Cathedrals of the Flesh (6 page)

Marina and I cleaned the floor and the bowls with a little soap. We doused ourselves in warm water to promote sweating and
soaped the city grime off our faces and feet. Then we sat down next to the running water of the
kurna.
I looked at Marina and noticed that we had both lost weight since our pizza and sundae years at school in Iowa. The years
after college were the lean years in every sense. Lean paychecks in large, expensive cities when dinner for one meant steamed
broccoli and soy sauce. I filled another bowl with water and poured it over my head. Glancing around the room, underneath
the dome, and in between the Corinthian columns, I saw every body type, every nationality, every pubic hair style on display.
If people checked one another out, it was with a spirit of sisterhood. Comparison, perhaps, but not competition. Everyone
in the room was more or less comfortable in her own skin, because the hamams draw adventurous, intrepid travelers without
an assortment of body issues. No, the prudes were reading aloud from guidebooks down the street in the Blue Mosque, another
of Sinan's tremendous creations.

The Blue Mosque's wealth of Iznik tiles — mostly blue, surprise, surprise - the elegant Arabic scrawl of verse from the Koran,
the awesome expanse of the dome, and the daringly low candelabras inspired wonder and a shrinking sensation. Here in the hamam,
each bather was an integral part of the tableaux. All the surroundings could be touched, used, and enjoyed. The
göbektasi
was an altar at which I could comfortably be a supplicant.

One of the ladies came to collect first Marina and then me. Once you are under the hamam lady's power, you no longer have
to move your own body. You are a car in neutral about to enter the most thorough, unrelenting car wash of your life. The hamam
lady removed my ill-fitting
nahn,
positioned me on the bellystone, and doused me with warm water. We nodded hello to each other, and she introduced herself
as Nermin. I looked up to the huge dome, dotted with a constellation of skylights called
faunuses.
The coming twilight lit the room in competing lasers of bluish light, cutting through the
stcakhk's
steamy mist at jagged angles. A planetary light show for one. The hamam lady returned, her wooden clogs clanking noisily over
the marble floor. In front of her pendulous breasts, she carried a round pink bucket with a washcloth and a coarse-looking
mitt.

Our only possible communication was through pantomime and pointing. Tonight, I promised myself, I will study Turkish phrases
at Kemal's.
(Nasilsiniz?
How are you?
Iyiyim tessukur
ederim.
I am fine, thank you.) She grabbed the black mitt and started to rub my legs. She scoured me like a pot with stubborn burn
marks. She pointed down at my legs. Little black balls of dirt gathered like a strange rash. She nodded approvingly, wanting
me to acknowledge the efficacy of her treatment or just how dirty I had been. I bowed my bead appreciatively and said a tea-sugar
thank-you. (Kemal told me that if you say 'tea-sugar' really fast, it comes out sounding like Turkish for 'thank you':
tesekk
ü
r.)
My amateur effort produced an amused look of comprehension.

It's a strange relationship between hamam lady and her client. I was not a regular and I didn't speak her language, so we
couldn't swap baklava recipes or beauty secrets. Her large, deep-set eyes reminded me of green olives. The stretch marks on
her stomach told the story of a large family. The scouring continued up my body. She took my right hand, and in order to stretch
out my arm for easier scrubbing, she placed my hand on the top of her left breast with as little ceremony as if handing me
a towel. What if I squeezed her breast by accident? How embarrassing.

She marched over to the
kurna
and refilled her bowl, returning to soap me with long, deep strokes of the washcloth. It no longer seemed strange that she
scrubbed and massaged me under my armpits, behind my ears, between my breasts, and everywhere you'd think only to wash yourself
in a windowless room. Turkish women, I'd heard from other travelers, think nothing of performing the most intimate ablutions
in public, whereas Turkish men never even remove their
pestamals
inside the
stcakhk.
Nermin tapped me twice on the hip - hamam sign language for turn over - and she scrubbed my backside with similar devotion.

'Marina, this is all clean, right?' I asked, lifting my head off the marble. 'They change washcloths after every person?'

'You can't think about that,' said Marina. 'When you eat at a restaurant, do you think about what's going on back in the kitchen?'
Actually, I did.

I kept my eyes shut and gave myself over to the sensation of being soapy and slippery on warm marble. This is how pastry dough
must feel as the rolling pin stretches it out on the baker's marble surface.

Nermin took my hand and guided me over to a
kurna.
She desudsed me with bucket after bucket of water. Then she shampooed my hair. She massaged my scalp, she pressed on my temples.
I was melting. When she finally succeeded in removing all of the soap from my hair, she put her fingers on my eyes and pushed
away the water so I could see. 'Rest now,' she said, and left me to find her next client.

'Tesekk
ü
r ederim/
I yelled weakly and gratefully after her. The
göbektasi
was too crowded to take up our own post, so Marina and I returned to the
kurna
and leaned our rosy, scoured bodies against the wall.

'How long did that last?' I wondered.

'I don't know, maybe ten minutes, maybe half an hour. I feel rubbery and relaxed.'

'It's so different from an American spa, where something happens to you for a prescribed amount of time. That
kese
scrub and being in this dreamy, surreal room feels like . . . an unfolding process . . . like an experience that gets richer
the longer you let it work on you. Not to mention the theatrics,' I said, thinking of the ongoing yells between the hamam
ladies and the aggressive apple tea lady pushing her wares.

'I love the theatrics,' agreed Marina. 'Our hamam should be like a Fellini movie, a constantly changing cast of characters;
show up on any given day and you might find a cellist playing Stravinsky in the steamroom or someone pushing through a tray
of raspberry sherbet.'

'That's a brilliant idea. We could play silent movies along the walls one day, offer henna treatments the next. No two days
at our hamam will ever be the same,' I said with a sudden burst of optimism that faded instantly. One minute the world seemed
like our own tray of oysters on the half-shell, and the next moment our dreams seemed fenced off by insurmountable boundaries
called money, connections, experience. 'Marina, what are we going to do with our lives? I feel like we're back in college,
sitting on your bed and plotting our futures. Remember how sorted we thought we'd be by the time we hit thirty?'

'I know. Everything seemed so uncomplicated at twenty-one.' Then, out of the blue, Marina observed, 'You don't seem ready
to go home.'

'I'm not, I'm only just starting to get this. I mean, of course I miss Charles, but what's another two weeks. He'll understand.'

'Maybe the baths of the world need your energies more than Charles right now.'

I wanted to change the subject. 'Marina, how are things with Colin?' Marina, unlike most women, did not like to talk about
her boyfriend, and the moment, naked and relaxed, seemed opportune for prying.

'Same old, same old,' she said dismissively. 'I think our hamam should be alabaster instead of marble.'

'Fight, break up, decide you can't live without each other?' I surmised from 'same old, same old.'

'Exactly, the co-dependency continues. Three years of calling each other seven times a day.'

Marina would be the first to admit her relationship was dysfunctional. She envied the stability and honesty that Charles and
I maintained effortlessly. I envied the passion that she and Colin had —they would fight, make up, then disappear for hours.
While I accepted the universal rule always to side with your girlfriend, I knew Marina well, and I knew she was extraordinarily
high-maintenance. I had been on the receiving end of some of her tirades. So I did have some sympathy with Colin's tribulations,
though I would accept at face value any story that depicted him as an insensitive scoundrel bent on ignoring Marina's wishes.
Marina's wishes, however, were many and very specific. Compromise to Marina meant meeting you one-eighth of the way. But she
was a lovable bully.

We stayed at the
kurna,
staring up at the dome's darkening skylights that reminded me of Kemal's portholes. Both were windows that admitted light
but offered no view of the outside world, nor did they provide the outside world a view into this intimate sanctum. It was
getting late, soon we would have to leave this world.

'Are you hungry?' I asked.

'Famished. Let's get cheese borek,' Marina said. Cheese borek, a noodle pastry lined with filo, goat's cheese, and parsley,
was her favorite Turkish food, second only to baklava.

'We had that for breakfast. Please let's have grilled fish,' I suggested. A fish restaurant wouldn't serve cheese borek and
vice versa.

Marina adopted her open-eyed, beseeching look. Her eyebrows went up and her head tilted toward me. 'Oh, but I'm only here
for three days. After I'm gone you can have fish every night.'

'Okay, fine. But we're supposed to meet Baksim for dinner. What if he doesn't want cheese borek?'

'I'm sure he won't mind.' Poor Colin.

Back in the
camekân,
our
pestamals
exchanged for jeans and sweaters, Rusen brought over two orange juices and inquired after our bath. We were too deliciously
spent for conversation. 'It's like a narcotic,' I said. 'I'm too messed up to say anything, and I'll be back tomorrow for
more.'

We said good-bye to Rusen, who again invited us to visit his thermal hamam in Bodrum and to stay in his house there. Bodrum
is about six hours south of Istanbul and located on top of geothermal springs. Rusen's Bodrum hamam is more spa than public
bath. Because the waters are thermal, the Turks are allowed to soak despite the normal Islamic interdiction against soaking
in still waters. For a Muslim to soak in a body of water, it must be continually flowing and replenishing itself. Otherwise
it is considered unclean.

Rusen's offer was kind and tempting, but it seemed much more friendly and forward than anything I was used to, and the suspicious
New Yorker in me didn't quite know what to make of his generosity. I hadn't yet learned to recognize a good adventure from
a bad, and I still regret that I didn't take Rusen up on his well-intentioned offer.

Marina and I got busy. For the next three days, Marina put her textile obsession on hold and we racked up the baths, visiting
ten different hamams. Sometimes we just stopped to peek in, like wine connoisseurs who just swirl and spit but won't taste
a wine that doesn't meet their standards.

• Çemberlita?
. The best, most authentic of the big 'tourist' hamams, owned and run by a man who gets misty-eyed when he talks about hamam
culture.

• Ca
alo
lu.
Designed in the Baroque style in 1741, so it's interesting for connoisseurs of hamam architecture. The bathing experience,
however, will leave you desiring nothing so much as a hot shower and a bar of soap, since I think the place is dirty and neglected.
Guidebooks that suggest this as a good first stop for the uninitiated are woefully out-of-date. It appears that the owners
stopped caring about this place years ago.

• Galatasaray.
One of the most famous 'tourist' hamams near Istiklal Caddesi. While the men's side is charming, an original from 1481, the
women's side was a second thought built in 1963, and some of the women who work here are better at cleaning wallets than bodies.

•
Tarabya.
An excellent and faithful modern re-creation of a hamam in the Tarabya Hotel, an establishment favored by rich Arab businessmen.
Though it requires a long taxi ride north along the Bosphorus, past Bebek and Etiler, it's worth the trip if you're looking
for a mixed-gender bath - bathing suits required - and American levels of hygiene.