

Fanis and Isa returned to the cold room. Isa turned two chairs inward toward the fountain.

“Still in the same place?” Fanis asked, easing himself into the chair.

“No. Can’t afford Pera anymore. Now I’m living further up, but who knows? They’re building there, too. Soon I may have to go somewhere else.”

“You’re as restless as the Rums. We were driven out of Anatolia. We left the Old City. Soon we’ll disappear from the earth altogether. Tell me, Isa, after your wife passed, may she rest in brightness—”

“Amen.”

“—did you find another woman?”

“To sleep with, yes. To marry, no. You?”

“The same, but now I want to marry. I’m sick of being alone.”

“Got one in mind?”

“That’s just the thing.” Fanis and Isa took their teas from the attendant’s tray and stirred in their sugar cubes. “I’m pursuing a stunning Rum woman who has just come back to the City from America. Pretty, intelligent. A good soul. There’s another fellow after her, nice enough, but hardly competition for an old pro like me. My suit is going swimmingly, but a complication has presented itself.”

“A complication?”

“A feisty violinist. The problem is that she’s not Rum, and please don’t misunderstand me, but I was set on finding one of my own. Yesterday, however, she gave me her phone number.”

“Good-looking, I assume?”

“Fetching.”

“Nice quinces?”

“An entire balcony.”

“Age?”

“Forties. Older than I’d like, but—”

“Maybe that’s why the feeling’s returning to your back. Love healed you.”

“No,” said Fanis. “That’s something else. If I tell you, you’ll think I’ve gone mad or, worse yet, senile. And I’ve already broken my vow never to discuss women, which shows that I’m not as sharp as I used to be.”

“I’ve always thought you were crazy, so it won’t make much of a difference. Tell me.”

Fanis reached his hand into the fountain’s trickling water and whispered, “It’s the god Hermes. He’s told her that she must send me on my way.”

“Who?”

“The nymph Kalypso. I saw it in a dream.”

“You’re lucky I’m more pagan than Muslim,” said Isa.

“And I’m discovering, as the years pass, that I’m just as pagan as I am Christian, but don’t tell anyone: I want to be buried properly, with all the blessings of the Orthodox Church.”

“Of course. But can I ask you a question? Why do you care if the violinist is Rum or not?”

“Because I want to feel home again.”

Isa took a sip of tea. “Listen. We’re lucky to feel anything at our age, so if the violinist does it for you, you ought to go for it. As far as I’m concerned, if a pullet with nice quinces gives me her phone number, I don’t care if she’s a Turk or a Martian.”

“Yes, you have a point. But women aren’t interchangeable, Isa. You have to decide which one you can really love, which one will really love you.”

Isa patted Fanis on the shoulder. “Good luck with that,” he said. “Now get going before your nemesis is ready for his tea, and get your ass back in here before I retire.”

Fanis dressed, gave Isa a handsome tip, and exited into the back alleys of Galatasaray. Having retraced his steps down Turnacıbaşı Street, he turned the corner into Ağa Hamamı Street and found Ali the barber, in his habitual white jacket, leaning against the doorjamb of his shop with a glass of tea in hand.

“No customers on a Saturday?” Fanis asked.

“Welcome, Uncle,” said Ali. “It’s lunchtime. Give ’em fifteen minutes and my shop’ll be full again. Where have you been?”

“I was trying to let my hair grow so that it would cover the bald spot better, but it’s not working. I’m a mess, and I need you to fix things.”

Ali made a half-bow and stood aside so that Fanis could take a seat in the red faux-leather chair.

“By the way,” said Fanis, staring at the photos of Atatürk on the wall above the mirror, “I sent a young friend of mine here for a haircut. Tall fellow, Rum. Has he been in?”

Ali swung the polyester cape over Fanis’s head. “Stopped by this morning to make an appointment. Was supposed to be in half an hour ago for his cut.”

Perfect, thought Fanis. I’ll have a chance to find out exactly what’s going on with Daphne.

Bits of hair flew this way and that. Fanis, feeling more and more bald, closed his eyes. When Ali had finished, he opened and beheld the bishop sitting in the waiting chair. He was reading a copy of GQ magazine. “Your Eminence,” said Fanis, as Ali spread cream on his cheeks with a fine badger brush. “I didn’t know that you, too, were a fan of Gentlemen’s Quarterly. By the way, I love your shirt.”

“Hüsnü Mirza made it for me this week. You know, the tailor recommended by Kosmas. You should try him.”

Fanis did not respond because his straight-razor shave had already begun, and the slightest move could have resulted in a severed jugular. Finally, after an anointment with perfumed lotion, Fanis said to the bishop, “I can’t tell you how glad I am to see one of my own.”

“Although we are few, we are infinite,” said the bishop.

At that moment Kosmas came through the door, out of breath and yet looking strangely triumphant. “Elder,” he said, nodding to the bishop. “Mr. Fanis. Mr. Ali. Good afternoon.”

Kosmas sat down beside the bishop and began fanning himself with a newspaper. “Sorry I’m late, Mr. Ali. I was out until three a.m., and then I was a little distracted at the pâtisserie. You know how it is.”

Had Kosmas been out with Daphne? That, Fanis supposed, was inevitable. The important thing, however, was not whether they had seen each other, but whether things had gone well.

“Out drinking raki with the boys?” said Fanis, while Ali massaged his shoulders.

“No,” said Kosmas, with an uncontrollable smile. “I had a date with Daphne. I’m a little concerned about how it went. She’s different, you know, one of us but not entirely like us.”

“Yes, I did notice a certain something,” said the bishop. “But she’s a nice young lady, and nice-looking, and a teacher, which is a calling rather than a profession.”

“She has a boyfriend in America,” said Kosmas.

“So?” said the bishop.

“You don’t see the boyfriend as a problem, Elder?” said Kosmas.

“Of course it’s a problem,” said Fanis, as soon as Ali had finished trimming his nostril hairs. “You should be respectful of the other man and desist.”

The bishop turned toward Fanis and raised his bushy eyebrows. “And you would know all about that, Fanis, wouldn’t you?”

Fanis shot the bishop a playful smirk, then returned his attention to Kosmas. “Did you kiss her?”

Kosmas switched places with Fanis. “No. You told me not to. But something did happen.” Kosmas leaned his head into the sink. “I had some chocolates boxed up for her at the Saryan, and when I gave her the package, our fingers got mixed up in the ribbon.”

“And then?” said Fanis, sitting bolt upright in the waiting chair.

“That’s it. But that finger mix-up was almost as sensual as a kiss, like our hands were making love. I’m pretty sure she felt it too.”

“It’s best not to jump to conclusions,” said Fanis, slouching back into his chair. He needed to disguise both his jealousy and his excitation with a relaxed stance. “Otherwise you get carried away and make hasty moves.”

“I’m glad we’re onto this subject,” said the bishop. “It’s something I’ve wanted to talk to you about for some time, Kosmas. Ever since I was ordained, my absolute favorite thing has been the first presentation of an infant when it is forty days old. I take the baby in my arms and carry it to the front of the church. Most of the time it keeps its eyes on me, except for the moment when I pass beneath the dome. Absolutely every baby I’ve ever presented shifts its gaze to Christ at that moment, as if it knows it is meeting its maker.”

“Thank you for sharing that, Elder,” said Kosmas. “But I don’t understand what it has to do with me.”

“You haven’t had children yet. You haven’t married. I’d like to present your children before I die.”

“I’m working on it,” said Kosmas.

“He’s not the only one who might have children,” Fanis muttered. He stood, put Ali’s money on the cashier counter, and made a move for the bishop’s hand.

The bishop slapped his wrist and said, “See you tomorrow?”

“Unfortunately not. I’m going on a little outing to Antigone. But I’ve arranged a substitute.”

“So you’re coming, too?” said Kosmas, while Ali trimmed his wet hair.

“Excuse me?” said Fanis.

“Daphne invited me last night. But she didn’t say anything about you.”

Just fabulous, thought Fanis. But perhaps it’s for the best. Let Daphne see how we compare.

“How nice,” he said. “Oh, and Kosmaki, one last bit of advice. It’s my ultra-secret weapon. I’ve never told anyone, but because I see you as a son, I’m going to share it. You know how I told you not to kiss a woman on the first date? That’s only part of it. You really shouldn’t kiss her for at least—and I mean at least—ten dates. That way, sometime after ten, she’ll be so hungry she’ll tear your clothes off. You won’t have to make the smallest effort to get her into bed.”

That is, Fanis said to himself, if she hasn’t yet grown bored of you, given up, or decided that you’re gay.

Fanis left the shop and walked home at a brisk pace. He was so absorbed by his analysis of the Daphne situation that he forgot all about his new neighbor. He cursed the moving truck blocking his street and stormed straight upstairs. Without even peering across the way to the garret, he put Sinatra’s Swing Easy! on his 1955 Magnavox Consolette, turned up the volume, and paced the living-room floor. It was always while listening to the Sultan of Swoon that he came up with his best plans and strategies.