You Are Always Safe With Me (14 page)

Across the road was a park, green and inviting, with benches facing the sea. They were not far from the dock and the
Ozymandias
. She could see, in the near distance, the many masts and sails of the boats resting in port.

“Could we sit in the park a few minutes?” she asked Izak.

“No problem. I carry you across the road.” He swept her up, an arm around her shoulders, one under her knees, and transported her to the park where he set her down on a wooden bench. Facing them was a square in which there was a bronze statue of a man on a horse.

“Who is that man, Izak?”

“Atatürk. Ottoman. Very important.”

“Tell me about him.”

“He make Turkey modern, like America, your country. We have much better world here because Atatürk lived. Our country good to live here now. Still poor.”

“But you do love your country?” she asked.

“Problems every country. But this place, my country. Yes, I love.”

“
Seni çok seviyorum,”
she said.

His eyes flew to her face, he was completely startled. What had she said? She had hoped to say—in his own language—that he loved his country. But what had she really said? She knew she had mistakenly told him that she loved him.

“I mean,” she said, “seviyorum your
country
,” she stammered. Was she only making it worse?

“Lilly,” he said. “Seni çok seviyorum. Me—you, also. You understand?”

She bowed her head. She was feeling dizzy. The pill, the sun on her head, the bursting forth of those weighted words from her tongue, and now Izak had returned them to her. “Me—you, also.” What were they saying to one another? What did they mean by this exchange of impossibly vivid words?

He took her face in his hands and addressed her directly. “Love, Lilly. I know this word. Me—you also. Love. You are like my own family. We know this from the beginning.”

“Oh God,” she said. She shivered and felt tears cloud her vision. She looked out to sea, confused. She hadn’t meant to express any of this, but since she had said those words, what was she trying to make happen? It was all a mistake, a hallucination, a result of a day of shocks—the invading pirates, the gun, her fall, her pain—and the accidents of speech between two people who shared no language.

“Not worry or cry, Lilly,” Izak said. He touched a tear with his finger. “Just rest. No problem. We here now together. This is good. I told you already, you are always safe with me. I care for you now, not worry.” He lifted one of her hands and brushed his lips upon it.

“But when I have to leave you! Who will care for me then?”

“You wear the evil eye, you will always be safe.”

“Why don’t you wear one?”

“I don’t have,” he said, simply.

“Then here, you take mine.” She lifted the blue eye on the red cord from around her neck and placed it over his head. “I have another one, many others, in my suitcase. I bought them to take home. I don’t need this one. I want you to have it.”

“I wear,” he said. “Always I think of you.”

She was looking down at his legs, his brown thighs in the familiar khaki shorts, the rubber sandals on his feet, his long naked toes. She memorized the shape of them. He knew they would have to part, he was preparing her. She looked toward the dock at the row of gulets and felt as if she were impaled on one of those distant masts, as if one of those pointed poles ran directly through her heart.

*

“You wait here,” Izak said. “We have lunch, yes? I buy food.” He pointed to the many cafes behind them on the street facing the sea. “You like fish?”

She nodded and he was gone.

When the tourist season was over, he must leave the boat and go home somewhere. Did he live with his mother and father in one of these small villages on the water? Or in the mountains? Did he take a job for the winter and what kind of work did he do then? Did he have brothers and sisters? Had he ever had a wife? Or wanted one? What did he truly feel toward the rich tourists he served year after year on one pleasure boat or another? What—in fact—did he think of the group on the
Ozymandias
, the cocky Harrison, the doll-like Gerta, the prissy Lance, the over-dramatic Fiona, the machinations of Marianne, the jolly chirpiness of Harriet, her mother?

She could never know or ask him about these things! “We here now together,” he had said. “This is good.” Lilly thought of her friend who owned a cat she called “Be Here Now.” Her friend, who studied the works of the spiritual philosopher, Ram Dass, had met him once in a grocery store in San Francisco and had said to him “How can I ever tell you how much your work means to me?”

“I’m here now,” he said, smiling.

Lilly was here now. This was the moment. She looked at the military figure of Atatürk, the hero of Turkey, born 1881, died 1938. Here and gone, like everyone who had ever been born, or who ever would be. “
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his petty hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Words to live by, she thought. Try as she might to teach them to her students, they were out the door as soon as the bell rang, to pursue their food, their lovemaking, their pleasures. Did they worry about their “petty hour upon the stage”? No, they were busy pursuing sex and love, they were more like Ram Dass who had written:
“The moment is permeated with space, peace, equanimity, joy, and lightness…When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, We are One.”

*

Izak brought back fried fish sandwiches, fried potatoes, cans of Coca Cola, and paper wrapped ice-cream cones for their lunch. They spread the food on the bench between them and ate hungrily, watching the birds flying over the incoming waves, looking for morsels of nourishment that might emerge from the sea. The sounds of music could be heard from a café behind them, the constant drumbeats and the high crying strings of an eastern melody.

Lilly’s ankle was painless now, wrapped and protected from harm, untested by her weight. There was one piece of fried potato left in the white box on the bench. Izak lifted it to Lilly’s mouth.

“No, you have it,” she said.

“You,” he said, showing his beautiful white teeth in a smile.

“We’ll share,” she said, and bit it in half. He took the other half from her and laid it on his tongue, savoring it. Then he took Lilly’s hand and pressed in his. She looked around guiltily, fearing she might find some Turkish woman staring at them, her eyes peering out from her head covering in disapproval.

“Don’t worry,” Izak assured her. “Atatürk would say ‘
No problem
, Good things are good.’”

*

After a long while of watching the ocean together, Izak carried her to the curb and hailed a cab to take them back to the dock. “Tomorrow,” he said in her ear, “they all go to Saklikent Gorge. We stay on my boat.”

Her heart flew into her mouth from the feel of his breath in her ear.

“I don’t mind not going,” she said, as if she had not understood him. “I’ll just read and rest.”

“We will have time alone,” he said. “You don’t want it?”

“Oh yes! Yes I do,” said Lilly.

At dinner the table was abuzz with plans for the trip to Saklikent Gorge. With Jane and John Cotton already departed and on their way to Greece, the boat seemed twice as large, the dinner table more spacious, the food more plentiful. Lilly was astonished at how just two fewer people could make the boat seem enormous in size.

Someone else was missing from the dinner table; it took Lilly a minute of counting heads before she realized Marianne had not joined them. Gerta noticed this at the same moment and said, “Should someone go down to Marianne’s cabin and call her?”

“She’s busy,” Fiona said mysteriously.

“If you tell her Morat has cooked those delicious “Ladies’ Thighs” again she’ll come right up,” Harrison said. “She likes anything on the racy side.”

“She’s already busy with something a little ‘racy,’” said Fiona. “She’s decided to teach Barish English. They’re down there now in her cabin having a lesson.”

“She should know better,” Lance said.

“She does,” said Fiona. “But that has never stopped her doing what she wants to do.”

Morat now came up from the galley carrying two large platters—on one were dishes of eggplant salad and in the other bowls of red lentil soup. Izak was noticeably absent from doing his part in the serving of dinner, which fact relieved Lilly. She did not want her mother watching him with her eagle eyes, making judgements, assumptions—or worse, giving Lilly another lecture.

When Morat returned with the tray of “Ladies’ Thighs,” grilled ground-lamb patties which, by a long stretch of the imagination, might be said to resemble women’s thighs, there was a round of joking. Gerta said thank God her thighs were not that thick, Fiona said hers were twice as thick, Harriet said she hadn’t seen her own thighs for years, not till this cruise on which she was forced to wear swim suits. Lance assured her there was nothing wrong with her thighs and Lilly did not discuss thighs at all. She could hardly eat in the realization that by morning everyone would have departed the
Ozymandias
but herself and Izak.

To name a pleasure boat the
Ozymandias
seemed a fairly exotic choice to Lilly. She wondered why Harrison had chosen to christen this gulet after Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous poem, “
Ozymandias
.” Lilly had memorized the poem in college, and now, to blot out this foolish conversation about thighs, she tried to recall the words.

“I met a traveler from an antique land…”
was the first line. Indeed, it resonated in her that she (who was the traveler) had come to this antique land of history and ruins.

The rest of the poem was about—or so she’d always thought—human vanity:

Those last words, “round the decay…the lone and level sands stretch far away…” chilled her soul. All the grandeur she had seen of ancient Turkey, the amphitheaters, the hill tombs of Myra, the baths, the cities made of stone, were the works of mighty rulers and now were nothing but “colossal wrecks.” All things were leveled by time, by death. Both the mighty and the humble had only their allotted lifespan—and whatever they constructed from their years on earth was theirs only while they lived. This was news of the greatest equality—even the rich and powerful did not live forever. The message to Lilly was indeed “carpe diem”—an imperative for her to seize the day and take her happiness when it was offered.

*

Marianne appeared from below just as the last of the dinner dishes were cleared away by Morat. Barish followed behind her, his head down, his eyes averted, and he quickly walked away from them along the side deck and out of sight. Lilly saw the curve of his beautifully tanned back, the individual knobs of his vertebrae, the delicate nape of his neck. He was the least communicative of the crew, the youngest, the shyest, and the one who seemed loneliest. She often noticed him sitting at the very point of the boat, smoking, looking out to sea. What did he imagine his future to be, what would his winter days be like, and where would he spend them?

Marianne’s cheeks were flushed, she was smiling a smile that seemed to express embarrassment, confession and triumph.

“What else beside English are you teaching that boy?” Fiona asked her and Marianne laughed.

“He needs some diversion, don’t you think? He’s like a monk stuck in a cell here.”

“He goes into town when we do,” Lance said. “Maybe he has friends he sees, maybe a girlfriend.”

“I think what he sees are crates of eggplant and cucumbers,” Harrison said. “He always shops for supplies. What else would he have time to do?”

“I’m teaching him English,” Marianne said, “and that’s all I’m going to say. So do you think there’s anything left for my dinner?”

*

Lilly, whose ankle was strapped and bound who moved slowly from chair to deck pad, sat herself against the railing and leaned back to watch the clouds swirl above her. She was in a state of suspended animation, between worlds, somewhat dreamy from the pain pill she was taking, utterly peaceful and calm at her center.

Izak had not appeared this evening at all. She thought again of his quarters which he entered through the trap door on the foredeck; how did a man of such energy and presence exist in so tiny a space? Whatever freedoms he had must exist mainly in his imaginings, in his taking ownership in the vastness of the blue waters and the height of the towering cliffs. In this arena, with the cup of the sea below and the dome of the sky above, he could live without constriction.

Darkness crept over the horizon, a breeze blew in from the sea. Beyond, along the water’s edge, Lilly could see the lights of other gulets and pleasure boats anchored at the dock. Some, like the
Ozymandias
, were drifting further out in the cove at some distance from one another, their occupants hoping to find quiet for the night. Lilly let her head fall back. She tried to count stars. She remembered a cartoon she’d read years ago in a magazine, a cartoon that had amused and pleased her: two men, scientists, are staring at the night sky and one of them says “When I look up at the stars, I realize how insignificant they are.”

The thought of it made her smile, even at this remove. The stars tonight, as low as they hung over the water, as bright as they shone, were merely the stage setting for the central action of the universe, her own life. She was human. She was the center of the universe! How could it be any other way?