Cathedrals of the Flesh (2 page)

We entered the
salle de repose,
or relaxation room. Divans the color of dried mint surrounded the room, and light coming from hanging fabric lanterns cast
a soft glow. The ubiquitous bath priestess popped her head in to offer us mint tea. It came Turkish style, intensely sweet
and in tall glasses with tiny saucers. We dimmed the lights and sipped our tea.

'Imagine if this was our life.' I sighed.

'It could be,' Marina said.

'Yeah, like either of us could be ladies who lunch.' I took another sip. 'Well, maybe you could.'

She shook her head. 'I'm serious,' she said. 'Our lives could really be like this.'

'How's that?'

'We could open a hamam.'

'And whose trust fund should we use, yours or mine?' I said.

'I'm not kidding. We could write the perfect business plan, raise the capital, I'll move to New York. Stranger things have
happened. A Turkish bath in Manhattan. Just imagine how popular it would be.'

'Marina, far be it from me to play the skeptic, but I think a public bath would be a tough sell. Americans might be a bit
squeamish about bathing en masse. Yeah, spas are popular, but people book spa appointments almost like they book doctors'
appointments. I mean, the person who signs up for an oxygenating facial or a seaweed cellulite removal isn't going to while
away the afternoon in a steam room, no matter how beautiful.'

Marina, perched on the adjacent couch, regarded me like the young child who must be told she can't live exclusively on macaroni
and cheese. 'Think of the public baths in Roman times — the Romans visited the baths for all the same reasons we visit spas.
The baths had masseuses, hair removers, perfumers, even doctors.'

I leaned my head back on the cushion and looked at the ceiling. 'So,' I said, thinking out loud, 'public baths are the original
spas.'

'Exactly, and not only would our bath be a place to sweat and exfoliate the old fashioned way, our hamam would also offer
a refuge from this century. Imagine - an oasis of Ottoman elegance, where steam makes marble glisten and mint tea flows from
silver spouts . . .'

Thus Marina's speech crescendoed, and I expected music, perhaps a dramatic chord of Bach, as an exclamation point. Instead,
exhausted by her prophetic outpouring, Marina took another sip of mint tea and sank back into the divan. She was convincing,
but nothing was as convincing as how rejuvenated, relaxed, and at peace I felt after an afternoon at Les Bains du Marais.
This was a seductive lifestyle.

We indulged again the very next day (hey, we could have been stuffing our faces with napoleons). On the periphery of the Latin
Quarter is the generically named Arab Mosque, built by the French government in 1926 as a thank-you gesture to the North Africans
for their service in World War I. In addition to a tea salon and full restaurant, the Arab Mosque offers a hamam, alternating
between days for men and women. At this hamam, pandemonium greeted us rather than the tranquil, choreographed calm of Les
Bains du Marais. This time we heard Arabic and Turkish and other hard-consonant languages. There were only a smattering of
interlopers like ourselves, French women who had acquired the taste, and Lonely Planet tourists who had read about the place.

We stepped right up to command central — a huge counter elevated above the rest of the room. A young woman with olive skin
and widely spaced green eyes was in her multitasking glory. She poured tea from a huge silver urn and passed it to reposing
bathers lying on divans surrounding the huge reception room. She collected valuables from incoming bathers and sold bath,
gommage, and massage tickets. She laughed with regular customers and disciplined a masseuse who seemed to be complaining about
the onslaught of massage seekers. Ladies were lined up five deep for every table. The bath was hopping.

She handed us a little white plastic cup, filled with brown sludge and topped off with a blue chip. Marina, who had been here
before, explained, 'You wash with the brown stuff before the gommage. Then you give the token to the massage lady to prove
you've paid.'

To get to the cramped dressing room, we had to walk through this buzzing central room, which mushroomed up into a domed cupola
on the second floor. It was a colonnaded room with a fountain in the middle, which the massage ladies used to clean their
hands between customers. Behind the elaborately adorned columns, the bathers reclined on worn blue cushions. The busy, overladen
room seemed to incorporate every element of Arabic design — every geometric pattern, every color sequence - in order not to
offend anyone's culture by omission. The women on the massage tables in the center of the room glistened with oil. I thought
with a smile of the United States, where in a private room the masseuse delicately makes sure you are not showing any skin.
Here everything was on display. A few women wore underwear, but most people were nude, just sitting on towels. From the looks
of things, the massages included upper thigh, breasts, and abdomen as much as they did shoulders and back. Walking by the
massage tables fully dressed in a parka and clutching a backpack was an odd sensation. It felt as if we should enter the dressing
room via tunnel so as not to disturb the pure naked abandon these women were enjoying. So we hurried by, Marina feeling just
as ill at ease as I did.

We quickly shed our belongings and headed into the hamam, holding our little white cups filled with briny sledge. Unlike yesterday's
hamam, this one was huge, labyrinthine, and lined with gray, white-veined marble.

'This is the real deal,' said Marina. 'This is halfway to Istanbul.'

Only halfway? After showering (rule one applies everywhere), we entered a steamroom much bigger than yesterday's little Les
Bains du Marais. Never had I felt so skinny. I loved the whole cast of characters, but I remained fixated on one woman. She
had hips that took over the room, and she moved with the grace of a belly dancer. She wore lacy lilac underwear, and her stomach
could have been sculpted by Rodin. Taking turns, she and her friend scrubbed each other. The other women, women I could tell
were regulars, also gommaged each other. We neophytes, without mitts and washcloths of our own, had to seek out our gommage
from the one gommage lady. It was not the luxurious experience of yesterday. She scrubbed with distracted ennui, using a ratty
mitt. She wore a tattered cotton flower dress and smelled strongly of perspiration. I tried to be French about it and remind
myself how natural pheromones are. It was about seven in the evening, and I wondered how many hours she'd been scrubbing women
today.

After the gommage, Marina and I found an empty patch of the bellystone to recline on. We compared the redness of our pallor.
My Scandinavian coloring meant I bore the marks of a fierce scrubbing, whereas Marina's Asiatic complexion masked the hamam
chafing. Les Bains du Marais was what the French would call
raffm
é
,
refined, polished; the Arab Mosque was coarse and visceral, soulful and mysterious. The difference between the two experiences
was as marked as the chasm between a fancy, nouveau French feast and a rustic, peasant repast where you scrape up the contents
of your plate with a piece of crusty bread. Both experiences are deliciously satisfying, but they transport you to different
places.

Watching the groups of women in the
halvets
(small private bathing areas surrounding the central bellystone), chatting good-naturedly, happy and serene, Marina and I
began to hatch a plan. We would open our own hamam, which we would call simply the Hamam. We would create an oasis as exotic
as an Eastern spice bazaar, where people could shed their make-it-happen mentality for a couple of hours and just chill out,
so to speak, in the heat.

How much money would we need? How big would it be? What kinds of treatments would we offer? And how could I open a hamam having
seen only two re-creations in France? If this was only 'halfway to Istanbul,' I still had a lot to learn.

'Marina, this would require research. Visiting hamams in Turkey, taking measurements, seeing what kind of marble they use,
how the rooms are laid out. We need some actual facts.'

'You have unused vacation time,' Marina said. 'Why not go to Istanbul for a couple of weeks? In two weeks, you'll get the
flavor of the hamams. You can map out all the different floor plans, talk to some of the owners, get a sense of what's involved.
If I can get away, I'll meet you for a long weekend.'

'Istanbul, Constantinople, Byzantium.'

'I'd forgotten you were a classics major.'

'Me too.' I laughed. 'So I go to Istanbul for a couple of weeks. You come and visit, and then we write a business plan for
world hamam domination. Is that the plan?'

'Exactly.'

I lay back on the warm marble, breathing in the steam. I thought of Emperor Justinian's vast, underground cistern in Old Stamboul.
Did the fifth-century cistern still feed the hamams? How many hamams would Istanbul have? Hundreds? Thousands? So it was resolved.
I would take a working vacation to Istanbul. For the first time in my life I felt driven by a personal project; for the first
time I wasn't doing someone else's bidding. The Hamam. Maybe nothing would come of it, but I needed to take this leap of faith.
I'd come home with sketched-out blueprints and travel notes on how the hamams operate, and Marina and I would set about creating
a business plan. Who knows, with the stars aligned we might even be able to open our hamam within two years.

turkey
:

taking the measurements

As you set out for Ithaka

hope the voyage is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

—
Constantine Cavafy, 'Ithaka'

When I first arrived in Istanbul, my plan seemed simple. Over the course of two weeks, I would have a
kese
scrub at every bath in Istanbul; I would meet the regulars, who would show me how to henna my hair and share their personal
baklava recipes; I would smoke narghile and drink mint tea with hamam owners who would divulge their business secrets - 'It's
all about the size of your bellystone'; I would discover local beauty products - pistachio face masks, Black Sea loofahs,
and Cappadocia salt scrubs - and I would import these elixirs to New York. I would, as Marina and I termed it, 'take the measurements.'
And with my measurements carefully documented, I would go home.

Once back in New York, Marina and I would set about writing the most tantalizing business plan ever to cross Ian Schrager's
desk. As a life-altering plan, it was both practical and inspired. Never mind that I didn't speak Turkish and didn't have
a place to stay. That I knew little about Turkey and hadn't even seen
Midnight Express.
I was heading to Istanbul prepared to be lucky and efficient, eager for a crash course in hamams. I showed up with one contact
name Baksim Kocer. Baksim, an Istanbul native, had attended college in the States with a good friend of mine, and to me he
was a familiar name without a corresponding face. As I planned the trip from New York, Baksim and I exchanged introductory
e-mails in which he offered his help and hospitality. His advice on where to stay boiled down to an uninspiring 'Don't worry,
I'll take care of everything.'

Though I certainly never expected it, Baksim took me under his wing from the first night. He had reserved a room for me in
a hotel owned by his uncle. In Turkey everyone has an uncle who can help you out. At 8:00 P.M. I met Baksim in the hotel's
bar for a night out with his childhood friend, Mehmet. Turkish hospitality not only dictated that Baksim take me out for that
introductory dinner that friends of friends are internationally obliged to cater, but also stretched to helping me find an
apartment (two weeks in a hotel felt too cold and would have cost too much). To Baksim's Middle Eastern sensibility, it would
have been rude and potentially dangerous to leave me, especially as a woman traveling alone, to find my own lodgings in the
male-dominated streets of Istanbul. As a strictly practical matter, I was only too happy to submit to Baksim's paternalism
and to end my previous two weeks of e-mail brokering with a Turkish real estate agent who insisted that Istanbul rents were
on par with Manhattan's.

I woke up the first morning following my arrival in Baksim's guest room, my head throbbing after a dramatic collision of jet
lag and too much raki, the national drink of anise-flavored liquor. We had eaten dinner - an endless stream of meze, small
plates of succulent eggplant concoctions, dolma and sarma (stuffed peppers and grape leaves), and calamari — at an apparently
famous restaurant that served food from the Black Sea coast. The raki left more of an impression than the food, and my head
ached as the clanking of dishes echoed from the kitchen. Mehmet had also spent the night in the other guest room, as he often
did when his wife was out of town. I made myself presentable and joined them for a breakfast of Nescafe and cigarettes.

'Today we go to Tuzla. You'll love it,' Baksim announced when he saw me.

'Where's Tuzla? It sounds far away,' I said, rubbing my head and pulling my mess of hair back into a ponytail.

'It's where Mehmet and I practically grew up. It's a little seaside town on the Asian side, about an hour from here, where
our parents have places. There's tennis and swimming and sailing. Oh, Mehmet, maybe Kemal will be sailing today.'

'Are there any hamams there?' I asked, eager to start visiting the first of the city's hundred or so remaining hamams.

'No, but you'll meet people who can tell you all about hamams. My uncle will be there. He knows everyone and everything about
Istanbul. Now let's get dressed.' He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray as if to bolster the finality of the decision.
At a mere twenty-seven, a slight five feet six, and with an eyebrow as dark and thick as Humphrey Bogart's, Baksim possessed
the authority of a Turkish godfather figure. He didn't make plans or propose outings, he simply announced them.

We drove an hour east in Baksim's red Fiat, traversing a two-mile-long suspension bridge that connects Europe to Asia. The
geconkondu
(random groupings of houses built out of scrap parts rugs, wheels, corrugated cardboard - where recent rural immigrants to
Istanbul would first make their homes) and planned housing developments flew by. Soon we outdistanced the long-fingered sprawl
of Istanbul and veered onto a road that led to a small settlement of houses. Tiny, tranquil Tuzla, hidden scarcely an hour
outside of Istanbul, had impressive houses on quiet, shaded streets where children could learn to ride bikes. Front yards
were adorned with carefully planned gardens, a telltale sign of affluence, which in Turkey stood out like a Fabergé egg in
a mudslide.

The moment I saw the waterfront I was glad I'd been bullied into coming. Tulza is one of those unobtrusively beautiful places,
where the longer you let it work on you, the more mesmerizing it becomes, like a plain face with perfect bone structure. Set
in a little nook on the Sea of Marmara, Tuzla gazes placidly toward Istanbul to the northwest. Despite the cranes of a nearby
shipyard, I could make out the clustered domes of the
k
ü
lliyes
across Istanbul's skyline.
külliyes
are groupings of domed structures that contain all the buildings essential to Ottoman life — a mosque, a library, a school,
a hospital, and, invariably, a hamam.

Walking around Tulza is similar, I imagine, to stumbling into an uncataloged museum spanning the fourth century onward. Remnants
of antiquity are scattered like a Caesar's garage sale. At the clubhouse, marble bases of Corinthian columns served as coffee
tables. A coffin-size tablet decorated with Greek script was used to hold glasses of cold raki and that morning's issue of
H
ü
rriyet
(translation
Freedom,
though the Turkish government still throws the odd journalist in jail). The pool, which was badly damaged last year by the
Islamic fundamentalist Fazilet political party (they oppose all kinds of immodesty, including swimming in Victorian swimming
costumes), was surrounded by a crumbling colonnade of withering Doric columns. Baksim and Mehmet had a proud, offhanded attitude
about the antiquities, as if to say 'Look what our ancestors built! Their tablets are our coffee tables.'

After lunch Baksim announced, 'Now we will visit Kemal.' His name had come up several times with no supporting biographical
data and only enigmatic asides. We traipsed through a gate and down a dusty road, only to end up at another gate, this one
with a mangy dog and her pup barking to greet us. Baksim shouted,
'Allo,
allo, Kemal?'
and after a minute of silence we let ourselves in. Once past the yapping Cerberuses, I could see a huge, lush, and elegantly
unkempt garden stretched out before us. The garden was framed by a vine-covered trellis and a semicircle of little cottages.
Had we just walked into an artists' colony, or did all these dwellings belong to one person? Could I live
here?
I wondered. My commute to the hamams of downtown Istanbul would be rather difficult, but who could complain about commuting
from paradise?

The garden was patterned with a dried-up marble fountain, scattered stumps of byzantine columns, a pagoda, and, dominating
the landscape, six antique wooden sailboat hulls sitting on the lawn like carcasses waiting to be skinned. It took a minute
to process the pandemonium of the scene. My eye traveled to the edge of the thickly reeded Marmara shores. Only then did I
realize that a garden party was in progress. From our relative distance, it felt as if we were spying on a Renoir painting
of a languid late-afternoon gathering. I counted six people reclining on wooden furniture, sipping tea, and chatting with
the air of old friends while sun danced across the water and their faces.

I glanced at Baksim, expecting us to retreat from their intimate gathering before anyone saw us, but instead we barged right
in. One of the men folded the newspaper on his lap, stood up, and put on a smile the way you might unroll a dirty sock. 'Baksim,'
he said with what little enthusiasm he could muster. The arrival of guests meant the making of more tea, the fetching of cups
and saucers and sugar cubes, the offering of food, all the tiring elements of Turkish hospitality.

Baksim introduced me to Kemal as a 'guest from New York,' and Mehmet apparently needed no introduction, since the dogs were
nuzzling him with excessive familiarity. Kemal was so tall that he stooped apologetically from his six-foot-three-inch height.
He appeared deliberately disheveled in a wrinkled striped dress shirt and paint-splattered khakis. His angular jaw was covered
in grayish stubble; his thick salt-and-pepper hair was brushed back off his ruddy face. If I could have pushed back his shoulders
and made him stand up straight, he would have cut a dashing figure. As it was, he still cut a dashing figure, though he appeared
slightly raffish and discombobulated, like a paper doll put together at off-kilter angles.

A round of introductions followed. All my social awkwardness, which at home is so often paralyzing, was gone. I felt calm,
relaxed, supremely confident. I wasn't expected to know the etiquette of Turkish society, whether or not it was rude to arrive
unannounced. That was Baksim and Mehmet's problem.

Kemal left to fetch tea, and I wondered if he needed help. He seemed like the kind of person who might get overwhelmed by
life's little details. Baksim and Mehmet discussed the wood-hulled boats on the lawn. A new one had been added, and Kemal
was in the middle of restoring five already.

'Why did he buy another one?' Mehmet wondered.

'He wants a fleet of nineteenth-century dinghies,' replied Baksim.

Kemal arrived with the tea and offered me a cup. As I took the saucer, I felt all thumbs. I looked around for a place to settle
my glass teacup, and the only options were the base of an Ionic capital or a large tablet with Greek writing. 'Where did you
find these?' I asked.

'Over there,' he said distractedly, and he pointed about fifty feet away. Soon everyone had their tea and the appropriate
number of sugar cubes, and the group got deep into a discussion about the latest Galatasaray-Leeds soccer game, which had
ended in the deaths of two English fans who had been burning a Turkish flag. The verdict: 'The Brits deserved it.'

Kemal, apparently not a soccer fan, scanned the garden. He looked like someone who liked to putter around, and I could tell
he was sizing up summer improvement projects. Then, as if remembering that he was the host of this little tea party, he turned
to me and said: 'So tell me, what brings you to Istanbul?'

'I'm here to study Turkish baths.'

'Whatever for?' he asked in thickly accented but perfect English.

'Well, it's a long story, really, but I'll give you the short version. My friend Marina and I want to open a hamam in Manhattan.
I'm in Istanbul to learn how its properly done.'

He nodded. 'It's a fascinating area of study, but Turks don't go anymore, you know. Very unhygienic business. You must be
careful.' He said the last part softly, as if divulging a secret that he wanted me to take to heart.

Kemal didn't know it, but he couldn't have said anything crueler to me. I'd come halfway around the world to indulge in what
I imagined was a distinctly Turkish pastime, and now I was being told that most Turks wouldn't set foot in a hamam.

'What do you mean, Turks don't go anymore?'

'Oh, you look sad. Let me explain. Modern Turks, like me or Baksim, consider hamams an old-fashioned habit, the kind of thing
our grandparents' generation did. Turkey has modernized because of Atatürk's marvelous leadership.' This was my first induction
into the cult of Atatürk's, the first prime minister of modern Turkey and a beloved secular hero, a combination of Superman
and Winston Churchill. 'Indoor plumbing became common, and people stopped needing to go to the public baths. Though some people
still enjoy the ritual and the camaraderie. I think Mehmet and Baksim go to the hamam at the Hilton hotel from time to time.
But it's more of a lark. Of course, I could be completely wrong,' he said in an attempt to comfort me. I shouldn't have been
so surprised by what Kemal was saying. I had been in Istanbul just over twenty-four hours and every single Turkish person
I had canvased about hamams always used the word
unhygienic
in their response, along with 'Be careful.'

Kemal continued, 'Maybe there still is bathing culture in Istanbul. I just don't know about it.' He paused and scratched his
scruffy chin. 'You seem genuinely interested in baths. I think I have something that might interest you very much.' He grinned,
displaying sharp incisors but twinkling eyes that seemed to offset the malevolence of his teeth. I wondered if he was married,
though he seemed more the confirmed bachelor type. He was probably in his late thirties, and no one here seemed to be his
wife or girlfriend.