The Journal I Did Not Keep Page 28

  Dimitra led her little crowd off the boat, got them loaded onto the waiting buses, and unloaded them in the parking lot at the bottom of twin-peaked Mount Euboea. Mycenae! Idea turned earth underfoot, grass, some wild trees, blue water, blue, blue sky, and a lot of stones: Agamemnon’s actual palace! “Mine eyes dazzle,” Ilka said to the tiny, very very old English woman, bent at a 90-degree angle, who could be trusted not to hear. The old woman looked as if she needed all her wits to get one foot put in front of the other. The ascent was hot and steep but the very old English woman waved her sturdy stick at the campstool that the nice man with all the cameras offered to unfold for her. She was going to stand like everybody else while Dimitra explained how the pre-Greek ae ending told scholars that Mycenae had been inhabited since the early Bronze Age. “That’s around 3000 B.C. Over there is the famous lion gate you see on the postcards.”

  Mr. Coker took his glasses out of their hard case and looked at them. “Would you believe bifocal sunglasses!” he turned to say to the American woman.

  “Up there,” said Dimitra, “is where—one story says at the table, another one says in his bath—Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus murdered the ‘king of men,’ as Homer calls Agamemnon, on his return from the sack of Troy.” When the old English woman raised her head to look, she tumbled, lisle legs and plimsolls in the air, backward into the grave-circle in which, in 1876, the German, Schliemann, thought he had unearthed Agamemnon’s golden death mask, tiaras, thoi, bracelets, and a necklace clasped around the cervical of what might have been a Mycenean princess whose royal garments had disintegrated a millennium ago. The old woman flailed her stick at the hands reaching down to her and climbed out by herself.

  I think she thinks once she accepts help, she’ll lose herself, Ilka was going to tell Leslie in Athens on Tuesday.

  “This way, everybody, please!” They stood peering down into the subterranean blackness of the cistern which, in times of siege, had brought water from the well outside the Cyclopean wall into the royal palace. “There are one hundred wet and very worn steps. Please let us not have any accidents,” said Dimitra, and the very old woman gave herself a small sad smile, a half shake of the head, and turned away. Ilka saw her, later, standing on Agamemnon’s flagstones and said, “I think I’m looking for the place where a bloody bath might have actually stood.”

  Dimitra was clapping her hands. “Ithaca people, over here, please!” She kept one hand in the air. Ilka watched her watching the excruciating slowness with which a lot of people form into a group that can be instructed. “Let us not become mixed with the people in the buses from the hotels. We are the green bus.”

  * * *

  —

  Day two their guide was Aikaterini, an elegant woman with an interesting air of sorrow, though it might only have been the sorrow of a woman in her fifties. The American woman wore a peach cotton knit sweater tied round her slim waist and looked terrific.

  It grew hotter. Sky and water were so blue that the whiteness of the marble columns constituted the dark element. “You’re standing on land’s end, which would have been the returning sailor’s first sight of home.” Something for Aikaterini’s little group to imagine.

  The Reverend Gallsworth with his romantically missing arm was sitting on a stone. Ilka went and sat beside him and said, “This is embarrassing!”

  The Reverend Gallsworth looked suspicious.

  “Here I was being all dazzled and this turns out not to even be the original Temple of Poseidon after all! Darn thing is a mere thousand years old!” Ilka was flirting with the Reverend Gallsworth. The Reverend Gallsworth smiled with an exquisite exhaustion.

  Ilka said, “Something I wanted to ask you, about your lecture.”

  The Reverend Gallsworth looked alarmed.

  Ilka said, “Conscience doesn’t do a very good job, does it! Sin really is like death: one lives comfortably enough with the knowledge of both for a good twenty-three out of the twenty-four hours.”

  Here the Reverend Martin Gallsworth looked, and saw Ilka, and Ilka rose, said, “Well, I think I better…” and ran away.

  Ilka went and stood beside Aikaterini. “I do sympathize with the two of you having to squeeze everything you know into five minutes spiced up with skeleton princesses and homing sailors.” Ilka was flirting with Aikaterini, who drew her head subliminally backward. Ilka experienced the thrill of recognition. She said, “Your head is doing what my head does when one of my students comes up and asks me something to which the real answer is, ‘Okay! I notice you!’”

  The sorrowful, elegant Aikaterini did not smile at Ilka.

  Ilka saved the head drawing subliminally backward to tell Leslie.

  * * *

  —

  The sun stood straight above the avenue of the phalli. Ilka worked her way forward, fell into step beside Dimitra, and tried again: “I’m getting used to coming to what looks like another lot of stones, and then you talk for five minutes and the stones stand up and they’re baths, markets…”

  “Yes?” said Dimitra.

  Ilka looked at Dimitra, looked around at all the groups and guides, looked at the crowd from the Ithaca. There was no one who cared anything about her and Ilka longed for Tuesday. She wiped the hair out of her damp forehead and looked inside her bag. No comb. Was that a comb held toward her by the hand of the American woman? “Keep it,” the American woman said. “I always travel with two or three. I’m Boots.”

  “Well, thank you so much! I’m Ilka.”

  The American woman introduced her nephew, Hank, and his brand-new wife, Belle. The young people smiled nicely and walked off together. Boots pointed to a pleasantly ugly man Ilka had noticed. His wide smile was squeezed way down into the lower half of his face as if he had a secret he might be glad to be rid of. He turned out not to be Boots’s husband, but Boots’s husband’s baby brother. “Poor Herbert. His wife died three years ago and he hasn’t got anything going. You must come and sit at our table,” said Boots.

  When Ilka got onto the green bus, Boots was in the first seat on the right and moved over for her. The smiling brother-in-law sat in back with the man with the cameras.

  “So which is your husband?” Ilka asked her.

  “Oh, Coleman! He’s a dear but absolutely unpersuadable on the subject of travel. His birthday present to me is to take Herb and the kids on a Hellenic cruise!”

  “Wow,” Ilka said.

  “And he stays home and plays golf.”

  “And everybody is happy!” said Ilka.

  “Everybody couldn’t be happier,” said Boots. “Driver, what’s holding us up?”

  The Greek driver didn’t know, but they must stay on the bus and not get off. When they were still standing twenty minutes later, the driver said they could get off, but must not leave the parking area.

  “Oh, funsies!” said Boots.

  Boots introduced the brother-in-law, who looked at Ilka with a smile inappropriately wide. He introduced the man with the cameras. Ilka had thought he was Jewish but his nose turned out to be a French nose: his name was Marcel. Boots invited him to sit at her table. They stood around the parking lot for the better part of an hour before Dimitra returned: An accident in the Sanctuary of the Bulls. An elderly American had had a heart attack, the wife didn’t know what bus they had come on, didn’t know the name of the hotel they were staying in. “Horrible—in a foreign place.” Dimitra had stayed to help out with the English while they connected with the American consulate.

  “Takes the stuffing out of you, that sort of thing,” said Boots back in the bus. Ilka was appalled to be telling this woman she didn’t know, and didn’t necessarily like, about Jimmy’s death driving back from Washington.

  * * *

  —

  Next morning a mist suffused the brightness. Boots and Ilka leaned on the ship’s railing and watched the silver islands on a silver sea, and the ones that were far away and large enough to live on looked the same size as the rocks with their bonsai vegetat
ion passing close at hand.

  Close at hand Boots’s handsome face was creped and cratered below the corners of the lips—the toll taken by so much slimness?

  Why was Ilka telling Boots about Leslie? “There’s a gospel song about Jesus when he meets the woman at the well and tells her everything she’s done. ‘Woman, ’said, Woman, you got three husbands but the one you got now isn’t yours.’ I had only one husband but this one belongs to a friend.”

  “Is he cute?” Boots asked Ilka.

  “God no!” said Ilka.

  “Cole’s pretty cute,” Boots said.

  Ilka hesitated a moment, and another moment, so that when she said, “Leslie,” in Boots’s presence it had the force of an event, “Leslie and I make these half-assed attempts to stop seeing each other, trusting the other to refuse. Our consciences aren’t working very well. So, I left my little girl with my mother…”

  “You have a child,” said Boots and looked as if someone had boxed her ears: the eyes snapped wide, the lips thinned to pencil lines and peeled back from the splendid parade of her teeth.

  “My Maggie,” said Ilka. “Leslie thinks I need to move on and find someone…He told me to come on this cruise. But he’s meeting me in Athens. He arranged for our hotel room. Leslie arranged for me to get off the Ithaca in Istanbul…”

  “Coleman is an arranger,” said Boots.

  Ilka couldn’t stop. “I have this theory that the men of feeling and passion…”

  “No such animal,” said Boots.

  “Oh, but there is! Only it isn’t the ones with the long hair and the jeans, it’s the one who keeps his legs inside the stovepipes of his business suit and his throat knotted with a tie till he takes everything off…”

  “Does Leslie talk?” asked Boots. Ilka was unpleasantly startled to hear his name in Boots’s mouth. “Cole never hears a word I say to him.”

  “Leslie hears what I mean,” boasted Ilka. Ilka was not hearing what Boots was saying or what Boots meant.

  * * *

  —

  Ilka waved to the Cokers from the table at which she now sat with Boots, the smiling brother-in-law, and the French photographer. The young people had found themselves a table with a lot of other young people. After Professor Baines-Smith’s talk on the pumice of Thera, Boots invited him and his wife to sit at her table. He was charming and courteous but continued to sit with the other English experts forming a virtual high table. The two interesting Greek guides continued to sit at their table for two. Boots had gone ahead and acquired the Tottenhams, an English high school teacher of classics with a severe stammer and his clever wife, Dotty, who did his talking for him. Now Boots and her entourage walked together and rested together on a circle of stones. “Look! How Greek!” Boots pointed to a boy hurrying a little mule down a path so steep the animal had no time to place its feet, and the very very old English woman’s mouth opened. She said,

  “Ah! The poor thing!”

  * * *

  —

  Sunday, and the friends agreed it was a blessed relief to have no excursion planned: into the bus, out of the bus, stand and wait, look left, look up. “And when it is hot,” said Marcel, “I can’t see anything.”

  “That’s right! Or feel anything! That’s true,” cried Ilka. “And if you stay back on the boat, you chafe at whatever ancient Greek or new human thing you might be missing out on.”

  Why was Boots giving Ilka a look?

  Around eleven that morning Ilka had passed the open lounge door and seen Boots sitting at the bar. She went in. “This is Aziz,” Boots said. Ilka knew Aziz, who had trimmed her hair in the ship’s tiny barbershop. He was lovely looking if you liked your men young with soft eyes, a chiseled nose, a pure jawline, and a childish back of the neck.

  “Coleman’s an absolute dear,” Boots was telling the young man, “but un-per-sua-dable on the subject of travel. Our house backs onto the golf course. Cole steps out the door and is on the golf course.” It was not clear to Ilka if young Aziz understood what Boots was saying to him. He smiled and looked apprehensively in the direction of the door. The ship’s staff were not supposed to hobnob with the guests. “I’ll take another.” The elderly waiter behind the bar put down his Greek newspaper. “And one for my friend, here. No? Why not? What? What are you looking at your watch for?” Boots asked Ilka. “We know you don’t always play by the rules.”

  Ilka was shocked by the hatchet in Boots’s voice.

  Boots said, “Tomorrow night Aziz is going to show us the real Istanbul. Listen! I’ll square it with the powers that be.”

  “Yes, I show you!” the young man said, with an eye on the door. “I have friend is chauffeur. He borrows one car. A friend from his friend is waiter in restaurant on the water, beautiful. I take you to Asia. I show you.” The lounge door opened, the boy jumped. Boots said, “You’re making me nervous. Go, go, go, go. We make arrangements. Come to my cabin.”

  * * *

  —

  The ship was scheduled to pass Hagia Sophia at the moment of sunrise. Boots’s young folks refused to so much as think about getting up. The rest of the friends asked the steward to rouse them, but only Marcel, Herbert, and Ilka rose when roused. They, the very old English woman with her cane, Mr. Coker with his bifocals, and a half-dozen other passengers stood on the captain’s deck. Ilka shivered. Herbert put his jacket around her shoulders and kept his arms around his jacket with Ilka inside.

  “Thank you! Oh, wow! Look at that! Oh!”

  “Like a picture postcard,” someone said.

  Oh, lucky Marcel! He had something he could do about beauty—focus, frame it, and snap! Have it to take home! How was Ilka to tell Leslie about this silhouette of domes passing the yellow heart of light?

  Boots, Ilka, clever Dotty Tottenham, and the nephew and his pretty wife did the bazaars. The hope of treasure is coeval with love and sin. Boots bought the latest guidebook, called Turkey Traversed. After lunch she and Tom Tottenham and his Michelin sat on deck by the little swimming pool, blue as an upward-looking eye, and decided where Aziz was going to take them. Marcel leaned over the railing and took pictures of the little jolly boats that chugged around the sunny water like the bumper cars in a funhouse.

  * * *

  —

  Aziz met them round a corner out of the sightlines of the powers that be. He was excited, looked charming, had a car and a friend twice his age and inclining to fat, who had another car.

  The two cars shone blackly in the Turkish night. Boots and Tom Tottenham sat in back urging the advice in their own guidebook against the advice in the other’s guidebook. Boots said, “Listen to this: ‘The Khedive Sarai, or Palace Khedive, home of the last Ottoman Pasha of Egypt, has been turned into a cafe!’” But Aziz had already told the other car where to rendezvous.

  * * *

  —

  “Aziz! This is adorable!”

  The charming restaurant, the lights, their own upside-down reflection in the black water. A young waiter in black and golden tights came with a single long-stemmed scarlet rose for each lady. Another waiter brought a platter with an enormous fish.

  “How you call in America levrek?”

  “Search me,” said Boots.

  More young black and golden men came—or it might have been one or maybe two young men who kept coming—carrying mussels cooked with rice and berries stuffed back into their shells; with stuffed vine leaves, eggplant; with egg rolls filled with white cheese and meat, a mixture of mushroom, tomatoes, and peas. Aziz sat by Boots and taught her the names of the dishes and how to pronounce them. There came bottles—“Ouzo,” said Aziz. “Raki.” Tomorrow night Ilka was going to tell Leslie about the blanched, sumptuous, crisply tender, larger-than-life almonds floating in their clear liquid in a silver dish.

  Boots said, “Aziz, how far is it to this Khedive? Listen: ‘…home of the last Ottoman Pasha of Egypt has been turned into a café from which the visitor can enjoy one of finest views of the Golden Horn.’”

>   Aziz said, “I think I regret is closed the Khedive Café. I have arranged for you hookahs.”

  “How many people want hookahs and how many would rather go to the Khedive?”

  Dotty Tottenham said, “Boots, it’s all been arranged…”

  “How far is it to the hookahs?” asked Boots as they got back into the two cars. Not at all far up the shore road they got out, and Aziz walked them into a terraced, outdoor establishment. They were introduced to the problematic of the hookah, a fat glass bottle Ilka remembered from a child’s picture book of the fat thief of Baghdad. Aziz, the friend, and the friend who owned the establishment went from guest to guest, showed them how to blow and ran to untie those who got themselves entangled in the ingoing and outcoming tubes. A lot of good-natured laughter turned to discouragement, to boredom. How about the Khedive?

  They got back into the cars and drove up and up and up and there was the view, but the Khedive Café was in darkness.

  Boots said, “But I need to pee! Too much ouzo and, Aziz, what was that other drink supposed to be called?” Aziz and his friend were arguing with a person—a man—whom they had roused and who stood blocking the entrance to the cafe. “What the hell, I’m going to pee!” said Boots, and that, Ilka told Leslie, was the high point of the night—that communal peeing in the warm Turkish darkness with the Bosporus way, way below and the long arrow straightness of the bridge which they had crossed from Europe to Asia.

  Some of the party were ready to return to the boat. Ilka, scheduled to disembark before breakfast, hadn’t finished her packing, but Boots wanted one more drink. Aziz and the friend consulted. They knew an all-night place. “There is where is the best singer of my country’s music.”

  “Not too far is it, Aziz?” asked Boots. “Where the hell are they taking us? I hope he knows where he’s going. Aziz, sweetie, why are you taking us out into the boondocks? Where the hell are we?”