Cathedrals of the Flesh (4 page)

'What do you mean, "as long as you want to stay there"?' Marina asked curiously.

'I mean if I decide to stay another week. Then, through one of Baksim's uncles, I met an architect and historian who wrote
a history of Turkish baths and we're going to have lunch tomorrow.'

'This is all good, but you need to concentrate on living, breathing hamams, not people excavating or writing about baths.
You need to visit at least two a day. Remember, there are sixty-seven registered hamams in Istanbul.'

'Got any bank weekends coming up?' I asked.

'In fact, I do,' she said, laughing. Marina had recently left her job in Moscow and taken a position at a London investment
bank. Almost every weekend seemed to be surrounded by a bank holiday on Friday or Monday. Her suitcase was always in the hall;
any time Marina had a three-day weekend she left the country. In fact, she traveled so often and to such exotic, borderline
undesirable places that I sometimes wondered if she weren't a special agent or spy, not to mention that she liked to dance
around in her underwear to the James Bond theme song. 'I could come over for a long weekend next week.'

'Perfect. But Kemal said I'm not supposed to have any slumber parties.'

'What?'

'You've got to meet this guy. I can't tell if he's a complete charlatan or a misunderstood artist. In any case, he's my landlord
and I kind of like him.'

Earlier that morning and the day after we barged in on the tea party, Baksim and I toured the pink house alone. 'Wait, Kemal
wants me to live in this whole house?' I asked, incredulous. On a cobblestone lane opposite the Ortaköy mosque, we had entered
the chaotic mind of Kemal Orga. The basement kitchen was designed to look like the galley of a cruising yacht - a bilge pump
toilet, plates moored to the walls using special vertical dish racks, and nautical instruments hanging from the rough cement
walls. The next level was a small unlivable drawing room and dining room with an outoftune miniature piano, lumpy yellow furniture,
and a grammar school writing desk strewn with antique fountain pens, inkblots, and letters in Turkish. It looked like an Agatha
Christie crime scene. Painted across the wall in blue paint: 'the right feeling.' The third level resembled the ideal living
quarters of a wealthy Oxbridge student circa 1910: French doors opened onto an enormous high-ceilinged, fustily furnished
room with exposed brick and huge closets constructed out of tall bamboo reeds. This would suit me for the next ten years.

'One more floor,' said Baksim. 'You still haven't seen the bedroom.'

This final flight of stairs, the narrowest, led us through a homemade shoji screen and into a sunlit gabled room dominated
by a king-size bed and two decks. One deck, like a widow's walk, peered down onto Ortaköy's main piazza, a row of restaurants
looking across the Bosphorus to Beylerbeyi. The second deck, an outdoor living room with wicker furniture and potted azaleas,
looked out onto Istanbul's famously surreal view. Ortaköy's flamboyantly Baroque mosque was pitted against the ultra-modern
Europe-to-Asia suspension bridge.

The steps creaked and a deep-throated voice yelled,
'G
ü
naydin
!'
Kemal Orga emerged into his own attic bedroom.

Kemal was sporting three days of silver whiskers, and his apparel was more disheveled than his unkempt look of the day before.
He wore a fluffy blue parka that would three weeks later be eaten by his puppy. He was definitely in costume. He looked like
an aristocratic Turkish gangsta or a German hiker in need of a bath.

'Kemal, are you going for a hike in today's rain?' I teased, hoping to get to the bottom of the pose. I was starting to adore
him.

He threw back his head with an English chortle. 'I'm about to confront my tenants, and I need to cultivate a raffish look.'

'Am I one of your tenants?'

'No, no. You're safe for now,' he said, reaching out to touch my shoulder. 'My family owns a building on the waterfront that
we're trying to turn into a boutique hotel. A few tenants refuse to go, and since I'm the point man for the hotel, I have
to take care of this.'

The point man? Baksim explained to me later that Kemal is the beloved black sheep of his affluent banking and real estate
family. Kemal's older brother oversees a huge luxury housing project, but Kemal's interests revolve around antique boat restoration
and painting. From time to time, the family put pressure on him to be the 'point man' on a project, but Kemal is cut from
a fundamentally different cloth, and his forays into the business, according to Baksim, usually ended with another family
member cleaning up after him.

'So what do you think of my house?'

'I'm speechless. It's a fantasy world.'

He smiled, looking pleased that I'd appreciated his porthole windows. I asked Kemal if guests would be a problem.

'Where would she sleep?' he asked.

'Well, right here. I've never seen such a big bed.'

'Like a slumber party? I don't want any slumber parties in my bed.'

'How's the excavation going?' I asked, not understanding his objection to slumber parties. I thought most men dreamed of slumber
parties in their beds, even if they weren't invited.

'Yes, that's another reason I stopped by. I wanted to Xerox that book you were telling me about.'

'Oh, the ancient bath book,' I said. I had referred to it during our walk but hadn't thought he was serious about wanting
to see it and put it out of my mind. 'Let me get it for you. It's a long book; you might want to look specifically at the
section on the heating systems.'

'Thank you, and hopefully you can come back out to Tuzla this weekend,' Kemal said. 'We've cleared all the rubble and you
can see the furnace now. Also, when you have time, I'd like to show you my other house in a planned community that my family
developed. It's very beautiful and modern, and my living room is shaped like a hamam,' he said with a wink.

Our cab slowly snaked the congested seven kilometers from Ortaköy to Sultanahmet. Crowded buses were hard to endure when a
cab ride cost only $1.50. We were going to the City. Say
Eis ten
Polis —
Greek for 'to the city' — ten times really fast and you get 'Istanbul,' at least according to my college Greek professor.
The city of Constantine, the city of Süleyman the Magnificent, where hamams were once so popular that bathing revenues subsidized
libraries and a yearly parade of hamam owners drew crowds on the streets of Istanbul.

The cab dropped us off near the unimaginably large dome of the Aya Sophia, the minarets an afterthought to what was originally
a Byzantine church. Marina and I scurried past rug dealers who roved the streets near the Divan Yolu, shouting, 'Nice shoes!'
or 'Let me help you . . . spend your money' to us. Slightly lost, we asked a rug rogue, 'Do you know where Çemberlita? is?'

'Yes, very close, but first come to my uncle's rug store for tea.' For once Marina was not interested in rugs; besides, she
had her own personal dealers who e-mailed her when collectable
suzanis
became available.

Within a ten-minute walk of the Aya Sophia, the Blue Mosque, Topkapi Palace, the vast dripping Hades of the Roman Cistern,
the former site of the Baths of Zeuxippus (a second-century Roman bath), and the Roman Hippodrome (site of chariot races)
- yes, just ten minutes from all these Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman riches —are the last two great remaining monuments to
the Ottoman hamam, Çemberlita? and Ca
alo
lu. Pronounced Chem-ber-lee-tash and Ja-la-lou. These are the hamams where foreign
tourists end up after a day of sight-seeing in Old Stamboul and before the evening cruise along the Bosphorus with belly-dancing
entertainers. There's something touristy and kitsch about these grand duchesses, yet if you want to see an imperial, still-functioning
hamam, there's nowhere else to go in Istanbul.

Marina's pink scarf trailed in the warm breeze of this April day, her long brown braid wagging back and forth between her
shoulder blades. She wore white netted heels with apparent indifference to the swirl of garbage on the street and stopped
momentarily to consult a map. Marina had always been the map reader and I the second-guesser. While she traced her finger
along the Divan Yolu, I thought about how this was our eighth year of visiting baths together. In college, Marina and I had
a standing Friday night date: twenty minutes on the StairMaster, followed by thirty minutes in the college's sauna, disfigured
by graffiti carved on every beam of wood. Our favorite graffito: 'Beware of Greeks bearing Trojans.'

We headed up the Divan Yolu, past Marina's beloved baklavateria, past an English-language bookstore where the Turkish owner
wrapped his inventory in Saran Wrap and suggested Irfan Orga's
Portrait of a Turkish Family
to every customer who walked through the door. A quick right on Vezirhan Caddesi, and there at number 8 is Çemberlita? Hamam.

There was only a neon sign out front to tell us we'd arrived. Çemberlita?'s facade was not grand like a mosque's with a series
of cascading domes and a parade of minarets. Hamams are always described as 'introverted buildings.' Gazing upon a hamam did
not need to inspire awe in Allah; rather, hamams were places to satisfy Allah's will by performing ritual ablutions. Hamam
architecture always contained the same succession of rooms; the architectural challenge lay in adapting the traditional layout
of progressively hotter rooms to fit the constraints of a particular lot. As a rule, though, the men's and women's sections
were built parallel to each other so the hot rooms could share a heating system.

A lean man in his late thirties with black hair and a slight hunch worked at the cashier's office. The listed prices, for
a tourist hamam, were reasonable. Roughly $8 for a bath, $15 if you added the
kese
and massage. Certainly it was excellent value compared to some of the fleecers and baksheeshers employed at Galatasaray and
Cagaloglu. But compared to a neighborhood hamam, where you could have the works for $6, it was steep.

'Ì
ngilizce biliyor musunuz?'
I asked in halting Turkish. This phrase ('Do you speak English?'), as far as I was concerned, was the first to master in any
language. It scored instant cultural diplomacy points, spared me of being confused with an assumptive American, and indicated
subtly that I did not speak a word of Turkish.

He smiled. 'Yes, I speak English, of course I have to. It's not Turks who come here after all,' he said as if it were a self-evident
fact.

'What do you mean, the Turks don't come here?' I asked. Had Kemal's precis been correct?

Marina nudged me as if to say 'Spare us the theatrics, let's have a bath.' But I needed to get to the bottom of whether or
not Turks still visited hamams. I was pouting and I knew it, but the cashier obviously wanted to talk.

'I love the hamam,' he began. 'In fact, I love the hamam so much, my wife left me because she said, "You love hamam more than
me," and she was right.' Hmm, this struck me as unlikely. I had heard about the law being a jealous mistress, but the hamam?
He continued, 'The hamam is regarded by many in Istanbul as an old-fashioned ritual. Turks are proud of modernization, of
all that Atatürk's accomplished.' He stopped and pointed to a wall hanging depicting a handsome square-faced man in a Western
suit. The ubiquitous image of Kemal Atatürk's, the closest thing this secular state has to a savior. After our moment of silence,
the cashier continued, 'Atatürk's modernized Turkey. No more veils, no more fez, everyone got a last name for the first time,
Roman letters replaced Arabic letters, and we got plumbing. Turks are proud to be modern, and then, sadly, hamams became a
reminder of life before modernization, before stability, before Atatürk's. Now people think, Why do I need to go to a hamam
if I have a nice bathtub or shower at home? They forget the history, all the significance of bathing together.'

'Do Turks
ever
come here?' I asked.

'Occasionally, yes. Especially if they have a foreign friend visiting.'

I shot a glance at Marina. She wasn't taking this as hard as I was. What came out of her mouth next shocked me. 'Excuse me,
is that rug from the Caucasus?' she asked, pointing to a rug in the reception area. How could she be thinking about rugs when
a hamam employee had just confirmed that the Turks no longer visit hamams?